Yesterday, I provided a brief examination of Behe’s scientific output since he published Darwins Black Box in 1996, and argued that his adoption of ID effectively stopped any research output. Just as a follow-up of sorts, let’s look at Jonathan Well’s whom we are reminded by Witham is a “biologist [and] design theorist”.
Gonzalez and Richards have posted a response to some of the objections by Kyler Kuehn raised to their Privileged Planet argument.
While I intend to address in more detail Gonzalez et al’s claims in the near future (I am recovering from a nasty cold) I would like to comment on some of their claims directed at Kyler Kuehn
The authors comment how Kyler Kuehn presented his arguments during the 2003 ASA meeting but then continue:
But Kuehn has since posted essentially the same critical response online, and presented on the subject at at least one public conference. Thus, a brief response is appropriate.
Kyler Kuehn’s response has been online for quite some time. I am not sure as to which public conference the authors are refering but since I used Kyler Kuehn’s excellent arguments in my rebuttals of the Privileged Planet I feel partially responsible for these “accusations”. If Kyler Kuehn’s posting of his powerpoint is a reason for rebuttal then why did Gonzalez and Richardson wait until now? The webpage mentions that it was ‘Last Updated by Kyler Kuehn, August 11, 2003 ‘
Have you ever heard of the Manmin Research Center, and the Jaerock Lee Ministry? Neither have I, but William Dembski has—and he's been following it for years. He has recently even endorsed it.
The ministry of the Manmin Church is quite remarkable, and I have been following it now for several years. As a scientist, I tend to be skeptical about events that are supposed to be miracles. Yet as a Christian, I also know that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that there is nothing to prevent the power of God from working miraculous events. Having visited the Manmin Church and having seen the news reports of Rev. Dr. Jae-Rock Lee's ministry around the globe, I am persuaded that God truly is manifesting himself with works of power through this ministry. There is a great need for people to experience the power of God in their lives. I therefore commend "Manmin World News" for emphasizing this aspect of the Christian life that is so often neglected in the West.
--- Dr. William A. Dembski (Author of "Intelligent Design")
Continue reading "Isn't that special?" (at Pharyngula)
As part of an essay review I am completing, last night I finished reading Larry Witham’s By Design, which “recounts the history of the intelligent design movement [and] … shows how ideas and personalities mix to challenge deep scientific presumptions.” I don’t have time at the moment to go into it, but Witham’s work is deeply flawed as an historical study and clearly demonstrates his support for the design faction (not surprising giving his Unification Church background and friendship with Jonathan Wells). That aside (and it is something I will return to eventually), Witham makes much of Behe’s scientific credentials along with his “conversion” to ID being for evidential (rather than religious) grounds. In Chapter 8 he states:
Although critics call his design idea a “science stopper” (arguing that if a designer is presumed, many questions about origins are settled by fiat), Behe keeps up his research. (p. 132)
Tom Woodward also makes much of Behe’s standing as a research scientist in his Doubts About Darwin (Baker House, 2003), another flawed and partisan history of design.
Let’s examine Behe’s publication record over the past ten years, concentrating on peer-review scientific articles (i.e. ignoring letters, op-ed pieces, etc).
Continue Reading Behe as Research Scientist (at Stranger Fruit)
Anyone who has followed the evolution/creationism issue for any period of time is quite accustomed to seeing articles filled with the most basic factual errors, poor spelling and hackneyed arguments. But this article, written by someone named Brian Cherry in a webmag called the Washington Dispatch, may take the cake. It’s so badly written that for a moment, one suspects that it is a parody. Alas, it’s not. Mr. Cherry actually wrote it and, presumably, believes it. Unfortunately, he can’t even get the most basic facts right, let alone comprehend the larger issues he discusses. Let’s begin the fisking.
Who’s your daddy? It is exactly this sort of question that results in slapped faces and restraining orders if the query is made in a bar. When this question was posed to the State School Board of Ohio and framed in the context of human origins it sparked national debates and threats of lawsuits. The board was tasked with making the decision on whether or not students can be presented with an alternative to the theory of evolution. The alternative in question is the theory of intelligent design.
Mistake #1: There is no “theory of intelligent design”. At this point, ID is nothing more than a technical-sounding argument from ignorance. William Dembski, the leading ID advocate, defines an argument from ignorance as one that takes the form “Not X, therefore Y”. Yet even while denying, in rhetoric, that ID is based upon such an argument, he has created and developed a rather obvious one, the Explanatory Filter (EF). The EF is precisely this form of argument - “If not regularity and if not chance, therefore intelligent design”. This is not a theory in a scientific sense, and there is no actual explanatory model in place for ID. There is no model of how such design took place, by whom, or when. There is no actual positive research in favor of ID, there is only sniping at evolutionary theory as an explanation so that they can repeat the argument from ignorance seen above - if evolution doesn’t (yet) explain it, it must be ID. Sorry, this isn’t a theory.
Continue Reading “Answering a Horrible Pro-ID Article” (at Dispatches From The Culture Wars)
I would like to welcome two new contributors to the Panda’s Thumb crew.
Mike Dunford has been a contributor to talk.origins for so long that he almost doesn’t feel like the new kid on the block any more. Currently, Mike is an Nth year senior at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he is (finally) completing his B.S. in Zoology. Following completion of his undergraduate work, he plans to continue to study evolution in island environments (especially ones with good beaches). Current interests include speciation processes in sympatric populations, and the evolution of introduced species. In the past, he has worked as a paleontological lab technician. Other interests include the history of geology, especially in 19th century England.
Paul R. Gross is University Professor of Life Sciences, emeritus, at the University of Virginia. His baccalaureate and doctoral degrees are from the University of Pennsylvania. He holds honorary degrees from Brown University and the Medical College of Ohio. He is a developmental and molecular biologist who has taught at Brown, Rochester, MIT, and the University of Virginia. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served from 1978 to 1988 as President and Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and was Vice President and Provost of the University of Virginia, where he helped to found and served as Director of the Molecular Biology Institute. He is co-author with Norman Levitt of Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins, 1994, 98) and with Barbara Forrest of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford, 2004).
A hearty Panda’s Thumb welcome to Mike and Paul. Protostome Pilsners are on the house for the next hour. Cheers!
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Following on from PZ’s post below, if you read the original report from the conference you find the following:
Discussing the various scientific advances that have pointed more and more toward a Creator, the Cambridge-educated [Stephen] Meyer said “the future is very bright” for research into Intelligent Design.
He then revealed that donors have now contributed enough funds to create a laboratory for the study of biomolecular information at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute - a very significant development that could yield new breakthroughs.
“There is,” concluded Meyer, “a lot of good science in the pipeline.”
Just as well, because there has been bugger all in the five plus years since the Wedge was launched. Remember the key scientific research objective from the Wedge document?
One hundred scientific, academic and technical articles by our fellows
Still waiting. Search the scientific citation indices for works by Behe, Dembski, Meyer, Wells, Nelson et al. for primary research that explicitly supports ‘design’ or even tests design as a null hypothesis. Have one beer for every paper you find. Come back here. You’ll be stone-cold sober.
It’s worth pointing out that some of their other objective have been met - “Thirty published books on design and its cultural implications” and “Significant coverage in national media”. Indeed they even have had some success in making “states begin to rectify ideological imbalance in their science curricula & include design theory”. Just no science.
At a recent ID conference, Phillip Johnson was awarded the "Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth" (I know, creationists, irony, yadda yadda yadda). He spoke, and this is the subject he chose to bring up:
In accepting the award, Johnson noted the pending U.S. Supreme Court case over the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and said that the next burning issue in our culture will be the fundamental question of whether or not God exists. In fact, he said the ultimate question of whether God is real or imaginary—and whether God's moral authority has any standing in American society—"is the most important issue since slavery."
"It is the issue that divides our culture and it needs to be addressed," he said. "Every politician should address the issue of the existence of a Creator.
Ah, but of course Intelligent Design is an entirely secular, non-religious, scientific program of research.
I will address the issue, though. Every individual is free to decide whether god is real or imaginary. Personally, I've decided that he's a worthless fantasy, but I don't get to try and compel others to think likewise. Similarly, some may believe otherwise, but they don't get to tell me that I'm fired from my job or should be thrown in jail or should suffer some quaintly evil Old Testament torture for my beliefs—it's that "liberty and freedom" thing, Phil. And because we are a pluralist society that supports diverse religious beliefs, "God's" moral authority has no standing in American society. None at all. It can be a matter of private conscience, but not public policy.
Don't expect the theocrats at the Discovery Institute to grasp that concept any time soon, though. Making their interpretation of Biblical law the ruling principle of the United States legal system is their goal.
During the first world war, according to a hoary old tale, the message was sent from the trenches to the command post behind the main front of the British Army from soldier to soldier. The message was sent as Send reinforcements, we're going to advance, but was received as Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance. As things are transmitted, they change. School children are often introduced to this as the game "postman".
I have developed a revision of the MovableType plugin QuickCcode, named KwickCode, to suit the needs of our blog. The syntax should be familiar to anyone used to posting on web bbses. It comes in two flavors, one for posts and a restricted one for comments.
Please note that these are all direct quotes from creationists taken from the many public domain creation/evolution debates. I have collected these for years, and many of the debate sites no longer exist. Even so, I wager that I could replace them today without too much trouble. I have arranged them some, but I have not altered original spelling or grammar. GH
Logic and Sweet Reason
“There is proof in math and logic… ok. I’ll give you proof. You go first. “
Please note that these are all direct quotes from creationists taken from the many public domain creation/evolution debates. I have collected these for years, and many of the debate sites no longer exist. Even so, I wager that I could replace them today without too much trouble. I have arranged them some, but I have not altered original spelling or grammar. GH Dating Fossils
“Although personally, evolution is a load of crock. I think the fossil records speak for themselves in that area. As does logic. If you truly beleive that all species are evolving, and changing and that the earth is a billions of years old, explain to me why all of the species alive today can be found in the fossil record from millions of years ago. Fossils are just creatures that died in the flood and were buried. All the sediment deposits and massive lava flows and oil deposits are the remnants of a tremendous global cataclysm. It’s that simple and that’s all you need to explain it. It isn’t complicated.”
In reforming its school system, Italy has dropped evolution from its primary and middle school curricula.
This isn’t exactly breaking news, but I’m just catching up with things following hospitalization.
A post by David Wilson on talk.origins translates one of the Italian news articles about this change and gives a summary of the situation.
Please note that these are all direct quotes from creationists taken from the many public domain creation/evolution debates. I have collected these for years, and many of the debate sites no longer exist. Even so, I wager that I could replace them today without too much trouble. I have arranged them some, but I have not altered original spelling or grammar. GH
“Creation has just as much evidence as evolution does. That is a known fact. Besides it is just a theory. If you really look at the evidence for evolution, and the evidence for creation, you will see that science supports a young-earth. Evolution has NEVER been observed. That is a FACT. “
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Andrea Bottaro has shown by example the irrelevance of William Dembski’s explanatory filter to archaeology. In this contribution, I want to show how in the real world the explanatory filter can lead to a false positive.
Dembski’s vaunted explanatory filter is no more than a flow chart designed to distinguish events of low probability. If the probability of an event is low enough and if Dembski can discern a pattern, then he concludes that the event must have been the product of design. Dembski admits that the explanatory filter may produce a false negative (fail to infer design where design exists) but claims it will never produce a false positive (infer design where none exists). In this article, I will give a real example wherein the explanatory filter could have yielded a false positive.
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I'm trying a little experiment on the web—a project to highlight and encourage other people to write about biology or medicine or natural history by posting a biweekly digest of interesting weblog articles on those topics. The project is called The Tangled Bank. The first entry is currently posted at my website, and the next edition will be published in two weeks and hosted at the Invasive Species Weblog. These will be places where you can learn about other weblogs that should be of interest to readers of The Panda's Thumb.
Our first edition has only seven entries, but we hope that will grow, and that's why I'm mentioning it here. If you even occasionally write about science on your weblog, send a URL to one of your recent articles, preferably with a brief synopsis, to host@tangledbank.net. If the article meets our generous criteria, we'll acknowledge you with a link in the next edition. Join in, make connections, spread the word about good science!
Some time ago, an Insight article by Stephen Goode quoted ID advocate and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow William A. Dembski as saying that biologists opposed to “intelligent design” were like the repressive former Soviet regime. Knowing something of the history of science under Soviet rule, I knew that the actual lessons of history were being completely inverted by Dembski. Scientists who applied principles of biology accepted in the West were, in fact, repressed under Soviet politically mandated biological doctrines, specifically those teleological principles of Michurinism promulgated by Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.
I joined with Mark Perakh, who lived through Soviet scientific repression and encountered Nazi materials in World War II, to write an essay that explores the ID advocates’ deployment of invidious comparisons of biologists to the Soviet and Nazi regimes. We conclude that these comparisons cannot be sustained, that they can only be proposed through thorough ignorance of the actual historical record, that politically mandated biology is a costly proposition, and that the elements of self-aggrandizement in ID advocacy ironically echo the Soviet and Nazi regimes that they invoke as being like their opponents.
The essay is available on TalkReason.org and as a PDF at TalkDesign.org and atAntievolution.org.
There is a thread on invidious comparisons used by “intelligent design” advocates on the Antievolution.org discussion board.
I was somewhat bemused by Francis Beckwith’s report that ID advocates consider Forensic Science to not be a part of natural science (perhaps natural science is only that which is presented by David Attenbrough). How could reasonable people not see that Forensic science is part of natural science thought I.
Then I had one of my semiannual encounters with the public understanding of science.
The basis of Einstein's life-changing view called the theory of relativity can be summed this way: Time is not constant. Both velocity and gravity can distort time. Nearly nine decades ago, this surprising discovery shook the very foundation of human perception, understanding and reality. Mistakenly, in the minds of many, the theory of relativity became relativism. So it was in the 1920s and still today that the popular interpreter of Einstein's work finds himself saying "All things are relative" and thinks that he is voicing a scientific discovery. This notion of "all things relative" moved from the laboratory into the public domain, creating an era in which all absolutes disappeared. Relativism has become the prevailing spirit of thought and action in our modern culture, but that is just half the equation.My reply is available at EvolutionBlog. Enjoy!
The discovery in microbes of two oxygen-packing proteins, the earliest known ancestors to hemoglobin, brings scientists closer to identifying the earliest life forms to use oxygen.
Hemoglobins are ubiquitous in Eukarya and Bacteria but, until now, have not been found in Archaea. A phylogenetic analysis of the recently revealed microbial family of globin-coupled heme-based sensors suggests that these sensors descended from an ancient globin-only progenitor, or a protoglobin (Pgb). Here, we report the discovery and characterization of two Pgbs from the Archaea: ApPgb from the obligately aerobic hyperthermophile Aeropyrum pernix, and MaPgb from the strictly anaerobic methanogen Methanosarcina acetivorans. Both ApPgb and MaPgb bind molecular oxygen, nitric oxide, and carbon monoxide by means of a heme moiety that is coordinated to the protein through the F8 histidine (histidine 120). We postulate that these archaeal globins are the ancestors of contemporary hemoglobins.
EurekAlert press release.
Recently deceased NYU professor and postmodernist cultural critic Neil Postman (1931-2003) has a cult following for books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. I have always been mystified by this, since Postman demonstrated again and again in his writings that he was actually remarkably ignorant of the technology he chose to criticize.
This week I picked up a copy of Postman's 1988 book Conscientious Objections at a local book sale. Not surprisingly, Postman's ignorance is on display again, this time about evolution.
By any objective standards, the principal players in the ID movement are reasonably intelligent people. Phillip Johnson, for instance, graduated first in his law school class at the University of Chicago and clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren. Jonathan Wells got double 800s on his SATs and was awarded a full, merit-based undergraduate scholarship at Princeton in the 1960s. Guillermo Gonzalez, though a young assistant professor, has over sixty articles in refereed astronomy and astrophysical journals. These are just a few examples off the top of my head.In fact, Dembski's opponents have not asserted that Dembski and his friends are "not intelligent" or "not smart." (If I am wrong, Dembski is welcome to provide relevant references). If the opponents of ID do not specifically stress how smart Dembski and Co are, that is because there is no need to do so - Dembski and his colleagues take care of that themselves - they routinely unabashedly praise each other and sometimes themselves in superlative terms (a documented proof of that is forthcoming from Elsberry and myself).
A curious thing: I reported yesterday on this lovely work on the genetic regulation of pelvic limbs in fish, and got a comment that the "modularity and surprisingly robust flexibility" of the system was evidence of design. Quite the contrary, I see evidence of mechanisms that permit integrated evolution of organisms, with no designer required. There's another example briefly described in a news article in this week's Science (Pennisi, 2004) that describes work presented at a Cold Spring Harbor conference on the evolution of developmental diversity. It expands further on this matter.
Cichlid fishes are examples of a recent, rapid radiation into new forms. One of the reasons behind their success seems to be the adaptability of their jaws, which have allowed them to diversify into many ecological niches by changes in their feeding apparatus (Albertson et al., 1999, 2003). What's becoming clear is that the modular and interlinked network of regulatory genes does not hinder change, it facilitates concordant change in the patterns of expression of multiple genes to produce an integrated morphology of the jaw.
Continue reading "More development. More evolution. More genes. More fish. Cichlid jaws!" (on Pharyngula)
In the short article "Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa" (subscription required), published in tomorrow's issue of Science magazine, Henshilwood and coworkers report the finding of 41 perforated tick shell beads (from the mollusk Nassarius kraussianus) dated as about 75,000 years old. They provide evidence that the beads are human-made artifacts - the oldest known personal ornaments and a sign of the emergence of symbolic thought in early humans.
Clearly, pace all the ID advocates' recent claims, upon finding the perforated shells Henshilwood and his colleagues considered "intelligent agency" as a possible cause (perhaps they didn't know that methodological naturalism supposedly proscribes such consideration, according to Francis Beckwith).
There's rumbling in Darby, Montana. The school board there seems to be ready to adopt an ID curriculum, and they anticipate lawsuits over it, although they have support from the Speaker of the House of the state legislature. But now, the board's in trouble because they held a behind-closed-doors meeting where they apparently decided to rescind a job offer extended to a new superintendent of schools, and offer it instead to another person because of his "a sense of strong spirituality."
The Ravalli Republic, a local newspaper, has filed suit against the board for its closed meetings. Now, Montana law on open meetings appears to be pretty strong--the state Constitution, Art. II s 9, declares that "No person shall be deprived of the right to...observe the deliberations of all public bodies...except in cases in which the demand of individual privacy clearly exceeds the merits of public disclosure," and under the statutes enforcing open meetings requirements, courts can void decisions made at closed-door meetings. See, e.g., Bryan v. Yellowstone County Elementary School Dist. No. 2, 312 Mont. 257, 274 (Mont.,2002) ("open meetings violations remain of utmost concern to this Court. Nothing in this opinion should be interpreted to suggest that violations of open meeting laws by any entity subject to those laws will not result in voiding decisions so reached. We will not hesitate to affirm a district court's determination to void such decisions or reverse a court's refusal to do so." quoting Common Cause of Montana v. Statutory Committee to Nominate Candidates for Com'r of Political Practices, 263 Mont. 324, 333-34 (1994)). Why the school board secrecy, though? Because not all the parents are real thrilled about their kids being taught lies. Not to mention the fact that "Both federal and Montana's civil rights acts forbid religious discrimination by employers." Wolfe v. State, Dept. of Labor and Industry, Bd. of Personnel Appeals ex rel. Helena Educ. Ass'n, 255 Mont. 336, 339 (1992). See also McCann v. Trustees, Dodson School Dist., 249 Mont. 362, 364 (1991).
Since John Lynch mentioned it first, why yes, I have read this article on limb loss in vertebrates.
Some of the complicating features of developmental genetics are pleiotropy and multigenic effects: that is, that the genes required to build an organism are all tangled together in an intricate web, with multiple genes required to properly assemble each character (that's the multigenic part), and each gene having multiple effects on multiple characters (that's pleiotropy). One might think of the organism as a house of cards, each card supporting all of the cards above it, so that tinkering with any one piece leads to catastrophic collapse. This isn't the case, of course. While developing systems are all elaborately interlocked, they also exhibit modularity and surprisingly robust flexibility. One recently published example can be found in Shapiro et al. (2004) which describes the developmental flexibility of the regulation of the pelvic appendages in sticklebacks, and ties it all neatly to patterns of evolution.
Continue reading "Development. Evolution. Genes. Fish. What's not to like?" (on Pharyngula)
Claude Shannon invented the mathematical theory of information shortly after World War II. The inspiration for his theory derived from his work during the war on cryptography.War on cryptography? Is that like the War on Drugs or the War on poverty? I guess Shannon didn't like number theorists. Or this one, from page 143:
The Darwinian mechanism is a trial-and-error mechanism, with natural selection providing the trial and random variation providing the error.Ahem. Actually, it is random variation that provides the trial. Selection plays the role of “error”. If you're looking for more high-minded criticism of Dembski, go visit EvolutionBlog. I have just added a lengthy post about the limitations of intelligence and the difference between embodied and disembodied designers. Enjoy!
Francis Beckwith has posted a more well thought-out response to my posts criticizing his claim that the NCSE website violates the Establishment Clause. Some quick notes:
An interesting article in this week's edition of Nature suggests that at least in some fish, alterations in a single gene bring about evolutionary change in the form of limb (fin) loss.
Genetic and developmental basis of evolutionary pelvic reduction in threespine sticklebacks
MICHAEL D. SHAPIRO, MELISSA E. MARKS, CATHERINE L. PEICHEL, BENJAMIN K. BLACKMAN, KIRSTEN S. NERENG, BJARNI JÓNSSON, DOLPH SCHLUTER & DAVID M. KINGSLEY
Nature 428, 717–723
Eurekalert press release
Original Article
Discussion by Shubin & Dahn
They say that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. But for our good friends at Answers in Genesis (AiG), fiction and truth are freely interchangeable. The latest bit of hilarity comes courtesy of AiG's legal counsel, who, aside from not being able to take a joke, apparently has a poor grasp of both the legal and ethical meaning of intellectual (sic) property law.
To begin with the beginning, AiG is America's leading young-earth creationist outfit, and like all high-caliber scientific organizations, it has its own resident cartoonist. Dan Lietha writes two cartoon series which appear on AiG's website: CreationWise and After Eden. The drawings are kind of nice in an Ziggy sort of way, but they're not quite as funny as Mary Worth. Basically, they're not much more than inane creationist claims made to look cartoonish. . . um, that is, being made into visual form. But they certainly contain lots of unintentional humor, so there's only one thing left to do: Poke fun at them.
Making parodies of visual materials over the web is hardly a new thing, and as anyone familiar with the frequent Photoshop contests on Fark.com can tell you, they're a great venue for fun and artistic talent. So when participants of the Humor forum of the Internet Infidels Discussion Board (IIDB) decided to do a parody of AiG's cartoons, they were just having harmless, legally permissible fun. Right?
Brian Leiter has a post up about the reactions of some Federalist Society members concerning the recent Van Dyke flare-up.
A distinguished legal scholar and well-known Federalist Society figure reacted to my recent comments on Stuart Buck and Lawrence VanDyke, in which I quipped that they seem "intent on making sure the Federalist Society gets a reputation as a hotbed of dense apologists for Intelligent Design." This reader objects:
"[H]olding the Federalist Society responsible for idiotic design people in its midst is like holding the Democratic Party responsible for Larouchies. [...]
Youch! It's quite an interesting issue, but I think it's worth noting that many conservatives care little for the ID movement, despite the fact that ID was originally conceived for the express purpose of advocating a strain of conservative ideology. Can't blame 'em.
An excellent opinion piece by Dr. Brian McEnnis on the "critical analysis" lesson plan for the new Ohio model science curriculum has been published in the Marion Star newspaper.
Here's the ending:
Mr. Hedges refers to the support of Sen. Edward Kennedy, echoing a claim made by Sen. Santorum in the Washington Times of March 14, 2002. Kennedy responded in a letter to the editor, published in the same newspaper on March 21, 2002:"The March 14 Commentary piece, 'Illiberal education in Ohio schools,' written by my colleague Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, erroneously suggested that I support the teaching of 'Intelligent Design' as an alternative to biological evolution. That simply is not true. Rather, I believe that public school science classes should focus on teaching students how to understand and critically analyze genuine scientific theories. Unlike biological evolution, 'Intelligent Design' is not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has no place in the curriculum of our nation's public school science classes."
So much for the claim of Kennedy's support! This type of misrepresentation and shading of the truth is typical of the way that Intelligent Design proponents present their case. The lesson plan that they wrote is similarly riddled with deceit and error.
If it is honest science you want, this lesson plan is not it. It is scientific fraud, and has no place in the classroom.
I have a situation report from just before the Ohio Board of Education approved the lesson plan for inclusion into the model curriculum that gives the background.
Technical analysis of the lesson plan was performed by geologist Thomas A. Baillieul on both references used and website links used in the lesson plan.
Further news about the situation in Ohio can be had on the Ohio Citizens for Science website.
Charles Darwin died on April 19th, 1882, at the age of 73. The 122nd anniversary of his death would be a week from today, and I'd intended to make this post then, but I'm prompted by an odd question about Darwin's dying words to jump the gun a little bit.
The subject is relevant to several things being discussed here, because much to the surprise of many creationists (and many atheists, as well) Darwin was not a bitter, hateful old atheist. He was an agnostic who held his Christian friends and family in respect, who refused before his death to engage in any public debate about the truth or falsehood of religion.
Continue reading "The death of Darwin" (on Pharyngula)
I hope everyone who wanted one had a good Easter. Hungry the Cow sure did, and he wants to tell you all, “eat mor bunnie.”
Now, can any of our readers explain why Hungry the Cow is eating this rabbit? Double bonus if you can identify the journal and paper that this unmodified photo is associated with.
We've had a few discussions here, and there have been several more elsewhere, on a strange idea: that scientists automatically exclude the supernatural from science because of some close-minded metaphysical bigotry, that for instance there is an a priori determination that any explanation that mentions the words "ghosts" must be wrong and excluded from science. I disagree. We practice methodological naturalism, and all that matters is whether we have an operational toolkit to evaluate a claim. I don't dismiss "ghosts" (or Intelligent Design) because I have some prejudice against supernatural beings, but because those beings are so poorly described and delimited by their proponents that I have no way to evaluate them—and if these proponents want to be taken seriously, they must make the effort to establish clear definitions, criteria, and procedures for their study, something Intelligent Design creationists have steadfastly refused to do.
Now Brian Leiter has ripped into this topic at length. One of the interesting points there is that this represents a common strategy of trying to muddy the waters and pretend that science is religion, and that religion is science, and therefore religiously-motivated babble, like Intelligent Design creationism, is on an equal footing with evolutionary biology.
I assumed that he [VanDyke] --like all the others who peddle Intelligent Design--might be making a non-trivial point, namely, that methodological naturalism was genuinely a priori, i.e., a dogma immune from and indifferent to the empirical evidence, and thus on a par, epistemically, with supernaturalism. If that were true, then we would have an argument for saying that evolutionary biology, with its genuinely a priori commitment to methodological naturalism, was indistinguishable from supernaturalism. Alas, it is not true that methodological naturalism is a priori in the only sense that is relevant.
I've also written up an anecdote from 1999, Scientific bias and the Void-Of-Course Moon. Scientists are willing to consider even the most ridiculous hypotheses, if they are stated with sufficient clarity that they can actually assess them. Even if the idea is as absurd as astrology.
Just in case you aren't as tired with the whole NCSE-violating-the-Establishment-Clause thing as I am. . .
We have recently had the jaw dropping experience of Joe Carter stating that Forensic Science does not use "methodological naturalism" because the mind is a "supernatural" entity. However, this kind of reasoning is used by other ID advocates. Francis Beckwith has written:
ID theorists maintain that contemporary science's repudiation of intelligent agency as a legitimate category of explanation is not the result of carefully assessing ID's arguments and finding them wanting, but rather, it is the result of an a priori philosophical commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), (n4) an epistemological point of view that entails ontological materialism (OM),(n5) but which ID proponents contend is not a necessary condition for the practice of science.(n6) (p. 457, "Science and Religion Twenty Years after McLean v. Arkansas: Evolution, Public Education, and the New Challenge of Intelligent Design." Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 26.2 (Spring 2003: 455-499)
As Francis Beckwith visits this blog, and had to discuss this issue with ID "theorists" to write the above paragraph, perhaps he could be so kind as to inform us what ID "theorists" mean by "intelligent agency" that it excludes humans, australopithecines, chimpanzees and Pacific Island Ravens.
Miss me, anyone?
I'm in the hospital with my worst-ever flare-up of Crohn's disease. I promise to spare you the disgusting details, but it has been bad enough to keep me away from an Internet connection for almost a week. That should tell you something.
But I did learn about some preliminary research that indicates that perhaps my condition results from changing the environmental conditions away from the usual coevolutionary relationship between humans and intestinal parasites. A small clinical trial tested the effect of giving Crohn's and ulcerative colitis patients porcine whipworm, Trichuris suis, and got some intriguing results. The researchers note that the initial study is too small to separate possible placebo effects, but positive responses in several patients indicate the need for a larger controlled study.
The basic gist behind this is that the porcine whipworm parasites are invasive enough to obtain an appropriate response from the gut, while being out-of-place enough in the human system that they don't pose a significant health risk of their own. The researchers also note an observed inverse relationship between incidence of Crohn's and colitis cases and prevalence of intestinal parasitic infections. If this works out, continuing maintenance of Crohn's and ulcerative colitis in at least some patients may include a routine of ingesting porcine whipworm eggs periodically. While I usually shudder at the idea of deliberate nematode ingestion, my recent experiences certainly put me in favor of giving it a try.
It's April, it's Minnesota, and it's snowing here. On days like this, my thoughts turn to spicy, garlicky delicacies and warm, sunny days on a lovely tropical reef—it's a squiddy day, in otherwords, and I've got a double-dose of squidblogging on this Friday afternoon, with one article on the vampire squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and this one, on squid evolution and cephalopod Hox genes.
Continue reading "Squid Hox genes" (on Pharyngula)
I came across this passage in another blog, Alcaide's Cafe, written by Russell Husted. As a general rule, Russell's page is considerably more sophisticated and better written than most of its kind, but this passage came as a surprise to me. In this post, he discusses the fact that finding water and methane on Mars is not necessarily evidence of life on Mars, and on that point he is of course correct. Those things might provide evidence that microbial life was once present, or is now present, on Mars, but that is still an entirely open question. But he doesn't stop there. He seems to think that if we do find life on Mars, this will be a problem for evolution because that life, presumably, stayed at the microbial level and did not "advance" to more complex, multicellular life. He writes:
When reading Andrea Bottaro's fine post of April 6 (titled Getting Away With "heresy") where he tells telltale stories about non-orthodox ideas taking hold in mainstream biology, it reminded me some stories that took place in my field. I am taking the liberty of telling here a story from my own past with a hope it will not be found inappropriate for this forum. I guess the name of Lev Landau is known to most of the readers of this blog. He was a very prominent theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate and a founder and a long-time leader of a group of outstanding theoretical physicists in Russia. His authority among physicists in the USSR was immense and undisputed. To argue against Dau (as he usually was referred to) one could only at one's peril. Every physicist viewed it an honor to be allowed to give a presentation at Landau's famous weekly seminar. If Landau approved the presentation it would immensely enhance the prestige of the presenter. On the other hand, if Landau disliked the thesis he would make mincemeat of the offender with a few very caustic and witty remarks. After being thus disparaged, the hapless offender had nowhere to appeal. There was in the USSR a professor of physics by the name of Pines who authored an authoritative book on X-rays technique. Once he submitted to Landau a paper which he wished to present at Landau's seminar. This paper was a theoretical treatise about Poisson coefficient. Poisson coefficient is the ratio between the relative transverse and longitudinal strains of a solid body. It had been a commonly accepted view that Poisson coefficient may have only positive values up to k=1/2. Positive value of k means that when a body is stretched along some axis, it shrinks in the transverse direction. (For example, this is stated in the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics). In fact, a thermodynamic analysis (which I performed in ‘69) shows that no law of physics forbids a negative value of k, so that k may in principle have values between -1 and +1/2 . Negative k means that a body, while being stretched along some axis, would simultaneously expand along the transverse direction. Such a behavior was, though, never observed, and to the best of my knowledge, the thermodynamic analysis I mentioned was never conducted before, so the common notion had been that k is always positive and not exceeding 1/2 . I have not read Pines's article so I don't know what his arguments were, except for the general idea - he suggested some theoretical consideration showing that solid bodies with a negative Poisson coefficient may exist. I could not read Pines's article for a simple reason - Landau derided Pines, and his article was never published and was nowhere to be found. Some of my colleagues who happened to witness the story, told that, having looked over Pines's article, Landau said, "You know, Pines, if you swap i and e in your name you get the only body in the world that expands sideways when stretching. " End of Pines's prestige and of his theory. Now jump to 1969. I had at that time a doctoral student Vitaly Balagurov. He was one of only four of my doctoral students (out of the total of 26) who failed to get the doctoral degree. (In 1970 Balagurov had to abandon his research because of family circumstances). In '69 he was conducting experiments with films of magnetic alloys deposited in strong magnetic fields. He was frustrated by the stubborn instability of the data he got while measuring stress in these films - which was the task I gave him. For a while I was very busy with some other research and kept postponing a review of his data. Finally I turned to his raw data and, to my amazement, realized that the alleged instability was caused by what seemed to be a bizarre effect - when the films were stretched along one of the axes, they seemed to expand in the transverse direction. It was hard to believe, so I set out to check the data and to find the glitch in measurements which surely must have been somewhere. Together with Balagurov, we conducted hundreds of measurements, modifying the set-ups, the conditions etc, and, after a long-long series of experiments (as far as I recall, it took a whole year) I came to the conclusion that it was a real effect - these films had a negative Poisson ratio! Of course everybody knew it was impossible - the great Landau himself said so a few years earlier and destroyed the poor Pines who dared to suggest otherwise. What could I do - to openly go against Landau and common knowledge? That was exactly what I did. I wrote an article (with Balagurov as a co-author) where not only described the experimental results but also dared to offer a model suggesting a mechanism for the observed bizarre phenomenon, and sent it to the prestigious journal of the Academy of Sciences - Fizika Tverdogo Tela (Physics of Solids). The submissions to this journal always are reviewed by at least two anonymous referees. It usually takes some time. What happened, neither Landau's prestige nor the "common knowledge" played a role - our article was published, and unusually soon - in less than two months. The "orthodox" scientific "establishment" was obviously more interested in the unusual results than in preserving prestige, orthodox views, or using the alleged mechanism of peer-review to kill unwanted data - all those malaises of science attributed to it by the ID crowd. In physics and biology alike - what counts is evidence, and that is what the ID champions have in a very short supply.
