Evolutionblog

EvolutionBlog is Dead. Long Live EvolutionBlog!

2006-05-14T19:27:00.000-05:00

This will be my last post at this site. The new site can be found at the link below. This site will remain active indefinitely, but it will no longer be updated. This seems like a good time to thank the folks at Blogger for hosting and housing this blog, free of charge, for the last two years. Thanks!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE NEW BLOG

EvolutionBlog is Moving!

2006-05-09T17:30:00.000-05:00

As some of the commenters have previously surmised, EvolutionBlog will be joining the gang over at Science Blogs! I'm rather excited about this, and am currently working on getting the new site up and running. Regular blogging will resume shortly. I thank you for your patience.

Brief Blog Break

2006-04-20T15:09:00.000-05:00

I will be taking a blog vacation for the next two weeks. End of the semester and all that. That's the bad news. The good news is that when I return I expect to have big things to report about the future of EvolutionBlog. Stay tuned!

Let me take this opportunity to thank everyone who stops by to read my ramblings, and to the commenters, who usually manage to say something thought-provoking (even when they have the nerve to disagree with me). As I've said before, it is only lack of time that keeps me from replying to more of the comments.

Heddle on ID

2006-04-19T13:04:00.000-05:00

Here's something I never thought I'd write: I agree completely with David Heddle's latest post. Well, almost completely. But the few nit picks I have pale in comparison to the points where I agree with hin. He is expressing his disagreement with various strategies used by ID proponents in promoting his views. He writes:

The first strategy I disagree with is proclaiming ID as science. Philosophical discussions aside, I will accept ID as science when I read something like this:

A scientist at (some respected research university) has been awarded a grant to do experiment X. ID predicts the result of the experiment will be Y. Non-ID predicts the result will be Z.

And don't tell me this cannot happen because the secular scientific community would never allow it. I was a practicing scientist before I was a believer, and we never had any secret meetings where we discussed our true agenda of destroying Christianity in the guise of science.

And later:

The second strategy I disagree with is attempting to get ID placed in the science curriculum.

And later still:

The third strategy I disagree with, and this is the most germane to this post, is to deny that ID is religiously motivated. I don't personally know any ID advocate who is not religiously motivated—and I don't know one (personally) who is a strong ID proponent based solely on the physical evidence, although I am told such people exist.

Couldn't have said it any better myself. Expect the ID folks to whip out David Berlinski or Antony Flew in response to that last statement, but Heddle's point remains valid.

Heddle goes on to discuss what he thinks ID is, since he evidently does not consider it to be science:

[ID] is a scientifically-based apologetic. It is part of God’s general revelation. That’s what I think ID is, and that is where I think it is most effective: bringing glory to God, and showing men how they are without excuse. It can be an effective form of witnessing—it worked for me, and I have seen it work for others. Not because it proves God, but because it suggests God.

This is admirably forthright, but it also contradicts the the following statement, from elsewhere in the same post:

Also, anecdotally, when I look at fine tuning I see design because I believe God designed the universe, while someone else sees multiverses because they don't share that belief. (Emphasis in religion).

As far as I know, the fine-tuning argument is the only ID argument Heddle endorses. He describes this as an effective apologetic, one that leaves people without excuse for atheism. But he also asserts that fine-tuning suggests design to him only because he already accepts God's existence. If that is the case, then fine-tuning is not a reason for an atheist to change his views. Moreover, it makes it hard to understand the sense in which fine-tuning was an apologetic that “worked for him.”

I would also reject the idea that an atheist “sees multiverses”. Speaking personally, what I see is an interesting question about why the fundamental constants of the universe have just the properties they ought to have to make life possible. I note that one possible explanation is based on the idea that we are just one small part of a larger multiverse, in which case the apparent fine-tuning is explained via simple principles of probability. I note that physicists have been talking seriously about multiverses for decades, and that such ideas have a pedigree going back well beyond anyone's use of fine-tuning as a religious argument. Finally, I observe that multiverses can claim some support from currently popular theories in physics. That is evidentially slim, but it is an improvement over the nothing at all that God belief can claim. For these reasons, I believe that multiverses are a better explanation than God belief for fine-tuning.

As far as I can tell, Heddle has no reason beyond his prior faith commitments for finding the God hypothesis more reasonable than the multiverse hypothesis for explaining fine-tuning.

In the past, Heddle has been linked to favorably by other ID bloggers. I predict that this post will not be treated so kindly.

Is Evolution a Problem for Jews?

2006-04-19T12:31:00.000-05:00

David Klinghoffer, writing in The Jerusalem Post, says that it is. Of course, he comes to ths conclusion only by completely distorting what evolution is all about:

Maimonides was saying that though parts of the Bible's text may indeed be interpreted in other than a literal fashion, there are philosophical reasons that make an eternal universe incompatible with the God of the Torah. Simply put, Aristotle makes God's role in the world, as a creator and guide, superfluous and impossible.

AND DARWINISM does the very same thing, ascribing all creation to blind material processes, as Darwin himself wrote: “I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.”

All creation? Please. Darwin is explicit in The Origin of Species that he is not even interested in the origin of life, much less all creation. And the Darwin quote Klinghoffer provides is perfectly explicit that the issue is miraculous interventions in the course of descent. In other words, natural selection would not be a plausible mechanism of evolution if it required divine intervention to explain specific trajectories through the tree of life. It says nothing about divine intervention in other aspects of natural history (like, say, how the universe got itself created in the first place).

Later Klinghoffer writes:

In practice, however, there is simply no way to reconcile an idea with its precise negation. The premise of Judaism is that God commands us on the basis of his having created us. The question before us, therefore, is not a simple-minded one of whether the universe was made in six calendar days, but rather of whether the universe has a need for a God, period.

In the philosophical system elaborated by Darwin and his disciples, there is no room for a creator in any sense. To explain the existence of life without reference to a deity was Darwin's entire purpose.

Since Klinghoffer has chosen to repeat himself, we conclude that his sole argument for the irreconcilability of Judaism with evolution is the latter's completely eliminaion of any reasonable possibility of God's existence. That point is ridiculous, as I have already shown. But we shouldn't let slide the casual reference to the “philosophical system elaborated by Darwin and his disciples.”

There was no philosophical system elaborated by Darwin in his scientific work. There is only a large collection of biological facts coupled with a theory for explaining them. That theory has passed countless furhter experimental tests undreamed of by Darwin, so that today it is accepted by all reasonable people. And Darwin does not have “disciples.” There are only scientists who find his ideas useful in their professional work.

Klinghoffer includes some of the usual blather about cellular complexity and the Discovery Institute's list, but rather than addressing those cliches let me close with a brief consideration of whether evolution and Judaism are compatible.

I see three potential points of conflict between the two:

Evolution deals a severe, perhaps fatal, blow to the argument from design.
Evolution contradicts the creation story in Genesis.
The idea that God's chosen mechanism of creation is the violent, bloody, wasteful process of natural selection runs counter to our intuitions about how an all-loving, all-powerful God would behave.

If your faith in God is not based on natural theology, and if you do not believe that every word of the Bible should be taken literally, then I don't see why the first two items should trouble you. Both of these viewpoints (rejecting natural theology and biblical literalism) certainly have a long history in Jewish thought. Item three is just a variant on the problem of evil. If you had previously managed to resolve that problem to your satisfaction, then it should pose no difficulty either.

Therefore, I do not see how evolution poses any particular challenge to Judaism (or Christianity for that matter).

Klinghoffer can only defend his views by baldly distorting what evolution actually is. For some reason, evolution deniers find it almost impossible to be truthful about scientific issues.

The Simplest Explanation?

2006-04-17T14:59:00.000-05:00

Let me suggest that Lerner advise his atheist-fearing congregants that they spend more time worrying about people like the Reverend Mark Creech. The last time we saw Mr. Creech he was calmly explaining that only someone who was insane could be a liberal.

This time he's lecturing us about the simplest explanation for the Biblical account of Jesus walking on water:

Nevertheless, not to be outdone among the skeptics, Professor Doron Nof of Florida State University claims it may have been ice Jesus stood on and not water. According to a recent article by Reuters, “Nof used records of the Mediterranean Sea's surface temperatures and statistical models to examine the dynamics of the Sea of Galilee, which Israelis know now as Lake Kinneret. Nof's study found that a period of cooler temperatures in the area between 1,500 and 2,600 years ago could have included the decades in which Jesus lived. A drop in temperature below freezing could have caused ice -- thick enough to support a human -- to form on the surface of the freshwater lake near the western shore ... it might have been nearly impossible for distant observers to see a piece of floating ice surrounded by water.”

It's hard to believe any such theories are ever taken seriously. Yet they often are. Why? Why is it so incredibly hard for some to believe the obvious -- a miracle took place?

As a graduate student I once attended a debate hosted by a Christian student group on the subject of whether God existed. During the debate, the theist made much of the assertion that Jesus' tomb was empty. This, he claimed, was a strong piece of evidence in favor of the resurrection.

The atheist, who was a philosophy professor at Dartmouth (where I went to grad school), replied roughly as follows: “But let's suppose my opponent is right. Suppose that Jesus' body was placed in the tomb and then three days later the tomb as empty. Then we have two choices. We can either believe that roughly two thousand years ago one particular dead body behaved in ways no dead body before or since has ever behaved. Or we can believe that somebody moved the body.”

I don't understand a person who could seriously say that a two thousand year old account of a man walking on water is best explained by the assumption that a man really did walk on water.

Creech isn't finished:

Moreover, apologist Josh McDowell writes: “[W]e must remember that scientific laws neither dictate events nor do they explain them. They are merely a generalization about observable causes and effects .... The proper way of determining if something happened is not whether we can explain it. The first question to be asked is not can it happen, but rather did it happen .... If an event can be determined as having happened, yet it defies explanation, we still have to admit that it happened, explanation or not. The evidence for biblical miracles is as powerful historically as other historical events (such as the fall of Rome and the conquests of Alexander the Great). Just because miracles are outside our normal daily experience does not mean they have not occurred and do not occur.”

Still another reason why some people have a hard time accepting the miracles described in the Bible is because they compare them to Greek and Roman mythology -- tales of pagan miracle accounts that are clearly superstition. The difference, however, between the miraculous events recorded in the Bible and those in pagan religions are the firsthand accounts. In the Bible, miraculous events are always validated by the testimony of eyewitnesses.

But when a person comes to us with a story that stands in stark defiance of all natural laws as we know them, surely we are entitled to think that the person is mistaken about what he witnessed. A person seeing a magic act for the first time might return with fantastic stories of elephants disappearing from the stage, women being sawed in half, and rabbits appearing in hats that were previously shown to be empty. Something more than an alleged eyewitness account is required if we are to accept such stories, especially when we are separated from the events in question by thousands of years.

For that matter, I routinely see magicians perform feats that I can not explain. Is it just my naturalistic bias that leads me to believe there is a non-miraculous explanation for what I saw? I suspect neither Creech nor McDowell believes that it is.

We skeptics have a saying: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Two thousand year old hearsay testimony doesn't count.

Lerner on Scientism

2006-04-17T14:20:00.000-05:00

Via P. Z. Myers I came across this essay, from The Nation, by Rabbi Michael Lerner. The good Rabbi makes the familiar argument that the electoral problems faced by liberals and progressives stem from the antics of mean old secular relgion-haters. They scare away religious people who might otherwise care about basic social justice and vote accordingly, you see.

Lerner writes:

In my research on the psychodynamics of American society I discovered that the left's hostility to religion is one of the main reasons people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off. So it becomes important to ask why.

I suspect that Lerner's psychodynamical reasearch consists mostly of anecdotal evidence. But more to the point is that Lerner's assertion paints a very dim picture of religious believers.

To see how ridiculous his claim is, simply turn it around. If an atheist in the nineteen sixties argued that he would like to be involved in the civil rights movement, but he's turned off by the role that churches are playing within it, no one would be sympathetic to him. Likewise for Lerner's religious believers. He's effectively saying that it's the fault of atheists and secularists that more religious people can't be moved to fight for basic social justice. It is possible that this claim is true (though I'd like to see some evidence for it). But if it is true it reflects very badly on religious believrs.

But that's just a warm-up. Lerner's real point is to wag his finger and yell J'accuse! You secularists think your soooooo rational and unemotional. Well, take this:

Science, however, is not the same as scientism--the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured. As a religious person, I don't rely on science to tell me what is right and wrong or what love means or why my life is important. I understand that such questions cannot be answered through empirical observations. Claims about God, ethics, beauty and any other face of human experience that is not subject to empirical verification--all these spiritual dimensions of life--are dismissed by the scientistic worldview as inherently unknowable and hence meaningless.

Scientism thus extends far beyond an understanding and appreciation of the role of science in society. It has become the religion of the secular consciousness. Why do I say it's a religion? Because it is a belief system that has no more scientific foundation than any other belief system. The view that that which is real and knowable is that which can be empirically verified or measured is a view that itself cannot be empirically measured or verified and thus by its own criterion is unreal or unknowable. It is a religious belief system with powerful adherents. Spiritual progressives therefore insist on the importance of distinguishing between our strong support for science and our opposition to scientism.

If Lerner scoured the Earth I suspect he'd be unable to find even one person who accepts scientism the way he describes it. Absolutely no one believes that only things that can be empirically observed (as opposed to unemprically observed?) and measured are real. In fact, scientists seem pretty solidly united behind the idea that science has little directly to tell us about morality and ethics (thought it can bring to light facts that might be relevant in answering moral questions.)

Om the other hand, truth claims have to be defended on some basis, and if Lerner can't provide any actual evidence for his relgious beliefs that surely it is unreasonable for him to expect the rest of us to take them seriously. And if he further agures that his religious beliefs are in some way relevant to setting the publi policy of the country, then we have the right to actively oppose him.

Now let's see if we can help Lerner out. He's trying real hard, but doggone it, he just can't seem to figure out why secularists are so hostile to religion. The best explanation he can come up with is that they are in thrall to an absurd worldview that no one actually believes. I mean, what else can it be?

Let me suggest that secular hostility to religion comes from exactly one cause: The various truth claims made by Lerner and his fellow theists have no rational foundation at all. The assertions they make about God and His will have no more basis in fact than a child's beliefs about the monster in his closet.

That's it! That's the reason. Nothing more complicated than that. Lerner even tacitly concedes this, by lumping God's existence in with other areas he believes are not open to empirical investigation. Doing so allows him to sidestep the unoleasnt fact that there is ample reason for rejecting the idea that the world is superintended by an all-powerful, all-loving God (the problem of evil).

Lerner blathers on at great length about people's spiritual needs, even preposterously arguing that it is the Democrats and the left that have become too enamored of the view that all concerns are economic. Democrats understand perfectly well that people have spiritual needs, they simply reject the idea that the political system is the proper venue for satisfying them. It is not the job of government to attend to whatever religious needs people are said to have. Rather, the government should be providing the environment in which people are free to attrend to their own needs in whatever way they see fit.

Near the end of his essay lerner offers this:

I don't mean that the secular left ought to give up its secularism. I am not suggesting that a secularist should convert to some particular religion in order to garner popularity and win votes. What I do mean is that a leftist secularist ought to approach other belief systems with a greater spirit of humility, recognizing that secularism is one possible answer among many to the question of how to understand the universe and how to live one's life. Secularism is not “the rational approach” but “a rational approach” among other rational approaches. To be effective, a social change movement will need to make a place for everyone who shares the same political values, even though they may belong to different religious traditions or hold different philosophical positions. Speaking from a religious perspective should be normal in political meetings or at public events sponsored by the left--and the left should work as hard to create an inclusive feel for this as it does to include any other constituency.

For some reason I'm reminded of Stephen Colbert's line: I know the Pope's infallible, but that doesn't mean he can't make mistakes.

First of all, Lerner is unfairly conflating secularism with atheism. In a political context, secularism is effectively equivalent to the separation of church and state. That is a principle all religious people should be able to get behind. Secularism is not a statement about how to understand the universe.

Secondly, by his own admission God belief is not rational. Not if by rational you mean, “based on sound lines of evidence equally available to everyone.” By what possible definition of “rational” does it make sense to say that the world is run by an all-powerful, all-loving God who wants us to do certain specific things, and we know this because an ancient holy book tells us so?

Next, elsewhere in the essay Lerner implies that he supports the separation of church and state. If he really believes this, then he should also recognize that people's religious beliefs have no relevance to public policy. Consequently, casting policy discussions in religious terms makes no sense. If I walked into a church meeting and started giving a lecture on mathematics, no one there would take kindly to it. Would that mean that the church is hostile to mathematicians? It is not excluding religious people to say that the minutiae of their beliefs is not relevant to questions of public policy.

There are many liberals who are not fond of religious belief (I am one of them). There are many others, like Lerner, who are not fond of atheism. That really shouldn't be of any relevance in the fight for social justice, or in the fight for people to be free of government intrusion in their daily lives. It's that simple. Instead of trying to blame others for the failure of religious liberals to do their part in supporting liberal and progressive candidates, he should be chastising his own flock for being “turned off” by the thought of having to share space with people who don't share their religious beliefs.

Intercessory Prayer

2006-04-14T12:00:00.000-05:00

In Tuesday's post I responded to an op-ed by Episcopal priest Raymond Lawrence on the subject of the recently completed study on intercessory prayer. The study showed that such prayer had no positive impact on the recoveries of recent bypass patients. Lawrence argued that this was welcome news for sincerely religious people, since the whole idea of intercessory prayer was theologically suspect.

One point I made in reply was that Lawrence can talk all he wants about how “credible theologians” (his phrase) think about intercessory prayer, but virtually every religious group of any influence in our society was perfectly happy to promote prior, discredited studies claiming to establish its benefits.

Charles Colson's website Breakpoint has just provided a useful case in point. Consider this commentary, from Breakpoint contirbutor Mark Earley, on the subject:

Naturally, some observers were delighted at the results. They think the study proves conclusively that prayer doesn’t work, and it’s time for men of science to “stop dabbling in the supernatural,” as one academic put it.

But wait a minute. The researchers acknowledged that they could not control for the fact that many “unauthorized” people may have interceded for loved ones in the so-called “unprayed-for” group. And plenty of other studies indicate that intercessory prayer does have an impact. (Emphasis in original)

Lawrence's op-ed argued that the interest in prayer studies seemed to come entirely from scientists, and that this was evidence of their arrogance and lack of recognition of their proper place. But it is not people like Lawrence and his cadre of “credible theologians” who advise the modern Republican party. It is not the moderates who have the ear of the President, or control of numerous Southern and Midwestern state houses. It is people like Colson, and groups like Breakpoint, that set the terms of religious discussion in this country. And they do not share Lawrence's dim view of intercessory prayer.

Incidentally, when I wrote Tuesday's post I was unaware that the funding for this study came from the Templeton Foundation, which devotes itself to projects aimed at reconciling science and religion. It wasn't some arrogant, scientific society that put up the money. You can be sure the Templeton folks were hoping for a different result.

More Transitional Forms

2006-04-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

Thursdays are busy days for me, so I'm afraid I'll have to blog and run. Check out this article from today's New York Times:

In following the fossil tracks of human evolution, scientists have for years searched for links between Australopithecus, the kin of the famous “Lucy” skeleton, and even earlier possible ancestors. Now, they think they have found some connections in Ethiopia.

An international team of paleontologists is reporting the discovery of transitional species superimposed in sediments in the neighborhood of a single site. The findings appear today in the journal Nature.

Tim D. White, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a team leader, and his colleagues said the 4.1-million-year-old fossils were anatomically intermediate between the earlier species Ardipithecus ramidus and the later species Australopithecus afarensis, the Lucy family. The newfound bones and teeth are the earliest remains of the most primitive Australopithecus, known as anamensis.

I love it. The ID folks boast about their fruitful scientific reasearch program, but spend most of their time desperately trying to prop up the same bad arguments they were making a decade ago. Scientists, meanwhile, seem to make significant discoveries on almost a daily basis.

Presenting Evolution, Part Two

2006-04-12T12:53:00.000-05:00

I had intended to get back to the Monty Hall problem today, but then I made the mistake of reading this article from today's New York Times.

The article is about evolutionary biologist Randy Olson, and his recent film Flock of Dodos. The article begins as follows:

If a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist makes a film about creationism's cousin, intelligent design, and calls it “Flock of Dodos,” you know who he's talking about, right?

Maybe not.

The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design's embrace of a supernatural “agent” puts it outside the realm of science.

But when he watches the advocates of intelligent design at work, he sees pleasant people who speak plainly, convincingly and with humor. When scientists he knows talk about evolution, they can be dour, pompous and disagreeable, even with one another. His film challenges them to get off their collective high horse and make their case to ordinary people with — if they can muster it — a smile.

Otherwise, he suggests, they will end up in the collective cultural backwash just like the dodo.

Later we have this:

“Flock of Dodos” does not attack intelligent design. Dr. Olson just lets its adherents talk. His view, expressed as a Latin motto at the start of the film, is “res ipsa loquitur” — the thing speaks for itself.

But he also lets the scientists talk. Asked to come up with a slogan to match intelligent design's “teach the controversy,” they fumble. Asked to make the case for evolution, they get into arguments or discuss it in terms so fancy they require on-screen definitions. (“I did not realize 'mendacity' was a 50-cent word,” Dr. Olson said. “That's what academic life has done to me.”)

Where to begin? The case for evolution has been laid out in countless books and at countless websites. It is a long and detailed case, and requires a certain amount of effort to fully assimilate. But the facts are readily available to anyone who wants to take the time to learn them.

So the issue is not that scientists need to get off their high horses and present evolution to the public. What Olson is really saying is that scientists need to dumb down their message so it can compete with pre-digested ID pabulum. Of course scientists fumbled when asked to come up with a slogan to rival “Teach the Controversy!” After all, that slogan is a fraud designed both to conceal the religious motivations of those who promote it, and to obscure simple scientific facts. Even the best slogans exist to reduce complex issues to simplistic and memorable catchphrases. Scientists, who tend to see subtlety in everything, are especially ill-suited to that activity.

If Olson is simply making a crass political point, then I might be willing to go along with him. If he is saying that it is frustrating that things have to be dumbed down so much when presented to the public, but that is simply what must be done to promote evolution effectively, then he might have a point. But I get the impression that he sees himself as being on the side of the angels against the arrogant, pretentious scientists.

For example, take his casual remark about the word “mendacity.” He didn't know it was a fifty cent word! That's what academia had done to him! But of course, it's not a fifty cent word. It's a perfectly good word that everyone should know how to use in a sentence. Dictionaries are readily available for those who do not know the word but are willing to invest thirty seconds in educating themselves.

Obviously, there's no shame in not knowing a particular word. The shame comes in pretending that it is the person who used the word who did something wrong. Olson's casual remark about what academic life had done to him is standard anti-intellectualism. It is very disappointing that a scientist would say such a thing.

Scientists, you see, tend to have large vocabularies. They use this vocabulary to express theselves with a level of precision that is foreign to everyday life but essential if one is to think clearly about complex issues. That so many lay people prefer cheap sloganeering to careful thought is a maddening fact of life, not something to sympathize with.

And what about that part about ID advocates being charming, pleasant people? Well, again, if Olson is saying simply that ID folks are good at PR then we have no quarrel. If he's saying that ID folks have to be good at PR because of the emptiness of their arguments, then I agree completely. But it sounds to me like he's saying that the charm offensive ID advocates put on in public is not a facade, but rather a genuine reflection of who they actually are. If my interpretation is correct, then I can only shake my head sadly at his naivete.

ID advocates are perfectly happy to level outrageous charges of fraud and deceit towards scientists. When someone like Jonathan Wells writes a book called Icons of Evolution, in which evolutionary biologists are likened to mafia kingpins and whose every major assertion is demonstrably false, he becomes a hero of the movement. ID advocates present laughable caricatures of scientific work, routinely quote scientists out of context, are perfectly happy to lay Nazism and other horrors at evolution's doorstep, and defend their position with arguments that are flatly wrong.

Apparently none of that matters to Olson. In public, ID advocates smile a lot and tell a lot of jokes. What pleasant fellows they are! If only scientists could be more like that!!

Of course scientists should be more skillful in presenting their arguments to the public. I said as much myself in Monday's post. But the solution isn't dumbing down the subject to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It likewise isn't pretending that ID advocates are charming folks who just want to have an engaging discussion about science, while ignoring their breathtaking sleaziness as soon as they get away from the camera.

If Olson really believes that ID speaks for itself, then why all his emphasis on scientists presenting themselves more effectively? It's precisely because ID does not speak for itself that we have the problems we do. ID presents itself as one thing but is really something else entirely. Its advocates are sufficiently skillful at this that many lay people, already sympathetic to the basic message of ID (that God exists), find it difficult to pierce the fog.

Instead of making a commercial film chiding scientists for sometimes seeming like fuddy-duddies and criticizing them for not dumbing down their message sufficiently to appeal to people who refuse to educate themselves, why not make a slick, mass-market film pointing out the flaws in ID?

Actually, I think I know the answer to that one. A film pointing out the flaws in ID would be difficult to market. Promoting crass stereotypes of scientists by making them look clueless and aloof on the other hand...

That Prayer Study

2006-04-11T15:16:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times has has this interesting op-ed from Raymond Lawrence, an episcopal priest and director of pastoral care at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. The subject is that major, recently completed study that showed that intercessory prayer is ineffective. William Saletan provides a useful summary of the basic facts of the situation here.

Lawrence gets off to a good start. Early on he writes:

The results of the study, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, came as welcome news. That may sound odd coming from an ordained minister. But if it could ever be persuasively demonstrated that such prayer “works,” our religious institutions and meeting places would be degraded to a kind of commercial enterprise, like Burger King, where one expects to get what one pays for.

Historically, religions have promoted many kinds of prayer. Prayers of praise, thanksgiving and repentance have been highly esteemed, while intercessions of the kind done in the Benson study — appeals to God to take some action — are of lesser importance. They represent a less-respected magical wing of religion.

In fact, many theologians reject out of hand the notion that any person or group can effectively intercede with God in any respect. Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, the two major Christian theologians of the 20th century (and certainly no opponents of prayer) would have scoffed at the idea. The Lord's Prayer, the central prayer of Christendom, contains no plea for God to influence specific events in people's lives.

Pretty good. I'd point out, however, that while many theologians dismiss intercessory prayer out of hand, many others do not. We will return to this in a moment.

Lawrence also includes this:

Doctors in particular should be pleased that the Benson study demonstrated no benefit from intercessory prayer by strangers. Recently, a colleague told me about a devout, well-educated woman who accused a doctor of malpractice in his treatment of her husband. During her husband's dying days, she charged, the doctor had failed to pray for him. If prayer could be scientifically shown to help, every doctor would be obligated to pray with patients, or at least provide such service, and those who declined to do so would properly be subject to charges of malpractice.

I would assume the accusation did not go anywhere, but these days you can never tell.

Of course, since this is a priest talking he can't resist a comment to the effect that theologians know things that scientists don't:

We should note that the impetus for this recent research has come almost entirely from scientists, not from religious leaders. It seems that no credible theologian has been involved in planning, directing or even consulting on such studies. But scientists who conduct research on religious practice should at least consult reputable theologians. Had they done so to begin with a considerable amount of money could have been saved. Scientists who undertake the work of theologians are as reckless as theologians who pretend to be scientists.

Nonsense. Many of the most important Christian organiations in this country routinely extol the virtues of intercessory prayer. For example, here's Agape Press praising an effort to pray for the protection of Mayo Clinic patients from the pernicious influence of the Dalai Lama's forthcoming visit. When prior, less-rigorous studies seemed to show that there was some health benefit related to intercessory prayer, outfits like Focus on the Family and the 700 Club were crowing from the rooftops. The fact is that every Christian organization of any influence in this country was perfectly happy to tell its flock about how science has proven that prayer is effective. That was the impetus for carrying out research like this.

And, frankly, even many of those “credible theologians” were happy to take a limp, fence-sitting position with regard to those earlier studies. Sure, the whole idea is theologically suspect. God makes decisions about a person's health based on what another person asks Him to do? But the fact remains that such things are good for business. I don't have any quotes handy, but I certainly recall plenty of people like Lawrence going on television to express skepticism about the study on the one hand, while simultaneously using it to promote the value of their religion on the other. Furthermore, scientists were not undertaking the work of theologians. They were putting to the test a specific, testable claim endoresed by many of America's most important religious leaders.

If this study had turned out the other way Lawrence would not be writing articles for the Times telling us about how worthless the whole undertaking was. He would be prattling instead about how now even arrogant scientist types had to concede there was something to all this religion stuff. Since that's not how things turned out, he fell back on the other standard bit of theological blather. The one where they desperately explain away the inability of anyone to detect a tangible effect of God's alleged dominion over the world.

New CSICOP Column

2006-04-10T18:04:00.000-05:00

My new column for CSICOP's Creation Watch website is now available. It's my take on the latest version of the thermodynamics argument against evolution.

If you're really keen on this subject, you should also have a look at Mark Perakh's evisceration of some of the same arguments. Enjoy!

Snakes on a Plane

2006-04-10T17:47:00.000-05:00

Three words: Opening night, baby.

Presenting Evolution

2006-04-10T17:44:00.000-05:00

The last two weeks have been very good ones for evolution. First, there was the discovery of the fossil Tiktaalik. This fossil is so clearly transitional between ancient fish and land-dwelling tetrapods that it is probably destined for a permanent place in the biology textbooks. It is one more in a long line of stinging rebukes to creationist claims about the paucity of transitional forms in the fossil record. Nick Matzke provides this excellent post showing how the creationist textbook Of Pandas and People makes gaps in the fossil record a major part of its case, and specfically cites the gap between ancient fish and amphibians as especially significant.

Then came word that another complex biological system has now yielded to an evolutionary explanation. Ian Musgrave has all the details here.

Evolutionists have been handed two major coups in as many weeks, both of which are receiving signficiant media attention. So how would we capitalize on this bout of good publicity?

Not too well, I'm afraid. Two recent events have left me once again vexed at the inability of some on my side of this issue to present themselves effectively.

The first came on Friday night's installment of the MSNBC show Countdown. This show is unique among cable news chat shows in being vaguely left-leaning. It's regular host, Keith Olbermann, is the only cable news host worth watching. Friday's show featured a segment on Tiktaalik. Also on tap was the claim by one exceptionally ignorant person that a recently publicized photo of a kitten born with only one eye and no nose represented evidence for creationism. Evolution says animals are getting better, but this unfortunate kitty was clearly worse, you see.

And what guest did they get to discuss these issues? Bill Nye! The science guy! I was giddy. Like all sensible people, I'm a big fan of Bill Nye. It's hard to imagine someone who has done more to popularize science in innovative ways. Surely, I thought, Nye will hit it out of the park.

So here we had a segment with a stand-alone, articulate, pro-science guest being interviewed by a sympathetic host (not Olbermann, but his guest host Brian Unger). How often does that happen?

Sadly, Nye didn't hit it out of the park. In fact, for much of the interview I couldn't figure out what he was talking about.

The first minute or so of the intervew was wasted on a discussion of Nye's run-in with some unruly audience members at a recent public presentation. P.Z. Myers discussed the incident here. Nye remarked that he didn't feel like he had been heckled, but it was impossible to discern from the ensuing conversation what actually happened.

Finally they got around to Tiktaalik and that's when this exchange took place.

UNGER: Was this still a fish?

NYE: No. It may have been. But the thing is it's going to be a big deal fossil, like the famous archaeopteryx, the feathered bird. It's going to be, as we look through history in the fossil record, this is going to be a significant discovery, because tiktaalik has some fancy feet. There's the famous archaeopteryx, or one of them yeah, it's where they found—we found feathers on an ancient dinosaur, which is a big deal. A significant thing. It tells you a lot about what happened in history in the history of life on earth. And the same will be of this tiktaalik. It's got some unusual wrist bones and unusual crossover between paws and feet and fins.

UNGER: Bill, I know that men of science love pedestrian observations like the one I'm going to make right now, but it kind of looks like a crocodile to me. Could it be a relative of the crocodile that we just didn't discover until now?

NYE: It certainly could be.

UNGER: Why are we calling it...

NYE: You're on your way to becoming a naturalist. That's right. It looks kind of like a crocodile.

UNGER: I am? That sounds obscene, Bill?

NYE: But if you look closely—it sounds obscene if you were somehow embarrassed about nature.

UNGER: But is it a missing link, because it looks sort of like a crocodile? It takes a .

NYE: Well, the word missing link is charged with connotations that you may not want to carry with. But what it is is it's something that's very fishlike, very land animal-like, but has aspects of both and it was discovered on a remote island in the Arctic. I don't know what you do with your day, but I don't go looking for fossils in the Arctic. There are people who do.

If you were learning about this fossil for the first time from this segment, would you have any idea what Nye was talking about? They're well into the conversation before Nye finally gets around to mentioning that Tiktaalik is transitional between fish and land-dwellers, though even here his explanation is hard to follow. And he never gets around to saying that the fossil was found in rocks of exactly the right age, in exactly the right kind of environment. Meanwhile, he kept talking about Archaeopteryx wihtout ever really saying clearly why that particular fossil was so significant. And he never pointed out that actually this is just one more in a long line of transitional forms.

From here the conversation turned to that deformed kitten. Nye did better here, but it was still difficult to ferret out his main points. Opportunity missed.

How about that excellent paper showing, at an unprecedented level of detail, how a particular complex molecular system evolved? Sadly, the press release from the University of Oregon (where the work in question was done) sounds entirely the wrong note:

Using new techniques for resurrecting ancient genes, scientists have for the first time reconstructed the Darwinian evolution of an apparently “irreducibly complex” molecular system.

The research was led by Joe Thornton, assistant professor of biology at the University of Oregon’s Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and will be published in the April 7 issue of SCIENCE.

How natural selection can drive the evolution of complex molecular systems—those in which the function of each part depends on its interactions with the other parts—has been an unsolved issue in evolutionary biology. Advocates of Intelligent Design argue that such systems are “irreducibly complex” and thus incompatible with gradual evolution by natural selection.

“Our work demonstrates a fundamental error in the current challenges to Darwinism,” said Thornton. “New techniques allowed us to see how ancient genes and their functions evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. We found that complexity evolved piecemeal through a process of Molecular Exploitation—old genes, constrained by selection for entirely different functions, have been recruited by evolution to participate in new interactions and new functions.”

Oh, brother. The fundamental error(s) in current challenges to Darwinism have been laid bare for about a decade now. Behe's “irreducible complexity” argument was a total nonstarter. It was faulty as a matter of logic, since it is a triviality to imagine scenarios whereby known evolutionary mechanisms lead to IC systems. And it was wrong biologically, since there are quite a few complex biological systems whose evolution has been unravelled.

Yet here comes these fellows from the University of Oregon to tell people that Behe used to have a good point, but not any more because of this new work. I don't think that was their intention, but that was the message this silly press release sent.

In his Commentary (I'm not sure if a subscription is required to read this) for Science magazine on this subject, Christoph Adami did a better, though still inadequate, job of putting things in perspective. Here's his closing paragraph:

The Bridgham et al. and Lenski et al. (4) studies are of particular scientific interest, given the political attention given to intelligent design lately. Although these authors have not directly addressed this controversy in the discussion of their work--because the work itself is intrinsically interesting to biologists--such studies solidly refute all parts of the intelligent design argument. Those “alternate” ideas, unlike the hypotheses investigated in these papers, remain thoroughly untested. Consequently, whatever debate remains must be characterized as purely political.

It's good that Adami makes it clear that this work was not motivated by anything the ID folks are saying. The proper way to present this story is to state the results obtained, that the evolution of a complex molecular system has been explained at an impressive level of detail, and add as an afterthought that this puts yet another nail in the ID coffin.

But why oh why is Adami saying that ID ideas have not been thoroughly tested? They have been, at great length, and have been shown to range from false to worthless. Behe's arguments were wrong on the day he first made them, a fact that was obvious to anyone who knew a little biology and could think clearly for a few minutes. Dembski's arguments were vague and worthless from the day he introduced them. Likewise for every other ID proponent.

And Adami's article appears under the headline “Reducible Complexity,” thereby repeating the error from the U of O press release.

Very aggravating.

Dunford on Pianka

2006-04-07T14:11:00.000-05:00

Mike Dunford has writeen this excellent post pointing out the manifest distortions in the coverage of the Pianka situation provided by the Texas newspaper The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise. Dunford's conclusion:

The article in the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise contains numerous misquotes and out of context quotes. All of them err in the same direction - making Pianka look bad. It is almost impossible to believe that this is the result of anything other than deliberate effort on the part of the paper.

Now follow the link and read all the gory details.

Another Transitional Form Found. Yawn.

2006-04-06T21:29:00.000-05:00

Meanwhile, science marches on. Paleontologists have found a clear transitional form linking ancient fish to land-dwelling animals. The New York Times provides this decent run-down of the basic facts of the situation.

P. Z. Myers has more details on the subject, and he includes links to places where you can learn still more. I particularly liked this quote, taken from a review article about the finds published in Nature:

First, it demonstrates the predictive capacity of palaeontology. The Nunavut field project had the express aim of finding an intermediate between Panderichthys and tetrapods, by searching in sediments from the most probable environment (rivers) and time (early Late Devonian). Second, Tiktaalik adds enormously to our understanding of the fish-tetrapod transition because of its position on the tree and the combination of characters it displays.

This fossil is an impressive find and certainly helps to fill in some gaps in our knowledge of the fish to land-dwelling animal transition. But the mere fact that it is unambigously transitional really shouldn't be such big news. After all, there are droves of such fossils already known.

The Real Problem

2006-04-06T21:09:00.000-05:00

Since I'm in high dudgeon today, let me also comment on another annoying tidbit.

During a brief car ride this evening, I heard about two minutes of The Michael Reagan Show on the radio. Reagan had the night off and there was a guest host in his place.

Apparently some time before I turned on the radio the subject of evolution arose. A caller identifying himself as a scientist called up to object to what had been said previously. Since Reagan, and presumably any guest host sitting in for him, is a typical member of the brain-dead radio right, I think I can guess what had been said previously.

To my suprise the caller began by saying something like, “Claiming that evolution is just a theory misses the point,” and started to go into a pretty good explanation of theories and models and how science works. Along the way he remarked that everything in science is a theory.

The host took this as an opportunity. “That's not true!” he thundered. “For example, there's the second law of thermodynamics! That's a law, not a theory! One's a law and one's a thoery!! Why would you say that everything in science is a theory when some things are described as laws!!!”

Considering the slow, patient, and sadly ineffective way in which the caller was presenting his views, I gather that he probably was very knowledgeable indeed about science. But it didn't matter. Every time he got three words out the host cut him off to reiterate his blather about the differences between laws and theories.

The point? The next time someone tells you that insensitive, overtly atheistic remarks from Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are a major source of the problem for evolutionists, I encourage you to laugh in their face. Viewing things that way gives way too much credit to the anti-evolution side. It implies far too much thoughtful consideration and sober reflection.

The real problem is that if you did a poll in which you asked people whether discussing the second law of thermodynamics versus the theory of evolution indicates that the former is on solid evidential ground whereas the latter is not, I think you would have upwards of 70% of the people answering yes. And that idea is so jaw-droppingly pig-ignorant that it pretty much defies response. How is it that so many people can reach adulthood holding such delusional views about science?

Is hostility towards evolution caused by a few insensitive remarks by people like Dawkins and Dennett? Or is it caused by having a large segment of the population that doesn't know anything about science? You make the call.

The Governor's Office on Pianka

2006-04-06T20:43:00.000-05:00

The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise has also posted this article on the Pianka situation. Among other interesting nuggets, it contains the following reaction from Kathy Walt, press secretary for Texas Governor Rick Perry:

The very same day TAS declared its stance, Kathy Walt, press secretary for Gov. Rick Perry, expressed disdain over what Pianka calls his “doomsday talk.” Walt called the scientist’s viewpoints “abhorrent” and likened them to Hitler’s “hate-filled Third Reich.”

Golly! Walt must really have racked her brains coming up with that comparison.

I also found this interesting:

“He praised diseases such as Ebola for being efficient killers, and he showed a slide of rows of skulls to drive home his point,” Mims wrote in one of three petition letters to TAS. “I recall that one skull had flashing red eyes and that [Pianka] expressed his views about mass death and disease in good humor.”

That's pathetic. Apparently if you are discussing Ebola it's very important constantly to furrow your brow and express your disdain for the virus. If Mims is in the audience, be careful to add, “Bad Ebola! Bad, bad Ebola!” every few sentences.

Pianka Transcript

2006-04-06T19:02:00.000-05:00

The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, which I gather is a newspaper in Texas, has posted this transcript of a talk given by Dr. Pianka at St. Edwards University in Texas. It is not the talk given to the Texas Academy of Sciences, which is the one that is drawing all the attention. But it covers the same material and one suspects it is essentially the same talk.

The whole thing is a bit long, but it is worth reading in its entirety. I say that both because most of what he says is pretty interesting, and also because it confirms in every particular what I said yesterday. Folks, have no illusions about what is going on here. The reaction to Dr. Pianka's talk is standard issue phony outrage. It's what the right-wing fanatics and the ignorance peddlers always do. They make their living being in a perpetual state of righteous rage. The substance of what Pianka said holds no interest for them. Nearly all of the talk presented here is given over to a listing of basic facts about the ecological damage humanity has been causing over the past few decades. You have to look pretty hard to find anything that is remotely contrvoersial.

But facts and calm argumentation mean nothing to the zombies who are coming after Dr. Pianka. They see only another opportunity to promote their favorite sterotype; that academe is a hotbed of godless monsters set on indoctrinating your kids with a lot of hateful nonsense. They operate unencumbered by any sense of decency, integrity or conscience.

Which is not to say I agree with everything Dr. Pianka is saying. There were several places where I would have liked to have asked him precisely which creature comfort he'd be willing to give up to mitigate all the environmental damage we are causing. But the basic facts are now completely obvious. Absolutely nothing Dr. Pianka is saying deserves the condemnation that it is getting. Anyone who continues to parrot the insanity about Pianka calling for the extermination of most of the planet does so in complete disregard for the truth.

The Pianka Affair.

2006-04-05T17:56:00.000-05:00

On March 31, young-Earth creationist Forrest Mims posted this account of a talk given by ecologist Eric Pianka before the Texas Academy of Sciences. According to Mims:

But there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

Mims' account can be dismissed out of hand. There is no way a prominent scientist would call for mass murder by Ebola (both because no one would actually wish to see such a thing, and because anyone who did wouldn't be dumb enough to say it publicly). And if someone did advocate such a course, he would not receive a standing ovation for it from an important scientific group.

In the days following Pianka's comments it became clear that what he actually believes is that it is inevitable that overpopulation and overexploitation of the Earth's resources will lead to a catastrophic event for humanity, probably via a major outbreak of some disease. For example, he spells out his views very clearly in this brief essay. Also enlightening is this short article posted at the site of an NBC affiliate in Austin. It is also clear that he occasionally expresses himself a bit inartfully, but that there is no doubt about what he believes.

If you think that's the end of it, then you haven't fully appreciated just how thoroughly rotten many ID proponents are. William Dembski, for example, has done a slew of posts at his blog in which he slavishly accepts Mims' account in complete defiance of all evidence to the contrary. In this post, for instance, he boasts of calling the Department of Homeland Security to invesitgate Pianka. One suspects that Dembski doesn't believe for a second that Pianka is any threat to anyone. But in his sick little world such considerations are irrelevant.

According to this article from the Austin American-Statesman, Pianka is being interviewed by the FBI. It is unclear whether Dembski's antics had anything to with that. The article does contain this interesting nugget, however:

[Pianka] is particularly troubled by the recent explosion in the human population. He says we now take up about 50 percent of all livable space on Earth and that people should have no more than two children. Humans, and the way they've multiplied, are “no better than bacteria,” he says.

Such talk makes Forrest Mims' skin crawl.

Mims, an author and amateur scientist who heard Pianka speak in early March before the Texas Academy of Science, said Pianka's remarks were degrading and that he was deeply disturbed by Pianka's comments comparing different diseases and their potential to decimate the human race. He's one of dozens of bloggers who have expressed displeasure with Pianka's point of view.

A Gazette-Enterprise reporter who heard Pianka speak Friday on the same topic quoted him saying disease “will control the scourge of humanity. We're looking forward to a huge collapse.”

“It was 'Twilight Zone' material. It was like sitting in a science-fiction movie,” Mims said Tuesday, adding that he is worried young doctors and scientists with access to deadly diseases might take literally what he claims is a call by Pianka to control population growth through the spread of disease. “The big concern is this professor is instilling this in the minds of students.”

Let's take the comments of that unnamed reporter first. Even the little out-of-context snippets presented here seem perefectly clear. The scourge of humanity refers to the incredible overexploitation of the Earth's resources by short-sighted people. And Pianka is not looking forward to a huge collapse in the same way that my students are looking forward to summer vacation. Rather, he is saying that such collapse is inevitable unless we change our ways.

Don't believe any blogger or commenter who claims to interpret those phrases to mean that Pianka hates human beings and longs to see them die horrible deaths. Everyone understands that Pianka does not believe that.

As for Mims, he's rather given himself away here. Pianka speaks bluntly about subjects that make him squeamish and uncomfortable. So Mims writes a dishonest hatchet job about Pianka's talk, and spins ridiculous scenarios about young medical students moved to mass murder by Pianka's ideas. Right. And Pianka's the crazy one?

Meanwhile, in the comments to this post by P.Z. Myers, we find this:

I took Evolutionary Ecology from Dr. Pianka a few years ago. He'd frequently get sidetracked onto:

Cool Australian lizards.
His buffalo.
How much he disliked his neighbors who kept killing rattlesnakes.
How some horrible disease is going to wipe out huge chunks of the population any year now, and how pleased he will be when that happens.

So, yep, sounds like Dr. Pianka to me. The quotes in the article all sound pretty familiar.

Similar comments have been posted elsewhere.

Does point number four contradict what I have said previously? Of course not. You see, we simply start from the premise that Pianka is sane and reason to the conclusion that he will not be happy when civilization as we know it collapses for lack of people to keep it going.

So why would he make statements that could be interpreted otherwise? It has been suggested elsewhere that Pianka was joking, but I don't think that's really the best way of putting it. I suspect that in context Pianka was expressing his frustration at the dominant political culture in this country. The tone with which he made these statements is lost when you see them printed on the page. I'm willing to bet that no one who actually heard him make such a remark really pictured him happily eating popcorn on his front porch while his neighbors were dropping dead around him because of some dread disease.

We live in a society in which expressing the perfectly sensible opinions that we are havresting the Earth's resources at an alarming rate, and that if we don't control our numbers nature will find a way of doing it for us, immediately gets you branded as an environmentalist wacko or a left-wing extremist. You are called anti-capitalist, and probably anti-American. If in addition you happen to be a college professor while making those points, you will be accused of indoctrinating impressionable students (who apparently should be taught simply that unchecked, voracious consumption is a marvelous thing). You will be used as an example of the insanity of modern academe.

I'd bet real money that on those occasions where Pianka appeared happy about the looming downfall of humanity he was merely expressing his frustration at the unwillingness of people to think about the unsustainability of our way of life. What pleasure he was expressing was at the thought of arrogant, short-sighted people getting their comeuppance for not heeding his warnings.

Which leaves only one question. Is he right? Is humanity headed for a major population “correction”? Will it come in the form of a plague?

I don't know. But it looks to me like in much of the world famine, tsunamis, violent weather, genocide and war are already doing their part to control the world population. We may not need a virus to force us to change our ways.

The Monty Hall Problem, Part Two

2006-04-04T14:36:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid I'm very pressed for time today, so only brief blogging.

The answer to Variation One of the Monty Hall Problem, given at the end of yesterday's post, is that it now makes no difference whether or not you switch. Really.

The answer to Variation Two is that your best strategy is to stick with your initial choice until there are only two doors remaining. No other strategy will give you as high a probability of winning.

I'll go into some of the mathematical aspects of these problems in later blog entries, though some of my commenters to the previous post have already done an excellent job of it (note particularly Micahel Ralston's excellent comment explaining the difference between the situations where Monty Hall does, or does not know where the car is.)

Richard Wein points out that the Times version of the problem, quoted in yesterday's entry, is rather vague, since it is not stated explicitly whether Monty Hall knows where the car is. He's right about this, though I think it's stronlgy implied in the Times version that Monty Hall does know where the car is and therefore always reveals a goat.

If this is the point Somerby had in mind in saying that in the Times version it makes no difference whether or not you switch, then I will be very impressed. I don't believe that to be the case, however. Somerby's reply was so snide and harsh towards the Times reviewer that I think he was treating it as obvious that after Monty Hall opens one of the doors there is a 50-50 chance of winning. I don't think he was making subtle points about what Monty Hall does and does not know.

As of this writing Somerby has not revisited this problem.

Anyway, there's lots more to say about this problem, and I'll try to get around to it in the near future. Let me thank all the commenters to the previous post for their thought-provoking replies.

In the meantime, you can have a look at Wikipedia's entry on this subject. It contains several other variations in addition to the ones I mentioned.

The Monty Hall Problem

2006-04-03T15:02:00.000-05:00

The Monty Hall problem goes like this: You are presented with three identical doors. Behind one of them is a car and behind the other two are goats. You want the car. Monty Hall tells you to choose one of the doors. Regardless of which door you choose, at least one of the two remaining doors will have a goat behind it. Monty Hall, who knows where the car is, then opens one of the doors that has a goat behind it. He then gives you the option of either sticking with the first door you chose, or switching your choice to the other unopened door.

Question: What should you do? Should you stay where you are? Swtich? Does it make a difference?

This problem is a staple of courses in elementary probability theory. Virtually everyone, upon hearing this problem for the first time, reasons as follows: After Monty Hall opens one of the doors, there are only two doors remaining. Therefore, regardless of which door you choose you have a 50-50 chance of being right. So it doesn't matter whether you stay where you are or switch to the other door.

This argument is clear, convincing and wrong.

I suspect that every mathematician who has ever presented this problem to a lay person has had the following experience: Mathematician explains problem. Lay person reasons as above. Mathematician explains that, actually, you double your chances of winning by switching doors (more on this in a moment). Lay person gets annoyed, agitated and belligerent. Lectures mathematician on the subtleties of the problem. Repeats, ad nauseum, that after Monty Hall opens one door there are only two, equally likely, doors left!.

I was reminded of this when I came across this blog entry, from The Daily Howler, posted on March 31. The blogger, Bob Somerby, was commenting on this review of a new book about probability theory intended for nonmathematicians. The reviewer wrote:

Before scoffing, chew on the now famous Monty Hall problem, named after the host of “Let's Make a Deal.” A contestant knows that concealed behind three doors there are two goats and one new car. The contestant chooses Door No. 1. The beaming host opens Door No. 3 to reveal a goat, and then asks the contestant if he would like to change his choice to Door No. 2. Two doors add up to a 50-50 proposition, obviously. So why bother? Because the odds have actually shifted. The chances are now two out of three that changing to Door No. 2 will obtain the car. (Emphasis Added by Somerby)

Somerby replies:

Say what? We don’t know what the Kaplans wrote to provoke that highlighted sentence. But for the record: If the contestant changes to Door No. 2, he’ll obtain the car half the time—and “half the time” is not “two out of three.”

Ugh. That's totally wrong, I'm afraid.

The following day Somerby revisited the topic. Apparently some e-mailers informed Somerby that he was mistaken. Sadly, Somerby decided to dig in deeper:

Many e-mailers wrote to insist that there is a counterintuitive “Monty Hall problem” of the type we discussed yesterday (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/31/06). We haven’t had time to review this in detail, but:

We didn’t dispute that there’s some such effect—an effect which the Kaplans describe in their book. What we said is this: Whatever that counterintuitive “Hall effect” might be, the Times review doesn’t seem to describe it. We’ll persist in our statement about the situation as described in the Times review: In that situation, it just isn’t true that the contestant would gain an advantage from switching his guess. We’ll grudgingly try to sort through the matter. But what a bad time for this storm to reach land—on a weekend when tyrannical guvmint allows us just 47 hours.

Oh my. The description of the problem given in the Times may not be a model of clarity, but it is clear enough to make the point. Somerby is wrong and the reviewer is right.

I don't know about any counterintuitive “Hall effect”, but the mathematics of the situation are not especially complicated. When the contestant makes his initial choice he has a probability of 1/3 of being right. In other words, he will get it right 1/3 of the time and get it wrong 2/3 of the time. Nothing Monty Hall did in opening one of the doors changes that simple fact. By sticking with your initial choice you will be wrong 2/3 of the time. By switching, you will win 2/3 of the time.

Or think of it this way: Your initial choice is correct 1/3 of the time. Does it really make sense to say that when Monty Hall opens one of the remaining two doors your chances of having made the correct choice magically jump to 1/2?

Or try it this way: Suppose you choose door number one, and Monty Hall opens door number two. The choice Monty Hall then gives you is not really Door Number One vs. Door Number Three. Really the choice is Door Number One vs. Not Door Number One. Since door number one is only correct 1/3 of the time, surely it makes sense to swtich.

Still not convinced? Okay. Suppose you had 100 doors. The doors conceal one car and 99 goats. You choose door number one. Monty Hall then opens 98 goat-bearing doors. Are you seriously claiming that in this situation it makes no difference whether you switch or not? If you are not seriously claiming that, then explain to me how this situation differs from the original version. (In my experience, this way of putting it usually gets people to realize that things are not as simple as they originally thought. One time, though, I had a student in my office who was absolutely convinced that it made no difference whether or not you switched. No matter how I tried to explain it he woudn't give in. So I whipped out this example and smiled. Without missing a step he informed that even in this case it would make no difference whether you switched. I stopped smiling.)

Want more? Try this computer simulation. Do it many times and keep track of your statistics.

Think the computer simulation is rigged? Fine. Get out a pad and a pencil. Make a list of every possible scenario. (For example: Car behind door number one, you choose door number one, Monty Hall opens door number two.) It's a little tedious, but there aren't that many possibilities. Then put a little mark next to all the scenarios in which you will win by switching. I think you will find that by switching you will win 2/3 of the time.

Somerby's a smart guy, and I suspect he will eventually come to realize that he has made a mistake here. I've been a big fan of his blog, which is mostly devoted to exposing the blatant, jaw-dropping insanity that spews forth from our nation's press corps and political pundits, for a while now. But lately he's been annoying me a bit by hammering various liberal pundits for what strike me as pretty minor sins. So consider this brief essay a small measure of payback.

Let me close with two amusing variations on the Monty Hall problem.

Variation One: Monty Hall does not know which of the three doors contains the car. You choose one of the doors. Then Monty Hall chooses one of the remaining doors and opens it. It contains a goat. He then gives you the option of sticking with your original door or switching. What should you do?

Variation Two: This time there are five doors, concealing one car and four goats. You choose one of the doors. Monty Hall, who knows where the car is, opens one of the remaining goat-bearing doors. He then gives you the option of switching. You make your choice, after which Monty Hall again opens a goat-bearing door. Again you have the option of switching. This process continues until there are only two doors remaining. What is your best strategy?

Answers in a subsequent blog entry.

Teenagers Being Arrogant - So What Else is New?

2006-03-31T14:03:00.000-06:00

Today's Los Angeles Times has this vaguely annoying article. The subject is high school biology students parroting creationist talking points they don't understand and generally making obnoxious pests of themselves in the process:

Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.

As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection — in a word, by evolution.

The challenges begin at once.

“Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?” sophomore Chris Willett demands. “'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn't.”

Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but Willett isn't listening. “I feel a tail growing!” he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.

Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He's about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: “How are you 100% sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon.”

From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: “Those are real bones that someone actually found? You're not just making this up?”

Pretty standard stuff, these days. I know I should probably be angry at these kids, but mostly I just feel sorry for them. Consider this:

Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has spilled over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling to respond. Loyal to the accounts they've learned in church, students are taking it upon themselves to wedge creationism into the classroom, sometimes with snide comments but also with sophisticated questions — and a fervent faith.

As sophomore Daniel Read put it: “I'm going to say as much about God as I can in school, even if the teachers can't.”

Or this:

Daniel Read, for instance, considers it his Christian duty to expose his classmates to the truths he finds in the Bible, starting with the six days of creation. It's his way, he said, of counterbalancing the textbook, which devotes three chapters to evolution but just one paragraph to creationism. A soft-spoken teen with shaggy hair and baggy pants, Daniel prepares carefully for his mission in this well-educated, affluent and conservative suburb of 28,000, just outside Kansas City, Mo. He studies DVDs distributed by Answers in Genesis, a “creation evangelism” ministry devoted to training children to question evolution.

Other students gather ammunition from sermons at church, or from the dozens of websites that criticize evolution as a God-denying sham. They interrupt lectures to expound on the inaccuracies of carbon dating; to disparage transitional fossils as frauds; to show photos of ancient footprints that they think prove humans and dinosaurs walked side by side.

How is it that these kids hear a preacher say something in church, and it never occurs to them that maybe the preacher doesn't know what he is talking about? When their science teacher tells them something that conflicts with what they hear in church, they not only assume the teacher is wrong but apparently feel the need to get snarky and obnoxious as well. Even for a teenager it's pretty arrogant to think they've already solved all the mysteries of existence.

I think the reason is that from a very young age they are told not simply the basic assertions of their religion, but also that the whole idea of questioning those assertions is dangerous and immoral. That sort of relentless indoctrination is very hard to shake off. And that's why I feel more sorry for them than angry at them. We're talking about kids who have no higher ambition in life than to parrot the ignorant talking points they receive from the frauds at Answers in Genesis. Kids who have been raised in an environment that praises blind obedience to undeserving authority figures, rather than open-mindedness and education. Kids who have no idea how to distinguish between reliable sources of information, and unreliable sources of information. These kids are victims of their parents' ingorance. And once you appreciate that, some of Richard Dawkins' more florid statements likening religious indoctrination of children to child abuse suddenly don't seem so unreasonable.

Of course, let's not go overboard with our sympathy. Victims they may be, but the fact remains that they are also snotty ignoramuses who don't know anything about anything. Ultimately, they have to be dealt with aggressively and contemptuously. For their own good. They have to have it explained to them in no uncertain terms that their preachers frequently don't know what they are talking about, and that science should be learned from scientists, not clerics. Sadly, it is unlikely that any public school teacher could both administer the requisite tongue-lashing and also hope to keep his job.

Anyway, the whole article is worth reading. But not if you're currently in a good mood.

Wise Words from the RTD

2006-03-29T13:56:00.000-06:00

The Richmond Times-Dispatch (that's Richmond, VA), is no one's idea of a liberal newspaper. Today's edition featured this brief, but excellent, editorial. The Williams being referred to is the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams:

Williams makes two essential points:

Creationism (or its derivative, intelligent design) does not belong in public classrooms.
Supporters of creationism distort the scientific meaning of “theory” when they sneer at the “theory of evolution” even as they diminish the Bible and religious faith when they describe creationism and ID as theories in competition with Darwinism.

The Archbishop of Canterbury may not be infallible, but in this instance he has it exactly right.

Well said.

Chess in Staunton, Part Two

2006-03-29T00:10:00.000-06:00

For the first part of this tournament report, go here.

Round Three saw me move a little higher up the food chain. Happily, my opponent let his guard down and blundered away a pawn in the opening:

JR (1932) - Edward McLoughlin (1700)

Position After 9. ... Bc8-b7

This came out of an unusual line of the Sicilian Defense. I played 10. Nxb5! which pockets the pawn, thanks to the double attack on the black queen on c7 and the unprotected bishop on b4. This wouldn't have worked a move ago, because at that time my king was on e1, meaning that black could have played Bxd2 with check.

Dismayed by this development, my opponent tried to get his pawn back with 10. ... axb5 11. Bxb4 Bxe4 12. Bxe4 Nxe4, but now it's curtains after 13. Qg4! Black tried 13. ... Qc6 14. Qxg7 Qf6 15. Qxf6 Nxf6 16. Re1. Since black is about to lose the e-pawn, and probably the b-pawn shortly thereafter, he resigned after a few more moves. I was rather pleased with myself, until the computer pointed out to me that 14. Re1 is an even cleaner win.

This set up my final round game against the one master in the event. The game was filled with errors from both of us, and it ended somewhat appropriately with the following double blunder:

JR - Thomas Magar (2200)

Position After 32. ... e5-e4.

This position came after a very complicated middlegame which computer analysis showed was played, well, less than perfectly by both of us. We both had under ten minutes on the clock and we were consequently moving very quickly.

My opponent had just moved his pawn to e4. Play continued 33. dxe4 Qxe4??, which overlooked the reply 34. Re3!, which I promptly banged out. At this point my opponent noticed that the bishop on c5 is covering e3, providing yet another example of the old adage that backward diagonal moves are the hardest to spot. Black had no choice but to go for 34. ... Qxe3 35. Bxe3 Rde7 and now it was my time to return the favor. Incredibly, in my haste I overlooked that 36. Qa2+ gets out of the pin and wins easily. Instead I played 36. Qf3?? and after 36. ... Rxe3 37. Qf7+ Kh8 38. Qd7 R3e7 we agreed to a draw.

This gave both of 3.5 points. Another fellow won in the last round to catch up to us, and the three of us tied for first place.

All in all, a successful weekend. My thanks to the organizers for putting together such a pleasant tournament.

Wilkins on Dennett/Dawkins/Ruse

2006-03-28T15:13:00.000-06:00

John Wilkins offers these wise words about the recent brou ha ha surrounding Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Michael Ruse. Here's an excerpt:

Ruse appears to think that there is an ideological movement called “Darwinism”. I'm not sure why, apart from the tendency of historians and philosophers to reify abstract positions with labels that have capital letters. There have been any number of people who have called their views “Darwinism” - I'm thinking of the despicable views in the early 20thC of Benjamin Kidd and John B. Haycraft - but calling it “Darwinism” doesn't make it so. The term has also been employed in many contexts within science, usually to mean just an emphasis on natural selection. But there are people in the evolutionary field whose views differ enough from other people I would call Darwinian that we need a more differentiating name than “Darwinism”. Gould and Eldredge tried to revive some terms of Darwin's student George Romanes used against Weismann and Wallace: “ultra Darwinian” and “neo Darwinian”. Dennett and Dawkins appear to enjoy being so tarred. Fine. Even this phrasing is insufficient to bring out the actual nuances in the debates.

Well said. Go read the whole thing.

Chess in Staunton, Part One

2006-03-27T14:54:00.000-06:00

Your humble blogger had a successful weekend at the chessboard. I finished in a three-way tie for first place in the Staunton Open Chess Tournament. Pocketed $125 for my trouble. Went home, turned on the television, saw two guys playing poker for a stack of cash that represents more money than I will make in my entire life. Hmmmm. Maybe I'm playing the wrong game.

Thirty-seven players showed up, which was quite a good turnout for this area. Everyone played in the same section, meaning there were some serious rating mismatches in the early rounds.

In the first round I gave my lower-rated opponent a lesson in what happens when black dilly-dallies about starting his queenside counterplay in the Dragon variation of the Sicilian:

JR (1932) - Kevin Tapp (1190)

Position After 17. ... Kg8-f8

I met my opponent's Dragon with ye olde Yugoslav Attack, and since my opponent did not put any roadblocks in my way I was able to crash through with the standard kingside attack. I finished the game with an amusing rook maneuver: 18. Rh6!. Black is so tied up in knots that he is strangely helpless against the slow-motion threat of 19. Rg6 and 20. Rg8 mate. The most amusing line is 18. ... Bxd4 19. Rg6 Bxe3+ 20. Kb1, when black is up two pieces but defenseless against the threat of mate. The only possible defense is 18. ... Qc8 19. Rg6 Be6, but then 20. Bxg5 quickly takes care of business. My opponent played 18. ... e5, and resigned after 19. Rg6.

Round two saw me move up the rating ladder a bit. The position below came out of the Geller Gambit in the Slav Defense:

Donald Means (1472) - JR

Postion After 23. Nf3-d2

The Geller Gambit arises after 1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Nc3 dxc4 and now instead of the usual 5. a4, after which white will round up the c-pawn, restore material equality, and enter a long period of slow maneuvering, white plays 5. e4, gambtiting the pawn. Black generally replies with 5. ... b5, which secures the extra pawn. White is counting on his strong center and superior development to compensate for this fact.

The grandmasterly consensus is that white does not get enough for the pawn, and that black should be able to weather the storm and eventually make use of his extra pawn. But I am not a grandmaster, and I was nonplussed about being placed on the defensive right out of the opening, especially at a time control of game in 60 (meaning that both players had one hour for the whole game, regardless of how many moves the game took.)

Happily, my opponent was not a grandmaster either. He played as if he weren't down a pawn, took too long to put any pressure on me, and allowed me to create a position where my extra pawn actually counts for something.

The black pawns on c4 and b4 make a pleasing impression. After 23. ... b3! black's position is crushing. My opponent played 24. Qb2 c3 25. Qxb3 cxd2 26. Nxd2 and here I set a personal record for latest castling in a game by playing 26. ... 0-0. I duly converted the extra material. Another amusing line is 24. Qd1 c3 25. Nxb3 c2!. The only way for white to prevent the immediate loss of material is with 24. Qc1, but his position is hopeless in this case as well.

I'll cover the last two rounds in a later blog entry. Stay tuned!

Do Dawkins and Dennett Hurt the Cause?

2006-03-27T14:11:00.000-06:00

Yes, this subject again. P.Z. Myers offers some excellent commentary on a poorly reasoned op-ed by Madeleine Bunting, published in the British newspaper The Guardian. Bunting writes:

The curious thing is that among those celebrating the prominence of these two Darwinians on both sides of the Atlantic is an unexpected constituency - the American creationist/intelligent-design lobby. Huh? Dawkins, in particular, has become their top pin-up.

How so? William Dembski (one of the leading lights of the US intelligent-design lobby) put it like this in an email to Dawkins: “I know that you personally don't believe in God, but I want to thank you for being such a wonderful foil for theism and for intelligent design more generally. In fact, I regularly tell my colleagues that you and your work are one of God's greatest gifts to the intelligent-design movement. So please, keep at it!”

But while Dembski, Dawkins and Dennett are sipping the champagne for their very different reasons, there is a party pooper. Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: “Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level.” The nub of Ruse's argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: “If Darwinism equals atheism then it can't be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool.”

As Myers also points out, neither Dawkins nor Dennett believes that evolution leads ineluctably to atheism. They are both quite explicit about that. Dawkins has written that evolution makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, by which he means that minus a viable theory of evolution there's a major fact of everyday life, namely the existence of complex organisms, that would be awfully hard to explain without referring to God. Dennett has similarly written that evolution effectively destroys the argument from design, thereby removing the underpinnings from the best argument theists have ever offered.

Bunting uncritically accepts Ruse's argument on this subject:

But Ruse has got a point. Across the US, the battle over evolution in science teaching goes on. Just in the past month there have been bills in state legislatures in New York, Mississippi, Nevada and Arkansas promoting intelligent design. Last November the Kansas education board promulgated a new definition of science that allowed for supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. A school district in Kansas rebelled last month, accusing their board of “an utterly false belief that evolutionary science and the scientific method is based on atheistic philosophy. Promoting this false conflict between science and faith erects unnecessary barriers.” At the heart of many of these local controversies is the firmly held belief that Darwinism leads to atheism, indeed that it is atheism. Across the US, a crude and erroneous conflict is being created between science as atheism and religion.

I suspect that to British intellectuals like Bunting, places like Kansas are something of an abstraction. Prior to actually moving to Kansas in 2000, I would probably have made a similar argument. But after you've actually spent some time living in socially conservative areas, you begin to understand the absurdity of laying opposition to evolution at the feet of Dawkins and Dennett.

The only thing your typical Kansas anti-evolutionist knows about Dawkins or Dennett is that their preacher told them they are very bad men. It is almost a sure thing that none of them have read The Selfish Gene or Darwin's Dangerous Idea. It's a common mistake to think, when you're on the outside looking in, that the people promoting the anti-evolution legislation in states like Kansas base their opposition on high-minded arguments and plausible reasoning.

But when you live there for a while you get a very different picture. Turn on the local Christian radio station and listen to the irrational, groundless vitriol that gets hurled at evolution on nearly a daily basis. Then ponder the fact that similar venom is getting spewed every Sunday from the pulpits of the dozen or so churches you drive past on your daily commute. Ponder the fact that the fundamentalist Christian bookstore is the largest bookstore in town. Consider walking into a mainstream bookstore like WaldenBooks and having the first thing you see be not Stephen King or John Grisham, but Tim LeHaye and James Dobson.

While living in Kansas I once had a conversation with a para-educator in a local elementary school. We had just met and we were both observing a first-grade mathematics classroom. Our conversation was ostensibly about what we had observed. Suddenly she goes off for several paragraphs about the importance of doing God's will and looking to the Bible for guidance when you encounter difficult situations in life. From the casual and entirely non-confrontational tone with which she said it I'm sure she was simply taking it for granted that I agreed with her view of life.

Another time I was listening to a call-in show for parents on the Christian radio station. One obviously distraught parent called in and casually likened the trauma of learning that her college-aged son had become an atheist to the trauma of a previous caller whose child had been killed in a car accident.

I could rattle off many other stories just like this. These sorts of things were daily occurrences for me, and they entirely changed the way I look at this issue.

In other words, spend some time immersed in the culture of someplace like Kansas, see the extent to which the most irrational sort of religion is the dominant social force, and then try to argue that Dawkins and Dennett are the problem. If they and every other outspoken atheist disappeared off the face of the Earth how much difference would that make to the attempts to teach creationism in public schools? Answer: Zero. There would just be fewer people fighting against it.

What does hurt the cause, however, are people like Ruse. He's not the dominant source of the problem, but he is a source. How can we explain to people that there is no serious scientific controversy on this subject when Ruse is willing to use his considerable clout to get Cambridge University Press to say that there is one. And then, as if it's not bad enough that he's collaborating with the enemy on such a project, he does a lousy job of assembling essays to represent the evolutionary side of things (but that's a separate blog entry). Ruse is hurting the cause far more than Dawkins and Dennett are.

Let me close with an excellent statement from Myers:

Scientists will never be the close, reassuring father figures that Americans see every week. We will always be threats to the backwards-looking flocks of the majority of the religious, and we will always be railed against from the pulpits—science is an alternative and better way to approach the truth, so we are the competition. The only religion that we can coexist with is one that abandons dogma and scriptural authority, that concedes all explanations of the natural world to the scientific process rather than ancient writ, and to short-circuit the inevitable whining that will follow in the comments thread: those faiths and those individuals are in the minority just as much as we atheists are, and are regarded by the Baptists and the Catholics and the Lutherans and the Mormons and other established sects as just as much of an evil. (Emphasis in original)

Amen.

What is Science?

2006-03-24T19:33:00.000-06:00

Science is best viewed as an activity undertaken with a specific goal in mind. That goal is to understand the way nature works. We measure our understanding by the extent to which we can make nature's phenomena predictable and controllable. Any investigative technique that brings us closer to this goal can reasonably be considered part of science.

All of the standard pieces of the scientific method we learned about in high school - experimentation, hypothesis testing, inductive reasoning and so forth - have their role to play in bringing us closer to our goal of predictability and control. By contrast, hypothesizing the actions of ill-defined supernatural entities such as ghosts or poltergeists do not help us move closer to our goal. Consequently, the actions of supernatural entities play no role in modern scientific discourse. The day someone finds a way to use such an hypothesis to bring clarity to some confusing aspect of nature is the day scientists will embrace the supernatural.

Many of the terms that get thrown around in this discussion - such as testability, falsifiability, or methodological naturalism (MN)- are really just ways of saying that scientists care about predictability and control. Saying that scientists adhere to MN in their work is really just a shorthand way of saying that science is a very pragmatic enterprise, and that the naturalistic hypotheses are the ones that have historically proven useful to scientists. It is a phrase that accurately describes the way scientists approach their work, and it survives because the only alternative - methodological supernaturalism - has proven itself time and again to be utterly ineffective in bringing scientists closer to their goal.

I think my description will seem obvious to any practicing research scientist. Indeed, I think it is obvious to most people who have devoted any thought to the matter, with the possible exception of that small subset of philosophers who see their job as the complexification of fundamentally simple questions.

I was moved to state this plainly because of this bizarre post up at IDtheFuture, written by Paul Nelson. I say bizarre because the arguments he is making are so bad that it is simply impossible to accept that Nelson really believes what he is saying.

Nelson recoutns a visit he received from the historian Ronald Numbers. At that time Numbers was working on his book The Creationists and wished to have a look at some primary source material Nelson possessed reagrding early twentieth century creationists. Early in his post, Nelson writes:

The philosophy of science program at Pitt is one of the best in the world. I had struggled through difficult but deeply rewarding courses with Carl Hempel, Adolf Grünbaum, Jim Lennox, and others, where the question of the definition of science often came up. I observed to Ron that the philosophers (and scientists) I knew best did not agree about whether design by a non-human intelligence qualified as a scientific explanation.

I'm sure Nelson meant to refer to a supernatural intelligence rather than a non-human intelligence. After all, it's perfectly acceptable to refer to animal intelligences in explaining some particular phenomenon.

Could the hypothesis of a supernatural intelligence ever be scientific. I doubt it, but I won't completely rule it out. In principle you could hypothesize a designer with specific supernatural abilities who is also possessed of certain clearly defined motivations and goals. Given such a hypothesis you might be able to say that certain sorts of observations could plausibly be atrributed to the action of this designer while certain other sorts of observations could not be so attributed. You might even be able to make some prediction based on your understanding of the designer's attributes. On the other hand, a carefully circumscribed supernatural designer begins to look an awful lot like a natural law, but still, I won't dismiss this possibility out of hand.

In the context of evolution/ID disputes, however, this is moot. The ID folks are adamant that, to the extent that ID is science, it does not allow any inference to be drawn at all about the nature of the designer. One reason they are adamant on this point is that they know full well that the natural world as we find is not at all consistent with the idea of an all-powerful and all-loving designer. Reconciling the natural world with the Christian God requires so many ad hoc hypotheses that such a designer immeidately loses all value as a scientific hypothesis.

But this is a mere warm-up. The real silly parts are still to come...

On the one hand, Charles Darwin had refuted the theories of special creation of the early 19th century -- and thus such theories were testable, not least because they had been tested and falsified. On the other hand, however, the strong positivism that permeated the atmosphere of the 10th floor of the Cathedral of Learning, the home of the history and philosophy of science program at Pitt, often held that “supernatural” explanations were untestable in principle.

But if such theories were untestable in principle, why did so many of my professors, from both philosophy and biology, talk at length about data that did or did not support Duane Gish's creationism, or “scientific creationism” generally (au courant at the time because of the various “balanced treatment” cases in US federal courts). If Gish's arguments could be countered by evidence, then the dialectic of science was already fully engaged. Whatever evidence can challenge, evidence can support. Right?

The problem, of course, is that Gish made a great many arguments. Some of those arguments dealt with matters of science, and those arguments were both testable and shown to be wrong. Other of his claims dealt with bald assertions of supernatural action, and these were not scientific. For example, Gish was fond of arguing that the best evidence from the relevant branches of science implied that the Earth was on the order of thousands of years old. That's a perfectly scientific assertion, and was shown conclusively to be wrong. Likewise for many of the assertions Gish made about the fossil record. But Gish made other assertions that were plainly not testable. For example, that the universe was created instantaneously by God via mechanisms that are no longer in effect today. That is plainly unscientific.

This point is not complicated, and it has been made times before. I am baffled that Nelson could have overlooked it.

Nelson continues:

Intelligent causation, I said to Ron, seemed to me to have been unjustifiably excluded from the roster of candidate hypotheses for the origin of life. Life could have been designed. That might have happened, as an empirical possibility, and whatever is possible ought not to be excluded from science a priori. (Some possible states of affairs might turn out not to be the case, of course, but that is a matter for empirical inquiry, not definitions.)

Of course design is possible and could have happened, Ron said to me, tucking into his meal. That's not the problem.

This answer stunned me, and today, almost 23 years later, I can still experience the sense of amazement and shock. One grows accustomed to positivism after a while, and the familiar “science” and “religion” categories had been well-buttressed by multiple lines of argument from very bright people indeed on the 10th floor (albeit with the glaring inconsistencies mentioned above, e.g., 'Wait until Duane Gish sees this new transitional fossil!' -- and with a long historical record of shifting definitions and practices of science shoved to one side). I fumbled out a reply to Ron: But that's not fair, I protested. Where was the justification?

Ron shrugged. You're right, he continued, it isn't fair. (Emphasis in original)

Maybe I'm just a closed-minded skeptic, but I don't believe for a second that Nelson was stunned by that answer. After all, what other answer is possible? Has anyone in the history of the universe ever denied the bare possibility that the world is the product of intelligent design? I'm as hard-core an atheist as you're likely to meet, but I think it's such a live possibility that I spend an inordinate amount of time reading what religious people have to say on the subject. And the possibility of design has nothing to do with positivism, or definitions of science and religion or anything else.

So is it unfair that scientists do not accept supernatural design as an acceptable scientific hypothesis? Only in the same sense that it is unfair for a plumber to dismiss out of hand the gremlin theory of drain clogs. The plumber has unclogged a lot of drains, but has never once found it helpful to hypothesize a gremlin in the pipes as the cause of the clog. Likewise scientists have never once found it helpful to invoke a supernatural entity in pursuing their goals. So how is it unfair for them to leave that assumption out of their work?

Sadly, we now come to the part of Neslon's essay that I found especially vexing:

But think about it this way, he went on. Why is it that when a batter in baseball hits a foul ball, he has to stay at home plate (assuming no one catches the ball)? Why can't he run to first base?

If you're going to have a game, he continued, you've got to have some rules. For a long time now -- really from the middle of the 19th century -- one of the rules in science has been that the hypothesis of supernatural design is excluded from scientific discourse as a candidate explanation. Just as in baseball, where the first and third base lines define the field of play, in science one of the defining rules has been that the hypothesis of design, although quite possible, falls wholly outside the lines of admissible discourse.

Ron then referred me to Neil Gillespie's classic treatment, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, where this problem is much discussed. The exclusion of design is long-standing, Ron concluded, and unlikely to change. That's just the way the game is played nowadays.It's not fair, he said, but those are the rules.I couldn't think of any reply to this -- after all, a rule is a rule is a rule -- and so our conversation moved on.

I hope Numbers didn't really say this, but if he did I can only shake my head sadly and suggest to people that they not learn their science from historians. The analogy of science to a game, with MN as an arbitrary rule within that game, is a very bad way of putting things.

Completely left out of Numbers' description is the fact that science has specific goals in mind. As already discussed, the convention of MN is just a reflection of the sorts of hypotheses scientists have found useful in several centuries of work.

Unfortunatly, this failure to recognize that science is a goal-directed enterprise is very common, in my experience, even among otherwise very well-educated people. I have had many religious people present to me the argument that science tries to discover the truth about nature, God is part of that truth, therefore God should be part of science. This fundamentally misses the point. Science isn't really about ultimate truth. It's about a more practical sort of truth.

Two quick examples should help make the point. First, is it true that the planets orbit the Sun and trace out a ellipse as they do so? Well, all we really know is that they hypothesis that they do has allowed us to make so many successful predictions that it seems reasonable to conclude that it is true. That's what I mean by a practical sort of truth.

Second, consider Newton's law of gravitation - the one that says that the gravitational force between two masses is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. Question: How do we know that 2 is the correct exponent to have on the bottom of that fraction? If used the exponent 2.00000000001 or 1.99999999999 we would get the same predictive consequences, at least as far as our ability to measure things is concerned. So why do we assume that 2 is the correct exponent? Answer: We don't. What we know is that 2 is the simplest exponent we can use that allows us to make accurate predictions. No room for ultimate truth here.

Why do scientists believe that simple theories are better than complicated theories? Not because simple theories are more likely to be true in some uoltimate sense. Rather, it is because simple theories are more likely to be useful than complicated theories.

Now, does this mean that science has no role to play in making a case for atheism? Well, yes and no. But we'll save that for a future blog entry.

Nelson concludes with his standard complaints about scientists rigging the game and about how naturalists try to rule out ID by definitional fiat and about how people should let the evidence decide. Blah blah blah.

The situation is actually very simple. If Nelson or any other ID advocate believes that science ought to introduce supernatural thinking into its standard repertoire than the test they have to pass is very simple: Go discover something. Stop with the abstract philosophizing, stop levelling bogus charges about the bigotry and closed-mindedness of mainstream scientists, and stop whining about just wanting to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Scientists have given all due consideration to such evidence as ID folks provide, and they have rightly found it worthless. If Nelson believes they have made an error, let him go into the lab and prove them wrong in the only currency scientists care about: progress towards taming the chaos of nature.

Bolton Weighs In

2006-03-23T15:16:00.000-06:00

As a companion piece to yesterday's blog entry, consider these thoughts from Warren Bolton, Associate Editor of the South Carolina newspaper The State:

A FEW YEARS ago, a friend of mine and his family took a trip to the Grand Canyon.

He was awed by the cavernous wonder. A tour guide said it took a billion-plus years for the canyon to form. “My Bible tells me God formed it in six days,” my friend said to himself.

Each day his family rose early to have devotion at the edge of the canyon. They wanted to worship and praise God, whom they saw in his magnificent creation.
My Sunday school class is studying various Psalms that recognize God as creator. Psalm 8 says God’s name is “excellent in all the earth” and that he gave man a special place in creation. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.”

Psalm 104 says God covers himself with light as with a garment and “stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.” He “laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.” Psalm 139 says we’re “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

One Sunday, a class member raised concern about the growing debate over whether evolution and/or intelligent design should be taught in schools. We didn’t come to a conclusion, but we acknowledged that our studies provide a sound argument in support of intelligent design that easily trumps the theory of accidental creation and random evolution of man. Darwin’s theory of evolution can’t begin to fully explain the complexity of the origins of life.

As far as I can tell, the only studies he undertook, and the only argument he has offered, relate to what the Bible has to say. Does anyone believe for a second that Mr. Bolton could give a coherent description of what evolution actually says, or could summarize what origins of life researchers have discovered?

The more I read things like this the more I come to believe that sheer laziness has a lot to do with the preference for blind faith over actually following the evidence. Learning biology is hard work. Mindlessly pounding the Bible is so much easier.

Later Bolton writes:

You either believe the Genesis story is true or you don’t. I believe the story that God created man and woman for one another. I believe man fell because Adam and Eve ate of forbidden fruit, making all humans sinners and in need of salvation, available through Jesus Christ. If that story isn’t true, then the Bible — from the first to the 66th book — isn’t the literal, infallible word of God.

Attacks against creation casts doubt on scriptural authority. If we question the Bible’s account of creation, what does that say about the existence of original sin? What does it say about Jesus Christ, the risen savior, and man’s need to be saved?

I’ve got no beef with science. It serves its purpose. But God is bigger than science. Science can’t poke and prod and explain him. It can’t challenge his authority, disprove his existence, ascertain his location or calculate his spiritual density. Those who discount intelligent design say there is no scientific proof that an intelligent being spoke creation into existence. But the Bible says not only did God create the ends of the earth, “there is no searching of his understanding.” While we humans toil to put an age and date to everything, scripture tells us that, to God, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. Our thoughts don’t come close to matching his; our ways fall far short of his.

Translation: Your puny evidence is no match for my groundless delusions!

Creech on Insanity

2006-03-22T14:03:00.000-06:00

Here's the Reverend Mark Creech, columnist for for the Christian news outlet Agape Press, lecturing us about the nature of insanity:

Only those whose judgment has been profoundly diminished -- whose ability to think and carefully weigh the facts, after witnessing the rioting of Muslims around the world over something as silly as a cartoon -- would still believe Islam is essentially a peaceful religion. Only those who are not thinking straight would believe redefining marriage to allow same-sex couples to marry could ever be in the best interest of the nation. Only those who've been brainwashed by the screwy philosophies of our time would defend abortion, pornography, euthanasia, gambling, premarital sex, stem-cell research on embryos, the legalization of drugs and prostitution, removing the influence of prayer, Bible reading, and the Ten Commandments from public life. This is all a form of madness!

And later:

Real wisdom comes from God. Those who turn from their sins to Christ, the living Word, find it. And those who live by the inerrant written Word, the Bible, discover it. Other voices are simply unreliable and can lead to a darkened understanding, a defiled mind and conscience -- much like what's demonstrated in the many arguments of the atheists, the evolutionists, the theological modernists, and the secular humanists of today.

This is usually the point where some well-meaning commenter feels compelled to explain to me that actually people like Creech are a fringe minority, that they only speak for a small percentage of religious believers, and that I shouldn't get so worked up about the fanatics.

Spare me. I've heard it before. It isn't true. Creechism is the dominant religious view in many parts of this country. Try living in Kansas for a while if you don't believe me. Walk into almost any Christian bookstore and it is Creechism you will find being promoted. It wasn't theologically moderate people who made the Left Behind series so successful. It wasn't theological moderates our President was thinking about when he struggled to answer an audience member's question about whether the rise of terrorism is a sign of the apocalypse. It wasn't theological moderates that Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was appealing to when he complained that faith plays too small a role in modern American discourse. It wasn't moderates who proposed a resolution making Christianity the official religion of the state of Missouri, and it wasn't moderates who allowed that resolution to make it to a floor vote.

I could go on. The fact is that the Creechists of this country are so numerous and politically powerful that every Republican of any prominence is either one of them, or bends over backward to make everyone think he's one of them. The genuine theological moderates need to wake up and realize that, in terms of deciding public policy, they have far more in common with the atheists and secular humanists than they do with the religious right.

V for Vendetta

2006-03-21T19:28:00.000-06:00

Excellent movie. Go see it immediately. Not quite a masterpiece, but very good nonetheless.

Hunter's Distortions

2006-03-21T19:22:00.000-06:00

Over at IDtheFuture, Cornelius Hunter offers this piece of drivel about the low standard of evidence scientists adhere to in defending evolution. The target of his ire is this paper, about the evolution of “electric organs” in certain fish, published in the Proceedings of the National Acdemy of Science.

I have posted my reply over at The Panda's Thumb. I'm sure you'll be shokced to learn that Hunter's arguments run the usual ID gamut from bad to laughably bad. Go have a look!

Cool Juggling

2006-03-17T12:33:00.000-06:00

Check this out.

Good Math Blog

2006-03-17T12:27:00.000-06:00

Computer scientist Mark Chu-Carroll has started an excellent blog called Good Math, Bad Math. I've only been able to skim his posts so far, but it looks like he has some first-rate essays ripping into creationist mathematics. I know what I'm going to be reading this weekend!

Klugman on God

2006-03-17T12:21:00.000-06:00

I'm a big Jack Klugman fan. Twelve Angry Men is one of my favorite movies. He was in some terrific Twilight Zone episodes. (I especially like that one with Jonathan Winters in the pool hall). And television definitely hit a high-water mark with Quincy.

But I must take issue with part of this brief essay from The Huffington Post:

I'll come back to what the movie says about God in a minute -- now I'm gonna get political for you. Remember, I'm a lifelong Democrat. Never vote any other way. And as a Democrat, I want to say this to the Democratic Party, "GOD IS NOT A REPUBLICAN!" Get that? Heard me clearly? Read it again. That's why I wrote it in capital letters.

We live in a religious country. Get over it. And not only that, but religion is not a superstitious bromide for the ignorant. There is tremendous wisdom, accumulated over centuries of deep thought, in all the major traditions, and all those folks who invest their time and energy in faith are NOT idiots. Why is this a political thought? Because our party has set itself up as the party that's against God, and as long as it does that, we will keep losing power. If we were to do all the same things we're doing now, however, and somehow extend an olive branch to the faithful, we could swing the Washington pendulum hard and fast to our side. Think about it. There are plenty of religious people who respect women's rights and believe in evolution - that's not the point. The point is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “Both sides pray to the same God.” God is not a Republican, and it's about time we gave Him equal opportunity on our platform.

For the purpose of this blog entry I will accept the premise that Democrats lose elections because they don't appeal to religious people.

My question is: what form does the olive branch take? The Democratic party believes in a strong separation of church and state. It believes that the decision to terminate a pregnancy should reside with the mother in most cases. It believes that science and rationality are sounder bases for public policy than religious faith. It believes in full civil rights for homosexuals. Granted, the party has not always been as steadfast in defense of these principles as it should have been. Individual Democrats might dissent from one or more of these ideas (or various other issues I could have listed). But the fact remains that these are things that Democrats have historically stood for. Does Klugman believe that Democrats should compromise these principles?

In what sense is the Democratic party hostile to God or religious people? Certainly they are hostile to using the government to promote particular religious ideologies, but any religious person who sees no distinction there is not someone we want to court. Has any Democrat of any prominence made statements hostile to religion? Has any Democrat proposed legislation that is hostile to religion? Is there any plank in the Democratic platform that is hostile to religion? I fear that Klugman has simply absorbed a standard Republican talking point (no doubt because of its frequent repetition.)

Democrats believe that religion is a personal matter and should not be used as the basis for public policy. If extending an olive branch to religious people means sacrificing that principle, then I would prefer to lose elections.

Barrow Wins Templeton Prize

2006-03-17T10:03:00.000-06:00

From The New York Times:

Continuing a recent trend in which the world's richest religion prize has gone to scientists, John D. Barrow, a British cosmologist whose work has explored the relationship between life and the laws of physics, was named the winner yesterday of the 2006 Templeton Prize for progress or research in spiritual matters.

Dr. Barrow will receive the $1.4 million prize during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 3. The prize was created in 1972 by the philanthropist Sir John Marks Templeton, who specified that its monetary value always exceed that of the Nobel Prize. Five of the last six winners have been scientists. Asked about this, Dr. Barrow said, “Maybe they ask the most interesting questions.”

Dr. Barrow, 53, a mathematical sciences professor at the University of Cambridge, is best known for his work on the anthropic principle, which has been the subject of debate in physics circles in recent years. Life as we know it would be impossible, he and others have pointed out, if certain constants of nature — numbers denoting the relative strengths of fundamental forces and masses of elementary particles — had values much different from the ones they have, leading to the appearance that the universe was “well tuned for life,” as Dr. Barrow put it.

Ugh.

Make the commonplace and trivial observation that the universe is congenial to our sort of life, assert this is evidence for God, ignore rival explanations that can claim at least some evidential support, win $1.4 million. Lovely.

The Times article closes with:

Noting that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, Dr. Barrow said that in contrast with the so-called culture wars in America, science and religion had long coexisted peaceably in England. “The concept of a lawful universe with order that can be understood and relied upon emerged largely out of religious beliefs about the nature of God,” he said.

That last claim gets repeated a lot, but it sounds like nonsense to me. The concept of a lawful universe with order that can be understood and relied upon seems amply justified by our everyday experience. Adding God to the mix only creates a reason not to have confidence in the regularities of mature.

Round Two with Cordova

2006-03-16T19:23:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: March 17. 2006.: Salvador has replied to this post. You will find his reply as comment seven here. I will let him have the last word.

Salvador has now replied to yesterday's post. You will find his reply as comment six.

Here's a quick recap of the argument thus far: On Tuesday evening I attended a talk given by John Angus Campbell on the subject of teaching ID in schools. During his talk Campbell argued that Darwin contrasted his ideas about common descent against rival ideas that we would nowadays refer to as ID. I criticized this on the grounds that there was an equivocation in the use of the term ID. The thing with which Darwin contrasted common descent was the idea that species were special creations of God and fixed through time. That is not what the term ID means today. Therefore, this was not a good argument for defending the inclusion of modern ID in science classes.

Salvador replied by providing a few quotes from Darwin in which Darwin explicitly refers to creation or design. This, sadly, completely missed the point. The question was whether what Darwin had in mind by those terms was equivalent to what modern ID folks have in mind. I went on to show, by placing Salvador's Darwin quotes in their proper context, that Darwin was not talking about ID as that term is understood today.

Apparently Salvador continues to miss the point. He writes:

Rosenhouse objects by saying that Darwin was arguing for common descent and the mutability of species as the conclusion of the theory. However, Rosenhouse misses the fact that Darwin had to use anti-Design arguments, particularly in chapter six to justify his conclusion. Also his writing was targeted at the pro-Design culture of the time. To arrive at that conclusion, Darwin had to make anti-Design arguments. One will see his writings anticipate design arguments of his day and today:

In Chapter 6

Organs of extreme perfection and complication.
….
It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?
….
may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?
…
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

“It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope,” and in the modern day it is scarecly possible to avoid comparing the flagellum to an outboard motor, or some parts of the cellular machinery with a computer, or biological clock with clocks. Darwin recognized he had to address the design argument for his anti-creationist theory to be received.

Darwin would not reach Chapter 14 had he not felt he offered a sufficient designer substitute. I think Jason is underestimating the importance of the anti-design arguments which are in Darwin’s work. Darwin recognizes that the problem of design in “organs of extreme perfection” could sink his whole theory. And that is very much the same battle ground being fought today!

First off, in my original blog entry I was explicitly talking about Darwin's arguments in favor of common descent. Salvador's first reply used quotes related to that subject as well. He has now changed the subject to the question of how Darwin defended natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. This is a different issue.

Of more import, however, is that Salvador has once again misrepresented what Darwin said. Let's look at the full context of that “telescope” line:

He who will go thus far, if he find on finishing this treatise that large bodies of facts, otherwise inexplicable, can be explained by the theory of descent, ought not to hesitate to go further, and to admit that a structure even as perfect as the eye of an eagle might be formed by natural selection, although in this case he does not know any of the transitional grades. His reason ought to conquer his imagination; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths.

It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; and each to be preserved till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man? (Emphasis Added)

Note that first bold face statement, in which Darwin explicitly separates the question of common descent from the question of natural selection as the mechanism of that descent.

Now look at the final bold face statement. This makes it obvious that Darwin has no problem with the idea of intelligent design in the abstract. There is evidently nothing in his arguments that rules out the existence of a Creator who produces various works. It is, therefore, far too simplistic (to put it kindly) to say that Darwin was presenting anti-design arguments.

Now look at the middle bold face statement. What he is criticizing there is not the idea that there is a Creator who creates, but rather the presumption that such a Creator would produce his works by the same mechanisms through which human designers produce theirs. In other words, he is criticizing the idea that the eye (in this example) was produced by divine planning and fiat, as opposed to appearing via a gradual process presumably set in motion by the Creator.

Or to put it yet another way, he is not criticizing design in some vague sense, but rather the idea of the special creation of species with all of their structures in their present form. This is exactly what I argued in my previous post.

The only way Salvador's argument makes sense is if you construe the design argument as merely the claim that the complexity of certain anatomical structures, all by itself, implies they must have been designed. In that case, your argument is identical to the one offered by William Paley, and you should call it natural theology, not ID. Modern ID, as proposed by people like William Dembski and Michael Behe, was supposed to be a huge leap forward from Paley. They claimed to have produced a rigorous, quantifiable procedure for proving to a certainty that certain structures were designed. This was said to be an improvement over Paley's mostly analogical arguments.

The claim that Darwin set his arguments in opposition to ID can only be defended by defining ID in a way that ignores everything that modern ID proponents claim to have produced. But then you are left with the statement that Darwin set his arguments in opposition to Paley's earlier arguments, which everyone already knew.

So let's turn this in to something productive. If by “teaching ID” you mean that you should say that before Darwin it was very common for people to analogize complex anatomical structures to machines and conclude that they were designed directly by God, but then Darwin came along and showed that this analogy is seriously deficient, then I am all in favor of teaching ID. But if by “teaching ID” you mean that we should give respectful mention to things like irreducible complexity or complex specified information, then I am opposed to that, for the simple reason that we shoudn't be presenting false information to children.

Likewise, if “teaching the controversy” means that we should teach so much about evolution that we actually come to those esoteric issues that professionals actually argue about, then I am all in favor of it. But if by “teaching the controversy” you mean we should present respectfully the sort of bogus anti-evolution arguments offered by, say, Jonathan Wells, then I am against it.

Campbell himself was a bit confusing on these points. At times he seemed to be advocating the first option in these two paragraphs. Other times he seemed to prefer the second. Salvador appears to be defending the first in his reply. If that was his intention, then we don't disagree on very much, but he is abusing language in a serious way to describe that as teaching ID. But if actually he thinks that anything produced by contemporary ID advocates, most notably William Dembski and Michael Behe, is relevant to understanidng any of Darwin's arguments, then he is terribly confused.

Cordova on Campbell

2006-03-15T12:22:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I offered up this account of John Angus Campbell's presentation at James Madison University. Salvador Cordova was also in the audience, and he has offered his account here.

Cordova describes his blog entry as a competing account to what I wrote, but he actually only challenges one thing that I said. Cordova writes:

Campbell argued that Darwin’s idea can’t be fully understood without understanding the idea Darwin was seeking to replace, namely (using today’s jargon) intelligent design. Thus to learn about Darwin correctly, one must learn about intelligent design.

Darwin explicitly points out he’s going after “special creation”, “plan of creation” or “unity of design”. (See Chapter 14.)

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the `plan of creation,’ `unity of design,’ &c.,
…
This grand fact of the grouping of all organic beings seems to me utterly inexplicable on the theory of creation.
….

What is the proper relationship of special creation to intelligent design? Intelligent design is a necessary but not sufficient condition for special creation. This logically implies that if one can negate the design argument through a designer substitute (Darwinian mechanisms), one can destroy not only the design argument, but also the case for special creation.

To illustrate, a typical car needs fuel to run. Fuel is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a car to run (a lot of other things like electricity and oil are needed to make a car run, not just fuel). But if there is no fuel, the car doesn’t run.

In like manner, if there is no intelligent design, there is no special creation. In fact, since intelligent design is a necessary condition for theories like Front Loading, PEH, etc., they (in addition to special creation) would be swept away if Darwin’s hypothesis were true.

Total poppycock, I'm afraid.

First off, since Cordova presents this as an account that is competing with my own, I assume he thinks this is a counter to what I wrote in my blog entry on this subject:

Another point that arose in our conversation was the role of ID in the Origin. I pointed out that Darwin did not contrast evolution with ID as that term is understood today. Instead he contrasted the idea of common descent with the idea that species were fixed through time. That is a specific hypothesis with different predictive consequences from common descent. Consequently, it was not a good argument to say that we should present ID in science class because that is how Darwin did it in his own work. (Emphasis added)

ID as that term is understood today. Salvador seems to have overlooked that part.

When Darwin spoke of the theory of creation, he had in mind the idea that each species was a separate and independent creation. To put it another way, he was contrasting the idea of descent with modification with the alternative hypothesis that species were fixed through time. This is made clear throughout the Origin, including in the few sentences that precede the one Cordova so selectively quoted:

This tendency in the large groups to go on increasing in size and diverging in character, together with the almost inevitable contingency of much extinction, explains the arrangement of all the forms of life, in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great classes, which we now see everywhere around us, and which has prevailed throughout all time. This grand fact of the grouping of all organic beings seems to me utterly inexplicable on the theory of creation.

This fact is made even clearer in this statement, from earlier in Chapter 14 of the Origin:

On the view that species are only strongly marked and permanent varieties, and that each species first existed as a variety, we can see why it is that no line of demarcation can be drawn between species, commonly supposed to have been produced by special acts of creation, and varieties which are acknowledged to have been produced by secondary laws. On this same view we can understand how it is that in each region where many species of a genus have been produced, and where they now flourish, these same species should present many varieties; for where the manufactory of species has been active, we might expect, as a general rule, to find it still in action; and this is the case if varieties be incipient species. Moreover, the species of the large genera, which afford the greater number of varieties or incipient species, retain to a certain degree the character of varieties; for they differ from each other by a less amount of difference than do the species of smaller genera. The closely allied species also of the larger genera apparently have restricted ranges, and they are clustered in little groups round other species -- in which respects they resemble varieties. These are strange relations on the view of each species having been independently created, but are intelligible if all species first existed as varieties. (Emphasis added)

The ideas that each species was specially created and that species are fixed through time are manifestly not ones that the leading proponents of ID attempt to defend. In fact, they typically distance themselves from them, pointing out that one can accept both common descent and ID. Darwin's only comment about things like irreducible complexity or complex specified information, the pillars of modern ID, was to note that we shouldn't be so cavalier about saying that this or that complex structure could not have evolved gradually.

No one objects to showing how common descent provides a better explanation for the facts of nature than the rival hypothesis of species fixity. More than that, I agree with Campbell that it is almost impossible to present evolution effectively without making this comparison. I don't know anyone who disagrees with this. That Campbell seems to think that is what is at issue suggests to me that he doesn't really understand the modern evolution/ID debate. That is why I said in my previous entry that he should stick to talking about science education, where his ideas have some merit, and stay away from evolution, where they do not.

If Darwin is correct then the idea that each species was created in its present form, in a puff of smoke, with one waggle of God's finger, is out the window. This has nothing to do with front-loading, or the PEH, or any other idea that takes a more nuanced view of God's action. Mind you, I think front-loading and the PEH are silly ideas for other reasons, but they are not ruled out by accepting the hypotheses of common descent and natural selection. Indeed, the PEH is the brainchild of John Davison, who accepts common descent. Likewise, front-loading has been seriously proposed by Michael Behe, who also accepts common descent.

We see, as usual, that Salavdor is talking through his hat.

Incidentally, let me note that Salvador's headline for his blog entry was:

Rosenhouse Praises Discovery Institute Fellow John Angus Campbell.

Pretty misleading, don't you think? I praised certain aspects of Campbell's remarks about science education, but also criticized much of his take on evolution and ID. And considering that I specifically singled out our differing views of the Discovery Institute as one of our main points of disagreement, it was rather poor form to imply that by saying something nice about Campbell I was liekwise praising his involvement with the DI.

One suspects that if I had written a slash and burn post ripping in to Campbell, but then paused to note that he had good taste in clothes, Salvador would have used the same headline.

Campbell at JMU

2006-03-14T23:49:00.000-06:00

I just got back from a public presentation given by John Angus Campbell on the subject of what to teach in high school biology classes. You may recognize Campbell as the coeditor (with Stephen Meyer) of the Michigan State University Press anthology Darwinism, Design and Public Education. I reviewed this book a while back for Skeptic magazine. You can read my (mostly negative) review (PDF format) here.

I agreed with most of what Campbell had to say. He began by extolling the virtues of civil discourse and respecting those with whom we disagree. No argument there. He had nothing but praise for Charles Darwin, both as a scientist and as a writer. He mentioned also that he was himself a Darwinist, which he reiterated to me in our conversation after the talk (more on that later). I liked all of that.

Eventually he got to his main point, which was that science education should emphasize the role of argument and intepretation of evidence in its presentation. There should also be enough philosophy introduced to help students understand the distinction between science and nonscience. He argued that in The Origin Darwin frequently contrasted evolution with the rival idea of ID, and as a result it was impossible to understand Darwin's argument without discussing the rival ideas prevalent at the time. It was in this context that ID had a role in science classes.

After the talk I had the opportunity to talk to him semi-privately (there were a few other people hanging around who also offered some thoughts). I pointed out to him that I agreed with nearly everything he said, but that I thought he had avoided most of the issues that cause all the heat. What gets scientists angry is not the idea that there should be more discussion of the nature of science and the role of argumentation and interpretaion of evidence within it. Nor is anyone bothered by the idea of presenting Darwin's work in the historical context of the times in which he was writing.

Rather, the problem comes in presenting the modern incarnation of ID as a legitimate scientific theory alongside evolution. I argued that we should not do that because the arguments ID proponents make are totally false. I also pointed out that civility is a two-way street, and that considering that all of the leading ID proponents engage in sleazy, dishonest rhetoric, it was a little galling that I was expected to be civil towards them.

Campbell didn't seem to disagree with any of this. In the end, I was a little confused about what role ID was playing in his argument. After all, he made it clear during his talk that it was not his intention to single out evolution for special treatment. Rather, he was making suggestions for fundamentally rethinking the way science gets taught. I suggested to him that he shouldn't be casting his argument in the context of evolution and ID, but rather as a more general talk about the nature of science education. He even seemed to agree with that!

Another point that arose in our conversation was the role of ID in the Origin. I pointed out that Darwin did not contrast evolution with ID as that term is understood today. Instead he contrasted the idea of common descent with the idea that species were fixed through time. That is a specific hypothesis with different predictive consequences from common descent. Consequently, it was not a good argument to say that we should present ID in science class because that is how Darwin did it in his own work.

Yet another point that came up was the role of the courts. Campbell fretted that it was a bad idea to look to the courts to resolve this issue, since that leads to ill will from non-scientists who dislike being told what they can and can not teach in schools. Curiously, though, Campbell was adamant that he did not favor any sort of equal-time treatment of evolution and creationism or ID.

So I pointed out that the equal time question was precisely the one the courts were adjudicating. This was explicit in the 1982 Arkansas trial, and implicit in the recent Dover trial. The courts only come into this to prevent people from taking over science classrooms to teach their preferred religious views. Again Campbell didn't seem to disagree, but argued instead that it should be possible to develop a scientifically rigorous curriculum along the more ecumenical lines he was suggesting.

One genuine point of disagreement was the role of the Discovery Institute in all of this. I tend to see the DI as a sinkhole of darkness and rottenness, whereas Campbell seems to think they want something along the lines of what he is suggesting. I argued that the DI might go along with Campbell's ideas, but only as a stepping stone towards their real agenda of having their religious views taught in public schools.

One final point that came up was when Campbell quoted from the book The Evolution of Darwinism by Timothy Shanahan. In the quote Shanahan was talking about debates from within Darwinism on certain fundamental issues about evolution. Campbell suggested that in light of this scientists shouldn't be so quick to say that there is no controversy.

I have not read Shanahan's book, but from the nature of the quote that was read I surmised that he wasn't talking about anything the creationists or ID folks are pointing out, but rather about more esoteric points. Judging from the blurb linked to above, I believe I had it right. So I replied that such controversy as exists among biologists on the subject of evolution has nothing to do with those portions of it that get taught in high schools. The hypotheses of common descent with natural selection as a major mechanism of evolution are, indeed, noncontroversial. Anyway, we didn't have time to discuss this in much depth.

All in all, it was an interesting night. Initially I was annoyed that he had been invited as the only guest to lecture publicly on this, since I knew him only from the awful anthology he coedited. But I was pleasantly surprised by his talk and found that he had a lot of interesting things to say. I think he has some interesting ideas about science education but shouldn't really be talking about evolution and ID at all.

An enjoyable evening nonetheless.

Nakamura in Salon

2006-03-13T15:10:00.000-06:00

Today's issue of Salon features this profile of U.S. Chess phenom Hikaru Nakamura. He is undoubtedly the most talented American chessplayer on the scene today, and with a little more experience could probably compete at the highest level. He won the U.S. Chess Championship in 2005, though he failed to defend that title in the recently completed 2006 version of the event.

Sadly, Nakamura will probably have to give up competitive chess because it is virtually impossible to make a living at it.

Nakamura's potent brew of balls and brains has earned him the obvious comparison: Bobby Fischer. But for Nakamura, Fischer, the wunderkind who became a wild-eyed, long-bearded paranoid, who vanished mysteriously during his prime, serves also as a cautionary tale. “He played too much chess and went crazy,” says Nakamura. “I'm not a mad genius.”

But his experience serves as a sort of modern parable about the game. Nakamura rode the fuel of new technologies to become a powerhouse player. But his hard, fast rise has left him feeling burned out and, unlike his coddled peers in Europe, ready to pull the plug. “When it's this hard to make a living,” he says, “you're not going to keep the talent in the game. Eventually, they have to go into other things.”

Actually, concerning Fischer, it has been wisely said that it wasn't that chess drove him crazy, it was that he was always crazy and chess was the only thing keeping him sane.

The whole article is worht reading for its comments about the scene at the thighest levels of competitive chess. Experienced chess players will role their eyes a bit at some of the comments the author makes, but it is mostly an accurate and engaging read. Here's one more excerpt:

But America is another story. The cost of living is high, the respect is nil, and the sponsorships nonexistent. Nakamura explodes when he talks about the other players' sponsors because, despite being the U.S. champion, he has none. “Any other young person who devotes his life to becoming the best in the world at something is making millions of dollars!” he fumes. He's exaggerating, but the point is well taken. He's the best, and for this he has given up plenty. Before he goes onstage, he likes to slip on his iPod and crank up his theme song. “It's by Green Day,” he says. “'Boulevard of Broken Dreams.'”

Notable Book Reviews

2006-03-13T14:59:00.000-06:00

The current issue of Quarterly Review of Biology has a couple of book reviews that are worth looking at.

First, Christoph Adami rips into Hubert Yockey's new book Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life. Yockey will be familiar to devotees of evolution/creationism disputes because of his endorsement of various probability arguments against naturalistic explanations of the origin of ife. Yockey's arguments are considerably more sophisticated than the ones offered by the creationists, but they are no less wrong for that.

Anyway, Adami is very unimpressed with the present volume:

These are only mild idiosyncrasies compared to the author's serious departures from accepted scientific standards of conduct. To begin with, at least half of the (poorly edited) book is a nearly verbatim copy—including typographical errors—of the author's previous volume, Information Theory and Molecular Biology (1992. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press). This information is disclosed nowhere in the current book. The parts that are new to this volume are a mixture of historical and philosophical notes on origin-of-life research and researchers (in a section entitled The Life of Walther Löb, we learn the names and ages of the four daughters of the electrochemist at the time of his death), and reiterations of the same points already put forth in the older material. Even worse, some literature sources are either changed to conform or falsified. The sequence data for much of the presentation in Chapter 6—unchanged since its 1992 inception—is ostensibly from the Protein Information Resource 2003, but checking with the 1992 book reveals that the source is a 1986 paper. Despite its appearance as rigorous by the use of mathematical jargon, many derivations in this book (all of them already present in the 1992 version) are deeply flawed either mathematically, or by the use of inappropriate biological assumptions, or both. What is most surprising is that such a volume could pass an impartial peer review process. Cambridge University Press would do well to examine the circumstances of this and the previous book's approval and editing process. (Emphasis Added)

Phony rigor to disguise mathematical emptiness? Small wonder creationists like Yockey so much.

The comments about peer review are also well-taken. Passing peer-review is a necessary condition for meriting serious consideration from knowledgeable people. Sadly, it is far from sufficient.

There is also this review, by philosopher Evan Selinger, of Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle.

Ruse provides a historical framework for understanding the current and seemingly interminable clash between proponents and detractors of evolution. In a manner reminiscent of Paul Feyerabend, Ruse even wants to examine the seemingly dogmatic (if not downright fundamentalist) position on evolution that some of its staunchest proponents take. He declares, “[e]volutionism— making evolution into something more than a science—is the cause of the trouble” (p 281). To articulate such a proposition is to create some conceptual space for symmetrical inquiry—and this, in turn, provides a diplomatic opening from which to get beyond the denunciatory platitudes that often render discussions of the topic incendiary and redundant. (Emphasis Added)

Selinger gives Ruse a mostly positive review, but I would like to address that bold-face sentence. I have blogged about this recently, but it bears repeating. If the trouble being referred to here is the widespread rejection of evolution and acceptance of various forms of creationism, then I suspect Ruse is wrong. And if he's right then the implication is that religious believers are so emotional and irrational that they can't be expected to base their opinions on an understanding of the basic facts of biology. Rather, they just hear some snide remarks from Richard Dawkins or E. O. Wilson, and run screaming to the other side.

As for denunciatory platitudes, here are a few more. There is a simple fact that people like Selinger never get around to discussing. In the evolution/creation dispute, the evolutionists are arguing from more than a century's worth of meticulously collected scientific data while the creationists are arguing almost exclusively from ignorance, religious extremism, and sleazy rhetoric. Selinger can talk all he wants about conceptual space and symmetrical inquiry, but the fact remains that there is nothing of any substance at all in creationist arguments or literature. Surely that fact needs to figure prominently in any philosophical analysis of this conflict.

Math in Boca Raton

2006-03-04T17:40:00.000-06:00

On Monday I'll be flying to Florida to participate in the Thirty-Seventh Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, at Florida Atlantic University. As you can see from the list of abstracts, I will be delivering a scintillating, edge-of-your-seat, rhetorical masterpiece of a talk with the alluring title, “Group Actions on Arithmetic Riemann Surfaces.”

Sadly, this means I will be out of town all next week. Regular blogging will resume upon my return.

Thermodynamics, Again

2006-03-04T17:18:00.000-06:00

Over at his blog Uncommon Descent, William Dembski is linking to an online lecture by mathematician Granville Sewell arguing that evolution runs afoul of the second law of thermodynamics. The lecture is thirteen minutes long, but it does not contain anything that Sewell has not said before.

It is significant that Dembski is linking so enthusiastically to this argument. You see, the thermodynamics argument is one of the very worst creationists have ever used. It is wrong, of course. But more than that it is wrong in a way that betrays an extreme simple-mindedness about science in general and physics in particular.

As a result, the thermodynamics argument has become a symbol for the sort of mind-numbing ignorance that is the stock-in-trade of creationists. How could anyone take creationists seriously when they parroted such obvious nonsense about thermodynamics?

And it was precisely this level of silliness that ID proponents were keen to avoid. Until recently. Now we have William Dembski, who provides most of the tiny amount of intellectual oomph the ID folks can claim, supporting this ridiculous argument.

The basic argument is this: The second law states that a spontaneous, natural process can only lead to an increase in the entropy of a system. Entropy is roughly a measure of disorder or complexity. So the second law implies that natural processes can only cause things to become more disordered and less complex over time. But evolution asserts that natural processes have caused organisms to grow more complex over time. This is a contradiction, and since no one is inclined to abandon the second law, evolution must not be correct.

But this is a cartoon version of the second law. After all, you don't need fancy principles of thermodynamics to argue that the growth in complexity of organisms over time is something that requires a special sort of explanation. It is a simple fact of everyday life that without maintenance things tend to break down and fall apart.

Everyone agrees that the growth in complexity that evolutionists claim took place over the course of natural history requires an explanation. And biologists have one. Many generations of natural selection acting on random genetic variations can cause the average complexity of organisms to increase.

This is not theoretical. Natural selection has demonstrated its ability, in both the field and the lab, to increase the level of order and complexity in organisms. The same principle is at work in artificial life experiments, and in the use of evolutionary algorithms in engineering problems. Granted, the experiments I am referring to tend to show relatively small increases in order, but that is enough to establish that no principle of thermodynamics prohibits known evolutionary mechanisms from increasing biological complexity.

Sewell himself inadvertantly concedes this. When it comes time for him to explain why natural selection is not an adequate explanation for the growth of biological complexity, thermodynamics goes out the window. Instead he simply parrots the irreducible complexity argument of which ID folks are so fond. That argument is incorrect, but of more relevance to this discussion is the fact that it has nothing to do with thermodynamics.

Let me make things even simpler. Things that are thermodynamically impossible do not occur. But natural selection is certainly capable in principle of explaining increases in biological complexity. Therefore, there is no principle of thermodynamics that says that evolution is an incorrect theory.

But let's push this a bit further. In certain physical situations it can be useful to think of the second law as a statement about order and disorder. Really, though, the second law is a mathematical statement. It says that the change in entropy of a system in going between two states must be larger than a certain mathematical quantity (the integral of dQ over T, for those who know some calculus and some thermo notation). The technical details of what this means need not detain us here.

If you make the added assumption that your system is completely isolated from the outside world, so that neither matter nor energy is crossing the boundary of the system, then the integral I mentioned ends up having the value zero, and the second law tells us that the change in entropy must be positive. In other words, the entropy must increase in this situation.

Creationists of old tended to ignore this assumption, and argued simply that the second law rules out any possibility of natural forces causing order to increase. Consequently, scientists generally replied that the Earth is not an isolated system, since we receive copious amounts of energy from the Sun. That's certainly an important observation, and it does, indeed, refute some primitive versions of the second law argument.

But the second law still applies when energy is crossing the boundary of the system, and in this case it says that the change in entropy must be larger than the mathematical function I mentioned previously. Entropy can, indeed, decrease in this situation, but the second law still makes a definite statement about the magnitude of that decrease. Sewell understands this, and gives a tolerable, if highly nontechnical, description of this fact.

Which makes his unwillingness to follow through all the more annoying. You see, any claim that evolution violates the second law must be backed up with a calculation. Sewell believes that the second law is a problem for evolution? Fine. Let him evaluate the integral I mentioned and show that the change in entropy has been smaller than it should be. Anything short of that is no longer an argument based on thermodynamics. It is just ye olde argument from personal incredulity, in which Sewell is expressing nothing more than his own disbelief that biological complexity could have evolved naturally.

The reason Sewell will not carry out this calculation is that he can not. No one can. Entropy calculations are always carried out in the context of a reversible process, and no one has the faintest idea how to describe a reversible process for assembling an organism from it's component atoms. That is why serious scientists do not try to apply the second law to biological processes in the simple-minded ways ID folks prefer.

But Sewell has another trick up his sleeve. He is fond of recasting the second law as a statement about probability. In his American Spectator article he writes:

Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it. The second law is all about probability, it uses probability at the microscopic level to predict macroscopic change: the reason carbon distributes itself more and more uniformly in an insulated solid is, that is what the laws of probability predict when diffusion alone is operative.

What Sewell is really doing here is taking a statistical mechanics view of things. The basic idea is this: Given a box that is filled with gas and has been sitting, untouched, for some time, we expect the gas molecules to be distributed roughly evenly throughout the box. We would be very surprised to find all of the gas on one side of the box with empty space on the other. We can explain this in terms of probability: There are vastly more configurations in which the molecules are distributed roughly evenly than there are where all the molecules are on one side of the box. So other things being equal, we can say that it is vastly more likely that we will encounter one of the even distributions. And the distributions in which the gas is evenly distributed can plausibly be said to be less ordered, and therefore have higher entropy, then the highly uneven distributions. This permits a probabilistic interpretation of the second law.

Sewell sums up his thinking here with the following formulation:

In these simple examples, I assumed nothing but heat conduction or diffusion was going on, but for more general situations, I offered the tautology that “if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable.” (Emphasis in original)

Yes, of course. But so what? In his podcast Sewell describes evolution as being a “film running backwards” by which he means that we see complexity increasing in apparent violation of the second law (just like in a movie run backwards you might see the shattered pieces of a broken coffee cup reassemble themselves into a functional mug).

If he wants us to take this claim seriously, he needs to follow the dictates of his own theorizing. Does evolution require us to believe that something incredibly improbable has occurred in the course of natural history? Let Sewell carry out the probability calculation that shows that to be the case. Then let him explain what significance his calculation is supposed to have. (Improbable things happen all the time, after all). Once he has done that, he will have an actual argument, and we can revisit this subject at that time. Without such a calculation, he has only a lot of polysyllabic bluster.

The solar energy that enters the Earth every day fuels the chemical reactions that allow living organisms to survive and reproduce. This cycle of survival and reproduction ultimately leads to natural selection, which can, in turn, lead to increases in biological complexity. Minus that energy living organisms would quickly go extinct and evolution would not occur. So, to use Sewell's idiosyncratic phrasing, something is indeed crossing the boundary that makes an increase in biological complexity more likely.

If Sewell wants to retreat to the question of the origin of life, then he will have to confront the simple fact that the various sources of energy bathing the early Earth would have fueled the numerous chemical reactions that are believed to have led to the first primitive life forms. Once again, it is for him to back up his claims about probability with something more substantive than his own beliefs.

Sewell will have no more luck carrying out these probability calculations than he had with the prior, entropy calculation. And that is because these sorts of probabilities are effectively impossible to calculate. The probability of any particular set of outcomes of several billion years of evolution depends on far more variables than can possibly be included in a practical calculation. Probability theory finds many applications in biology, but this is not one of them. There is a reason real scientists do not talk about probabilty calculations in Sewell's haphazard manner.

The pattern in Sewell's arguments is now rapidly becoming clear. When he wants to impress us with the rigor of his argument, he talks about entropy and order and probability and the history of thermodynamics. But when it comes time to apply any of this to evolution he retreats to simple-minded arguments about films running backwards and atoms arranging themselves into microchips. The reason he does this is that, in reality, thermodynamics and probability play no role at all in his argument. As already discussed, he contributes nothing to the discussion beyond his own incredulity.

Sewell closes both his essay and his podcast as follows:

The development of life may have only violated one law of science, but that was the one Sir Arthur Eddington called the “supreme” law of Nature, and it has violated that in a most spectacular way. At least that is my opinion, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it only seems extremely improbable, but really isn't, that, under the right conditions, the influx of stellar energy into a planet could cause atoms to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants and spaceships and computers. But one would think that at least this would be considered an open question, and those who argue that it really is extremely improbable, and thus contrary to the basic principle underlying the second law, would be given a measure of respect, and taken seriously by their colleagues, but we aren't. (Emphasis in original).

But knowledgable people will not show any respect for Sewell's argument, because he has produced virtually no argument at all. He describes it as his opinion that evolution violates the second law. But this is not the sort of thing about which scientists are supposed to have opinions. We have ample evidence that evolution happened and that natural selection was the driving force of it. Biologists find evolutionary thinking to be very helpful in their research. If Sewell believes that it runs afoul of the second law nevertheless, then he needs to carry out the calculations that show that to be case. Otherwise he has only an opinion based on nothing.

These sorts of considerations should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of mathematical or scientific training. That they are not obvious to Sewell is another reason his quest for respect will be in vain.

The Value of Algebra

2006-03-03T17:25:00.000-06:00

I am so mad right now.

I devote a small part of each and every day to perusing some of the dopiest, most inane websites on the net. There are about a dozen creationist web sites I monitor on a daily basis, not to mention several very right-wing political sites. I've grown so accustomed to their relentless stupidity that I barely notice it anymore.

But I read a number of other sites that are supposedly more reliable. At those sites I expect to read things that will provide some food for thought, even if, in the end, I disagree with them. So encountering breathtaking, creationist-level stupidity at such a site is just too depressing.

I'm sure you've figured out by now that I am referring to this column, by Richard Cohen, from the February 16 edition of The Washington Post. We consider it in full:

I am haunted by Gabriela Ocampo.

Last year, she dropped out of the 12th grade at Birmingham High School in Los Angeles after failing algebra six times in six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over ever getting it. So, according to the Los Angeles Times, she “gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus book room and, without telling a soul, vanished from Birmingham High School.”

Gabriela, this is Richard: There's life after algebra.

In truth, I don't know what to tell Gabriela. The L.A. school district now requires all students to pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry in order to graduate. This is something new for Los Angeles (although 17 states require it) and it is the sort of vaunted education reform that is supposed to close the science and math gap and make the U.S. more competitive. All it seems to do, though, is ruin the lives of countless kids. In L.A., more kids drop out of school on account of algebra than any other subject. I can hardly blame them.

I can blame them. I'll bet real money that every one of those kids who dropped out of school on account of algebra had problems that go well beyond difficulties in math. Were these students who were generally doing well in their other subjects but, doggone it, just couldn't pass algebra? Or were these people who didn't take school very seriously, had little in the way of discipline, and were just scraping by in their other, less demanding classes? I'm sorry, but no one of normal intelligence fails algebra six times simply because the subject is just so darn difficult.

I'm glad to hear that LA now requires a year of algebra and a year of geometry to graduate. I'm amazed that only 17 states do likewise.

Incredibly, though, that's not the supid part of the column:

I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time -- the only proof I've ever seen of divine intervention -- somehow passed geometry and resolved, with a grateful exhale of breath, that I would never go near math again. I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.

It is a truism among mathematicians that mathematics is the only subject that people brag about being bad at. Cohen thinks it's just the cutest thing that he has trouble with percentages. Can you think of any other academic subject where he would proudly joke about how bad he is at it?

The following fantasy conversation plays in my mind from time to time:

NICE PERSON AT PARTY: What do you do?
ME: I'm a mathematician.
NICE PERSON: Oh, (giggles), I was never any good at math.
ME: That's because you're an idiot.

I never say that of course. No, usually I say something tactful like, “You just never had the right teacher.” But it really is irritating when otherwise intelligent and well-educated people act like you're the weird one for being good at math.

The fact is that things like math phobia, or the idea that people's brains are wired differently, or that some people just can't do math, are total bilge. Hostility towards mathematics has nothing to do with any of those things. In reality it is just standard anti-intellectualism. Nothing more glamorous or interesting than that.

Actually, though, we still have not reached the truly dumb part of the column:

Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know -- never mind want to know -- how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later -- or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note -- or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.

Now that's one of the dumbest things I've read in a while. And remember, I read websites that say things like: “If humans evolved from apes, why do we still have apes?”

First, how on Earth does Cohen know what Ms. Ocampo will need to know later in her life? The fact is that if she wants to pursue any sort of scientific subject she will inevitably need to know algebra to do that.

As evidence that Ms. Ocampo will never need algebra, Cohen presents the fact that he has never had to use it. He's never even rued not knowing it! I have no doubt that Cohen is telling the truth here, but that only proves that Cohen has led an empty, intellectually impoverished, life. It says nothing about what students should learn in high school.

He then presents a standard caricature of what algebra is. He has apparently overlooked the possibility that sometimes you use an unrealistic, contrived situation to illustrate a more general principle.

But the idea that calculators and computers can do “most of math” is really just too much. Calculators and computers do not do math at all. They do computation. It's clear at this point that Cohen thinks algebra, and mathematics generally, is just about manipulating symbols according to arbitrary rules. That's like saying that carpentry is about hammering nails and sawing wood. Mathematics is about the reasoning process you go through in taking the information you have and inferring the things that you need. Algebra and computations are just tools you use in the course of implementing such reasoning.

Incredibly, Cohen then tells us that computers can't reason - not even a little bit. Well, duh! That's the whole point!

And then, to cap off this masterpiece of inanity, Cohen offers up his examples of genuinely useful subjects: History and English. Oh, for heaven's sake. Thirty seconds with a good internet connection is enough to learn any bit of history you might be interested in. And English? Has anyone other than an English professor ever needed to read Dickens or Shakespeare?

Of course, the problem here is that Cohen has a pathetically empty idea of what education is all about. Education isn't job training. Education isn't about teaching you how to use an ATM, or balance a checkbook, or any of those other things you need to know in your day-to-day life. You don't need school to teach you those things.

The reason you learn about history, or read great literature, or study math and science when you're in school is precisely because you won't do these things in your day-to-day life. You don't read Dickens because you think it is going to get you a job someday. You read Dickens because the man could write, and your life will be just a little richer for being shown what the English language can be made to do. You read Dickens because by doing so you realize that the things people worried about a hundred years ago are mostly the same things they worry about today. Likewise for any of the other things you learn in school.

Cohen seems to have this idea that education is about learning a bunch of facts. And if those facts don't materially help you in the course of your professional life, then it was a waste of time to learn them in the first place. When teenagers display attitudes like that we chalk it up to immaturity and the lack of a long-term perspective. Columnists for major newspapers don't have that excuse.

Cohen continues:

Gabriela, sooner or later someone's going to tell you that algebra teaches reasoning. This is a lie propagated by, among others, algebra teachers. Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not. The proof of this, Gabriela, is all the people in my high school who were whizzes at math but did not know a thing about history and could not write a readable English sentence. I can cite Shelly, whose last name will not be mentioned, who aced algebra but when called to the board in geography class, located the Sahara Desert right where the Gobi usually is. She was off by a whole continent.

And this paragraph isn't even coherent. Writing is the highest from of reasoning? What? The proof of this is that some old classmate of his aced algebra but couldn't find the Sahara Desert on a map? Does this guy understand what reasoning is? Reasoning is what you do when you are told that a hen and a half can lay an egg in a half in day and a half and want to determine how long it will take seven hens to lay seven eggs. Finding the Sahara Desert on a map is just a matter of being in possession of certain facts.

Cohen continues:

Look, Gabriela, I am not anti-algebra. It has its uses, I suppose, and I think it should be available for people who want to take it. Maybe students should even be compelled to take it, but it should not be a requirement for graduation. There are those of you, and Gabriela you are one, who know what it is like to stare at an algebra problem until you have eyeballed a hole in the page and not understand a thing you're seeing. There are those of us who know the sweat, the panic, the trembling, cold fear that comes from the teacher casting an eye in your direction and calling you to the blackboard. It is like being summoned to your own execution.

Why not take that attitude with every subject? Maybe we should just make every subject available to students who want to study it, but then leave it up to the kids to decide what they need to know?

As for the uses of algebra, do I really need to point out that every bit of technology Cohen uses every day was invented by scientists, that virtually every major branch of science has mathematics at its core, and that no matter what branch of mathematics you are using it is certain that algebraic manipulations reside at its foundation? Of all the subjects he could have labelled as useless, Cohen could not possibly have made a worse choice.

As for the rest of this paragraph, I'm getting weepy. When you're not understanding what you are reading in your textbook, the solution is to work harder and ask questions. Everyone has subjects they're not good at. But we don't whine and blame the subject. As for being called to the blackboard, I don't know many algebra teachers who actually do that. And I know even fewer who, when the student says he doesn't know how to do the problem, ridicules the student for his ignorance.

Cohen closes with:

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a similar column about algebra. Math teachers struck back with a vengeance. They made so many claims for algebra's intrinsic worth that I felt, as I once had in class, like a dummy. Once again, I just didn't get it. Still, in the two decades since, I have lived a pretty full life and never, ever used -- or wanted to use -- algebra. I was lucky, though. I had graduated from high school and gone on to college. It's different for you, Gabriela. Algebra ruined many a day for me. Now it could ruin your life.

Sorry, but I don't think it's unreasonable for a high school diploma to certify that you know a tiny amount of higher mathematics.

As I said, I expect this sort of stupidity and short-sightedness from the creationists and the right-wingers. But Cohen is supposed to be one of the Post's liberal columnists. Yet here he is promoting the very silliness he's supposed to be fighting against. Ugh.

Ruse Weighs In

2006-03-02T16:46:00.000-06:00

Since I've been bashing Michael Ruse quite a bit lately, it's nice to be able to link to this interesting essay from Science and Spirit magazine. In it Ruse comments both on the Court's ruling in the Dover evolution case, and also on the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. He has nothing but praise for the former, but criticizes the latter for not being more rigorous in presenting Darwin in the context of his times as opposed to a stand-alone genius. I especially liked this quote:

Jones was unambiguous. ID is not science, he wrote; it is religion. More than this, the judge took great umbrage at the tactics of the school board and its supporters, accusing them of telling untruths and of being morally bankrupt in the ways in which they justified their case for teaching ID. What made his ruling all the more impressive is that Jones is no bleeding-heart liberal, but rather a solid conservative, a churchgoer who was appointed to his post by the Bush administration.

Basically, Jones told the world that Pennsylvanians have standards, and he was outraged that the children of his state were to be fed a load of neo-fundamentalist religion because of the ideological beliefs of a group of unscrupulous fanatics. This is not a question of right or left, he seemed to be saying, but rather a question of right and wrong—and we in Pennsylvania know the difference. Apparently, the citizens of Dover were on the same page as the judge because, even before the verdict came down, eight of the nine existing school board members were voted out in favor of a new group whose first act was to unanimously rescind the policy on ID.

I recommend reading the whole article.

New CSICOP Column

2006-03-01T13:34:00.000-06:00

Update: March 2, 2006: I owe an apology to readers of this entry for an error I made in its initial version. I originally presented two quotes, one of which I attributed to Henry Morris, the other to William Dembski. In reality both quotes were due to Morris. The point I was making was that both ID and scientific creationism assert that the question of the age of the Earth is independent of the scientific question of whether evolution is an adequate explanation for life’s complexity. But in writing this entry I carelssly misread what I had originally written in my essay. I am sorry for the error.

My new column for CSICOP'S Creation Watch web site is now available. This time we take a closer look at the question of whether there is any important difference between ID and scientific creationism. Turns out there's even less of a difference than you think?

Maher on Scarborough Country

2006-03-01T13:25:00.000-06:00

Bill Maher was on the MSNBC show Scarborough Country yesterday. Here's an excerpt I especially liked:

SCARBOROUGH: And this goes back to what we—this goes back to what we talked about a time earlier when you were on this show. You think that‘s being disrespectful to people‘s faith, to their value system? The thing that is most important to them, for you to say that the Bible doesn‘t have relevance or isn‘t important?

MAHER: Well, I‘m sorry, Joe. You know, I‘m sorry if I offended anybody. But somebody has to say these kinds of things. Somebody has to stop...

SCARBOROUGH: Why?

MAHER: What? Why?

SCARBOROUGH: Yes.

MAHER: Because religion does so much more harm than good. And as long as we constantly give it a free pass, as long as nobody questions it because, when you say those words, “That‘s my faith,” everybody backs off.

I‘m sorry, but faith means the suspension of rational thinking. And the Bible is an anthology. It‘s an anthology of many works written a long time ago. Some of it is wise. There are some good things in the Bible.

But I like to look at the Ten Commandments as sort of a microcosm of the Bible. Are there some good things in the Ten Commandments? Yes, two of them are actual laws: Don‘t kill—OK, that‘s a good one; I think that‘s good to teach people that—and don‘t steal, also good.

The rest of the eight of them? I don‘t know. Don‘t work on Sunday? Doesn‘t have a lot of relevance, really, does it, Joe? Don‘t swear? Is that really as important as don‘t kill and don‘t steal? Don‘t make statues of other gods and pray to them?

You see what I‘m saying? Some of it is good; some of it is, you know, an old book of Jewish folk tales.

Exactly right.

Creationism in England

2006-02-28T19:52:00.000-06:00

Here's a cheery article from a recent issue of the British newspaper The Guardian:

A growing number of science students on British campuses and in sixth form colleges are challenging the theory of evolution and arguing that Darwin was wrong. Some are being failed in university exams because they quote sayings from the Bible or Qur'an as scientific fact and at one sixth form college in London most biology students are now thought to be creationists.
Earlier this month Muslim medical students in London distributed leaflets that dismissed Darwin's theories as false. Evangelical Christian students are also increasingly vocal in challenging the notion of evolution.

In the United States there is growing pressure to teach creationism or “intelligent design” in science classes, despite legal rulings against it. Now similar trends in this country have prompted the Royal Society, Britain's leading scientific academy, to confront the issue head on with a talk entitled Why Creationism is Wrong. The award-winning geneticist and author Steve Jones will deliver the lecture and challenge creationists, Christian and Islamic, to argue their case rationally at the society's event in April.

“There is an insidious and growing problem,” said Professor Jones, of University College London. “It's a step back from rationality. They (the creationists) don't have a problem with science, they have a problem with argument. And irrationality is a very infectious disease as we see from the United States.”

Jones is right that the growth of creationism represnts a step back from rationality. But he is wrong to characterize creationists as not having a problem with science. They do, indeed, have a problem with science, because science accords no evidential weight to ancient, allegedly holy, texts. The students who are quoting the Bible or Qur'an on their medical exams (who fully deserve to fail, incidentally) do not believe that the scientific method represents the only proper means of investigating the mechanics of nature. They make arguments aplenty, they just aren't scientific arguments.

Later we come to this:

The leaflets are produced by the Al-Nasr Trust, a Slough-based charity set up in 1992 with the aim of improving the understanding of Islam. The passage quoted from the Qur'an states: “And God has created every animal from water. Of them there are some that creep on their bellies, some that walk on two legs and some that walk on four. God creates what he wills for verily God has power over all things.”

A 21-year-old medical student and member of the Islamic Society, who did not want to be named, said that the Qur'an was clear that man had been created and had not evolved as Darwin suggests. “There is no scientific evidence for it [Darwin's Origin of Species]. It's only a theory. Man is the wonder of God's creation.”

Of course. God created everything from water. How could it be otherwise?

The article concludes with this:

Most of the next generation of medical and science students could well be creationists, according to a biology teacher at a leading London sixth-form college. “The vast majority of my students now believe in creationism,” she said, “and these are thinking young people who are able and articulate and not at the dim end at all. They have extensive booklets on creationism which they put in my pigeon-hole ... it's a bit like the southern states of America.” Many of them came from Muslim, Pentecostal or Baptist family backgrounds, she said, and were intending to become pharmacists, doctors, geneticists and neuro-scientists.

It has been wisely said that against stupidity the Gods themselves toil in vain. I suspect that things aren't quite as gloomy as this article makes it seem. But it does provide some perspective on where the real problem in lies. Are these arrogant, ignorant students responding to some snide remarks from Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins? Or is it that their entire ability to think rationally and discern good arguments from bad has been compromised by the religious zealotry of their upbringing? Is the rejection of evolution a problem of PR, something that can be fixed if only evolutionists would present their arguments more eloquently? Or is it simply that too many people prefer the comforts of blind faith to the hard work of clear thinking and meticulous investigation?

Don't get me wrong. I think evolutionists should continue to make their case in public venues and confront creationism at every turn. What else is there to do, after all? But we have to get over this idea that there is some silver bullet, that if only evolutionists were doing some simple thing differently everything would be okay. It just isn't so. The facts are readily available to anyone willing to make the smallest effort to obtain them. Scientists have been leading the horses to water for decades. But they are determined not to drink.

Publisher Waters Down Biology Textbook

2006-02-24T17:18:00.000-06:00

From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel comes this annoying, but typical, example of a textbook publisher caving in to creationist pressure:

High school biology students in Broward County will use a textbook next year that watered-down passages about Charles Darwin and evolution theory.

Science teachers picked Florida Holt Biology this month in a countywide vote, favoring it over another book that discussed the controversial idea of intelligent design.

The Holt textbook stays away from intelligent design, the idea that a god or other guiding force caused the development of life on Earth. Mainstream scientists have discredited the theory as a repackaged form of old-school creationism.

But publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston did edit several sections at the request of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that has peddled intelligent design around the country for years.

The changes were “kind of a merging of philosophies to get something that everyone was satisfied with,” said Broward science curriculum supervisor J.P. Keener.

“What came out in the book was scientifically correct,” Keener said. “That's the bottom line.”

Does anyone honestly think that scientific correctness represents the bottom line for Mr. Keener? Or do you think maybe he's perfectly willing to water down the science to sell a few more books?

The article goes on to describe a few of the changes:

A review by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel found that on one edited page, Holt agreed to give Darwin less credit for shaping modern biology. In another section it inserted descriptions that conservative Christians believe challenge evolution theory.

Previous editions of the textbook said Darwin's theory “is the essence of biology.”

In the Broward edition, students will read instead that Darwin's theory “provides a consistent explanation for life's diversity.”

And later:

But Holt also added one section that introduced students to the “Cambrian Explosion,” a period in early earth's history that suggests species aren't the result of gradual change over time, as Darwin thought.

“That was a key change,” Discovery Institute spokesman John West said. “We want to keep the textbooks honest.”

Let's take these in reverse order. The idea that the Cambrian Explosion suggests that species aren't the result of gradual change over time is pure nonsense. If the article accurately describes what is in the book, then Keener was mistaken when he claimed the book was scientifically correct.

Describing Darwin's theory as the essence of modern biology sounds a little odd, but describing it as a consistent explanation for life's diversity isn't much of an improvement. (We'll leave aside the infelicity of referring to modern evolutionary biology as Darwin's theory.) The trouble is that “consistent” is a rather flabby word, and putting the emphasis on explaining “life's diversity,” doesn't really capture the most important aspects of evolution. Why not describe it the way it is: A theory supported by copious evidence that asserts that all modern species descended from common ancestors via numerous well-understood genetic mechanisms?

And considering that evolution now underlies virtually every branch of modern biology, it seems a little rich to downplay Darwin's significance.

In his State of the Union address President Bush talked about the need for quality science education. Now his brother's state is allowing a group of religiously motivated ignoramuses to dictate the content of their science books. Lovely.

Replying to Abbey

2006-02-23T18:30:00.000-06:00

Just in case you were fretting about The Stanford Dialy's willingness to publish brain-dead pro-ID letters, rest assured that they also publish magnificent replies like this one. It comes from Jai Ranganathan, who is a graduate student in the biological sciences:

Intelligent design proponents would have you think that there is a raging debate within the scientific community between evolution and intelligent design. Don’t believe the hype. The validity of evolution comes as close to consensus as any concept in science ever gets, which is why the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and every other major scientific society in the United States has officially endorsed the centrality of evolution to the field of biology.

The scientific-seeming arguments for intelligent design have been totally refuted time and time again by the scientific community. Why then, do proponents of intelligent design keep trotting out the same old tired warhorses and insisting on the need to “teach the debate”? The reason is that the point of intelligent design is not, and has never been, scientific debate. A memo leaked in 2000 from a right-wing think tank known as the Discovery Institute, one of the leaders for intelligent design, indicated that this concept is actually a Trojan horse existing solely as a vehicle to inject a greater degree of extremist religious beliefs into American society as a whole. According to the memo, the purpose of intelligent design is “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.”

It's hard to improve on that.

A Letter in The Stanford Daily

2006-02-23T18:24:00.000-06:00

How bad have things gotten for ID proponents? Apparently it is now a major triumph when a sophomore history major gets a letter to the editor published in a college newspaper.

Discovery Institute blogger Casey Luskin points us towards this letter(scroll down) from The Stanford Daily. Luskin writes:

Abbey blazes past the ad hominems, motivation-mongering, and labels so commonly promulgated by Darwinists to get right to the core issue: there's legitimate scientific dissent from Darwinism, and students deserve to hear about it. Abbey's argument is so simple, and so compelling, that it makes clear-as-day why the efforts of Darwinists must focus so intensely upon making scientific dissent look “illegitimate.”

Golly! Sounds pretty good. Let's take a look.

The letter was written by sophomore history major Tristan Abbey. His goal is to expose three myths about ID. Here's the first:

First, criticizing neo-Darwinism is not the same as promoting intelligent design. While microevolutionary mechanisms, such as the coupling of random mutations and natural selection, have clearly been demonstrated, they fail to explain macroevolutionary changes (e.g., morphological novelty). Neo-Darwinists argue there is no difference between the two kinds of evolution, but that claim is vigorously contested by many developmental biologists and paleontologists.

As a matter of logic it is certainly true that criticizing Neo-Darwinism is not the same as promoting ID. And if by “Neo-Darwinism” you mean some strong statement about natural selection being the sole important mechanism of evolution, then I would even agree with the first sentence here. But if you take “Neo-Darwinism” to mean simply that common descent is true and that natural selection is an especially important mechanism of evolution, then the situation changes. Logic aside, the fact remains that virtually everyone who publicly dissents from that minimal interpretation of Neo-Darwinism is, indeed, an ID proponent.

As for the distinction between micro and macro, such debate as occurs among scientists is far different from anything ID folks are describing. That major morphological novelty can arise via the accumulation of small changes is not in doubt. There is also unambiguous evidence that many of the complex systems ID folks are so fond of evolved in exactly this way. What some paleontologists and developmental biologists do say, however, is that there is more to macroevolution than just accumulated microevolution.

In other words, the debate is not that some scientists say macro is just accumulated micro while others say that macro is a huge mystery that is currently unexplained. Rather it is between the former group and those who claim that specific mechanisms X, Y and Z have been given short shirft by classical Neo-Darwinism. Why do I suspect that Abbey doesn't care about such subtleties?

Abbey's second point:

Second, creationism is not the same as intelligent design. Reasons to Believe, a creationist group which accepts that the earth is billions of years old, dismisses intelligent design as “not science.” The Institute for Creation Research, which argues for a literal six-day interpretation of Genesis, similarly criticizes intelligent design for not being biblical.

Well, I am certainly persuaded that some creationist groups have been critical of certain aspects of ID. But that is neither here nor there. The fact is that creationists and ID folks are virtually indistinguishable with reagrd to either their pro-design or anti-evolution claims, their sleazy use of dishonest rehtoric, their political and educational ambitions, and their reliance on religious extremsists to spread and fund their message. They are, indeed, the same, no matter how badly people like Abbey wish it were not so.

Abbey's third point:

Third, intelligent design theorists, by and large, do not support the mandating of intelligent design in public schools. The real story out of Wisconsin is not the hypothetical “ban on teaching intelligent design,” but the critical approach to science adopted in 2004 by the town of Grantsburg and to which this “ban” is a reaction. Grantsburg’s policy states: “Students shall be able to explain the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory. This policy does not call for the teaching of Creationism or Intelligent Design.” Who could argue with that?

And when someone tells you it's not about the money, you can be sure that it is, in reality, all about the money.

In the context of school board disputes discussion about critically analyzing evolution is purely a subterfuge for promoting some form of creationism. It is willful naivete to argue anything else. Everyone supports making students aware of the strengths and weaknesses of any theory that gets presented in science class. The catch is that those weaknesses must find their foundation in actual data, and not in an elaborate propaganda campaign intended to promote a relgious agenda by lying to school children.

Abbey has one more paragraph to go, and this is where he gives the game away. It's a funny thing about ID proponents. No matter how reasonable they try to sound, no matter how hard they try to keep their voice level and their arguments reasoned, they just can't keep the mask on for very long. Here's Abbey's conclusion:

Sadly, neo-Darwinists do argue with that by stereotyping critics of evolutionary theory as religious zealots, by reducing the debate to the simplistic but familiar terms of science vs. faith, and by persecuting researchers like the Smithsonian’s Rick Sternberg for keeping an open mind. Pernicious caricatures notwithstanding, the signatories to the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism now stand at over 500 scientists, including several who earned their doctorates from Stanford. As science advances, why has this number continued to grow?

Persecution? Please. Concerning Rick Sternberg, what happened is this: Sternberg abused his position as editor of a small biology journal to publish a pro-ID article that was very bad on the merits, went through a very quesitonable peer-review process, and was plainly inappropriate for the journal in which it appeared. By doing this he humiliated his colleagues and put a major dent in the reputation of the journal. Those colleagues replied by sending some angry e-mails among themselves, by being unfriendly towards him when they saw him in the hall and ... well that's it actually. This they call persecution. More sensible people call it suffering the consequences of your actions.

As for the “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” Abbey is just parroting Discovery Institute talking points. It is not the march of science that explains the glacial rate at which the number of its signatories is growing. Rather, it is the march of the DI's propaganda efforts that explains it.

Hopefully Abbey will use his college years to expose himself to some actual science, as opposed to the silly talking points of people like Luskin and outfits like the Discovery Institute.

The Dennett-Ruse Affair

2006-02-22T18:31:00.000-06:00

Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett are two of the most prominent philosophers writing about issues related to evolution. It seems they have been engaging in a bit of e-mail correspondence on the side.

How do I know this? Because Ruse inexplicably sent the entire correspondence to William Dembski. I say this is inexplicable because there is no indication that Dennett consented to have his private e-mails made public. For Ruse to make public e-mails that were intended as part of a private correpsondence is an incredible breach of professional ethics.

Of course, it was also shameless of Dembski to publish the e-mails without asking Dennett first, but we already knew he lacks both scruples and conscience.

I have written before about the problems with Ruse's latest assertions and arguments. I have also written about my disagreements with some of his recent behavior, such as his decision to edit a book with William Dembski. But until this I had viewed him as someone I was happy to have on my side despite my differences with him.

But this crosses a line. Handing over private e-mails to someone Dennett surely would not have wanted to have them is obnoxious and petty. Not that Dennett comes off looking especially bad in the exchange. Compared to Ruse's profanity laden and semi-coherent rant in reply Dennett comes off looking quite good, actually. Still, I can't imagine why Ruse would do such a thing.

Let's consider some excerpts. Dennett writes:

I’m afraid you are being enlisted on the side of the forces of darkness. You may want to try to extricate yourself, since you are certainly losing ground fast in the evolutionary community that I am in touch with. As you will see, I do lump your coinage in with “reductionism” and “scientism” etc. and think you are doing a disservice to the cause of taking science seriously. Are you among the Wieseltiers? I’d like to think not, but you are certainly being pulled in by them.

The reference in the question near the end is to New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who wrote a nasty, and mostly inaccurate, review of Dennett's new book for the New York Times. I will probably blog about that review at a later date.

The fears about Ruse that Dennett is expressing here are hardly original to him. Over the past few years it has become obvious that Ruse is motivated by rather more than a desire to make good arguments about important subjects. Instead he seems more interested in self-promotion, which he achieves by tweaking the noses of both scientists and the ID folks. Dennett is quite right to worry that Ruse is becoming a tool of the ID folks he claims to be fighting against.

Meanwhile, the most interesting part of Ruse's reply is this:

Fifth, I think that you and Richard [Dawkins] are absolute disasters in the fight against intelligent design – we are losing this battle, not the least of which is the two new supreme court justices who are certainly going to vote to let it into classrooms – what we need is not knee-jerk atheism but serious grappling with the issues – neither of you are willing to study Christianity seriously and to engage with the ideas – it is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard claims – more than this, we are in a fight, and we need to make allies in the fight, not simply alienate everyone of good will.

Now, I happen to share Dennett's and Dawkins' contemptuos attitude towards Christianity, but that's not the part I want to comment on. Rather, I want to challenge this idea that the atheism of Dawkins and Dennett hurts the cause of promoting quality science education.

This assertion is frequently made but it is never backed up with anything. Is it really true that the strident atheism of people like Dennett and Dawkins negatively influences the way people look at evolution? If that's true, it certainly paints a bleak picture of many religious people. If I argued that I would be symapthetic to evolution, except that I see people like Ken Miller, John Haught and Simon Conway Morris drawing theistic conclusions from it, I don't think Ruse would show me much respect. After all, evolution should sink or swim on the basis of the relevant evidence. If that evidence is strong, it should not matter what Dawkins or Dennett (or Haught or Miller or Conway Morris) thinks.

Arguing that strident atheism hurts the cause is remarkably condescending towards religious people. It's saying that they are too emotional to understand and think seriously about the evidence. It's saying that those people can't be expected to provide an honest assessment of the evidence because mean old Richard Dawkins made a snide remark about their religious views.

When I encounter people like Ken Miller or Simon Conway Morris I say simply that they are right about the science but wrong about the metaphysical stuff. Why can't religious people be expected to have the same reaction towards Dawkins and Dennett?

And when it comes to hurting the cause, I can't think of anything more harmful than Ruse running around trying to legitimize ID folks by editing books with them published by prestigious publishers. Why shouldn't a lay person conclude that there is a serious debate going on when a noted philosopher says that there is, and gets Cambridge University Press to back up the assertion. That's harmful.

Anyway, I hope Ruse comes to his senses soon. I have benefitted greatly from his writing in the past and every evolutionist will be grateful to him for his hard work as an expert witness in the 1982 Arkansas creationism trial.

At the end of his e-mail Ruse writes:

Ok, enough preaching for a Sunday – I really like you and Richard, but my liking for you and respect for what you two have done matters not a bit with respect to what I think that I, Michael Ruse, should do – I would be ashamed of myself if I thought and acted otherwise.

Indeed. I have never met Michael Ruse, but I suspect I would like him. But the fact remains that this sentiment leaves unchanged the fact that he has embarrassed himself repeatedly in the last few years. Hopefully he will, as Dennett suggests, be able to extricate himself shortly.

U. S. Amateur Team East

2006-02-21T20:06:00.000-06:00

We'll get back to evolution tomorrow, but let's do some chess today.

The U.S. Amateur Team East is the largest and most enjoyable tournament of the year. The comraderie of playing with three or four teammates coupled with the lack of cash prizes (and consequent very low entry fee) make everyone just a little more mellow than usual.

The tournament works as follows: You play as part of a team of four. You are allowed one alternate, if one of your players can't make it one particular round. In each round your team gets paired against another team of four. Four individual games of chess ensue, as the top rated players from each meet, then the next highest and so on. This is referred to as Board One, Board Two and so on. For each of the individual games your team wins you get one point. A draw counts for half a point. After all four games are finished, you total the team points for each side. All that matters is which team has more points (things could also end in a 2-2 tie). Winning the team match 4-0 counts the same as winning 2.5-1.5. In other words, all that matters is the team score, not the individual scores.

I was on Board One. On Saturday my friends Andy and David were on boards two and three. Fourth Board was held down by Andy's friend Colin, who I met for the first time that day.

So we sat down for Round One. Andy, smarter than I, did his losing quickly by blundering out of the gate. Oops. Colin got the best of both worlds, winning his game with impressive speed. That left David and me still playing. I spurned a forced draw in an attempt to go for the win, missed a trick, and lost. David soon followed suit, and we went down to defeat.

Round Two got off to a good start when I won a funky new digital chess clock simply by being the first to run to the stage with a Virginia driver's license. Sadly, things took a nasty turn when I blundered in a better position and lost my game. Ugh. Two losses. Colin took care of business on board four, and Dave won as well. Andy then took a draw, since that was enough to clinch the match for our side.

Sunday morning saw me make my best move of the tournament:

JR (1932) - Max Weiss (1630)

Position After 10. ... Ng4-h6

This came out of the Bishop's opening. Black opted for one of the lines with a quick Bc5 and Ng4, planning the big fork on f2 and the win of the rook in the corner. This is actually a known line of the opening, and I played the standard plan of f5, allowing black to win the rook but confronting him with a massive counter-attack and nearly impossible defensive task. Anyway, my opponent got nervous by my brazen willingness to part with the rook, and decided not to take it.

Instead he made some passive defensive moves leading to the position above. Given my development lead and his Swiss cheese kingside, I figured something dramatic was called for.

I played 11. Ng5!. Actually, the silicon monster tells me that while this move is okay, most of the less flahy alternatives were better. I don't care. When you're smarting after two losses the day before, there's nothing like playing a move like this to wash the taste out of your mouth. Everyone on the boards near mine looked over when I banged this move down. They were all quiet and poker-faced, but I could tell they were impressed.

Black should accept the knight sacrifice with 11. ... fxg5 and try to weather the storm after 12. Qxh5 Kf8 13. Bxg5 Qe8 14. Rf1. Instead my opponent tried the counter attack 11. ... Nxf5, but I got the last laugh with 12. Nf7 Ng3 13. Qf3 when white wins material in all lines. Score one for me!

Charlie, who didn't want to play on Saturday for religious reasons, was now on Board Two. He made a quick draw. Andy and David took care of business on the remaining boards and we won the match easily.

Round four saw my second best move of the tournament:

Jonathan Williams (1809)-JR

Position after 15. Qd2-e2

My opponent had just moved his queen off the d-file, thereby avoiding the cheapo with Bxe5, when white runs into problems with the pin on the d-file after Rxe5, Qxe5, dxe5 and Rxd2. Sadly, he avoided one trick only to fall into another.

Since my opponent's last move left both his b2 and d4 pawns unguarded, I played 15. ... Qb6, winning one of the pawns. My opponent opted to give up the d-pawn and play continued 16. Bb3 Qxd4 17. Nc4 Bb8 18. Qf3 Qf4!, when the threat on h2 forces a queen trade. I managed to win the endgame a few hours later. I don't recall the individual results of my teammates, but we did manage to win the match.

This left us with three out of four team points heading into Monday's rounds. We feared we would be facing one of the monster teams on Monday morning, and we were right. My opponent was an International Master of some renown, which didn't make me optimistic about my chances. Andy and Charlie went down quickly on Boards Two and Three, meaning that David and I had to win for us to tie the match. And that low-pressure situation led to my worst move of the tournament:

JR - IM Larry Kaufman (2359)

Position after 28. ... f4

After twenty-eight moves I had inexplicably reached this excellent position. My silicon friend tells me that I would keep a large advantage with either 29. Ne5 or 29. Nd8. Sadly, in mutual time pressure, I went for the greedy 29. Rxc6?? There followed 29. ... f3 30. g4 Be8 31. Rc5 Rc1+. The good news is I had actually reached this position in my mental analysis from about four moves previously. The bad news is that I suddenly realized that my intended 32. Kg1, stopping the black f-pawn and looking forward to ramming my extra pawns down his throat, was sadly illegal. Aaaargh. Sometimes I can't imagine why I keep playing this game. I was forced to play 32. Kh2. A few moves later my knight returned form c4 to stop the f-pawn. He was quickly dispatched to the glue factory for his trouble. Heavy sigh.

Happily, the team got back to business and we won our final round match. This left us with four points out of six. As of when we left the hotel it was still mathematically possible, though unlikely, that that would be sufficient to win our rating class.

I got to see a lot of old friends, made some new ones, and generally had a great time. Come to think of it, I guess that's why I keep playing this game.

Chess in Parsippany

2006-02-17T11:22:00.000-06:00

I'm off to sunny Parsippany, NJ this weekend to participate in the 36th annual U.S. Amateur Team Championship, East. As every chess enthusiast knows, this is the biggest and most enjoyable chess tournament of the year. Regular blogging will resume upon my return.

The Times Weighs in on Ohio

2006-02-15T13:39:00.000-06:00

Here's the New York Times reporting on Ohio's decision to eliminate their lesson plan “critically analyzing” evolution:

The Ohio Board of Education voted 11 to 4 Tuesday to toss out a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution and an accompanying model lesson plan, dealing the intelligent design movement its second serious defeat in two months.

Ohio Expected to Rein In Class Linked to Intelligent Design (Feb. 14, 2006)The board, which became the first in the nation to single out evolution for special scrutiny under the academic standards it adopted in 2002, stripped the language from the curriculum partly out of fear of a lawsuit in the wake of a December ruling by a federal judge that teaching intelligent design in the Dover, Pa., public schools was unconstitutional.

While the Ohio lesson plan does not mention intelligent design, which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone, critics contend that the critical analysis language is simply design in disguise.

“This lesson is bad news, the 'critically analyze' wording is bad news,” Martha W. Wise, the board member who offered the emergency motion, told her colleagues during 90 minutes of contentious debate here Tuesday afternoon. “It is deeply unfair to the children of this state to mislead them about the nature of science.”

Also included is the predictable response from the Discovery Institute:

“It's an outrageous slap in the face to the citizens of Ohio,” said John G. West, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the institute, referring to several polls that show public support for criticism of evolution in science classes. “The effort to try to suppress ideas that you dislike, to use the government to suppress ideas you dislike, has a failed history,” Mr. West said. “Do they really want to be on the side of the people who didn't want to let John Scopes talk or who tried to censor Galileo?”

Speaking only for myself, I prefer to be on the side of presenting science accurately and against those who believe lying to schoolchildren is an appropriate way of disseminating their message.

The Tribune States it Plain

2006-02-14T20:15:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's Chicago Tribune contained this excellent article about the utter vacuity of ID:

To advocates of intelligent design, the human sperm's tiny tail bears potent evidence that Charles Darwin was wrong--it is, they say, a molecular machine so complex that only God could have produced it.

But biologists now are starting to piece together how such intricate bits of biochemistry evolved. Although the basic research was not meant as a response to intelligent design, it is unraveling the very riddles that proponents said could not be solved.

In contrast, intelligent design advocates admit they still lack any way of using hard evidence to test their theories, which many biologists find revealing.

The new insights on evolution at its smallest scale were a major yet little-noticed reason why a federal judge late last year struck down a plan in Dover, Pa., that would have put intelligent design in public school classrooms. The findings the judge cited will provide the ultimate test of ideas about the origins of life, more lasting than court rulings or the politics of the moment.

Most scientists have long rejected intelligent design, or ID, on the grounds that it is a religious proposal not grounded in observation. ID adherents say biochemistry actually supports their view. They argue that many tiny mechanisms--the tails of sperm and bacteria, the immune system, blood clotting--are so elaborate they must have been purposely designed.

Yet biologists have made major strides on each of those phenomena since the first ID books were published in the mid-1990s.

Well said. Go read the whole article.

Ohio Kills Lesson Plan

2006-02-14T18:55:00.000-06:00

According to this news brief, the Ohio state school board has voted to kill a lesson plan that would have encouraged students to “critically analyze” evolution:

The state school board on Tuesday voted to eliminate a lesson plan and science standards that critics said opened the door to teaching intelligent design, a form of creationism.

The Ohio Board of Education voted 11-4 to delete material encouraging students to seek evidence for and against certain elements of evolutionary science.

The board also directed a committee to study whether a replacement lesson was needed.

The vote was a reversal of a 9-8 decision a month ago to keep the lesson plan. But three board members who voted in January to keep the plan in place were absent Tuesday, and supporters of the science material pledged to force a new vote to return the material soon.

I trust that no one is fooled by weasel language like “critically analyze evolution” or “seek evidence for and against evolution.” These circumlocutions exist solely to mask the blatantly unconsitutional motives of those who actively promote such things.

This is a developing story, so there may be more news soon. For now, though, it is a major victory for the good guys.

Eldredge in VQR

2006-02-13T14:52:00.000-06:00

Virginia Quarterly Review will be devoting an upcoming issue to the evolution and ID. Niles Eldredge has contributed this lengthy essay to the issue.

Much of the essay deals with Edlredge's involvement with the American Museum of Natural History's Darwin exhibit. But the essay also includes this interesting paragraph:

I take being called anti-Darwinian very personally. It has always hurt, for I have always thought of myself as more or less a knee-jerk neo-Darwinian, someone who thinks the basic mechanism underlying evolutionary change, including the origin, modification, and maintenance of adaptations, resides squarely in the domain of natural selection. And I have always felt that, with one or two major exceptions, my version of how the evolutionary process works lines up very well with Darwin’s. Take natural selection, for example: I see natural selection just as Darwin originally did—as the statistical effect that relative success in the economic sphere (obtaining energy resources, warding off predators and disease, etc.) has on an organism’s success in reproducing. This conservative view contrasts strongly with the modern tendency to see natural selection as a matter of competition among genes to leave copies of themselves to the next generation—a position I take to be hopelessly teleological, obfuscating the real interactive dynamics of economic and reproductive organismic behavior driving the evolutionary process.

The first part of this paragraph is yet another useful reminder that punctuated equilibrium, created by Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, has nothing to do with whether natural selection can craft complex adaptations.

But the remainder of the paragraph is bizarre. The view of natural selection as a statistical effect produced by competition among organisms does not contrast sharply with the gene's eye view of things. In reality, they are just two sides of the same coin, just like the classical view and the statistical mechanical view are two different ways of understanding the phenomena of thermodynamics. Dawkins, who is the primary defender of the gene-centric view, made this perfectly clear in the first chapter of The Extended Phenotype. There he describes the idea that evolution should be viewed as competition among genes as merely one way of looking at evolution, not as the sole correct way to understand biological phenomena.

Thus, the statistical effect produced by competing organisms in the economic sphere is simply reflected in certain genes increasing or decreasing their representation in the population. And certain complex biological problems, especially in ethology, are just easier to understand if you take the gene-centric view. So I think Eldredge is wrong in his characterization of natural selection.

Eldredge's essay is well worth reading, but I must confess to one other small frustration. It seems that every time journal editors decide to wade in to this issue they keep going to the same people. I'll read anything Eldredge writes, but the fact remians that much of this essay is recycled from his past writing. I notice that Michael Ruse, who has been on auto-pilot for quite some time, will also be contributing an essay.

But somehow arguments over punctuated equilibria or selfish genes seem so late twentieth century. Surely there are other angles to this issue that can be mined. For example, how about an essay or two about the role that blogging plays in disseminating information on this subject? Why not get someone like P.Z. Myers to do an article on current issues in evolution? Instead of yet another biographical sketch about Darwin, why not an article about the ways Darwin's writing continues to be relevant to current research. I'll look forward to reading the entire issue of VQR when it comes out, but it also seems like an opportunity missed.

Fawning Over Ham

2006-02-13T14:14:00.000-06:00

It seems like every couple of months the LA Times discovers there are young-Earth creationists out there. And every time they make this discovery they feel compelled to write bemused but respectful articles about them.

Here's their latest foray into this genre. The subject is Answers in Gensis front man Ken Ham:

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,'” Ham told them. “Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.'” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who's the only one who's always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who's the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

For some reason this reminds me of a scene near the end of the movie Firestarter. Drew Barrymore plays an eight-year old with the power to start fires with her mind. She and her father (who has some gnarly superpowers of his own) are captured by some obscure, and thoroughly evil, government organization that wants to use her as a weapon. One especially evil fellow, played by George C. Scott, poses as a janitor and manages, via a series of cleverly planned subterfuges, to win Barrymore's trust. He then uses that trust to manipulate her into cooperating with the government types.

One thing leads to another and Barrymore's father, played by David Keith, contrives a clever escape plan that culminates with Barrymore and Keith touchingly reunited in a barn. It looks like they're going to get away with it. But then Barrymore casually mentions that her friend the janitor wants to come with them. Keith's face melts in horror since he knows, I forget how, that the janitor is one of the bad guys. He realizes that Barrymore has told Scott about their plan.

Scott is concealed behind some bales of hey on the second floor of the barn. Keith turns, his horror turning to anger, and yells something like, “Congratulations! You managed to fool an eight-year old. You proud of yourself?”

That's all Ham is doing. He's shamelessly fooling children. And the Times' editors believe that such a man deserves respectful coverage in a major article.

Don't expect the Times to make it clear that everything Ham says is nonsense. Certainly not. They're too busy being bemused and above it all:

In two 90-minute workshops for children, Ham adopted a much lighter tone, mocking scientists who think birds evolved from dinosaurs (“if that were true, I'd be worried about my Thanksgiving turkey!”).

He showed the children a photo of a fossilized hat found in a mine to prove it doesn't take millions of years to create ancient-looking artifacts. He pointed out cave drawings of a creature resembling a brachiosaur to make the case that man lived alongside dinosaurs after God created all the land animals on Day 6.

In a bit that brought the house down, Ham flashed a picture of a chimpanzee. “Did your grandfather look like this?” he demanded.

“Noooooo!” the children called.

“And did your grandmother look like that?” Ham displayed a photo of the same chimp wearing lipstick. The children erupted in giggles. “Noooooo!”

“We are not just an animal,” Ham said. He had the children repeat that, their small voices rising in unison: “We are not just an animal. We are made in the image of God.”

The children have an excuse. They don't know any better. But how is it possible that there are adults in this country unable to see how mind-numbingly stupid that is?

The article does, inadvertently, manage to get at something important:

As the session ended, Nicole Ableson, 34, rounded up her four young children. “This shows your kids that there are other people who are out there who believe what you believe, and who have done the research,” she said. “So they don't think 'This is just my parents believing in fairy tales.' ”

I've made precisely this point myself. For the rank and file creationists, the service offered by people like Ham has nothing to do with providing scientific information. Do you think for one second that Ableson really cares about paleontology or genetics?

These people know they believe the Biblical account, but they also understand that they don't really know anything about science. So here come people like Ham to give slick, polished performances with the right balance of jargon and folksiness to sound both scientific and approachable at the same time. What service does Ham provide? He allows people like Ableson to be content in their ignorance, confident that there are people smarter and more knowledgable than they who share their beliefs.

I'll close with one more quote:

Emily Maynard, 12, was also delighted with Ham's presentation. Home-schooled and voraciously curious, she had recently read an encyclopedia for fun — and caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. “They were explaining about apes standing up, evolving to man, and I could kind of see that's how it could happen,” she said.

Ham convinced her otherwise. As her mother beamed, Emily repeated Ham's mantra: “The Bible is the history book of the universe.”

Caught herself almost believing the entry on evolution. Charming.

Darwin Day Talk

2006-02-09T20:38:00.000-06:00

So the big talk went well yesterday. Around thirty people showed up. If there were any creationists in the audience, they didn't say anything. Here's the Cliff's Notes version of what I said.

I began by showing a few of those cartoons Ken Ham likes so much, in this case drawn from his book Creation Evangelism for the New Millenium. You now the ones I mean. The ones that show evolution as the foundation of a secular worldview that promotes abortion, homosexuality, family breakup and all that other nasty stuff. I then rhetorically asked what kind of scientific theory could possibly provoke a response that irrational.

From here I discussed a few common myths about evolution. Evolution is neither a theory about the origin of the universe, nor about the origin of the Earth, nor about the origin of life. I gave examples from various cable news pundits illustrating each of these fallacies. Likewise, evolution is neither an atheistic theory nor is it a theory of random chance. I pointed out that the claim that humans and lobsters shared a common ancestor does not imply that we should expect to dig up a half-human half-lobster fossil. Finally, I explained why evolution does not say we evolved from apes.

After clearing up what evolution is not, I spent a few moments explaining what evolution is. I identified the hypotheses of common descent and natural selection as the primary shaper of that descent as the core of the theory.

Then I launched into the longest part of the talk, wherein I laid out some of the evidence for common descent and natural selection. The audience consisted primarily of students and I did not want to assume they were familiar with this area. Judging from the comments I got after the talk, this seems to have been the right decision.

I began with the fossil record, and argued that fossils provide three types of evidence for common descent. First, the broad history of life as revealed by the fossil record is perfectly consistent with common descent. No Cambrian rabbits, to use a famous example. Second, creationist protestations notwithstanding, there are droves of transitional forms in the fossil record. Finally, the geographic distribution of fossils supports common descent. For example, armidillos are native to South America, and that is also where you go to find the fossil ancestors of modern armidillos.

Next up was the issue of anatomical homologies. I used the ye olde forelimb example. There's a reason it's a classic. Why do the forelimbs of humans, whales and bats, among others, use the same bones in the same relative positions? This makes no sense from an engineering standpoint, but makes perfect sense if all of these critters evolved from a common ancestor.

Then came embryology. Why do the early developmental stages of very different organisms nonetheless look nearly identical? Why do human embryos form tails and yolk sacs? Why is it that birds possess the genetic information for making teeth when that information is not expressed in modern birds?

Then we talked about vesitigal structures like pelvic bones in whales in snakes. I brought up many others as well. Everyplace else we find pelvic bones they are there for attaching legs to torsoes. If whales and snakes evolved from critters with legs, this is easy to explain. If not, then what are they doing there?

I said a few words about biogeography as well, but I won't belabor that here.

Finally I discussed some of the genetic and molecular evidence for common descent and thisis where things got interesting. I used the example of cytochrome-c. I explained that all organisms possess some form of this protein, but that there is enormous functional redundancy in its structure. In other words, there are many different functional forms of the protein. Human and yeast cytochrome-c differ in over forty precent of the protein, but human cytochrome-c works perfectly well when transplanted into yeast.

How then to explain the fact that human and chimp cytochrome-c is identical? More genearlly, how do we explain the fact that the phylogenetic trees constructed by analyzing cytochrome-c across the animal kingdom perfectly matches the phylogenetic trees constructed by other methods. I argued that this fact alone argues strongly for common descent.

These patterns certainly can't be epxlained funcitonally, after all. And given the sheer variety of functionla cyctochrome-c proteins, we can't explain it as the result of chance either.

At this point an audience member asked how the ID folks explain this fact. I had to confess I didn't know. The only ID proponent I could think of who has addressed this subject was Cornelius Hunter, who did so in his contribution to Dembski's anthology Uncommon Dissent. But his only reply was to hold out the vague hope that there was some functional explanation after all for the patterns. Does anyone know of any other ID reply to this point?

I completed my round-up of the evidence for common descent with a discussion of retroviral scars. For example, the genomes of primates reveal numerous insertions of retroviral DNA. As with the cytochrome-c, the patterns of these insertions matches perfectly with the phylogenetic trees constructed by other means.

Next up was natural selection. I began with Darwin's description of natural selection from The Origin. Then I used Dawkins' “Methinks is like a weasel,” experiment to illustrate how it is possible in principle for natural selection to craft complex structures.

I then provided brief discussions of evolutionary computation, known instances of speciation via artificial selection, field studies of natural selection, laboratory experiments on selection that have shown that new functionalities can evolve, ring species, and artifical life. After this summary I argued that the upshot is that any claim that the adaptations of modern organisms are not the result of natural selection will have to be defended by appeal to specific biological data. There is no sound, armchair argument that can show that natural selection is fundamentally incapable of doing what biologists attribute to it.

I next offered three lines of evidence to show that natural selection really was responsible for crafting the complex systems in nature. I pointed to the fact that many complex systems appear to be cobbled together from parts that were readily available in related organisms. I used the examples of the bee-attracting gizmos of orchids. I also observed that, again, ID protestations notwithstanding, scientists had discovered plausible series of intermediates for a great many complex structures.

Related to this line of evidence are the many “senseless signs of history,” to borrow Gould's phrase, that we find in modern ogranisms. I pointed to the fact that we breathe and swallow through the same tube as an example. This makes perfect sense in the light of evolution (which posits that this system evolved from more primitive systems in ancient lungfish). I pointed to other examples as well, such as the weakness of our lower backs and the backward wiring of our eyes.

The final line of evidence came from the applications of game theory to problems of animal behavior. Mathematical models based on game theory explicitly assume that natural selection is the cause of the behaviors being analyzed. The success of these models is testimony to the correctness of this assumption.

This was the longest section of the talk. I next gave a short biography of Darwin and described what, exactly, his contribution to biology was.

Then came a round-up of various anti-evolution arguments. I treated Behe's claims about irreducible complexity in detail, and also said a few words about the tautology argument and the thermodynamics argument. I chose those three because all of them have been prominent lately, and all of them represent attempts to show that evolution is false while making very little appeal to the actual biological data. I used the following representative statement from the Judge's decision in the big Dover case:

The immune system is the third system to which Professor Behe has applied the definition of irreducible complexity. In Darwin’s Black Box, Professor Behe wrote that not only were there no natural explanations for the immune system at the time, but that natural explanations were impossible regarding its origin. However, Dr. Miller presented peer-reviewed studies refuting Professor Behe’s claim that the immune system was irreducibly complex. Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the
immune system. In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.”

Since I was mostly out of time at this point I had to jettison the part where I disucssed that recent Washington Post article about the odious Caroline Crocker. See this post for details on that.

So instead I wrapped it up with Darwin's old “There is grandeur in this view of life” quote, answered questions for another hour and a half, and called it a night. All in all, a successful evening.

Public Presentation II

2006-02-06T14:40:00.000-06:00

Just wanted to remind everyone that I wll be giving a public talk about evolution here on the James Madison University campus, Wednesday, Feberuary 8, at 6:00 pm, in Taylor Hall room 305. I am told that cake will be served. I look forward to seeing everyone there.

Replying to Shulevitz

2006-02-06T14:13:00.000-06:00

I never got around to blogging about Judith Shulevitz's review, for The New York Times, of Eugenie Scott's book Evolution and Creationism, and Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle. The article wasn't bad enough to merit a frothing at the mouth refutation, but wasn't good enough to really be worth reading. It was the usual pap that you get when a non-scientist has to find something to say about this subject. Those poor, beknighted, pointy-headed, ivory-tower intellectuals, thinking this is about science, she seems to say. Don't they realize that creationism is a cultural and anthropological phenomenon? Yawn.

Her article sure did provoke some good letters though. Paleontologist Niles Eldredge offers these wise words:

Judith Shulevitz's essay (“When Cosmologies Collide,” Jan. 22) contends that scientists often do not acknowledge the broader social implications of “evolutionism,” the mélange of often conflicting philosophical conclusions that have been drawn by disparate people from the very idea that life has evolved. It is this evolutionism, she says, that continues to inspire much of the resistance to evolution. But she gives short shrift to the fact that nearly all of the rhetoric of creationists, including contemporary “intelligent design” proponents, consists of ill-informed attacks on evolutionary biology itself, rather than on the inchoate philosophical ramifications of “evolutionism.”

Beyond the cardboard assertions of “irreducible complexity” in the supposed outboardmotor- like apparatus of bacterial flagella, and a few other oneliners in the current intelligent design canon, lie reams of tired old assertions of the supposed failings of evolutionists to explain natural phenomena. There is every reason for us evolutionary biologists to fight back, especially when the stakes are so high: the further dilution of integrity in science teaching in our nation's secondary schools.

Well said. And here's Skeptic's Society president Michael Shermer offering similarly wise words:

Although it is occasionally true that evolutionism can turn into bad philosophy in the hands of a rabid anti-theist, intelligent design (I.D.) creationism is always bad science and bad theology. We saw in the Dover trial why I.D. is bad science. I.D. is bad theology because it turns God into a mere garage tinkerer, a fumbling watchmaker, a Dr. Frankenstein cobbling together biochemical parts from the primordial soup into complex organisms. Such a God cannot be the omniscient and omnipotent God of Abraham; indeed, the I.D. God would have the same skill sets as an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence capable of genetic engineering and other feats.

Far more nourishing than the original article.

The Metabolism of Evolution Information by the Blgosphere

2006-02-06T13:48:00.000-06:00

Moment of Science offers this excellent summary of how evolutoin information is metabolized by the blogosphere. Great stuff!

Hitchens Nails It

2006-02-06T13:39:00.000-06:00

Chirstopher Hitchens says all that needs to be said about the riots over those Danish cartoons depicting caricatures of Muhammad:

As well as being a small masterpiece of inarticulacy and self-abnegation, the statement from the State Department about this week's international Muslim pogrom against the free press was also accidentally accurate.

“Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief.”

Thus the hapless Sean McCormack, reading painfully slowly from what was reported as a prepared government statement. How appalling for the country of the First Amendment to be represented by such an administration. What does he mean "unacceptable"? That it should be forbidden? And how abysmal that a “spokesman” cannot distinguish between criticism of a belief system and slander against a people. However, the illiterate McCormack is right in unintentionally comparing racist libels to religious faith. Many people have pointed out that the Arab and Muslim press is replete with anti-Jewish caricature, often of the most lurid and hateful kind. In one way the comparison is hopelessly inexact. These foul items mostly appear in countries where the state decides what is published or broadcast. However, when Muslims republish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or perpetuate the story of Jewish blood-sacrifice at Passover, they are recycling the fantasies of the Russian Orthodox Christian secret police (in the first instance) and of centuries of Roman Catholic and Lutheran propaganda (in the second). And, when an Israeli politician refers to Palestinians as snakes or pigs or monkeys, it is near to a certainty that he will be a rabbi (most usually Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the disgraceful Shas party) and will cite Talmudic authority for his racism. For most of human history, religion and bigotry have been two sides of the same coin, and it still shows.

And later:

I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

Exactly right.

Vedantam on Evolution and Morality, Part One

2006-02-03T19:17:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post has posted this article about evolution and morality, by Shankar Vedantam. It is very long and very mixed. Parts of it are good, but the article manages to get a lot of important things wrong. Since there is so much to comment on, I will devote several blog entries to it.

It gets off to a good start. Here's the headline and subhead:

Eden and Evolution:
Religious critics of evolution are wrong about its flaws. But are they right that it threatens belief in a loving God?

Sadly, it now launches into a lengthy, and uncritical, description of pro-ID biologist Caroline Crocker. Here's an excerpt:

Crocker was about to establish a small beachhead for an insurgency that ultimately aims to topple Darwin's view that humans and apes are distant cousins. The lecture she was to deliver had caused her to lose a job at a previous university, she told me earlier, and she was taking a risk by delivering it again. As a nontenured professor, she had little institutional protection. But this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.

...

Ripples of excitement spread through the class. Crocker took the students on a tour of experiments that she said were supposed to prove evolution. In the 1950s, she said, scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey ran electricity through a soup of chemicals to show how chemicals on the early Earth could assemble themselves into the building blocks of life.

“Anyone read about it?” she asked.

“It's in our book,” a student said.

Crocker said that subsequent research had shown that chemicals used in the experiment did not exist on Earth 4 billion years ago. “The experiment is irrelevant, but you still find it in your books,” she said.

She cited another experiment, involving researcher Bernard Kettlewell, who produced pictures of variously colored peppered moths on tree trunks to show that when the moths were not well camouflaged, they were more likely to be eaten by birds -- a process of natural selection that influenced the color of the moths. “This comes from your book -- it is not actually true,” Crocker said. “The experiment was falsified. He glued his moths to the trees.”

“There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution,” says biology professor Caroline Crocker, who supports the theory of intelligent design. (D.A. Peterson )

Gasps and giggles burst out. Why was the experiment still in the textbook? Crocker said the authors' answer was, “because it makes the point . . . The problem with evolution is that it is all supposition -- this evolved into this -- but there is no evidence.”

...

Nguyen was among the first students to speak. “With so many things disproving evolution and evolution having no proof, why is it still taught?” he asked.

“Right now, in our society, we have an underlying philosophy of naturalism, that there is a material explanation for everything,” Crocker replied. “Evolution came with that philosophy.”

Carolyn Flitcroft, a student in one of the front rows, said: “So far, we have only learned that evolution is true. This is the first time I have ever heard it isn't.”

“I lost my job at George Mason University for teaching the problems with evolution,” said Crocker, a charge that the university denies. “Lots of scientists question evolution, but they would lose their jobs if they spoke out.”

There's much more to this section than I have quoted. But Vedantam presents it all uncritically, with no indication that Crocker will be taking a fall later in the article. Anyone who simply skims the beginning of the article - a large percentage of the Post's readership I suspect - will come away thinking that Crocker is a reputable source. You have to go pretty far into the article before you come to anything that challenges her litany of nonsense, and even then we get only a short paragraph:

Crocker's arguments are part of a familiar litany of half-truths and errors, said Alan Gishlick, a research affiliate at the National Center for Science Education. The Miller-Urey experiment was not intended to be evidence for evolution but part of a research program into how biological mechanisms might arise from nonbiological chemical reactions. As for gluing moths to trees, Gishlick said, researcher Kettlewell affixed the moths to trees to determine how birds spot moths of different hues. The photos were illustrations and never meant to be depictions of real life.

“They put us in a position that we have to defend things that don't need defending, and then they come back and say, Why are you defending things that we know are wrong?” Gishlick told me, his voice rising.

Good for Alan. His voice should rise when dealing with people like Crocker.

Meanwhile, you have to go all the way to the end of the article to get GMU's reply to her charges:

GMU spokesman Daniel Walsch denied that the school had fired Crocker. She was a part-time faculty member, he said, and was let go at the end of her contract period for reasons unrelated to her views on intelligent design. “We wholeheartedly support academic freedom,” he said. But teachers also have a responsibility to stick to subjects they were hired to teach, he added, and intelligent design belonged in a religion class, not biology. Does academic freedom “literally give you the right to talk about anything, whether it has anything to do with the subject matter or not? The answer is no.”

Actually, what Crocker did was far worse than straying from the mandated syallabus. Assuming the beginning of this article paints an accurate picture of what she really said, Crocker was simply presenting a mountain of blatantly false information.

Did Bernard Kettlewell falsify his experiment (whatever that means)? No. The photographs of the moths on the trees was not part of the experiment itself. It was intended merely to illustrate the color contrast between different types of moths resting on tree bark. After all, how many people have ever seen a peppered moth outside of a high school biology textbook? And this experiment is in all the textbooks (a) because of its historical significance (it was one of the first detailed confirmations of natural selection in the wild) and (b) because of its relative simplicity. By itself it proves little and no one has ever claimed that it does. But in one simple experiment it illustrates most of the major ideas about how natural selection works. Furthermore, Crocker acts as if Kettlewell is the only one who ever did an experiment on peppered moths. In reality Kettlewell's experiments have been repeated many times, and his results have been confirmed.

So here we have Crocker not only presenting false information, but also impugning the integrity of a specific individual, Kettlewell, as well as the scientific community generally for relying on his work. Alan Gishlick himself has written a detailed refutation of Crocker's arguments here.

Is she on any better ground with the Miller-Urey experiment? No. As Gishlick points out, the Miller-Urey experiment had nothing to do with evolution. And the problem was not that it relied on chemicals that did not exist on the early Earth. The problem was that theories of the composition of the early atmosphere changed in the years after the Miller-Urey experiment. That is why variations on the Miller-Urey experiment have been conducted in the light of our new understanding of the early atmosphere. And these more recent experiments have produced results comparable to the original. Again, I refer you to Gishlick's excellent summary of the basic facts of the situation.

On and on it goes. None of Crocker's arguments are even close to being correct. Her assertions are not merely false, but false in ways that indicate both a complete disregard for the truth, and a complete lack of respect for her scientific colleagues. Her behavior as described here is the equivalent of me going into one of my math classes and telling the students that not only does 1+1 not equal 2, but actually that myth persists only because an authoritarian regime of arrogant, atheist mathematicians has conspired to squelch dissenting voices.

Would anyone argue that a mathematician seriously making such a claim in a classroom should keep his job?

As I said, there is much more to this article, but we will save that for future blog entries.

Dizikes on Galileo Groupies

2006-02-03T15:45:00.000-06:00

Check out this excellent article from Slate:

In a column late last month in the Catholic Church's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, Italian biologist Fiorenzo Facchini scolded intelligent design advocates for "pretending to do science." It was the Vatican's signal that the church had jumped ship on ID. That will no doubt rankle creationists who hoped for a potential ally in Rome. But there's a bright side for them: The church's rejection could help the ID-ers identify with their favorite scientist, Galileo Galilei.

Yes, that Galileo. In opinion pieces, speeches, and interviews, ID advocates commonly cite the 17th-century Italian astronomer and physicist as a forebear. It's not his views on biology they want a piece of, but rather his plight as a man before his time. “In my opinion, we must train students in the 21st century to do exactly as Galileo did … think outside the box,” says William Harris, one of the key players in Kansas' rebellion against evolution last year. In his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, leading ID-er Michael Behe calls the idea of a heliocentric universe, proposed by Copernicus and backed by Galileo, a prescient “assault on the senses.” So, too, Behe says, will his own work be vindicated. Last fall, an interviewer for the British newspaper the Guardian asked Behe if the criticism of ID he faces brings Galileo to mind. The self-appointed science rebel had a simple answer: “Yeah. In a way it's flattery.”

Welcome to creationism's absurdist history of science. During the inquisition, the Catholic Church put Galileo on trial in 1633 and forced him under threat of torture to recant his belief, presented unapologetically in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo's story has nuances—Pope Urban VIII tolerated his ideas more than hard-line cardinals—but it is unquestionably a tale of science squelched by organized religion. That is not exactly a problem today's ID backers face.

Think Dizikes is exaggerating? Check out this blog entry from William Dembski, posted today:

[From a colleague:] I understand the importance of the political struggle—not because the truth of neo-Darwinism or ID (or a “third way”) can be settled by the courts, but because Darwinian metaphysics is doing real moral and political mischief in our society, and therefore must be opposed in whatever manner is practicable. From that point of view, Dover was indeed unfortunate.

However, let us not lose sight of the fact that a scientific theory that requires a judge to enforce its teaching cannot be said to be in good INTELLECTUAL health. By proclaiming it illegal to “disparage or denigrate” neo-Darwinism, Judge Jones adopted the principle of the Inquisition, and in so doing rendered both himself and that state-enforced theory ridiculous. Taking a longer view, I think Dover will come eventually to be be seen as a moral victory, in the same way that Galileo’s condemnation is now viewed as a moral victory.

There is only one thing to say to Judge Jones—eppure, si muove!

A more accurate description of what happened in Dover is that a Judge, in possession of all the relevant facts, prevented a scientifically ignorant school board from lying to school children in the service of an especially mypoic religious agenda.

Boehner Wins Leadership Position

2006-02-02T19:09:00.000-06:00

Ohio rperesentative John Boehner has won the election to replace Tom DeLay as the House Majority Leader.

Boehner will be familiar to readers of this blog for his attempts to pressure the Ohio Board of Education into including ID in its science classes:

We are writing to comment on recent Ohio School Board hearings regarding the teaching of science in Ohio public schools in light of some recent developments in federal education policy. As you know on January 8, 2002, President Bush signed into law H.R. 1, the Leave No Child Behind Act of 2001. During the debate concerning H. R. 1, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) introduced an amendment, regarding teaching controversial elements of scientific theory. The Santorum amendment passed the Seante by a vote of 98 to 1 and was included as report language in the final version of H. R. 1, which was signed by the president. Specifically, the H.R. 1 Conference Report states:

The Conferees recognize that a quality science education should
Prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of
science from the religious or philosophical claims that are made
in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may
generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum
should help students to understand the full range of scientific views
that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how
scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.

Thus, the Santorum language is now part of the law. The Santorum language clarifies that public school students are entitled to learn that thee are differing scientific views on issues such as biological evolution.

H.R. 1 calls for the enactment of state standards in the field of science. It’s important that the implementation of these science standards not be used to censor debate on controversial issues in science, including Darwin’s theory of evolution. Science is neither religion nor philosophy. Many people may draw religious or philosophical implications from science, but those implication are best drawn outside the science classroom. Students should be allowed to hear the scientific arguments on more than one side of a controversial topic. Censorship of opposing points of view retards true scholarship and prevents students from developing their critical thinking skills.

The text of Santorum language in the H.R. 1 Conference Report and comments from members of House and Senate are enclosed for your background information. We hope this information will be of help to you in your deliberations.

Sincerely,

Rep. John A. Boehner Rep. Steve Chabot
Chairman, House Education Chairman, House
And Workforce Committee Constitution Subcommittee

Tell me again about how the Republicans aren't the anti-science party.

SOTU Response

2006-02-01T15:03:00.000-06:00

Andrew Sullivan has a series of good posts on the emptiness of Bush's State of the Union Address. Here's a representative example, under the headline “Sorry:”

...but I thought this speech lacked a real focus, and rehashed thoroughly exhausted tropes and phrases. The speech's key attention-grabber was the “addicted to oil” line. But after five years of being the oil-president, he needs to add a lot more substance to back up the counter-intuitive headline. On the critical question, Iraq, he said all the right things; and I believe he deserves support in navigating the path ahead, however twisted the path to this point. But I'd like to see more meat on those bones, and clear evidence of political progress and improved security. I guess, on this subject, I've just learned to follow what he does, rather than what he says. The calls for bi-partisanship, on the other hand, and for an entitlements commission, for Pete's sake, sounded ... well, desperate. Bottom line: this speech will rise without trace. And be remembered by almost no one.

I agree completely, including the part about Iraq.

I also liked Sullivan's take on the Democratic reponse, delivered by my incomping Governor:

Kaine looks good. Great idea to have a governor, an executive, standing with that big red tie. And the first thing you hear from him is that he was once a missionary. God, God, God for the first few minutes. Then competence and “good management.” Nice touch on Katrina response; even more effective on the Medicare mess. And finally, we have a real challenge on fiscal recklessness. Pity it took a Democrat. Nice line on “inaccurate information” about war intelligence. Much better than the “misled” line (which Begala is now repeating).The same blather on energy independence as the president. And then ... God and service. All in all, I'd say it's easily the best Democratic response I've seen since Bush took office. Of course, the standard was, well, two words: Nancy Pelosi. Bush: C+. Kaine B+. That's my immediate gut response. I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow.

I find nothing at his blog today to indicate that he has, in fact, changed his mind.

Sullivan's comments, coming from a conservative perspective, were a welcome change to the predictable Bush sycophancy of MSNBC (I didn't even bother watching Fox). There was Chris Matthews with his usual cadre of lickspittles, gushing about how strong Bush looked and how weak and timid Kaine looked. You know it's bad when former Republican representative Joe Scarborough is the most critical voice among the regular panelists.

On the other hand, Arianna Huffington was less impressed with Kaine:

While Kaine was droning on, I closed my eyes and imagined Jack Murtha giving the response, someone with the authority to do much more than second guess -- to offer an alternative strategy on Iraq and the war on terror, as opposed to Kaine’s program of &ldwuo;service and competent management.” And I thought “competence” had gone out of vogue with Michael Dukakis.

Guess you can't please everyone.

Brayton on Uncommon Descent

2006-02-01T14:33:00.000-06:00

Meanwhile, Ed Brayton has an important post up about how William Dembski's new blog czar (that's his own attribution), who blogs under the name DaveScot, seems to be doing his utmost to humiliate Dembski at every turn. It seems that DaveScot posted an entry in which he threw a tantrum directed at people who deny the common descent of all species. He wrote:

I will remind everyone again - please frame your arguments around science. If the ID movement doesn't get the issue framed around science it's going down and I do not like losing. The plain conclusion of scientific evidence supports descent with modification from a common ancestor. You are certainly welcome to have other opinions based on faith in something other than science but I'd ask that you go to a religious website with them if you must talk about it.

You certainly don't have to agree here with descent with modification from a common ancestor but I'm going to start clamping down on anyone positively arguing against it. It's simply counter-productive to our goals and reinforces the idea that ID is religion because nothing but religion argues against descent with modification from a common ancestor. What we are fighting is the idea that the modification was unguided. ID can fight that without ever leaving the battleground of plain scientific conclusions. If we try to argue against anything else we're are (sic) going to lose. Plain and simple. No buts about it. There's only one gaping vulnerability in the commonly accepted evolutionary narrative we can exploit successfully and that's the bit about it being unplanned.

This post quickly disappeared, without a trace, no doubt after numerous ID folks pointed out that virtually all of the prominent ID advocates reject common descent. Happily, several other bloggers managed to saved it before it vanished. Of course, bloggers with more integrity than DaveScot would have posted an update explaianing why the post was removed, or perhaps apologizing for their ill-considered remarks.

Brayton writes:

The creationist blog Creation Bits quickly said that DaveScot is “destroying Dembski's blog”. Josh Bozeman, aka jboze, a Dembski sycophant, put up a post at his blog saying that DaveScot had “actually lost his mind.” After less than 24 hours of the commenters venting their spleens at the Blog Czar, he did what what any good little Orwellian would do - he deleted the post. Gone, disappeared into thin air as though it never existed. Bozeman's blog post disappeared too. Thankfully, Jack Krebs had saved the whole thread and you can see it here.

I'm guessing Papa Dembski had a few stern words for the Czar and pulled in the reins a bit. But for crying out loud, how long can he allow this to go on? This guy is absolutely embarrassing him. It's become so ridiculous that you just can't not watch. To use Bill Hicks' analogy, it's like a loose tooth, you can't not touch it.

Meanwhile, Josh Rosenau offers some further thoughts.

Actually, there's potentially a deeper point here. The history of American creationism comprises a series of retreats in the face of legal defeats. It used to be that it was illegal to teach theories that contradicted the Bible, but that strategy was found unconstitutional. Then there was scientific creationism, which argued that things like a young-Earth, spontaneous creation of all “kinds” of organisms, and a world-wide global flood, were simply sound conclusions drawn from scientific evidence. As such, it should be taught as science alongside evolution. That didn't work either. Then came ID, which watered down the scientific creationist view and narrowed its focus solely to the explanatory sufficiency of natural selection. We now have a court decision saying that startegy is pure sham, and ID is no improvement, either legally or scientifically, over old-school creationism.

Could this be the new startegy? Are the ID folks gearing up to accept common descent, and then argue that God had some role in directing evolution? If they are, they are treading perilously close to theistic evolution, previously identified as the hated enemy of ID.

The Wedge in Seattle Weekly

2006-02-01T13:48:00.000-06:00

Lot's of good blog fodder today. Let's begin with this article from Seattle Weekly. The subhead says it all:

A Seattle think tank launched the modern intelligent-design movement with a simple memo. The idea has evolved into a media sensation. And the cause has mutated beyond rational control.

Well said.

The memo being referred to here is the infamous “Wedge” document. It is impossible, after reading it, to conclude that ID is anything other than a political and religious strategy. For example, the document describes the Governing Goals of the movement to be:

To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.

To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.

Seattle Weekly also presents, for the first time as far as I am aware, the full story of how this document came to be leaked:

The story begins, so far as the world at large is concerned, on a late January day seven years ago, in a mail room in a downtown Seattle office of an international human-resources firm. The mail room was also the copy center, and a part-time employee named Matt Duss was handed a document to copy. It was not at all the kind of desperately dull personnel-processing document Duss was used to feeding through the machine. For one thing, it bore the rubber-stamped warnings “TOP SECRET” and “NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION.” Its cover bore an ominous pyramidal diagram superimposed on a fuzzy reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel rendition of God the Father zapping life into Adam, all under a mysterious title: The Wedge.

Curious, Duss rifled through the 10 or so pages, eyebrows rising ever higher, then proceeded to execute his commission while reserving a copy of the treatise for himself. Within a week, he had shared his find with a friend who shared his interest in questions of evolution, ideology, and the propagation of ideas. Unlike Duss, the friend, Tim Rhodes, was technically savvy, and it took him little time to scan the document and post it to the World Wide Web, where it first appeared on Feb. 5, 1999.

I don't wish to turn this blog entry into a discourse on the ethics of whistle blowing, so let me cut right to the conclusion: Duss and Rhodes are heroes, and everyone who cares about good science education in this country owes them a debt of gratitude.

The rest of the article is a lengthy, and excellent, summary of the history of the Discovery Institute. I will limit myself to two representative excerpts:

By 1995, Chapman and an old friend, college roommate, and Discovery board member, George Gilder, were negotiating with the ultraconservative Ahmanson family of Southern California for a substantial grant to set up a program within Discovery Institute to promote intelligent design as a way to break Darwin's seemingly unbreakable lock on science education in America. Once again, Meyer was of crucial assistance; he'd worked as a science tutor to one of the Ahmanson children. Gilder and Chapman left Los Angeles with a pledge of a quarter-million dollars a year for three years, and the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture was born.

The center's first and so far only director was Meyer, who retains his day job in the Department of Theology, Philosophy, and Chaplain Services at Whitworth College in Spokane, a 115-year-old private liberal-arts college whose mission is “to provide its diverse student body an education of the mind and heart, equipping its graduates to honor God, follow Christ, and serve humanity.” To this end, the mission statement continues, “Whitworth's community of teacher-scholars is committed to rigorous and open intellectual inquiry and to the integration of Christian faith and learning.” (The Whitworth connection is not mentioned on the center's Web site, where Meyer is described as holding a Ph.D. in the history of philosophy and science from Cambridge University in England.)...

The roster of fellows has grown apace over the past 10 years and numbers 44 now (only one of them female). The Web site of the Center for Science and Culture, as it is known now (www.discovery.org/csc), describes the list of fellows as “including biologists, biochemists, chemists, physicists, philosophers and historians of science, and public policy and legal experts, many of whom also have affiliations with colleges and universities.” This list avoids mentioning that only seven fellows hold advanced degrees in biological sciences, while 13 profess philosophy and/or theology at such religiously oriented institutions of higher learning as Biola College in Los Angeles, Messiah College of Gratham, Pa., and Billy Graham's alma mater, Wheaton College, in Wheaton, Ill.

And later:

Considering that the Center for Science and Culture had publicly opposed making the situation in Dover a test case, it seems curious that two of the Discovery Institute's most prominent fellows signed on to testify at the trial as expert witnesses: Lehigh University biochemist Michael J. Behe and University of Idaho microbiologist Scott Minnich. But testify they did, and it was their testimony, more than that of many experts fielded by the plaintiffs, that left the scientific credentials of intelligent design in tatters. ...

Almost as soon as Eric Rothschild began his cross-examination, Behe's cultivated scientific calm began to crumble. Rothschild baited him like a picador, dashing in, planting a barb, turning away to attack from a new direction before his victim realized it. Hour by hour, Rothschild got Behe to admit:

That no peer-reviewed scientific journal has published research supportive of intelligent design's claims.

That Behe's own book was not, as he had claimed, peer reviewed.

That Behe himself criticizes the science presented as supporting intelligent design in instructional material created for that purpose.

That intelligent design seems plausible and reasonable to inquirers in direct proportion to their belief or nonbelief in God.

And that the basic arguments for evidence of purposeful design in nature are essentially the same as those adduced by the Christian apologist Rev. William Paley (1743–1805) in his 1802 Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected From the Appearances of Nature, where he sums up his observations of the complexity of life in the ringing words, “The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.”

In the last testimony of the Dover trial, Discovery Institute fellow Minnich presented a low-key, engineer's approach to intelligent design but ended up just as ideologically pummeled in cross-examination by plaintiff's attorney Steven Harvey.

Great stuff.

Public Presentation

2006-01-31T22:24:00.000-06:00

For readers within a reasonable driving distance of Harisonburg, VA, I will be giving a public presentation about Charles Darwin and evolution (I'll probably find some time to talk about ID too) next week. The talk will be on Wednesday, February 8, at 6:00 pm, in Taylor Hall, Room 305. Hope to see you all there.

From the comments to this Telic Thoughts post, I find my old sparring partner Salvador Cordova is telling everyone that I'm actually a great guy in person. Come see if he's right!

Farrell on Bethell

2006-01-30T17:56:00.000-06:00

In other news, John Farrel catches Tom Bethell rewriting history on the subject of relativity denial:

So, it seems, even Tom Bethell has some sense of the importance of methodological naturalism when it comes to doing science. Indeed, in regards to Van Flandern’s views on relativity, he now writes, “I did not (necessarily) thereby endorse all of those views.” Well, this is interesting. Because Bethell most plainly did get very excited about those views when he wrote his anti-relativity piece back in 1999. Excited enough to write a whole article about him. I’d call that endorsement. In fact he opened his piece, as we saw, foreshadowing (again) the death knell for the established theory by touting TVF’s paper and then explaining it in detail.

Round Three With Krauze

2006-01-30T14:40:00.000-06:00

Kruaze has now logged another entry in our little scuffle. After staring, slack-jawed and unbelieving, at his maunderings for about twenty minutes now, I've decided that I really have to respond.

Krauze begins as follows:

To Jason Rosenhouse, intelligent design is nothing but a political and legal strategy to disguise creationism. Consequently, it’s not surprising that in his latest reply in our discussion of Michael Ruse’s book he has adopted the tone of a shrill politician, presenting simple answers to complex questions and demonizing those who disagree with him. Thus, the arguments for intelligent design are “completely false”, “hopelessly flawed”, “standard gobbledygook”, the concept contains “nothing at all beyond falacious logic and distortions of modern science”, and what I’m saying is “ridiculous” and “pure fantasy”. At least no one can accuse him of being mealy-mouthed.

Here we see the typical martyr pose of ID proponents. I will simply point out that examining a nonsensical statement, calling it nonsense, and then explaining why it is nonsense is not demonization. It is refutation. By contrast, whining about your opponent's tone is not refutation.

Thus, it was the ID arguments based on irreducible complexity and complex specified information that were completely false and hopelessly flawed. I note, incidentally, that Krauze refuses to dispute my characterization of those arguments (more on this later). It was Krauze's assertion that Chambers' Vestiges marked the beginning of modern evolutionary theory that was ridiculous. And it was his statement that ID has evolved in recent years that was pure fantasy. I also explained very clearly why I attached those labels to Krauze's statements, but he was too busy feeling aggrieved to attempt a response.

But since whining is the order of the day, let me observe that he is the first one to resort to name-calling. Apparently I speak with the tone of a shrill politician. I note simply that I have attacked his ideas and that is all. There is nothing shrill about labelling nonsense for what it is.

Krauze continues:

In my post, “Big ideas take time”, I posted some excerpts from Michael Ruse’s The Evolution-Creation Struggle that showed that even after Darwin had published Origin of the Species, it still took a considerable amount of time for evolution to take off as a serious research program. I then made the point that ID critics should keep this in mind when asking when intelligent design will result in a research program. I didn’t say that it was just a question of time before intelligent design would result in research. I didn’t say that because evolution overcame its “childhood troubles” so would intelligent design. And I didn’t say that evolution has never resulted in any research. The reason I start by making this clear is that, when reading Rosenhouse’s reply, he seems to be thoroughly confused as to what the point of all of it is.

And here is my description of Krauze's point, taken from my previous entry on thus subject:

Last Thursday, Krauze, of the pro-ID blog Telic Thoughts, posted this essay in which he argued that big scientific ideas require time to come to fruition. He illustrated this idea with the early days of evolutionary theory, pointing out that it was more than sixty years after Darwin published the Origin that the neo-Darwinian synthesis was developed. This was intended as a rebuttal to those who criticize ID for not producing any peer-reviewed research. ID has only been around for a decade, you see.

See the original for links.

I defy you to find any significant difference between our versions of what this argument is about.

Krauze continues:

In a previous post, Rosenhouse disputed my claim that no theory of evolution existed until the Modern Synthesis was proposed in the 1930’s, offering Lamarckism and mutationism as counter-examples. I explained that according to NAS’ own definition, these views didn’t qualify as theories, but more as hypotheses. Rosenhouse shoots back:

The fact remains that there were many possible meachanisms of evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and all could claim a considerable amount of support. And these hypotheses led to clear avenues of research.

That's mighty selective quotation. Here's what I actually wrote:

In my original blog entry I made a clear distinction between a well-developed theory and a proposed theory. Krauze here argues that instead of “proposed theory” I should have said “hypothesis.” Fine. The fact remains that there were many possible meachanisms of evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and all could claim a considerable amount of support. And these hypotheses led to clear avenues of research. ID, alas, does not even have a hypothesis. It has nothing at all beyond falacious logic and distortions of modern science. This is what Krauze will have to come to terms with if he wants to draw any comparisons between modern ID and the early days of evolution.

The point was that it was rather silly to hide behind the NAS' definition of the term “theory” when it was perfectly clear that I was not using their definition. I'm afraid the distinction between a “proposed theory” and a “hypothesis” is too subtle for me.

So let's review. In his original essay on this subject Krauze asserted that there were no proposed theories of evolution in the time between the publication of the Origin and the modern synthesis of the nineteen thirties. I replied that actually there were a great many proposed theories, that these theories led to a large amount of valuable research, and that this is an obvious point of disanology with ID. In his reply, Krauze argued only that ideas like Lamrackism and mutationism didn't meet the NAS' definition of a theory, but rather should be called hypotheses.

And he says I'm the one who's missing the point?

This time around Krauze at least attempts to answer my point. He writes:

In the comments, I asked Rosenhouse to clarify exactly which hypotheses and what research he was talking about, leading him to answer:

Darwin made it clear to everyone that the nature of inheritance was of crucial importance. Prior to Darwin, that question had been almost completely ignored. The mere fact that there were so many viable theories of inheritance, each of which could claim some evidential support, was what drove a lot of the research into genetics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

At this point, Rosenhouse seems to have forgotten what his own point was. Remember, we were talking about hypotheses about possible meachanisms of evolution, and now he’s talking about “theories of inheritance”. Knowing how traits are passed from generation to generation sure is helpful in finding out how those traits change over time, but the two things aren’t the same. And if he wants to claim that it was Lamarckism and mutationism that drove the research into genetics, he really has some ’splainin to do.

He's joking, right?

Lamarckism and mutationism were two proposed mechanisms of evolution. Natural selection acting on small variations was another. There were still others as well. Assessing the correctness of any of these proposals required a thorough understanding of the nature of inheritance. That is why research into genetics is, unavoidably, also research into mechanisms of evolution. This isn't complicated.

Krauze continues:

Rosenhouse thinks that “there’s no controversy that new branches of science take time to come to fruition” and that my claim, “big ideas take time”, is “trivial”. But wait a minute, didn’t Rosenhouse just inform us:

[ID supporters’] entire theory, such as it is, rests entirely upon two pillars: irreducible complexity and complex specified information. Both of these ideas are utterly and irretrievably wrong-headed. Nothing the ID folks build upon such a foundation will ever produce anything but poisonous fruit.

In other words, it is impossible that intelligent design will produce new theoretical concepts or reformulate existing ones. The idea must emerge fully researchable from the get-go, or fail. Of course, it this very assumption that my “trivial” post calls into question.

An new branch of science does not have to emerge “fully researchable” (whatever that means) from the get-go, but it can't be based on obvious falsehoods either.

It is interesting that, once again, Krauze refuses to come to the rescue of irreducible complexity and complex specified information. Instead he reposes his dreams in some far-off day when ID produces new theoretical concepts or reformulates existing ones.

I thought the big idea Krauze was talking about was that there is actual empricial evidence of design in nature. The people who make that claim base their argument on two pillars, as I said. Both of those pillars are rotten. No reformulation of them will help. Let me be more specific. Any argument based on the idea of doing probability calculations to learn something about the plausibility of natural selection producing a given structure will always fail. Likewise, any argument based on the idea that natural selection can not produce a multi-part system in which all of the parts are essential will always fail.

But if Krauze's big idea is merely ID in the abstract (not wedded to specific claims made by Behe, Dembski or the others) then I would point out that ID is one of the oldest and simplest ideas there is. It goes back to the ancients.

So the choice is this: Either Krauze is talking about the vague idea that there is an intelligence behind the workings of nature, or he is talking about the recent assertions of major ID proponents about irreducible complexity and complex specified information. If the former, then the idea is ancient and has had plenty of time to prove its worth. If the latter, then Krauze is basing his essay on arguments that are blatantly incorrect.

Krauze concludes with:

Incidentally, Rosenhouse seems surprised that I didn’t dispute his claims about irreducible complexity and specified complexity. But there’s no need for surprise, as I usually attempt to focus on the issue at hand, ignoring distracting side-issues. And in a historical discussion about nineneteen-century ideas, the values of irreducible and specified complexity are side-issues. Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that Rosenhouse is correct that these concepts are “utterly and irretrievably wrong-headed.” What conclusion should we draw from this? Which promising concepts did evolution have when Robert Chambers published Vestiges of Creation?

I made it very clear in my last entry that it is silly to locate the origin of evolutionary theory in Chambers' book. Unable to respond to this obvious point, Krauze prefers to ignore it and simply repeat what he has said previously.

As it happens though, Chambers' book, for all its flaws, did have at least one big thing going for it: It popularized the idea of evolution through natural law. Chambers did present some good evidence for this (he also presented a lot of dreck), and it was certainly an idea amenable to scientific study. So even Chamber's work had produced one good idea, which is one more than ID has produced.

And, as we saw at the beginning of this essay, this is not primarily a discussion of nineteenth century ideas. It is a discussion of whether the history of evolutionary theory provides any lessons for how modern ID critics should respond to modern ID proponents. In that light, as I have explained repeatedly, it is relevant to look at points of disanaolgy between the early days of evolution and the current state of ID. One major point of disanalogy is that evolution post-Darwin had a solid empricial foundation, while ID has only a lot of bad arguments. Krauze is welcome to dispute that claim if he wishes to, but it is certainly relevant.

Suppose I claim to have a great new scientific idea. The idea is that the moon is made of green cheese. I suspect Krauze would lead the charge to point out that my claim stands in stark defiance of every piece of evidence we have about the composition of the moon. I retort with, “Sure, my theory may not be fully researchable right now. But just look at the early days of physics when Newton was occasionally invoking the action of Gods to explain mysterious points in his theories. That turned out well. So don't be too critical of the green cheese theory. Big ideas take time, you know!” Would anyone consider that a serious reply?

Let me also repeat that people on my side of this demand that ID folks produce some actual research only because many of those folks already claim to have actual scientific results to report. Behe and Dembski do not claim that they need more time to develop their ideas. They say that the discovery of design should be considered on a par with the ideas of Galileo and Newton (in Behe's case) and constitute a scientific revolution (in Dembski's case). It is not my side of this that is making unreasonable demands. It is the ID side that is making claims it can not defend.

I will conclude with some direct questions for Mr. Krauze. Do you believe that irreducible complexity, as defined by Michael Behe, poses any challenge to gradualistic evolution? Do you believe that William Dembski's use of the No Free Lunch theorems, or the probability calculation he did in section 5.10 of his book No Free Lunch, or his claims about complex specified information, are valuable ideas that scientists should take seriously? Does ID have any other ideas of scientific consequence that people on my side should be taking seriously?

Genetics and Genesis

2006-01-27T17:23:00.000-06:00

Let us close the week's blogging with a brief consideration of this amusing take on Science magazine's decision to spotlight progress in evolutionary biology as their scientific breakthrough of the year. It was written by Regis Nicoll and posted at Breakoint's website.

Actually, it was really only the closing paragraphs that caught my eye:

To the contrary, one could lift the basis for Mendel’s laws right off the opening chapter of Genesis, where flora and fauna are created “according to their kinds” and are bid to “be fruitful and multiply.” There we find the source of life’s origin, variety and fecundity. God creates life and endows it with the ability to adapt and proliferate in a decaying world.

But the Genesis account also informs us of an inherent limit to that adaptability. While the avian gene pool can produce everything from the Galapagos finch to the Andean condor, it will produce nothing other than a bird, “according to its kind.” And since the beginning, no evidence, fossil or otherwise, has demonstrated the contrary—“Breakthrough of the Year” notwithstanding.

If the basis for Mendel's laws is there right in the opening chapter of Genesis, one wonders why it took so long for people to formulate those laws.

Of course, the real bases for Mendel's laws are the ideas of particulate inheritance and the basic principles of probability theory. I'm afraid I must have overlooked the part of Genesis that discusses these ideas.

And I love Mr. Nicoll's take on what constitutes evidence.

A vague reference in Genesis to creatures being created according to their kind is taken as evidence for basic principles of genetics. Nicoll sees here an important statement about how on the one hand God equipped animals with the ability to adapt to their surroundings (thereby anticipating principles of microevolution that scientists would not establish for several centuries), while on the other hand He described a clear limitation on that ability. Not too shabby for half a Bible verse.

But confront him with the entirety of the fossil record, the anatomical homologies throughout the animal kingdom, the molecular and genetical similarities, the embryological evidence for common descent, the evidence from biogeography, the clear evolutionary orgins of numerous complex systems, various strategically placed retroviral scars, the entirety of mathematical population genetics and the numerous field studies of natural selection, the successful game-theoretical models of ethologists, the countless successful predictions made by biologists taking evolution as their starting point; in short, the mountains of data that pour in on a daily basis from every branch of the life sciences, and all Nicoll sees is a lot of groundless speculation and empty theorizing.

Where can I get a pair of glasses like that?

Design's Last Stand

2006-01-26T14:41:00.000-06:00

I finally finished Leonard Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. Susskind's main argument is that the universe as we know it is just one small piece of a vastly larger landscape inhabited by something like 10^500 different pocket universes. The laws of physics can vary from universe to universe. If this is correct, it provides a satisfying explanation for the apparent examples of fine-tuning we find in the fundamental constants of our own universe. Why does our universe appear to be so well-suited for life? Because if it weren't we wouldn't be here to ask the question. And if you get 10^500 tries to get it right, there is bound to be some corner of the landscape where the constants will work out the right way.

I won't attempt a full review of the book. Overall I liked it quite a bit, but there are also a lot of small problems along the way. My main criticism is that as an explainer of difficult ideas from physics, Susskind can't hold a candle to Brian Greene.

But his main argument strikes me as very satisfying on two fronts. First, the main rival to Susskind's idea is that the fine-tuning of the universe represents the action of an intelligent designer. This idea is based on nothing more than people's desire that it be true. Susskind's idea, by contrast, arises naturally from modern String Theory. Susskind writes (in a discussion of the idea of Eternal Inflation):

The bubbling up of an infinity of pocket univerdses is as certain as the bubbling of an opened bottle of champagne. There are only two assumptions: the existence of a Landscape and the fact that the universe started with a very high density of energy, i.e., that it started at high altitude. The first may prove to be no assumption at all. The mathematics of String Theory seems to make the Landscape unavoidable. And the second - high energy density - is a feature of every scientific cosmology that begins with the Big Bang. (p. 304)

I also liked this:

In any case the difficulties in testing the Landscape, Eternal Inflation, and the Anthropic Principle are real, but there are many ways to test a theory. Mathematical consistency may not impress the most hard-nosed experimental physicist, but it should not be underestimated. Consistent theories that combine quantum mechanics and general relativity are far from common. Indeed, this is the reason that String Theory has so little competition. If no alternatives show up and if String Theory proves to have as varied a Landscape as it seems, then the populated Landscape will be the default position - the theory to beat, so to speak. (p. 375)

So the choice between ID and the Landscape is the choice between an explanation made up out of whole cloth for its emotional value on the one hand and an explanation that makes sense out of such data as we have on the other. String theory can hardly claim to have proven itself correct, but it has a lot going for it.

The second reason I find the Landscape appealing is that it fits so well with everything else we have learned from science over the years. Everything science has been telling us has been in the direction of downplaying the metaphysical significance of our existence. Comparative anatomy reveals to us that there is nothing in our physical make-up to distinguish us from the animals. Neuroscience can find nothing to support the idea that the mind exists separately from the brain. Evolution shows that we are just one more species among many, formed by the same processes that formed every other species. And we did not arise in a puff of smoke in one moment of creation, but rather as one end result of a billion year process; a process, no less, that gives no indication of having had us in mind. Astronomy shows that the Earth is not the center of it all. Rather we are just an unremarkable planet orbiting a nondescript star; one of countless solar systems in countless galaxies that litter the universe.

And now here comes the Landscape to show us that even our universe is not distinguished in any important way. That is why I have titled this blog entry the way that I have. The relentless march of science over the last few centuries has been paralleled by one ignominious retreat after another for the design argument. Today design advocates can only play one, last, desperate card - the fine-tuning of the constants. Upon this one puzzling phenomenon they base their conclusion that despite all the evidence to the contrary, humans are still the point of it all. Can any thoughful person seriously believe such a thing?

And is there any argument at all - I'll take one! - for rejecting the Landscape, or more generally, the megaverse? Can the other side offer any actual reason for thinking that we are not part of a vast Landscape? It certainly can't be that we have no direct evidence of the existence of other universes. After all, we have no direct evidence for the existence of God either, but ID folks are quick to assure us that it is the height of rationality to believe it nonetheless.

Susskind himself points out some unsolved problems with the Landscape, and he also points to ways we might possibly, someday, be able to experimentally test various aspects of his theories. So it is possible that String Theory and its logical correlates will eventually fail the only test that matters - fit with experimental data. But until that day comes the Landscape has to be regarded as vastly more probable than ID. Even if some people find that idea unpleasant.

Good Stuff from CSICOP and Free Inquiry

2006-01-25T12:47:00.000-06:00

Be sure to have a look at Chris Mooney's excellent summary of the significance of the Dover decision:

Over the course of a lengthy trial, Jones looked closely at the scientific merits of “intelligent design”--the contention that Darwinian evolution cannot explain the biological complexity of living organisms, and that instead some form of intelligence must have created them. And in the end, the judge found ID utterly vacuous. “[ID] cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory,” Jones wrote, “as it has failed to publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain acceptance in the scientific community.”

ID critics have been making these same observations for years; so have leading American scientific societies. Meanwhile, investigative reporters and scholars studying the ID movement have demonstrated that it is, indeed, simply creationism reincarnated--all religion and no science. On the intellectual merits, ID was dead a long time ago. But before Judge Jones came along, it's astonishing how hard it was to get that acknowledged, unequivocally, in public discussion of the issue.

Meanwhile, the current issue of Free Inquiry has an excellent essay from Christopher Hitchens, not available online. Here's an excerpt:

It must be obvious even to the laziest observer that we now have at least a semi-official “religious test” for appointment to the Supreme Court. The test is not the one that the framers of the Constitution feared: the question of “What religion are you?” It is, rather, a test to make sure that the candidate does have a religion. In all the arguments about John Roberts, Harriet Myers, and Samuel Alito, one lement was consistent. Their religious affiliation was bannered as if it were a guarantee, in itself, of integrity. (In the case of Ms. Miers, it was the only thing that was bannered, apart from her devotion to the person of the president.)

However, along with this affirmation came a prohibition. It was, said the Right, quite outrageous to ask any furhter questions about the way in which a confessed allegiance might influence the application of the law. Any such line of inquiry would be construed as anti-Catholic (in the case of Roberts and Alito) or anti-evangelical (in the case of Miers). Rather than be accused of offending any faith-based “community,” the Democrats duly abstained from asking about abortion, creationism, and other salient issues that are well-understood to be of doctrinal as well as legal salience. Quite a neat trick, when you think of it. And now ask yourself what would happen to a nominee for the highest court who, superbly trained, educated, and qualified, announced that he or she had no belief in any deity and thought that an ethical life could be lived without religion. It must say quite a lot that we already know the answer to that question. (Emphasis in original)

MikeGene on Me on Krauze

2006-01-25T12:26:00.000-06:00

MikeGene offers up these thoughts on my recent exchanges with Krauze.

I will only reply briefly to two of MikeGene's points. He writes:

Rosenhouse talks about lots of evolutionary theories prior to Darwin, undercutting his previous claim that it was Darwin who got people to embrace common descent. But these other evolutionary theories were speculations. And yes, some of us have used ID to speculate about biotic reality.

I talked about no such thing. Actually I talked about lots of proposed evolutionary mechanisms in the time between Darwin and the modern synthesis. This was in response to Krauze's assertion that there were no such theories. My point was that while you had to wait 60+ years between Darwin's publication of The Origin and a well-substantiated explanation for how evolution occurs, that long period of time was marked by continual research and prgress. ID can claim nothing similar.

MikeGene writes:

He first misrepresents Krauze, telling us that Krauze believes ID is an infant science “that simply requires time to blossom fully.” I didn’t see this claim in Krauze’s blog. Then, Rosenhouse wants Krauze, an obscure internet persona, to tell other people how to title their books, what to say, and what to do. But this is ridiculous. Krauze, like me, has already told ID proponents to stop trying to teach ID in schools. And while I have not seem him instruct people about the other things, I have never seen him equate ID with revolution nor equate an ID proponent with Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Neither does he argue that evolution is a dying theory. On the contrary, both Krauze and I like to explore the reality of evoluion from an ID perspective.

Let me see if I understand the situation. Krauze writes an essay for a pro-ID blog in which he argues that big ideas take time. This is offered specifically as a cautionary note to those who challenge ID on the grounds that it has produced no useful research. He then draws an analogy with the early days of evolution, and attempts to liken the current state of ID with those early days.

But I wasn't meant to conclude from this that Krauze believes that ID is a big idea that just needs time to develop?

As for the rest of it, I have explained twice already that the leading ID proponents are not arguing that they need time to develop their ideas. They are claiming to already have the goods. If Krauze is concerned that people on my side are not giving ID folks enough time to make their case, then he should also criticize Behe, Dembski and the rest for cliaming that they have already made their case.

And I am not asking Krauze to tell anyone what to do. I am asking him to criticize leading ID proponents for the things they have already done. He chides people on my side for demanding results from the ID folks. He conveniently ignores the fact that my side makes such demands solely in response to the bloated, falacious claims of ID's leading advocates.

I note that neither Krauze nor MikeGene has disputed my contention that irreducible complexity and complex specified information are worthless ideas. And both seemed bothered that I would attribute to one of them the view that the triumph of ID is a matter of time. I'm glad to hear it.

Chapman in Harpers

2006-01-24T14:39:00.000-06:00

The February issue of Harpers contains a lengthy report on the big Dover trial, by Matthew Chapman. In addition to being a first-rate writer, Chapman is also a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin.

Sadly, the article does not seem to be available online. I recommend running down to the local newsstand to pick up a copy. But there are a few places where Chapman so completely nails it that I felt compelled to transcribe a few portions. Early on we find:

Having said that, I suppose I should declare my bias at the start. My great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin. This was not something I thought much about growing up in England. Evolution was fully accepted. Darwin was a historical figure. If I did think about my connection to him, it was only negatively. The pressure to succeed academically and the unlikelihood of doing so in comparison to my ancestor was such that I decided to turn my back on academia and pursue a course of willful ignorance. When I finally moved to Hollywood in the early Eighties, I had gone about as far as I could in that direction.

I then discovered that many Americans not only rejected the theory of evolution; they reviled it. I had come here in part because I never felt comfortable in England. I hated the snobbery and thought of America as being less weighed down by its past, more advanced. Sir Francis Drake might have been the first man to sail around the world, but it was an American who first set foot on the moon. Now here I was in the New World faced with a willful ignorance that went far beyond anything I had ever attempted.

True, I did not know much about evolution, but a quick study of the subject showed that 99 percent of scientists believed in it. Why would one doubt them? Did the pedestrian question the theory of gravity? Did the farmer who went to the doctor question his diagnosis? Why in this one area of science did nonexperts feel compelled to disagree with those who clearly knew better?

Willful ignorance. Exactly right. I've been to enough creationist conferences to know that a great many of the people in the audience eagerly want to be deceived.

Chapman's description of Behe is likewise perfect:

On the stand, Behe sat forward in his chair, earnest and concentrated. Only once did I see him lose his composure. This was when Rothschild revealed that Behe's own department at Lehigh had issued a statement saying it fully supported evolutionary theory and that:

The sole dissenter from this position, Professor Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of intelligent design. While we respect Professor Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

Behe put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, smiling defiantly. He looked like a naughty child who had told his mother he'd seen a ghost and wouldn't budge from the story no matter what. I couldn't help wondering what Behe would be without intelligent design. The scientific community may despise him, but he is beloved on the other side. He gets invited to talk all over the country, and he has sold a lot of books.

The answer is that Behe would be just another competent scientist toiling away at esoteric problems only a handful of people in the world would care about. I used to feel some sympathy for ID advocates who had made sacrifices in their careers to defend their beliefs. Then at some point it dawned on me that they were laughing all the way to the bank. There is a good living to be made in the propagation of popular crankery.

One more excerpt:

Heather Geesey, a school board member who supported Bonsell and Buckingham, fell squarely into the repellant category, however, without mitigation. I found her the most terrifying of all the witnesses. A woman who seemed to think - against all evidence - that everything she did or said was astonishingly cute and funny, she clearly relished being on the same team as “President Alan,” as she referred to Bonsell, and grinned relentlessly throughout....

[ACLU attorney Vic Walczak] asked Geesey if she supported the teaching of intelligent design. “Yes.” “Because it gave a balanced view of evolution?” “Yes.” “It presented an alternative theory?” “Yes.” “And the policy talks about gaps and problems in evolution?” “Yes.” “Yes. You don't know what those gaps and problems refer to, do you?” “No.” “But it's good to teach about those gaps and problems.” “That's our mission statement, yes.” “But you have no idea what they are?” “It's not my job, no.” “Is it fair to say you didn't know much about intelligent design in October of 2004?” “Yes.” “And you didn't know much about the book Of Pandas and People either, did you. “Correct.” “So you had never participated in any discussions of the book?” “No.” “And you made no effort independently to find out about the book?” “No.”...“And no one ever explained to you what intelligent design was about?” “No.” This went on for quite a while, Geesey grinning throughout as if her ignorance was just the cutest thing, until, finally, still smiling happily, she stated that she had relied on the curriculum committee - Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell - to make the decision. “And do you know whether Buckingham has a background in science?” “No, I do not.” “Do you know that in fact he doesn't have a background in science?” “I don't know. He's law enforcement, so I would assume he had to take something along the way.”

So this was the genesis of the whole thing: an auto repairman appointed an OxyContin-addicted biblical literalist without a shred of knowledge to decide which books the kids should learn from, and a woman who had no curiosity about anything, even her own most deeply held beliefs, seconded the whole idea.

And unless one doubted two seemingly decent professional reporters and a host of other witnesses, she would happily lie.

Ouch. That's rather harsh, but the unbelievable arrogance of these people simply has to be exposed.

Anyway, Chapman's article is quite long and nearly perfect. Go read the whole thing!

Round Two with Krauze

2006-01-23T15:49:00.000-06:00

Last Thursday, Krauze, of the pro-ID blog Telic Thoughts, posted this essay in which he argued that big scientific ideas require time to come to fruition. He illustrated this idea with the early days of evolutionary theory, pointing out that it was more than sixty years after Darwin published the Origin that the neo-Darwinian synthesis was developed. This was intended as a rebuttal to those who criticize ID for not producing any peer-reviewed research. ID has only been around for a decade, you see.

I replied here. I made four main points in reply.

The first was that, unlike ID, evolution had a solid foundation in empirical fact. A biologist of the late nineteenth century could be confident that the search for a mechanism of evolution was leading somewhere, because the fact of common descent had been adequately established by Darwin. ID, by contrast, has only proposed arguments that are completely false. Consequently, there is no reason to believe an ID research program wull ever get anywhere.

My second point was to correct Karuze's history. In his initial post he said that no theory of evolution had been proposed prior to the syntheiss of the thirties and forties. I pointed out that that was not correct.

My third point was that ID has not evolved at all in the decade or so that it has been around. This was in response to Krauze's contention that ID was developing in a manner similar to how evolution developed in its early days.

Finally, my fourth point was that people on my side would be perfectly happy to give ID proponents all the time they want. The trouble is, the leading ID proponents do not act like people who simply want time to develop their ideas. Instead, they run around claiming that they already have the goods, that they have made discoveries that should place them right along Galileo and Newton, and that they have revolutionized science.

Krauze replied here. Since he seems to have missed every important point, I thought I'd take another stab at it.

Krauze begins by stating that the title of my blog entry, “Is ID Just a Matter of Time?” overstated his point. He was not suggesting that ID was just a matter of time, rather his point was simply that new sciences take time to develop. He writes:

I think there are some subtle clues that point to intelligent design, but when dealing with natural history, there’s always a possibility that a closer look reveals another picture. If it turns out that there’s nothing to intelligent design, all the time in the world won’t make a difference. The point in my post was much more subtle: Sciences don’t spring up fully formed, as Athena from Zeus’ forehead. Critics should keep this in mind when demanding to see intelligent design turned into a research program.

Of course, there's no controversy that new branches of science take time to come to fruition. But the demand that ID advocates produce some significant reasearch in defense of their claims is merely a response to the conduct of its leading proponents. People like William Dembski and Michael Behe claim to already have the goods. I think it's perfectly reasonable for people on my side to point out that, actually, they don't.

We will consider this further below. But let's turn now to Krauze's bullet point replies (to my bullet-point criticisms):

Rosenhouse claims that intelligent design rests entirely on the pillars of irreducible complexity and complex specified information: “Nothing the ID folks build upon such a foundation will ever produce anything but poisonous fruit.” I don’t presume to have Rosenhouse’s gift to see into the future, so let’s instead look at the past. As I said in the comments, we have yet to see a work comparable to Darwin’s Origin of the Species on intelligent design. How was the state of evolution prior to the publication of Darwin’s great work? As Mike explained, the road was paved by Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Michael Ruse describes it as “the Big Mac of popular science”, in that it was “very tasty, very filling, very accessible, and (in the opinion of the authorities) of very dubious value to one’s health. Vestiges was the archetype of pseudoscience.” (P. 48) The archetype of pseudoscience. Yet on this foundation a prosperous research program was eventually built.

I note that Krauze does not dispute my contention that arguments based on irreducible complexity or complex specified information are hopelessly flawed. Instead he points to Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and identifies it as the rotten foundation that nonetheless led to fruitful research in evolution.

Sadly, that's ridiculous. Chambers' work has some historical significance today, but it was rightly dismissed by the scientists of the time, including Darwin. It did not form the foundation of any important scientific research. Modern evolutionary theory begins with Darwin, and his work was a solid foundation indeed for a new science.

Krauze claims that ID has not yet produced its own Origin. I certainly agree, but I'm surprised that an ID supporter would make that claim. I was under the impression that Dembski's The Design Inference and No Free Lunch, and Behe's Darwin's Black Box were supposed to be precisely those seminal works. In fact, in this paragraph Krauze seems to be saying that the combined works of ID proponents to date is at the level of Chambers' work. And since he is happy to describe Chambers' work as the archetype of pseudoscience...

In reply to my point that there were a great many proposed theories for evolution's mechanism prior to the synthesis, Karuaze writes:

Rosenhouse claims that it’s “manifestly untrue … that there were no proposed theories of evolution prior to the synthesis”, citing Lamarckism and mutationism (the proposition that evolution was driven solely by mutations, with no input from natural selection). Here’s the definition of a “theory” from the National Academy of Science, embraced by ID critics at Dover:

Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

Although I agree that there were some observations that were seen as providing support for Lamarckism and mutationism, I disagree that either of those were “well-substantiated”. In fact, they would seem to fit better under NAS’ definition of a hypothesis (“A tentative statement about the natural world leading to deductions that can be tested”).

In my original blog entry I made a clear distinction between a well-developed theory and a proposed theory. Krauze here argues that instead of “proposed theory” I should have said “hypothesis.” Fine. The fact remains that there were many possible meachanisms of evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and all could claim a considerable amount of support. And these hypotheses led to clear avenues of research. ID, alas, does not even have a hypothesis. It has nothing at all beyond falacious logic and distortions of modern science. This is what Krauze will have to come to terms with if he wants to draw any comparisons between modern ID and the early days of evolution.

Krauze next writes:

According to Rosenhouse, “The idea that ID has evolved over the years is nonsense. ID is today what it has always been: A political and legal strategy for uniting various schools of creationism under one banner acceptable to all.” We’ll ignore the Wedge-centrism, and get straight to the point. Ruse explains how evolution became a professional science by shedding its metaphysical baggage of progressionism, and the teleological approach has also evolved, shedding its commitment to religious apologetic. Young-earth creationism was wedded to a particular interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis, whereas even agnostics like me can contemplate intelligent design. Furthermore, ID has made the integration of evolution and design possible, something that could never have happened with young-earth creationism.

It is completely false that Young-Earth creationism is wedded to a particular interpretation of Genesis. Not if you take the Young-Earth proponents at their word anyway. They claim that all of their major conclusions (young Earth, sudden and simultaneous creation of all kinds, global flood) are justified by the best available scientific data. They are also happy to announce their faith in the Bible, and to trumpet the consonance of the scientific data with the story in Genesis. But the fact remains that scientific creationism was supposed to be a purely scientific enterprise.

More to the point, it's pure fantasy to say that ID has made the integration of evolution and design possible. To the extent that evolution and design can be integrated, it was theistic evolution that did the integrating, and that integration happened long ago. A theory in which God is constantly intervening to direct the development of life over time is not evolution. It is creationism. The theory in which God set up the initial conidtions of the universe and then allowed them to play out over the course of natural history is theistic evolution. Krauze will have to explain how, exactly, ID has made possible the integration of anything.

As for Ruse, I'd be surprised if he can really back up his claim that it was the shedding of progressionism that led to progress in evolution in the early twentieth century. There are certainly simpler explanations for evolution's sudden leap forward: progress in genetics, the quantitative approach pioneered by Fisher, the fact that all branches of science were becoming larger and more professional in the twentieth century...

Finally, Krauze writes:

Now, it just so happened that I have voiced my disapproval of teaching intelligent design in schools. But it really doesn’t matter, as I fail to see how me performing the tasks on Rosenhouse’s laundry list influences the matter at hand: In my post, I pointed out an aspect of reality. Whether Rosenhouse chooses to acknowledge this aspect or not is entirely up to himself.

Oh, please. Krauze's essay was intended as a cautionary tale about why it is unreasonable for critics of ID to demand too much from ID proponents at this early stage of its development. In that context it was perfectly reasonable for me to point out that the demands coming from people on my side are offered entirely as counters to rival claims made by ID proponents. It is the Behes and Dembskis of the world who claim they have the goods. My side is merely asking them to back that up with something other than their standard gobbledygook.

Krauze's initial post made a trivial point about reality (that big ideas take time), implied a fantasy (that ID has promise as a research program) and backed up the implication with a lot of spurious history (that there is any important parallel between the early days of evolution and modern ID). His reply disputes neither my claim that modern ID arguments are nonsense nor my claim that ID is nothing but a political movement (ignoring an argument is not the same as disputing it). He clearly implied that modern ID is at the level of Chambers' Vestiges, which he describes as a work of pseudoscience. I suspect Behe and Dembski are having a Get Off My Side moment right now.

Is ID Just a Matter of Time?

2006-01-20T14:32:00.000-06:00

Over at the pro-ID blog Telic Thoughts, Krauze has this amusing post suggesting that ID today is in the same place evolution was about a century ago. Evolution had some interesting ideas, but was hardly a well-developed science. The inspiration for the post was an excerpt from Michael Ruse's recent book The Evolution/Creation Struggle, in which Ruse recounted the fits and starts of evolution's early days. Krauze writes:

It wasn’t until the 1930’s, more than 60 years after Darwin had published Origin of the Species, that an actual theory of evolution was proposed, dubbed “the synthetic theory”. The mathematicians Ronald A. Fisher and Sewall Wright did the work necessary to make the effects of natural selection quantifiable, the journal Evolution was founded, and empiricists like Bernard Kettlewell and Ernst Mayr could carry out their field work, studying evolution in the wild.

In Ruse’s terminology, evolution only gradually arose from pseudoscience, through popular science, before finally becoming a professional science in the 1930’s. You could say that evolution evolved. Similarly, intelligent design has passed from being expressed in creationist pamphlets as a flimsy support for apologetics, to being expressed in popular science books. ID critcs often inquire as to why intelligent design still isn’t doing any research, “10 years after Behe published Darwin’s Black Box”. However, they should remember the lesson taught to us by Darwin’s followers: Big ideas take time.

Alas, there are several problems with this analysis.

First, while it is true that a well-developed theory for how evolution occurs had to wait for the synthesis of the thirties and forties, the fact remains that Darwin convinced just about everyone that common descent was a reality. The evidence for that proposition only got stronger with discoveries made in the years following publication of The Origin. The overwhelming evidence for common descent gave scientists good reason to believe that their search for a mechanism of evolution would not be in vain. ID can claim nothing similar. Their entire theory, such as it is, rests entirely upon two pillars: irreducible complexity and complex specified information. Both of these ideas are utterly and irretrievably wrong-headed. Nothing the ID folks build upon such a foundation will ever produce anything but poisonous fruit.
It is manifestly untrue, however, that there were no proposed theories of evolution prior to the synthesis. Quite the contrary. There were rather a lot of viable theories, such as Lamarckism and mutationism. These theories were viable in those days because so little was known about the nature of inheritance. Significant progress in evolution could not occur until genetics was placed on a more solid foundation.
The idea that ID has evolved over the years is nonsense. ID is today what it has always been: A political and legal strategy for uniting various schools of creationism under one banner acceptable to all. Young-Earth creationism was solidly defeated as a legal strategy in the eighties, and ID sprang up, in an act of spontaneous generation, in its wake. ID is making almost precisely the same arguments today as it was making a decade ago. And the few novel items (like Dembski's abuse of the No Free Lunch Theorems), hardly constitute progress).
But for all of that, I'd be willing to give ID all the time it wants, if only its propoents were willing to meet me half way. Krauze believes that ID is an infant science that simply requires time to blossom fully? Fine. Let him tell the main proponents of ID to stop writing books with titles like “The Design Revolution.” Tell them they should stop comparing their accomplishments to the work of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Tell them to stop preaching that evolution is a dying theory, soon to be replaced by their own brand of theistic science. And most of all, tell them to stop pressuring school boards to include their drivel in high school science classrooms.

ID is reviled among knowledgable people because the embarrassing emptiness of its arguments is matched only by the boundless arrogance of its leading proponents. If more time were all they wanted, everyone would be happy to give it to them. But no one who has been following the last ten years of ID activity could possibly believe that scientific progress rates highly on its list of priorities.

Dennett in The Chronicle Review

2006-01-20T13:43:00.000-06:00

Daniel Dennett's essay “Common-Sense Religion” has just appeared in the current issue of The Chronicle Review (a supplement to The Chronicle of Higher Education). It is adapted from his forthcoming book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Here are some excerpts:

So what is the prevailing attitude today among those who call themselves religious but vigorously advocate tolerance? There are three main options:

The disingenuous Machiavellian: As a matter of political strategy, the time is not ripe for candid declarations of religious superiority, so we should temporize and let sleeping dogs lie in hopes that those of other faiths can gently be brought around over the centuries.
The truly tolerant: It really doesn't matter which religion you swear allegiance to, as long as you have some religion.
The benign neglecters: Religion is just too dear to too many to think of discarding it, even though it really doesn't do any good and is simply an empty historical legacy we can afford to maintain until it quietly extinguishes itself sometime in the unforeseeable future.

It is no use asking people which they choose, since the extremes are so undiplomatic we can predict in advance that most people will go for some version of ecumenical tolerance, whether they believe it or not.

So we've got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like the families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many adherents afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.

If that is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain. Is that the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence?

And later:

The argument is straightforward. Suppose I have a friend, Fred, who is (in my carefully considered opinion) always right. If I tell you I'm against stem-cell research because "my friend Fred says it's wrong, and that's all there is to it," you will just look at me as if I were missing the point of the discussion. I have not given you a reason that, in good faith, I could expect you to appreciate. Suppose you believe that stem-cell research is wrong because God has told you so. Even if you are right — that is, even if God does exist and has, personally, told you that stem-cell research is wrong — you cannot reasonably expect others who do not share your faith or experience to accept that as a reason. The fact that your faith is so strong that you cannot do otherwise just shows (if you really can't) that you are disabled for moral persuasion, a sort of robotic slave to a meme that you are unable to evaluate. And if you reply that you can, but you won't consider reasons for and against your conviction (because it is God's word, and it would be sacrilegious even to consider whether it might be in error), you avow your willful refusal to abide by the minimal conditions of rational discussion. Either way, your declarations of your deeply held views are posturings that are out of place, part of the problem, not part of the solution, and we others will just have to work around you as best we can.

And later still:

It is time for the reasonable adherents of all faiths to find the courage and stamina to reverse the tradition that honors helpless love of God — in any tradition. Far from being honorable, it is not even excusable. It is shameful. Here is what we should say to people who follow such a tradition: There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict. Consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God pleased by displays of unreasoning love is worthy of worship.

Well said. I can't wait to read the book.

The Vatican on Evolution (Again)

2006-01-19T14:14:00.000-06:00

Have a look at this interesting article from today's New York Times:

The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as “correct” the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

“If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another,” Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano.

“But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science,” he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. “It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.”

The article was not presented as an official church position. But in the subtle and purposely ambiguous world of the Vatican, the comments seemed notable, given their strength on a delicate question much debated under the new pope, Benedict XVI.

This is certainly welcome news, but it still leaves something to be desired. I will cut Facchini some slack for saying, “The model proposed by Darwin...” I'm sure he's perfectly aware that modern evolutionary theory is substantially different from anything Darwin proposed. But I'd still like to know if the Church believes there is, indeed, some fundamental deficiency in modern theory.

The article goes on to say

At least twice, Pope Benedict has signaled concern about the issue, prompting questions about his views. In April, when he was formally installed as pope, he said human beings "are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution." In November, he called the creation of the universe an "intelligent project," wording welcomed by supporters of intelligent design.

Many Roman Catholic scientists have criticized intelligent design, among them the Rev. George Coyne, a Jesuit who is director of the Vatican Observatory. “Intelligent design isn't science, even though it pretends to be,” he said in November, as quoted by the Italian news service ANSA. “Intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.”

In October, Cardinal Schönborn sought to clarify his own remarks, saying he meant to question not the science of evolution but what he called evolutionism, an attempt to use the theory to refute the hand of God in creation.

“I see no difficulty in joining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, but under the prerequisite that the borders of scientific theory are maintained,” he said in a speech.

The impression that I have from all the recent conflicting statements from prominent Catholics is this: They begrudgingly concede that the evidence for evolution is very strong and that all proposed scientific alternatives to it are bogus. But, like a lot of relgiously inclined people, they just don't like it very much. That's why they're constantly making rather limp statements about how science can't comment on spiritual issues or can't disporve the existence of God.

Perhaps it can't. But that hardly implies the Catholic church has anything worthwhile to say on those subjects.

Saletan on Scalia

2006-01-19T13:52:00.000-06:00

William Saletan has this interesting analysis of Justice Scalia's blatant hypocrisy on the subjects of abortion and assisted suicide. Here's an excerpt:

Principle 1 is to beware value judgments disguised as fact or reason. In Casey, Scalia derided his colleagues for reaffirming Roe v. Wade. He accused them of invoking “what the Court calls 'reasoned judgment' ... which turns out to be nothing but philosophical predilection and moral intuition.” In Stenberg, he faulted the other justices for applying a standard that “can not be demonstrated true or false by factual inquiry or legal reasoning. It is a value judgment.”

That was Scalia's principle on abortion. On assisted suicide, however, the principle gets in his way. The latest case, Gonzales v. Oregon, involves a law, directly approved twice by Oregon voters, that lets doctors prescribe drugs so terminally ill people can kill themselves. Years ago, then-Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri asked then-Attorney General Janet Reno to block the law. She refused, citing states' rights. Ashcroft asked his Senate colleagues to pass legislation to block the law, but they refused, too. So, when President Bush took office, Ashcroft got Reno's job, ordered up an in-house legal memo that said assisted suicide wasn't a “legitimate medical purpose,” and declared that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 gave him authority to strip the license of any doctor who prescribed lethal drugs under the Oregon law.

Six of Scalia's colleagues conclude that what counts as a “legitimate medical purpose” is a value judgment and that on such questions, a 30-year-old law aimed at hippie stoners doesn't authorize the U.S. attorney general of 2001 to superimpose his moral intuition on the assisted-suicide-policy decision of Oregon voters. Scalia, however, says Ashcroft's definition of “legitimate medical purpose” isn't a value judgment; it's pure reason. He repeatedly calls it the “most natural” and “most reasonable” interpretation of that phrase.

Scalia chides the court's majority for confusing “the normative inquiry of what the boundaries of medicine should be—which it is laudably hesitant to undertake—with the objective inquiry of what the accepted definition of 'medicine' is.” Those silly justices—they applied Scalia's principle when it didn't lead to the result he wanted! To justify Ashcroft's interpretation, you have to spin it as objective, not subjective. Accordingly, Scalia opines, “The use of the word 'legitimate' connotes an objective standard of 'medicine,' and our presumption that the CSA creates a uniform federal law regulating the dispensation of controlled substances ... means that this objective standard must be a federal one.”

Saletan goes on to describe two other examples of Scalia's hypocrisy.

In a lot of circles Sclaia gets presented as the model of a principled justice. He preaches “originalism.” He's not one of those activist judges who just find in the constitution whatever it is they want to do anyway. Some of his more sycophantic admirers are fond of telling stories about how he tracks down dictionaries from two hundred years ago to determine what particular words meant at the time they were written.

In reality he is as much an activist as the people he criticizes. He espouses originalism, one suspects, because most of the time that is the language that provides the best cover for what he thinks the Constitution ought to say. But when abstract legal principles get in the way of his preferred view of the world, as in the Oregon assisted suicide case or in “Bush v. Gore”, the principles go out the window in a hurry.

The Republican War on Mooney

2006-01-18T17:24:00.000-06:00

In September of last year, Chris Mooney published his excellent book The Republican War on Science. Mooney documented in copious detail what any sentient person has suspected for some time: that hostility towards science is an integral part of the modern Republican party.

Unsurprisingly, this thesis hasn't played well among Republicans and conservatives, and they have written some nasty reviews of Mooney's book. Two in particular have recently caught my eye.

Mooney can take care of himself, so I will leave it up to him to decide whether a full-blooded reply to these silly reviews is warranted. Here I will only address one point made by both reviewers.

Mooney devotes a chapter to the subject of ID. Writing in Commentary, Kevin Shapiro takes exception to this:

Even the few credible examples of alleged right-wing scientific distortion in the book hardly rise to the level of genuine political abuse. Intelligent Design is an unscientific theory, but the Republican party has hardly made a systematic effort to promote it; the effort has instead been spearheaded by private institutions with only vague ties to some conservative politicians.

Meanwhile, in an essay published in National Review last October, Adam Keiper offered this defense:

The chapter on evolution and intelligent design provides some interesting historical background, but in the end Mooney fails to put the debate in its proper perspective. Conservatives are not politically unified in, not especially motivated by, and in a great many cases simply annoyed at, the intelligent-design debate.

Interesting. Here are two high-profile, right-wing venues trying hard to distance themselves, and the Republican Party, from ID. If only there were more of this coming from conservatives these days.

Sadly, this defense is bogus. Virtually every prominent Republican has come out in support of teaching ID in schools. President Bush supports it. Senators like Bill First, John McCain, Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback and many others openly support it as well. The only Republican senator I know of who has spoken against ID is Chris Shays of Connecticut, and he is frequently derided as a RINO (Republican in name only) by his right-wing colleagues. In the House we find that Ohio representative John Boehner, currently one of the three main candidates to replace Tom DeLay (himself an outspoken, and amazingly ignorant, critic of evolution), wrote a letter to the Ohio state school board pressuring them to include ID in their science classes on the fallacious grounds that the No Child Left Behind Act requires it. He was joined in this effort by Ohio Republican Steve Chabot.

Of course, the Religious Right is four-square behind ID (actually, many of them prefer young-Earth creationism), and since they are a large part of the Rpeublican base their opinions hold great sway over the party generally. Every prominent conservative magazine has published articles either ciritical of evolution or supportive of ID (or both). I don't know of a single one that has published a major article defending evolution. No, an occasional column by George Will or Charles Krauthammer doesn't count.

The main think tank promoting ID is the Discovery Institute, which was founded by ex-Reagan administration people and has its fingers in a wide variety of conservative pies. It is staffed and funded entirely by Republicans. I know of know conservative of any prominence who has criticized them specifically for their activities.

Most damning of all, in every state where anti-evolution measures have been brought before the school board, it has been Republicans who were behind it. I don't know of a single Democrat in any state legislature (we're talking recently, of course, just in case any petulant commenter was planning to throw William Jennings Bryan at me) who has ever introduced an anti-evolution measure.

So it's nice that Keiper and Shapiro want to distance conservatives from ID. Alas, they are a small minority in the modern Republican party.