October 2005 Archives

William Dembski has this odd habit when someone publishes a criticism of his writings. Rather than engage in substantive refutation of those criticisms, he often claims either to be the victim of some cosmic unfairness by the Darwinian Inquisition, or he claims that the person criticizing him is obsessed with him. As an example of the first, I point you to his frantic complaints of copyright violation and ethical mistreatment by Rob Pennock in early 2002, after Pennock had included a couple of essays of his in an anthology he edited called Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics. He accused Pennock of copyright infringement, but in fact he had the written permission of the actual copyright owners, Metanexus. The owners of Metanexus published a public exoneration of Pennock in the matter.

For an example of the second strategy, I point you to his having called Richard Wein, Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit his “internet stalkers” because they - gasp! - read and criticized his work. And in public. The nerve of these people, actually analyzing and critiquing the work of a scholar! He hasn’t done much to actually answer their critiques, mind you, but he’s called them “obsessed” and it appears that he thinks that actually defeats their arguments. Now he’s back making more weird accusations about the Dover trial, involving Shallit yet again. He writes:

Continue reading Dembski’s Obsessive Complaints of Obsession at Dispatches from the Culture Wars

The most recent issues of Natural History and Skeptical Inquirer magazines feature articles on Darwin, evolution, and, as SI puts it, the ID wars.

Join Alabama Citizens for Science Education to protect Alabama education.

The Associated Press is reporting this morning that Alabama state textbook committee several textbooks because they contained information on evolution.

The state textbook committee Thursday recommended dozens of science textbooks to be approved by the state school board for Alabama students, but rejected three elementary-level books for containing material on evolution which was deemed “controversial” for that age group.

The books were considered supplementary readers, meaning they could not be used as the sole textbook in the science curriculum, said Ron Dodson, a member of the committee, who presented the recommendations to the school board.

Each of the three elementary books rejected contained “controversial material at a grade level that is not developmentally ready for such controversial material,” according to a series of Sept. 28 memos sent to school board members. The books also didn’t meet the state’s science guidelines and were not “appropriate for the maturity level of the age group” they were targeting, the memos said.

The book “Geologic Time” (Perfection Learning Company) was rejected for an illustrated diagram that shows humans evolving from apes. Similarly, “Reptiles” (Heinemann-Raintree Classroom), incorporates two pages on reptiles evolving from amphibians. “Orangutan” (Heinemann-Raintree Classroom) discusses natural selection – a key part of the evolutionary theory.

(Committee turns down science texts)

In addition the committee has recommended that textbooks still contain a disclaimer.

The committee made its recommendations with the stipulation that high school biology textbooks would continue to carry a disclaimer which describes evolution as “a controversial theory” in the first paragraph and says in the second paragraph that any statement about the origin of life is “not fact.”

The purpose of the disclaimer is to give room to teachers who want to discuss alternative theories, namely creationism.

In addition it looks like some board members want textbooks to contain creationism.

However, after the meeting, school board member Betty Peters said she had hoped to see the textbooks discuss alternative theories of life, including creationism and intelligent design, in addition to evolution. She said that despite the disclaimer, many teachers are still afraid to teach about theories that are not included in textbooks. …

“I’m not saying advocate it, just open it for discussion,” Peters said.

Matthew J. Brauer, Barbara Forrest, and Steven G. Gey offer a timely, 149 page, review of intelligent design creationism and the constitution in Is It Science Yet? Intelligent Design, Creationism and the Constitution published in the Washington University Law Quarterly.

Matthew J. Brauer is Research Staff, Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University; B.A. (1988), University of California, Berkeley; M.S. (1988), University of Texas; Ph.D. (2000), University of Texas.

Barbara Forrest is Professor of Philosophy, Department of History and Political Science, Southeastern Louisiana University; B.A. (1974), Southeastern Louisiana University; M.A. (1978), Louisiana State University; Ph.D. (1988), Tulane University.

Steven G. Gey is David and Deborah Fonvielle and Donald and Janet Hinkle Professor of Law, Florida State University; B.A. (1978), Eckerd College; J.D. (1982), Columbia University.

PZ Myers has written a very interesting article on the evolution of insect wings. In the discussion of this article, JH Marden’s work on stonefly larvae came up and Marden now responded with a very nice example of an evolutionary prediction.

The York Daily Record reports on the testimony by Dover Board Member Heather Geesey who wrote a letter to the editor stating:

Dover Board Member Heather Geesey Wrote:

“You can teach creationism without its being Christianity”

But things only got better…

William Saletan has a very funny article on Slate titled The Brontosaurus Monty Python’s flying creationism.

Behe offered a number of interesting criticisms of Darwinism. But it’s impossible to focus on any of these criticisms, because they were so completely overshadowed by the brontosaurus in the room: ID’s sophomoric emptiness.

It seems that more an more media and scientists are realizing the scientific vacuity of Intelligent Design.

Note: I have corrected the many spelling errors. I blame it on an unfamiliar keyboard:-)

William Dembski has a peculiar post up in which he says,

Ask yourself why, after submitting almost 200 pages of materials against me in his expert witness report and after submitting to a deposition with the Thomas More Law Center in July, Jeffrey Shallit did not take the witness stand in Dover for the plaintiffs. Answer: his obsessiveness against me and ID made him a liability to the ACLU. If you don’t believe me, go here and here.

Um, Shallit was called as a “rebuttal expert”. The plaintiffs and defense each announced six expert witnesses on April 1, 2005. One month later, rebuttal experts were announced. The defense announced Steve Fuller and Stephen Meyer (director of the Discovery Institute ID program). Plaintiffs announced Jeff Shallit. However, Dembski dropped out of the case (or was withdrawn, or something – see the October 29 squabble at the American Enterprise Institute between the Discovery Institute and Thomas More Law Center about the withdrawal of Dembski, Meyer, and Campbell, online at NCSE). Without Dembski testifying, Shallit had no one to rebut, since his expert report specifically addresses Dembski’s arguments.

Speaking of withdrawing experts…

UPDATE: 10-28-05: The Kansas BOE issued a news release later yesterday saying that they were immediately addressing the copyright issue, and that they still intended to have the science standards on the November agenda. I have posted the news release in Comment 3 below. End update

From the National Academy of Sciences today:

Kansas Denied Use of National Science Education Standards National Science Education Standards.

October 26 – The National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association have refused to grant copyright permission to the Kansas State Board of Education to make use of publications by the two organizations in the state’s science education standards. According to a statement from the two groups, the new Kansas standards are improved, but as currently written, they overemphasize controversy in the theory of evolution and distort the definition of science.

These two organizations issued a joint statement, sent letters to the state BOE officially notifying them of this refusal to grant copyright permission, and released a lengthy response to those parts of the Kansas standards to which they object. All three of these documents can be downloaded from the NAS News Today webpage. These are strong and well-written statements, and, as a member of the writing committee, I appreciate this support from these national organizations very much .

Here are some excerpts, and a few comments.

A Citizens for Science organization has been finally organized for Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Citizens For Science (http://www.pacfs.org/) is “A non-profit group dedicated to strong science education in Pennsylvania public schools.” The mission of PACFS is

To make sure that the Pennsylvania Citizens for Pseudoscience, Bad Science, and Fake Science (they go by different names, of course) have no influence on science instruction in Commonwealth public schools. Our efforts are currently focused on protecting the ability of teachers to teach exclusively non-supernatural explanations for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and descent with modification (“evolution”) in science classes. Currently, teachers are often too scared to teach these topics, and thus evolution is given a mere 50 minutes or avoided altogether. The group does not oppose the discussion of supernatural phenomena in mythology, religion, or philosophy courses, or in private schools, homes, or churches.

We also try especially hard to promote the teaching of evolution in elementary schools, when children are most curious about dinosaurs, our similarity to other primates, and the origin of species and life itself. The group mascot is Phacops rana, a really cute trilobite from the Devonian, and the state’s official fossil.

If you care about science education in Pennsylvania, go join.

Yesterday, I was in Athens, GA meeting Dr. Steve “Number 22” Henikoff, who was visiting the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia. Steve Henikoff is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and works at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA.

On Wednesday morning we talked science over breakfast before I dropped him off at the department to talk to various professors and students through out the day. At the end of his day in Athens, he gave a packed talk to the department about his research on histone variants, nucleosome inheritance, and epigenetic inheritance.

On an interesting note, Steve Henikoff and PT author Reed Cartwright (with Luca Comai) have back to back papers coming out in November’s Plant Cell on HOTHEAD reversion, which Reed will expand on in a week or so.

Last week I wrote about the fact that Michael Behe claimed under oath in the Dover case that his book, Darwin’s Black Box, received even more thorough peer review than a scholarly article in a refereed journal. Now more and more facts are coming to light. We only know the names of 3 of the 5 reviewers - Michael Atchison, Robert Shapiro and K. John Morrow. Atchison, I’ve already documented, did not review the book at all. He had a 10 minute conversation about the book over the phone, without ever seeing the text, with an editor who was concerned about whether it would sell, not whether the science was solid. Skip Evans contacted Robert Shapiro and was told that he did review the book, and while he agreed with some of his analysis of origin-of-life research, he thinks his conclusions are false. He did, however, say that he thought that Behe’s book was the best explanation of the argument from design that was available.

Now, what of Morrow? As it turns out, this is the best of all. Over on the Panda’s Thumb, a commenter has left the text of an email from K. John Morrow in response to an inquiry about his review of Behe’s book. I contacted Dr. Morrow and we’ve spent some time on the phone over the last couple days discussing the situation. He has given me permission to post his response in full, with one disclaimer:

He dashed this response off pretty quickly in response to an inquiry and in retrospect he isn’t certain whether he reviewed the book for Free Press, who ultimately published the book, or for an earlier publisher who was considering publishing it. His recollection from a decade ago is that after he had given his review of the book and the review written by Russell Doolittle of part of the book, the editor told him that they didn’t think they were going to go ahead with publishing the book. But he can’t be certain at this point whether that was an editor for Free Press or an editor from a different publisher who was considering the book for publication. Ultimately this doesn’t matter. Behe himself named Morrow as a reviewer of the book in his testimony, so his views on the book are obviously germane to the question of the rigor of the peer review and whether it determined whether the book should be published. With that disclaimer, the post of his full response after the fold:

Continue reading Two More of Behe’s Reviewers Speak Out at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

by Dr. Robert Shapiro

As the author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers and 4 science books for the public, I can add the following comments. I was sent an examination copy of Darwin’s Black Box when it was in near-final form. At that point in most cases, a contract has been signed, advance payments against anticipated revenue have been sent to the author, and the publisher is committed to publication, except under unusual circumstances. I was acting as an editorial consultant, rather than a peer reviewer. In my experience, the principal concern of the editor of a Trade (mass-market) book at that point is that the book be marketable, rather than factually correct (libel is undesirable, but is the responsibility of the author). Peer review, for a scientific journal, is a very different process.

(And not in a supportive way). PZ and Orac discussed a recent New England Journal of Medicine editorial critical of intelligent design. Though the article had several shortcomings, it’s always a bonus to see other scientists treating ID as a valid threat (not in the scientific sphere, of course, but in the “hearts and minds” of the populace). Now the Journal of Clinical Investigation, another fairly heavy-hitter as far as medical journals go, recommends to its readers, Don’t be stupid about intelligent design. Kudos to them…now come the nitpicks. :)

(Continue reading at Aetiology)

Larry Caldwell (Litigious ignoramus) has issued a press release trumpeting a victory in his federal lawsuit against the Roseville, California school district.

Over at EvolutionBlog, I have posted this follow-up to Andrea’s post below. At issue is the ludicrous charge, posted at Denyse O’Leary’s pro-ID blog, that Stephen Jay Gould had such a low opinion of natural selection that he would not have signed the NCSE’s Steves statement. It wasn’t hard to find quotes from Gould’s writing that should really put this question to rest. For example, from Essay 12 of his book Ever Since Darwin, we find this:

Modern evolutionists cite the same plays and players; only the rules have changed. We are now told, with equal wonder and admiration, that natural selection is the agent of exquisite design. As an intellectual descendant of Darwin, I do not doubt this attribution.

Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most prolific writers in the history of science. If you want to know what Gould thought about evolution, the solution is to go to the library, retrieve one of his books, and read it. But in the shameless, value-free, twilit world of ID hucksters, such initiative is frowned upon.

It doesn’t take much to get some attention from the upper echelons of the Intelligent Design movement. All you need is two things:

1. an argument against mainstream evolutionary theory, no matter how old and stale (e.g.: “mutations are not really random”, “we can tell design when we see it”, “natural selection is a tautology”, “common descent is an illusion” etc)

and

2. some sort of claim of authority to prop up that argument (“I have a PhD in a science-related field”; “I design/engineer things for a living, so I know how design works”; “I have written a pioneering/forthcoming/acclaimed book on the topic”; etc).

Of all the latter kind of claims, the most bizarre I have heard is probably the one underlying the latest post at Denyse O’Leary’s blog: she believes a guy’s take on evolution and on Stephen J. Gould’s ideas, because Gould used to spend time at his beach house. Seriously.

(Please note - an update now follows the main entry)

‘New recruits’ said needed for intelligent design

In the Dover circus (updates continue here), a sociologist named Steve Fuller testified yesterday on behalf of the defense. What was a theme of his testimony? Recruit the younger generation to give ID theory a boost–since apparently, the senior level ID “theorists” haven’t been able to come up with jack squat.

Introducing “intelligent design” to high school students could help the idea gain wider acceptance among mainstream scientists, a sociology professor testified Monday in a landmark federal trial over whether the concept can be mentioned in public school biology classes.

Fuller said minority views can sometimes have a difficult time getting a toehold in the scientific community, but students might be inspired to develop intelligent design as future scientists if they hear about the concept in school.

“You have to provide openings where you have new recruits to the theory,” Fuller said. “Unless you put it into the school system, it’s not going to happen spontaneously.”

And later in the article:

“It seems to me in many respects the cards are stacked against radical, innovative views getting a fair hearing in science these days,” he said.

Once again, it makes you wonder how such “minority views” as a bacterial cause for ulcers and symbiogenesis ever made it without a political lobby.

Edited to add: once again, Mike Argento nails it.

Fuller said intelligent design is, essentially, a half-baked idea, pretty much something the intelligent design guys have whipped up without doing much in the way of producing evidence.

And that’s why it should be taught to ninth-graders in Dover.

You know, I can come up with a lot of half-baked ideas that no one in their right mind would want to teach to kids in Dover. Let’s see. How about this? Cows think in Spanish. Discuss.

A major development in the Dover trial yesterday. The Discovery Institute had submitted a brief in the case last week and Judge Jones issued an order denying that brief’s use in the case. Our attorneys had filed a motion to strike that brief from the proceedings on the grounds that it was an attempt to get the expert testimony of Stephen Meyer and William Dembski on the record in the case after they had pulled out as expert witnesses, thus avoiding being cross examined on their claims. The judge agreed, ruling:

As all parties and amici filers are well aware, both Mr. Dembski and Mr. Meyer are no longer expert witnesses for the Defendants. Over the course of this trial we have provided both parties with every opportunity to present their expert witnesses, and accordingly the parties have engaged in thorough cross-examination of the opposing experts. We thus find it to be fundamentally unfair to receive a brief that frequently references an expert report, that was originally prepared for use in this case when Mr. Meyer was to be offered as a defense expert witness, and which contains the full revised report of Mr. Meyer as an attachment to the brief. The inclusion of such information in an ad hoc unsolicited fashion, when Plaintiffs have not had the opportunity to cross-examine such expert witness is clearly inappropriate under the circumstances. In fact, “Appendix A” of the amicus brief is entitled “Revised Report of Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D., May 19, 2005” and it is clearly an expert report prepared in anticipation of Mr. Meyer’s testimony at trial. We will not countenance what is clearly a “back door” attempt to insert expert testimony into the record free of the crucible of trial and cross-examination.

In addition, after a careful review of the Discovery Institute’s submission, we find that the amicus brief is not only reliant upon several portions of Mr. Meyer’s attached expert report, but also improperly addresses Mr. Dembski’s assertions in detail, once again without affording Plaintiffs any opportunity to challenge such views by cross-examination. Accordingly, the “Brief of Amicus Curiae, the Discovery Institute” shall be stricken in its entirety.

Huge development in the case. Stay tuned for more.

No sooner do I finish Jack Krebs blog entry about John Calvert’s dishonest remarks at a recent public presentation than I find this amusing essay (PDF format) linked to over at William Dembski’s blog.

The title of the essay: “Are We Liars?” The author: John Calvert.

I offer some thoughts on the subject in this post over at EvolutionBlog. Enjoy!

In the following exchange, Behe seems to be uncertain as to what intelligent design really does. When asked about exaptation, he answers that exaptation is consistent with intelligent design (but what isn’t…). He then claims that intelligent design ‘only focuses on the mechanism of how such a thing would happen’.

Q. But it is certainly, exaptation – for example, a bird wing developing from some kind of feathered structure on a dinosaur that didn’t necessarily allow flight, that’s what evolutionary biologists propose, and they call it exaptation?

A. That’s entirely possible, and that’s consistent with intelligent design, because intelligent design only focuses on the mechanism of how such a thing would happen. So the critical point for my argument is, how such things could develop by random mutation and natural selection.

Q. And again, intelligent design doesn’t describe how it happened?

A. That’s correct, only to say that intelligence was involved somewhere in the process.

The Discovery Institute has submitted an incredibly poorly argued Amicus Brief in the Kitzmiller case. But let’s first try an interesting experiment.

Let’s try the ‘reverse Pandas experiment’, replace intelligent design with creationism and see where the evidence leads us (to use a common creationist ‘argument’)…

During my visit to Sydney (Australia), a coalition of 70,000 Australian scientists and educators has published an open letter condemning the teaching of intelligent design in school science classes.

Professor Mike Archer, the Dean of Sciences at the University of New South Wales, seems to have been one of the leading forces behind this initiative.

ABC AUstralia: Scientists, teachers protest intelligent design

Australian scientists have been outspoken about Intelligent Design.

Australia’s world-renowned physicist Paul Davies say ID is codswallop, not science but creationism in disguise.

The Australian September 03, 2005

I don’t use the word “lie” loosely. I know it means deliberately saying something that one knows not to be true.

But in this case, I am willing to claim that John Calvert lied to the audience at his presentation at a conference hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. this past week. I hope to write more about Calvert’s presentation there, which was in conjunction with a speech by Barbara Forrest, but here I want to concentrate on one comment made by Calvert concerning Kansas Citizens for Science.

Welcome to the first edition of Ask Prof. Steve Steve. Our first question comes from Jeremy Porath of Purdue.

Professor Steve Steve,

I read an article a while back about a group of Australian scientists who were attempting to bring back an extinct animal, the Tasmanian Tiger (or Thylacine) with cloning.

However, about two years ago, I read a book (What Do Martians Look Like?) that contained a rant against Jurassic Park that lead me to believe this sort of endeavor would be impossible. The relevant portions of the book and article are quoted on my LiveJournal.

I was hoping that you, or one of your colleagues, could perhaps shed some light on this and tell me which group is “correct”–or both, or neither, as the case may be.

Many thanks, Jeremy Porath, Junior, Purdue University

Jeremy, the Tasmanian Tiger cloning experiment is possible because the species only went extinct in the last 100 years. Unlike, dinosaurs Tasmanian Tiger DNA is still young enough to be potentially usable.

I had a deadline for a “real” science article that was receding into the past at an alarming rate (to my co-author if not the journal editors).

So, what did I do? Of course! I wrote a totally unrelated item about creationist lies from Answers in Genesis. The motivation was when a young creationist was floating big chunks, err, posting large sections from an Answers in Genesis article about the origin of the Moon written (sort of) by Michael Oard.

John Stear was kind enough to post it on NAiG entitled “Oard’s Moonbeam”.

Michael Behe took quite a flogging in Dover. Particularly embarrassing was the revelation that the “peer review” by one scientist of Darwin’s Black Box that Behe himself has described as more rigorous than the process journal submissions go through turned out to be a ten minute phone conversation. PZ Myers closed his blog entry on the matter by saying he’d “love to hear what Shapiro had to say about that book.”

Dr. Robert Shapiro is another scientist who reviewed DBB. Reading PZ’s closing line, I started wondering myself. So I emailed Dr. Shapiro and asked him what he thought of DBB, and Behe’s ideas, and he has been kind enough to give me permission to reprint his response, unedited and in full, here. Thank you, Dr. Shapiro.

Dear Mr. Evans,

I felt that Professor Behe’s book has done a better job of explaining existing science than others of its kind. I agree with him that conventional scientific origin-of-life theory is deeply flawed. I disagreed with him about the idea that one needed to invoke intelligent designer or a supernatural cause to find an answer. I do not support intelligent design theories. I believe that better science will provide the needed answers.

Sincerely yours, Robert Shapiro

In an email to me concerning this post, Matt Inlay points out that had Behe’s submission been to a scientific journal Dr. Shapiro’s review would have forced Behe to either change his conclusion of ID, or remove it entirely.

My colleague, Taner Edis, Associate Professor of Physics at Truman State University, sent the following e-mail to a mailing list in which we both participate. The e-mail is reproduced here with permission. Read it carefully before you gloat about the shellacking we think our side is delivering in the Kitzmiller trial.

One of the interesting segments of the Michael Behe cross examination begins on page 42 of the Day12AM transcript, and it concerns a paper that Behe wrote with David Snoke. That paper, called Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Feature that Requires Multiple Amino Acid Residues, was based upon a computer simulation that attempted to answer the question of how long it would take cumulative point mutations in a single gene to produce a new trait - the interaction of two proteins - requiring a change in multiple amino acid residues if there was no selective advantage to preserve any of the individual mutations until they were all present and the final result was fully functional. For Behe, this is a simple example of irreducible complexity:

Thus in order for a protein that did not have a disulfide bond to evolve one, several changes in the same gene have to occur. Thus in a sense, the disulfide bond is irreducibly complex, although not really to the same degree of complexity as systems made of multiple proteins.

This paper has been lauded by ID advocates as an excellent example of ID-stimulated research. The DI has listed it as an example of genuine peer reviewed research that supports ID. William Dembski has declared that Behe and Snoke’s research “may well be the nail in the coffin [and] the crumbling of the Berlin wall of Darwinian evolution.” Unfortunately for them, this paper didn’t hold up well under questioning during the Dover trial.

Continue reading Behe Disproves Irreducible Complexity at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Scientists in Australia have taken a stand against ID. The Weekend Australian reports:

Ban design theory in class: scientists Leigh Dayton, Science writer October 21, 2005

A COALITION of more than 70,000 Australian scientists and science educators has condemned the teaching in science classes of “intelligent design” - a creationist-like theory of the origin of life.

In an open letter published today in major newspapers, including The Australian, the group says it is “gravely concerned” that intelligent design is being taught in schools as an alternative to evolution.

“It’s important scientists take a stand on this because intelligent design is nothing more than creationism dressed up in a tuxedo,” says Mike Archer, dean of science at the University of NSW and the driving force behind the letter. “It’s the same mishmash of theology and science.”

The letter urges governments and educators to oppose the teaching of intelligent design in the nation’s science classes.

This morning both Casey Luskin, at the DI’s “news” blog and Dembski at his Uncommon Dissent blog posted extensive quotes from Austalian newspapers concerning this.

During the cross examination of Michael Behe in the Dover trial, he was questioned about whether the peer review process for his book, Darwin’s Black Box, was as rigorous as for a scholarly article in a refereed journal. He replied that it was even more rigorous. That led to an exchange that seriously impeached the credibility of Behe’s testimony. I have one report on it here and John Lynch has another report on it here.

Prof. Steve Steve always seems to have time to spare during his travels. (Traveling by parcel seems to give him some down time.) Now he and some colleagues have decided to answer questions submitted by students, teachers, and parents.

If you’ve got a question about science or cultural issues around it, drop the furry professor a line at [Enable javascript to see this email address.] or [Enable javascript to see this email address.].

Please include your name, school, town, and science course, as appropriate.

by Joe Meert

There were two days of talks given at the recent GSA meeting. Abstracts can be found at: http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2005AM/fi[…]on_16049.htm and http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2005AM/fi[…]on_16171.htm.

I’ll report as best I can on these two days beginning with day 2. I’ll try not to interject comments although it is hard to avoid.

Do you worship Prof. Steve Steve?

How about showing it this Halloween?

Dress up as the fuzzy professor for Halloween and send us a photo to enter the costume contest. Worthy entries will receive prizes like t-shirts or maybe a visit from the Professor himself.

To submit your photo, upload it to the Internet and place a link to its location in a comment to this post. You must give us a way to contact you in your comment either an email or a link to a site with an email address.

(Note that the actual prize has not been decided yet.)

Tangled Bank #39 is now available at The Questionable Authority. Enjoy.

The Rio Rancho (NM) School District adopted a slickly-worded “Science” policy in August, which many fear will open up the classrooms of this Intel bedroom community to “Intelligent Design.” (See earlier reports on the Thumb here, here, here, here, and here.)

Now, the school employees union has sued to stop the policy, and the Saga has made the National News.

Ah, how rare is it that my interest in stomping creationists and my interest in infectious disease collide. But I guess that when there’s a topic as hot as avian influenza, it’s inevitable that even the folks at the DI will sit up and take notice, as Casey Luskin has in this post: Avian Flu: An Example of Evolution?

First, as Luskin admits in the article, the answer to his titular questions is, “well, duh; of course it is.” And alas, it doesn’t get any better from there.

Continue reading (at Aetiology)

In a post Monday, October 17, 2005 on the Discovery’s Institute’s Evolution News and Views blog, (a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one), Casey Luskin makes the following comment in regards to the Caldwell’s recent suit against the evolution website:

Caldwell thus does not allege that teaching evolution endorses religion. Rather Caldwell is alleging that when the government specifically suggests to students that “religion need not conflict with evolution,” that the government is telling students what their religious beliefs should be. According to Caldwell, this form of telling students how their religious beliefs should deal with evolution constitutes impermissible religious endorsement on the part of the government.

There is an important misconception here that also came up at the Kansas hearings. Informing people about different religions’ views on the nature of God’s relationship to the natural world, and thus those religions’views on the relationship between science and religion, is not the same as endorsing those views. More specifically, it is educationally appropriate to highlight the beliefs of Christians and other theists who accept evolution in order to combat the mistaken notion that Christians can’t accept evolution: doing so is not the same as saying that such theists are correct. Scientifically, we can’t pass judgment on any theological position, but we can offer accurate observations about the scope of religious belief.

Let me tell a story from Kansas concerning this issues, and then draw some conclusions.

Spurred by a host of new findings in molecular and cellular biology, in recent years an increasing number of determined biologists have come to envision processes that contradict century-old biological assumptions and seem to defy the expectations of Darwinian evolutionary theory…

Naaah, I am not talking about ID. I am talking about prions, the specter of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, and “heretical” views about biology. And what must be truly baffling for conspiracy-minded ID advocates, the inflexible “Darwinist orthodoxy” seems to positively dig this “heresy”. Now, that must hurt…

Since there appears to be an ongoing confusion about the work by Haeckel, the relevance of his work to Darwinian theory and the work by von Baer, I have researched these issues and despite the somewhat unorganized nature of my thoughts and findings, I have decided to present the results now rather than wait another 1 or 2 months before I have time to revisit this issue in more depth.

In Iconoclasts of Evolution: Haeckel, Behe, Wells & the Ontogeny of a Fraud The American Biology Teacher Volume: 67 Issue: 5 Pages: 275-282, authors, Pickett, Kurt M., Wenzel, John W., and Rissing, Steven W. examine the arguments by Behe and Wells about Haeckel and von Baer.

They conclude that, contrary to the claims (by Wells and Behe):

Darwin did not rely on Haeckel, but rather on von Baer. von Baer’s stance against ‘evolution’ is irrelevant. Behe (1998) and Wells (1999, 2000) are deeply confused or intentionally confusing regarding the history and significance of this well-known field, an area they claim has special meaning in their political movement.

A particular ironic statement is made by Wells:

But Darwin persisted in citing him [von Baer] anyway, making him look like a supporter of the very doctrine of evolutionary parallelism he explicitly rejected

Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution 2000, page 86.

I wonder how Wells feels about the DI bibliography, given the above objections.…

Wishful (or careless) reading seems to be an ongoing ‘problem’ at the people at the Center for the renewal of science and Culture of the Discovery Institute.

When the University of Idaho reiterated its commitment to teaching scientifically relevant theories in science classes, the Discovery Institute (DI) was quick to accuse the university of attacking academic freedom. What caught my eye however was the following statement.

Rob Crowther Wrote:

The University of Idaho maintains that the edict censoring science wasn’t focused at [Scott] Minnich, but it seems that even [Eugenie] Scott found that hard to believe.

So what is it that Eugenie Scott said that led Crowther to make this statement?

Wildernesse (Tiffany) is a beautiful law student who just happens to be married to a handsome evolutionary biologist. Today in her class on education law they discussed evolution and creationism. She has written about it on her blog, go check it out.

Oh well. I wish people were more educated. I’m not even well-educated on this subject, but I know that a lot of what is spouted off out there is nonsense. (My definition of well-educated for laypersons is whether you can explain a frequency-dependent selection model, a phylogenetic tree, and why humans are taxonomically classified as an ape. If you can’t do those things, what makes you think you know enough? I am arbitrary and I love it.) I wish people didn’t feel they had to cram their religious beliefs into a stunted mold and become blind to the utterly awe-inspiring natural mechanisms of our world. Let God out of the box.

It seems like a lifetime ago now, but it was only December 7, 2004 when I posted the original “Panda-monium” post on PT, linking to NCSE’s new webpage of resources on Of Pandas and People. At the time, I was relatively new to Pandas. However, even back then it struck me that Pandas was a particularly important work, because it was published in 1989 and thus substantially predated the rest of the “intelligent design” corpus. At the time, I remarked that:

During a break in the Dover Trial, I traveled to historic Cambridge, MA to attend the Fifteenth 1^st annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Visiting Cambridge allowed me to visit several friends at Harvard University, where the Ig Nobels were held. Over the years, Harvard has attracted many famous evolutionary biologists, but also many creationists. Not counting its pilgrim founders, who had no knowledge of the modern scientific method (“methodological naturalism,” as my creationist friends call it nowadays) developed in the 17^th century after the puritans fled England, Harvard has been home to a few influential creationists, from Louis Agassiz in the 19^th century to modern day Intelligent Design creationists. I had a chance to visit them both on this trip, and you’re welcome to join me on my travels.

Dearest Cheri: whether you inundated the committee with every other standard used in the civilized world does not address the point at issue, which is whether you handed the committee the completely useless “Santorum language” with the implication that it had any legal force with respect to drawing up science standards.

(Continue reading… on The Austringer)

Although I hate to give credibility to statements which are so anti-science, I also believe that educating those who are willing to hear the “rest of the story” is important.

Point in case:

In a recent blog posting, Denyse O’Leary stated the following on the Cambrian explosion. Since her comments may be of direct interest to this group, I would like to repeat them here and discuss why they are flawed.

On October 6^th, the Discovery Institute issued a press release titled Dover Trial Witness Plays Misleading Word Games In Effort to Redefine Intelligent Design.

The release declares

“Forrest is playing word games, without looking at the meaning of the words,” said Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, in response to an intelligent design opponent’s testimony.

Plaintiff’s witness, Dr. Barbara Forrest, pointed to the word “creation” in early drafts of the supplemental textbook Of Pandas and People which in her opinion is evidence that intelligent design was the same thing as creationism.

“At the time the authors began work on Pandas, there was no widely accepted way to describe the scientific position being advocated there,” said Luskin, “namely that there are indicators of design in nature, that scientists should remain open to the possibility of intelligent causes, and that such evidence does not tell us the identity of the designer.” …

Luskin’s comment is funny, because Discovery’s Jonathan Witt said the exact opposite recently!

This post describes a discovery by Dr. Thomas D. Schneider which is a much stronger proof of intelligent design than all those incessantly disseminated books, essays and interviews by the fellows of the Discovery Institute. We expect that the ID advocates will promptly acknowledge our contribution to their case. (Thanks to Dr. Schneider for this guest contribution.) The full text of Dr. Schneider’s epochal breakthrough paper can be seen here

It’s always nice when there’s a groundbreaking article in the literature, and the subject just happens to be your baby. My current research focuses on Streptococcus agalactiae (group B streptococcus, GBS), a bacterium that is the leading cause of neonatal meningitis in the United States. It also is a leading cause of invasive infection in the elderly, and can cause sepsis and toxic shock-like syndrome in healthy adults. No vaccine is currently available.

But what’s garnered attention recently hasn’t been any clinical presentations or new case reports of GBS disease; it’s the bacterium’s DNA. Specifically, the whole genomic sequences of 8 different strains of GBS, and the conclusions the authors have come to regarding bacterial genetic diversity–that it may be “endless.”

Continue reading (at Aetiology).

This essay is authored by Dr. Thomas D. Schneider. We thank Dr. Schneider for this guest contribution.

Intelligent Design advocates frequently state that living things are too complex to have evolved. This article shows how Claude Shannon’s information measure has been used as a well-regarded proxy for ‘complexity’ to predict the information that is required for a genetic control system to operate. This measure is called Rfrequency because it is computed from the frequency of binding sites in the genome for proteins that do the genetic control. Using information theory, we can also precisely measure the information in DNA sequences at the binding sites, a measure that is called Rsequence. In nature we observe that Rsequence is close to Rfrequency, which implies that Rsequence must have evolved towards Rfrequency. A model that you can run on your computer demonstrates this evolution, starting from no pattern in the binding sites and ending with the two measures being equal within the noise of the measurement. The amount of information evolved in the model is far more than the Intelligent Design claim can withstand. Given 2 bi