May 2005 Archives

While researching the nematode work by Azevedo, I ran across the following [url=]website[/url] called ‘Design vs. Descent: A war of predictions”. The original article can be found at the Idea Center

While the article has many problems, one in particular caught my eye

Finally, a study which compared many proteins in humans, nematodes, arthropods, and yeast found that 2 starkly different trees were produced, depending on which genes were used.25 This pattern of different genes yielding very different phylogenetic trees is very common in the scientific literature, and shows that molecular data fail to give a consistent picture of the alleged common descent ancestry of organisms.

25. Mushegian A, Garey J, Martin J, Liu L. Large-Scale Taxonomic Profiling of Eukaryotic Model Organisms: A Comparison of Orthologous Proteins Encoded by the Human, Fly, Nematode, and Yeast Genomes. Genome Research 1998;8:590-8.

A creationist named Cowan who teaches science at the University Place School District in Washington state has written an essay that was published in the Christian Science Monitor. In part, it talks about how teaching the “controversy” regarding evolution is a stimulating pedagogy.

I wrote a letter to a few of the administrators of the high school at which Cowan works. I’ll show what I wrote on the flipside.

Jonathan Witt aruges that:

There is a factual error in the story’s headline and lead sentence. They suggest that the science documentary makes a case against biological evolution. In fact, the film doesn’t even touch on the subject.

The Privileged Planet focuses on cosmology and astronomy, and on Earth’s place in the universe. One could be a strict Darwinist and still agree with the argument in The Privileged Planet. In fact, that accurately describes at least two of the prominent scientists who endorsed the book upon which the documentary is based.

As reported by Reed Cartwright, the strict comment policy of IC blog sites and other websites, is ‘explained’ by Jay Richard by claiming that

the ID contributors ruled out comments because the debate about intelligent design often becomes malicious. “We would have one post and 30 comments that are vitriolic,” he said.

Randy Isaac Wrote:

In part 1 I spoke of prejudicial bias, in which there is a tendency for a prejudice, or an a priori desire or preference for a particular result, to influence the analysis and the outcome of a scientific investigation, and a scientific bias, in which there is a tendency for anomalous results, namely those not expected on the basis of established scientific knowledge, to be rejected, particularly if the results directly contradict previously well-documented results.

In this post, I’d like to take a closer look at Baumgardner’s paper http://www.icr.org/research/AGUC-14[…]mgardner.pdf which elicited the concern a few weeks ago that it might be rejected by peer-reviewers due to an inappropriate bias. Specifically, Vernon Jenkins wrote on April 4, 2005: “There can be little doubt that Baumgardner et al would be more than happy to publish these findings in peer-reviewed form if a relevant journal could be found to accept their work. However, the sad truth is that a paper challenging the accepted uniformitarian paradigm - irrespective of its intrinsic quality - invariably meets with editorial and reviewer hostility.”

Read more at Bias in Science, Part 2, on the Calvin Reflector

Gonzalez said this common charge isn’t true and reflects mistaken beliefs about science by its critics.

“They come from a specific philosophical point of view,” he said. “Any explanation apart from law and chance is not permitted in science.”

October 12, 2004 A universal debate By Lucas Grundmeier Daily Staff Writer

What else is there other than law and chance? Ignorance?

Also remember that in Privileged Planet, Gonzalez et al do not eliminate chance and law, only chance. In other words, they accept that laws can explain the universe. Why is it that ID proponents have no problem accepting front loading in astronomy but insist on intervention in biology?

In “Darwin”s Black Box” (DBB), ID”s arch-biochemist Behe glibly labeled evolutionary hypotheses for the origin of “irreducibly complex” systems as “hops into the box of Calvin and Hobbes” (for those who don”t know what the heck this refers to, go here to learn about Calvin and Hobbes, and here for info on their box, or even better go spend some time here, and come back tomorrow). This overconfidence has come back to haunt him as more and more evidence accumulated in support of the evolutionary origin of his various IC systems, from the flagellum to the complement and clotting cascades.

The topic where the idea of unevolvability of IC systems has probably taken the most beating is the vertebrate adaptive immune system, where not only evidence for evolution has accumulated at a steady pace, but even more embarrassingly for Behe, it has developed exactly along the lines predicted by those “Calvin and Hobbes jumps” he originally dismissed. A recent paper in the journal PLoS Biology [1] is the latest turn in the death spiral of irreducible complexity of the immune system, and I think provides a good opportunity to take a look at how science works, as opposed to ID navel-gazing.

I’m quoted in Science & Theology News criticizing ID’s new blog:

Unlike most blogs, however, Intelligent Design The Future does not let readers respond online to the posts. Reed Cartwright, a contributor to the evolution blog called The Panda’s Thumb, said preventing readers from adding their comments to the online discussion about intelligent design, also known as ID, shows that those who created it are not interested in running an actual blog.

“If ID is the future, as the title of the blog advertises, can’t it withstand criticism?” said Cartwright, a doctoral candidate in genetics at the University of Georgia. “I think that it is ironic that a movement, which claims to want ‘more discussion’ about biology in schools, does not allow discussion [on their blog].”

Word has reached the ears of the Thumb (!) that the Discovery Institute has managed to get the Smithsonian to co-sponsor an ID-friendly presentation, surprising us to say the least. (Indeed, Prof. Steve Steve was as crestfallen over the matter as anyone with a fixed expression could be.)

How could the Smithsonian, the quintessential archive of evolution as natural history in our nation, have agreed to co-host this video? How could the director be “Happy to announce” this private screening? Does the director even know if any Pandas were harmed in the production of this film?

Today, the NY Times has an article that explains the situation. We’ll discuss this and other possible violations of Panda rights on the flipside.

It’s rather like a puddle waking up one morning— I know they don’t normally do this, but allow me, I’m a science fiction writer— A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: “This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly… I mean really precise isn’t it?… It must have been made to have me in it.” And the sun rises, and it’s continuing to narrate this story about how this hole must have been made to have him in it. And as the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking— and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it’s still thinking— it’s still trapped in this idea that— that the hole was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us we will continue to destroy it in the way that we have been destroying it, because we think that we can do no harm.

Douglas Adams

Richard Dawkins has penned another good article on evolution. Read through it and we’ll discuss it on the flipside.

Two days ago, word of a survey reached the ears of the Panda’s Thumb. (Not to mix metaphors too much.) A Jewish theological seminary in New Jersey had polled doctors to see what their feelings were on evolution, intelligent design, etc. Additionally, they stratified the results based on religious identification. The results were hardly surprising to those who have been critics of the intelligent design movement. As the resident doctor here at the Thumb, I deferred commenting on this particular survey because the results were so predictable.

Well, the Discovery Institute is shopping around the idea that this survey provides evidence of a growing body of scientists that endorse ID creationism. (To be fair, their language only said that this survey was evidence of “a lively debate,” as though their enthusiasm was less about any scientific breakthrough and more about simply being prominent.)

We’ll discuss this survey on the flip side…

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting today that efforts are now under way in Cobb County, GA to remove the evolution disclaimers placed on science textbooks.

The county is still appealing, and if they manage to eventually win, we may see the disclaimers placed back on textbooks.

DEVOLUTION by H. ALLEN ORR Why intelligent design isn’t.

Overall a good overview of the arguments made by Intelligent Design and why they fail.

Orr documents a beautiful case of argument from ignorance, in addition to an admission that IC really does not mean anything much

Design theorists have made some concessions to these criticisms. Behe has confessed to “sloppy prose” and said he hadn’t meant to imply that irreducibly complex systems “by definition” cannot evolve gradually. “I quite agree that my argument against Darwinism does not add up to a logical proof,” he says—though he continues to believe that Darwinian paths to irreducible complexity are exceedingly unlikely. Behe and his followers now emphasize that, while irreducibly complex systems can in principle evolve, biologists can’t reconstruct in convincing detail just how any such system did evolve.

Bobby Henderson, a concerned citizen, has written an open letter to the Kansas school board about the attempts to put “intelligent design” creationism into the science curriculium. In the letter, he advocates for his view of creation to be included as well:

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

BBC News is reporting that scientists have discovered the irony centers of the brain. The only reason this study is surprising is that PT posters and readers were not the primary research subjects. Most of us had our irony neurons burned out long ago (I bet you would see some nice dark spots on brain scans, right next to our hypertrophied pun centers). This is why we have to compensate with irony meters, which, sadly, have been taking quite a beating lately.

This is a report of my trip to Grand Canyon on May 4, where I assisted NCSE‘s Eugenie Scott in her investigation of sightings of a creationist book in Grand Canyon bookstores. First, though, I gave Dr. Scott advice on her powerpoint talk to interpreters. She had been invited to address them during their annual training session before the Grand Canyon National Park gears up for the summer season.

On A Scientific Dissent on Darwinism we find a Discovery Institute press release which includes Philip S. Skell who is described as an Emeritus Prof. Of Chemistry. Strangely enough, in a more recent press release from the Discovery Institute we read

Dr. Phil Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences** and a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Pennsylvania State University, has just sent an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education encouraging them to revise the state’s science standards to allow students to learn the scientific evidence both for and against biological and chemical evolution.

What happened? Chemistry or biochemistry… Intelligent design or evolution…

A couple of days ago (infinity in blog-time), Chris Mooney had an interesting post about a 20 year-old article on the creation/evolution debate. As Chris writes…

I have just been reading an interesting article: Thomas F. Gieryn; George M. Bevins; Stephen C. Zehr, “Professionalization of American Scientists: Public Science in the Creation/Evolution Trials,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Jun. 1985), 392-409. What the article reveals is that during the 1981-1982 McLean v. Arkansas case, anti-evolutionists were using a very similar strategy to the one promulgated today: Attacking evolution for its own alleged religious (i.e., atheistic) biases.

Mooney produces some choice quotes from the article that I won’t bother to reproduce here (you should go to his blog to read them). The article was written in 1985, but it could have been written yesterday; the motives and tactics of today’s anti-evolution movement have changed little. At least in 1985, they were honest enough to still call themselves creationists.

John Calvert’s impending legal strategy (which seems to be the standard strategy for the ID movement) was aired during the recent Kansas kangaroo court. As reported by Stan Cox, it tries to paint evolution as necessarily atheistic, and therefore demands that ID be brought in for balance. Not only is this strategy not new, it’s already dead. One thing that Mooney neglects to mention is that this strategy backfired badly the first time around. Let’s take a look…

Andrew Gumbel, a correspondent for the London-based Independent, attended the recent intelligent design show trial in Topeka. His write-up at LA City Beat is recommended reading. Although he develops several good themes in his essay, there is one point in particular I would like to highlight.

Another manifestation of the misdirection of the ID movement is the ludicrous notion that high schools are the appropriate venue for intricate debate about the finer points of evolutionary science. Any public school science teacher will tell you it’s already a minor miracle if a 16-year-old can accurately summarize The Origin of Species, or pinpoint the Galapagos Islands on an atlas. Raising questions about the cellular structure of the flagellum is unlikely to exercise most students until grad school.

The only reason for raising such questions before state education authorities is not to deepen the scientific understanding of teenagers but rather to sow deliberate confusion. It is about denigrating mainstream science as biased against religion – which it is not; it merely regards questions of the supernatural to be outside the realm of scientific inquiry – and by extension bringing God and open avowals of faith into the public school system. (Emphasis mine.)

Many authors have correctly explained that the testimony of ID proponents in Topeka only criticized evolution. Indeed, in an effort to allay concerns that the rejected proposals were written to mandate the teaching of creationism, John Calvert articulated this point numerous times directly. Until Gumbel’s article, though, media coverage has failed to identify the desire by ID creationists to confuse the public. In other words, Gumbel is one of the first journalists to point out that, to an intelligent design creationist, the whole point of criticizing evolutionary theory is to criticize evolutionary theory.

It is important for advocates of science to recognize this strategy because there is a clear link between the beliefs creationists hold, the threats to those beliefs that they perceive from verified science, the fear they have from those threats, and the reactions to those threats that they make. Several points and implications about this understanding of creationist strategy merit mention and they will be developed below the fold.

As a virtual bar, the Panda’s Thumb relies on passing packets to enable the contributors to say their stuff and the commenters to put in their two cents. Well, for various reasons the management hasn’t been completely happy with the current packet-passer, and has arranged for a new packet-passing service. Unfortunately, this means that in the switchover, there may be a longish period where the name and the particular address used aren’t matched up. We have to change the “domain name service” (thanks, “wbrameld4”) entries for PT tonight, and these may take up to 48 hours to propagate. So don’t be surprised if you can’t get to PT this weekend. We hope that it won’t take that long for the DNS entries to propagate, but here we’ll give you fair warning.

NCSE is reporting that the Missouri legislature has ended and its anti-evolution bill has died in committee.

I am working on a joint statement from Citizens for Science groups about “intelligent design” creationism influencing education. I already have several groups on board but am wondering if there are any I’ve missed. If you are a member of a Citizens for Science organization, either local, state, national, or international please email me the contact information and background of your organization.

Don’t forget to spread the word.

[Enable javascript to see this email address.]

(Comments will be disabled to make people email me.)

I have not had time yet to reflect in writing on the Kansas hearings, but here is one of the best stories I’ve seen on what actually went on in the hearings. About the author, it says

Stan Cox lives in Salina, Kan. He has a Ph.D. in plant breeding and cytogenetics and has been a plant breeder for 22 years.

I encourage anyone interested in the Kansas hearings to read this article. If you think it is appropriate, you might send him an email at [Enable javascript to see this email address.] or offer a comment at the alternet site.

I recently got a copy of the new 2nd edition of Marvin Lubenow's book Bones of Contention, a creationist book about the evidence for human evolution. I'll do a fuller review of it later, but there's one thing I want to comment on now. In 2002, the discovery of a new hominid skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, was announced. This skull had a very small brain size of 600 cc, in the Homo habilis range. Two other skulls which had been announced in 2000 had brain sizes of 650 cc and 780 cc. The skulls had a mixture of features from H. erectus and H. habilis and although the smallest one seemed slightly more primitive, the discoverers saw no reason not to put them all in the same species.

I found these skulls particularly interesting because they nicely straddle the gap that creationists like to claim separates humans from non-human primates. Generally the less-incompetent creationists (i.e. those who don't still think that Java Man and Peking Man are ape or monkey skulls) have a dividing line of about 700 cc; usually anything above that is human, and anything below it isn't. Although there are a couple of fragmentary habilis skulls estimated to be in the 650-700 cc range, there weren't any moderately complete hominid skulls between about 620 and 720 cc, so that became the "gap" separating humans from non-humans. But now we have three skulls from the same place, the same time, and of the same species, sitting smack on top of that gap - above, below, and in it. How, I wondered, would Lubenow handle it?

This thread is for John A. Davison to hold forth, and those permitted to post on PT who wish to interact with him may do so here. Already banned persons should go elsewhere.

Update

We have removed the last of John A. Davison’s comment privileges for hyperbolic, offensive rhetoric.

Davison Wrote:

This post is destined for oblivion in the Welsberry gas chamber as just another example of his Nazi tactics. in comment 23402

In a recent post, I noted in passing that modern evolutionary theory is no more atheistic than other sciences that seek natural explanations for the natural world. Yet for some reason, Phillip Johnson and the rest of the ID camp think that it is evolution in particular that is inconsistent with Christianity. As Johnson stated in yesterday’s Washington Post article,

‘I realized…that if the pure Darwinist account was accurate and life is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy. Here was a chance to make a great contribution.’

Now, imagine how silly it would seem if Phillip Johnson had said this:

‘I realized…that if the pure scientific meteorologist account was accurate and weather is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy. Here was a chance to make a great contribution.’

According to a literal reading of the Bible, the evidence that God controls the weather is, if anything, much stronger than the Biblical evidence that God specially created organisms. PT poster Wesley Elsberry ran a search on an online Bible and found a slurry of quotes explicitly describing God’s influence on the weather. The Bible is shot through with such statements, from Old Testament to New. They are re-posted below for posterity.

It looks like the Washington Post has just seen fit to publish a long, fairly uncritical profile piece on Phillip Johnson. The ID people are already crowing and the ID skeptics are already booing. It is true that the article contains inaccuracies (“[Johnson] agrees the world is billions of years old” – no, he doesn’t); some strangely-quoted, or clueless, comments from some of Phil Johnson’s critics; and little resembling scientifically-informed reporting. The reporter, Michael Powell, has done capable reporting on ID in the past, but perhaps the Discovery Institute’s systematic harassment of reporters and news organizations has finally had an impact.

On the other hand, the article is good in giving us a lot of detail about Phillip Johnson’s crisis of faith and conversion experience in the 1980’s, and showing rather clearly that Johnson is first and foremost a religious apologist on a crusade against evolution, and accurate science is way down his list of priorities. Unlike most IDists, he often doesn’t even try and hide his motives and goals.

It's difficult not to laugh at the Discovery Institute, with their transparent attempts to pretend that they don't have a religious agenda, and their nonstop media spinning. Recently there's been the hilarity of the Kansas Board of Education hearings. Before that there was the claim by DI fellow Jay Richards, a philosopher and theologian, that he thought there was a problem with the theory of relativity, based on his reading of magazine articles. In Paul Myers' words, it's like "a circus where they've fired all the acrobats and animal trainers and it's clowns, clowns, clowns all the time".

It would all be very funny if it wasn't so serious. Even though ID may be dead in the water scientifically, it is a real threat to science education, and ID-friendly initiatives are popping up all over the United States.

All of which gives me an excuse to present the following cartoon, the caption of which seems appropriate. This is a classic Australian cartoon from 1933:

Every once in a while you encounter something that is so blindly oblivious, so … well … so pig-ignorant (there’s no more delicate way to put it), that you can only wonder what the purveyor of that ignorance is using to think with. An extraordinary example is provided by a benighted piece on the Social Affairs Unit, a British site primarily devoted to conservative political, economic, and cultural affairs. Like their American counterparts, the SAU folks seem to feel that they must weigh in on scientific issues about which they are supremely uninformed. From David Hadley via Pharyngula, we are pointed to a ludicrously bad piece by an historian titled The Theory of Evolution: Just a Theory?. (You can see it coming, can’t you?)

It’s always nice when someone who has some clue about the relevant science decides to write an article on the ID issue. I would like to highlight this article by Sanjai Tripathi, a microbiology grad student at Oregon State University. His opinion piece appeared in the OSU Daily Barometer, and no, even though I grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, I didn’t have anything to do with it.

One minor quibble: Tripathi uses the “reducing irreducible complexity” rhetoric. But the core issue is not really whether or not a system is irreducible, it is whether or not a system is unbuildable. This is a very different thing. A system that is currently irreducible for its current function might well be buildable anyway, most obviously via change-of-function. Tripathi talks about change-of-function anyway, so he basically knows what is up. But as a general rule, it is important for ID skeptics to keep in mind that “irreducible complexity” has never received a consistent definition, and that various ID proponents and ID opponents use the term to mean some very different things. See the entry on “definitional complexity” at Evowiki.

Well, the Kansas Kangroo Court is over, and it did not produce the outcome that the anti-evolutionists wanted. “Experts” from around the world were flown to Kansas to put on a state funded advertisement for intelligent design creationism because the local lay people were not doing a good job of it. Well, the “experts” that came to Kansas didn’t do a much better job. They routinely answered questions by admitting non-expertise. They were even caught having not read the standards they were supposedly testifying about. (Let’s be honest, the hearings were not about science education in Kansas but about giving intelligent design creationism a forum to advertise.) These revelations did more harm than good for the school board’s impending decision to accept the minority revisions to the standards.

Steve Abrams, chairman of the Kansas State Board of Education, has gone into damage control with a letter to the Wichita Eagle. Steve Case, chair of the Kansas Science Curriculum Standards Committee, has written a letter in response which was read by Pedro Irirgonegaray on the final day of the hearings.

If anyone needed any more evidence that the scientists’ boycott of the Kansas Kangaroo Court was an excellent idea, and that the Kangaroo Court didn’t go at all well for Intelligent Design Creationists (most of the ID proponents were proved to be straight-up creationists at the hearings) – well, here it is.

William Dembski, in a post entitled “The Vise Strategy: Squeezing the Truth out of Darwinists,” is now fantasizing about “the day when the hearings are not voluntary but involve subpoenas that compel evolutionists to be deposed and interrogated at length on their views.”

As a bonus feature, the post features photos of a stuffed Darwin toy with his head being squished in a vise (see photo, above left). (Let me be the first to pass on the indignant cry of Professor Steve Steve and condemn this flagrant abuse of plush toy rights.)

The New York Times has an article today about a new rodent discovered in Southeast Asia that’s so different, it’s been placed in its own family.

‘Oddball Rodent’ Is Called New to Science.

They live in the forests and limestone outcrops of Laos. With long whiskers, stubby legs and a long, furry tail, they are rodents but unlike any seen before by wildlife scientists. They are definitely not rats or squirrels, and are only vaguely like a guinea pig or a chinchilla. And they often show up in Laotian outdoor markets being sold as food.

It was in such markets that visiting scientists came upon the animals, and after long study, determined that they represented a rare find: an entire new family of wildlife. The discovery was announced yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society and described in a report in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity.

The new species in this previously unknown family is called kha-nyou (pronounced ga-nyou) by local people. Scientists found that differences in the skull and bone structure and in the animal’s DNA revealed it to be a member of a distinct family that diverged from others of the rodent order millions of years ago. “To find something so distinct in this day and age is just extraordinary,” said Dr. Robert J. Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society, one of the discoverers. “For all we know, this could be the last remaining mammal family left to be discovered.”

It sure does look delicious. While I don’t know any details about this new mammal, there are several predictions I can make about it based on our knowledge of evolution:

• It will have red blood cells that lack nuclei.
• It will have three middle ear bones.
• It will have continuously growing incisors.
• It will be endothermic.

And so on. I can make these predictions based on known synapomorphies within the mammal or rodent lineages. These are characters inherited from the common ancestors that all mammals (or rodents) share. If this new species is not related through ancestry with other rodents and mammals, and was perhaps “specially created”, there is no reason to suspect that it would have these characters, especially since they are not relevant to the morphological appearance of the animal.

As reported in Agape Press, “Ga. Schools Denied Time to Appeal Evolution Disclaimer Ruling,” Brian Fahling, “a constitutional lawyer with the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy,” is doing a lot of projection:

Fahling says the opponents of the evolution disclaimers have been showing a tremendous amount of hostility. “The high priests of evolution, if you will, are becoming increasingly shrill in their attacks on, for instance, the intelligent design scientists,” the AFA Law Center attorney notes, “and the reason for that is they’re not able to answer [the proponents of the intelligent design theory]. They can’t debate them and meet them on intellectual and scientific terms.”

A bill has been introduced in New York that would require “all pupils in grades kindergarten through twelve in all public schools in the state [to] receive instruction in both theories of intelligent design and evolution.” Hopefully this is a reminder that creationism is not a political concern for education in just “red” states.

Additionally, Florida’s “Academic Freedom” Act has died. It would have allowed students to sue teachers who stated that evolution is a fact.

A report from Joshua Rosenau of Thoughts from Kansas:

I see things a little differently from Pat Hayes’s metastory.

Red State Rabble explains The Kansas Science Hearings Metastory, concluding that:

The barnstorming brotherhood of bible college biologists came, they saw, they did not conquer.

That remains to be seen. I’ve seen letters to the editor today complaining about the boycott and others criticizing Kathy Martin in harsh terms. I think the metastory (the story about the story) is still congealing.

I’m optimistic. But we will almost certainly have bad standards, and if the public isn’t outraged enough, anything Governor Sebelius does to delay their implementation could make her re-election campaign more complicated.

The other problem is that the coverage was almost uniformly over the ID vs. evolution perspective. That’s only half the story, at best.

The consistent theme of Saturday’s hearings were not so much a criticism of evolution as an attack on science. Any sort of naturalism was decried as an attack on theistic belief. Teaching science as scientists practice it was attacked as disenfranchisement of religious people. Again and again, practical naturalism (or methodological naturalism) was attacked.

That would open up the door not just to ID, but to creationism, flood geology, and Raelianism. Definitions of science may be in flux, but there’s a pretty sound consensus that flood geology is apologetics, not science. Astrology isn’t science, but it seems to fall within a supernaturalistic form of science. We can all agree that that doesn’t make sense.

And that explains the attacks on “historical sciences.” If evolution, astronomy and geology can be cut off from the other sciences, it makes this radical, fringe agenda seem less insane.

That’s the battle. It isn’t just evolution, it’s “materialism” or “naturalism.” It’s the culture war. I don’t know whether we’re winning that battle.

Here’s the latest from Red State Rabble, where correspondent Pat Hayes is doing a splendid job of tracking the Kansas kangaroo hearings.

This entry, The Kansas Science Hearings Metastory, is worth repeating here at the Panda’s Thumb.

Monday, May 09, 2005 The message that intelligent design proponents hoped would come out of last week’s testimony in Topeka is that there is a controversy between scientists over the validity evolutionary theory.

‘There is a genuine scientific controversy,’ insisted John Calvert, the intelligent design attorney, somewhat plaintively as the hearings came to a close Saturday.

The false notion that scientists are divided is key to the intelligent design movement’s strategy to convince school districts around the country to ‘teach the controversy’ over evolution.

That, of course, is only the first step on the road to their ultimate goal of replacing religiously neutral science with a science consonant with their own narrow Christian and theistic convictions.

Dembski in a blog posting called Evolution: Vast Ignorance and Trifling Understanding shows once again why ID is scientifically vacuous