November 2005 Archives

On his blog, William Dembski is trying once again to argue that the intelligent designer need not be God: Everyone knows he doesn’t mean it, of course, but this is the pretense that they must maintain for purposes of their legal strategy. Unfortunately, their own words keep tripping them up in the attempt. He writes:

In those programs, Stewart & Co. had some lines that were not only funny but also memorable. The one that sticks out poked fun at ID: “We’re not saying that the designer is God, just someone with the same skill-set.” That line is now being reused on the debate circuit, with Eugenie Scott, for instance, deploying it this November at a debate at Boston University (go here).

Although the line is funny, it is not accurate. God’s skill-set includes not just ordering matter to display certain patterns but also creating matter in the first place. God, as understood by the world’s great monotheistic faiths, is an infinite personal transcendent creator. The designer responsible for biological complexity, by contrast, need only be a being capable of arranging finite material objects to display certain patterns. Accordingly, this designer need not even be infinite. Likewise, that designer need not be personal or transcendent (cf. the “designer” in Stoic philosophy).

Now let’s look, for the umpteenth time, at how the Discovery Institute - where Dembski is a senior fellow - defines intelligent design:

Continue Reading at Dispatches From the Culture Wars. All comments should be left there.

The AP is reporting that the National Zoo’s Panda club had a photo shoot today: Panda cub gets its close-up.

More than 100 reporters and camera crews from around the world got their first look at the fuzzy creature as they filed past his indoor enclosure in five different shifts. And the 4 1/2-month-old cub did not disappoint.

He chased his zookeeper around, trying to nibble at the hems of her jeans. He pulled himself over the ledge of the habitat’s rocky centerpiece. He tumbled onto his back, and he gummed at the bamboo stalks that will someday form his diet.

CNN even has a video of the tyke.

The Chicago Tribune has an article up about a new IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness) club at Cornell University, where the president recently delivered a scathing critique of intelligent design in his annual address to the school. The article includes many misconceptions and falsehoods, beginning with the first premise uttered by the new chapter’s founder:

The national spotlight recently has focused on school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that are grappling with calls for including intelligent design, a concept critical of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, in science curricula. But a significant new front in this cultural conflict is opening in the halls of American higher education, spearheaded by science students skeptical of evolution and intrigued by intelligent design.

One of them is Hannah Maxson. A math and chemistry major at Cornell University, she founded an Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club here this fall.

“In my opinion, both intelligent design and Darwinian evolution are science. Both have philosophical implications. Intelligent design implies the universe is somewhat directed. Darwinian evolution implies a naturalistic worldview,” Maxson, 21, said.

Continue Reading at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Comments may be left there rather than here.

Since I don’t think I posted this before, all of the PDFs of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial are now available on NCSE’s website – in searchable, error-free form, which was not previously the case. See also the TalkOrigins HTML version of the transcripts, complete with graphics, links, and HTML anchors for each question (just click on the “Q”).

In case you were wondering, variations on the word “flagellum” appeared 385 times during the trial. I was about to suggest that this count beats the total of all previous usages of the word “flagellum” in all trials, anywhere in history, but then I remembered the original meaning of “flagellum”, which is the latin term for “whip.”

(Rumor has it that immune system fans were disappointed that their favorite “irreducible complex” system only got 145 mentions. Then again, only the plaintiffs seemed to enjoy talking about the immune system…)

Also, the United States District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania has just posted all of the Proposed Findings of Fact from the Defense and Plaintiffs on their website.

A few months back, Nature published a series of papers on the completion of the chimpanzee genome, including a massive comparison of the human and chimp genomes (free online). One of the major utilities of having two closely-related genomes to compare (in addition to showing that humans and chimps have close common ancestors, as in Ken Miller’s testimony on Day 1 of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial) is that genes that are evolving rapidly under natural selection can be detected.

At the time, an odd observation stuck in my head: not only were things like immune system genes evolving rapidly (as they do in apparently all mammals studied thus far – it’s a war zone out there with the microbes), but according to Table 4 of the Nature article, so were some olfactory and taste receptor genes. This seemed rather odd, given that humans are not exactly first among the beasts when it comes to sniffing capabilities, or, I presume, tasting (although according to this PNAS article, our “gustatory receptors” are doing rather better than our olfactory receptors, many of which have become pseudogenes).

Even with our modest capabilities in this area, however, there are evidently some pretty important things that at least our taste receptors can do. Protect humans from malaria, for example. Read Carl Zimmer’s latest to find out how.

Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon and the lights of fireflies related to malaria and power grids? I know it’s something that’s kept me up many a sleepless night. One word: interconnections.

Many of you have probably heard of the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. This is based on the work of Stanley Milgram beginning in the 1960s, and brought up again more recently in a 1998 Nature paper, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” by mathematicians Watts and Strogatz. Milgram conducted a number of studies using his “lost letter technique,” in which letters were sent out and then needed to be forwarded onto reach their destination. In one instance, Milgram sent out 160 letters to individuals in the midwest, with instructions to pass them along to acquaintances who would be most likely to reach his stockbroker friend back east. Almost all of the letters that reached the stockbroker did so via one of 3 friends—and most did it within 6 steps–hence the “six degrees of separation” idea. Similarly, Duncan Watts first became interested in the “small world problem”—the idea that all of us are more closely connected than we realize—after watching fireflies flash in synchrony, and wondering how they accomplished that. What Watts, Strogatz, Milgram, and others were investigating boiled down to a series of links in a network—hubs and connectors. As Watts and Strogatz showed in their 1998 paper, all it took to make a “small world” from a regular network was the addition of a few “short cuts” (see figure from their paper, right). This elegant and seemingly simple structure of networks explains not only connections between movie stars and scientists but also cellular metabolism, ecology webs and the World Wide Web itself.

Continued at Aetiology

2001 winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Eric Cornell, gave a speech at his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Time article is an adaptation of this speech.

Cornell claims that science isn’t about knowing the mind of God, but about understanding nature and the reasons for things. For science, Cornell claims, Intelligent Design is a dead-end idea because it claims that the scientific reason for things is that God wanted it that way. Cornell calls on scientists to keep Intelligent Design out of science classes, and to keep moral and religious judgments out of science.

Time; 11/14/2005, Vol. 166 Issue 20, p98-98, 1p, 1c

Remember Behe’s testimony?

After being denied the much sought after status as ‘scientific’, Intelligent Design has run into another roadblock, upsetting the time line laid out in the Wedge Strategy

Intelligent design — already the planned subject of a controversial Kansas University seminar this spring — will make its way into a second KU classroom in the fall, this time labeled as a “pseudoscience.”

In addition to intelligent design, the class Archaeological Myths and Realities will cover such topics as UFOs, crop circles, extrasensory perception and the ancient pyramids.

I discussed here new research on venom evolution that topples some old conventional wisdom. It seems this and another study are already making waves in that field. Genealogy of Scaly Reptiles Rewritten by New Research

The most comprehensive analysis ever performed of the genetic relationships among all the major groups of snakes, lizards, and other scaly reptiles has resulted in a radical reorganization of the family tree of these animals, requiring new names for many of the tree’s new branches. The research, reported in the current issue of the journal C. R. Biologies, was performed by two biologists working at Penn State University: S. Blair Hedges, professor of biology, and Nicolas Vidal, a postdoctoral fellow in Hedges’ research group at the time of the research who now is a curator at the National Museum in Paris.

Vidal and Hedges collected and analyzed the largest genetic data set ever assembled for the scaly reptiles known as squamates. The resulting family tree has revealed a number of surprising relationships. For example, “The overwhelming molecular-genetic evidence shows that the primitive-looking iguanian lizards are close relatives of two of the most advanced lineages, the snakes on the one hand and the monitor lizards and their relatives on the other,” Vidal says.

The eminent science journal Nature has a letter (subscription required) from Professor A. Richard Palmer of the Systematics and Evolution Group, at the University of Alberta.

In it, he proposes that we teach the controversy - not only should we teach that there is an Intelligent Design hypothesis, we should also teach that there is an Intelligent Deceiver motivating the ID movement.

Individuals who understand how to debate alternative scientific hypotheses would never intentionally promote religious dogma as science. So an intelligent deceiver must be at work, guiding proponents of ID to sow confusion over valid scientific debate.

Heavy Demand for Intelligent Design and Science Wars Articles Prompts SciPolicy Journal to Give Free and Open Access to Archives Haverford, PA (PRWEB) November 21, 2005 – SciPolicy – The Journal of Science and Health Policy – announced today that all of its articles are now free and open access on-line.

The public service move is prompted by a recent ten-fold increase in demands on its already busy website (http://scipolicy.net) for articles related to its Amicus Curiae brief in Federal Court (the case of Kitzmiller, et al v Dover Area School District and Dover Area School District Board of Directors) and for its editorial opposing government mandates to teach of intelligent design in public schools, and its numerous articles on the Science Wars.

Fox News reports that Professor Paul Mirecki will be teaching a class on intelligent design.

The class, titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies” will be taught in the religious studies department of the university.

Carl Zimmer has a post today about the work of Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry on the evolution of snake venom. If that name sounds familiar to those of you who aren’t reptile specialists, you may have run across Dr. Fry’s homepage, or you may have seen his research profiled previously on Panda’s Thumb here, or you may have read comments by the good doc in this thread. Zimmer, as always, has an excellent overview of Fry et al‘s new paper in Nature (link ), but he didn’t emphasize the one sneak peek I received from Bryan. So, I thought I’d add a bit to Carl’s overview.

(Continued at Aetiology…)

Although attacks on evolution education usually come from politically conservative groups, it’s wrong to get the impression that conservatives are monolithically hostile to evolution. In fact, many prominent political conservatives, including Charles Krauthammer, John Derbyshire, and Larry Arnhart, not only defend evolution, but are worried about the fallout for conservatism when the ID movement finally blows up, as it must. I myself am not sympathetic to reconciliation between evolution and religion, as I explained in this post, and I’m not a political conservative myself. But conservatism is a respectable political position, and it would be a shame if it hitched itself permanently to the plummeting star of Intelligent Design. Conservatives who stand up for evolution deserve praise for their intellectual integrity; it can’t be easy for them to stand up against their friends and allies on such a controversial issue. On that score, congratulations to Timothy Wheeler for his post on the Claremont Institute’s weblog.

Update: Meanwhile, the (non-conservative) Cato Institute’s Andrew J. Coulson has this article on the ID/evolution fight.

Recently I had the opportunity to visit some of my relatives at the Panda Reserve in Chungdu, China. I was invited to visit the Reserve by my friend Dr. Steve “Number 42” Case. Number 42, besides being one of the original Project Steve Steves, is also co-chairperson of the Kansas Science Standards Writing Committee as well as Director of the Center for Research on Learning at the University of Kansas.

It was certainly moving to see my ancestral home and native habitat. I don’t run into many pandas in the scientific circles I inhabit, nor many real bamboo stands for dinner.

I imagine that Number 42 is enjoying doing research in China right now rather than dealing with the continuing shenanigans of the state Board of Education back in Kansas. He tells me that his next stop is Zhengzhou, the place where KU recently acquired fossil dinosaur eggs from. He is going to see if he can acquire some - maybe I’ll be able to visit him there also.

After various other Vatican officials had already expressed their discomfort with the Intelligent Design Creationism movement, Cardinal Schonborn, who initially had confused some with his comments about intelligent design, has finally outlined the details.

Schonborn, whose initial comments on Intelligent Design may have been coached by organizations supporting ID, seems to have come to the realization that Intelligent Design is scientifically vacuous.

My critique of Gerald Schroeder’s first book, Genesis and the Big Bang (Bantam Books, 1990), and of his second book, The Science of God (The Free Press, 1997), was first posted in April 1999, almost seven years ago. It was updated when Schroeder published his third book, The Hidden Face of God (The Free Press, 2001). My critical remarks can be seen here or here. Besides these posts on the internet, my critique of Schroeder was published in vol. 23, No 4 (2003) of Skeptic (Australia). Then, in my book Unintelligent Design, released by Prometheus Books in November of 2003, there is a chapter specifically discussing Schroeder’s three books. There also are references to my critique of Schroeder in various reviews of my book, both online and in print.

Response from Schroeder? A seven year long silence.

Now a reader of Talk Reason by the name of Daniel emailed Schroeder a copy of my post critiquing Schroeder’s output. This time Schroeder finally deigned to reply, probably because Daniel seems to be affiliated with he same religious organization as Schroeder (see here).

I will not repeat here my critical remarks regarding Schroeder’s output, which can be seen at any of the above mentioned places. Instead I will only address Schroeder’s “reply” to Daniel.

The Clergy Project letter now has 9,919 signatures, and their goal is to collect 10,000 signatures. This is a letter signed by clergy in the USA that asserts that religion and science are compatible, and further that evolutionary biology should be taught: “To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

So, if you are a member of the clergy, or if you know of a member of the clergy who has not yet signed, this is the final call for signatures. Instructions are on this page.

Update: The Clergy Project was at 10,002 signatures as of November 23^rd, 2005. Congratulations to Michael Zimmerman, and thanks to the participating clergy.

…and has spawned some press coverage, here in the Ames Tribune and here in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, making us the first state to have faculty from all Regent universities speak out against intelligent design. I’ll briefly address some of the comments.

In the first article, U of I physics professor (and signer of the DI’s “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition) Fred Skiff elaborates one giant strawman:

“It’s part of science to consider what blinders you might be wearing,” Skiff said. “Materialists put conditions on science that things can only exist if they satisfy materialism. I think that is a mistake.”

(Continued at Aetiology)

Edited to add: bummer, as noted in the comments, Missouri beat us to the punch.

Edited again to add: I see Dembski is claiming “ ID proponents were bypassed” when we circulated this. Not true at all–I don’t even know who on the faculty is an “ID proponent” besides the already-mentioned Fred Skiff (and I can’t say how it was circulated within the physics department, if it went there at all). It was mostly passed along through word-of-mouth, and generally sent to entire departments or colleges at a time. The idea that we were bypassing certain people on a faculty this large is a joke.

The Seattle PI reports that Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, has observed the obvious namely that “Intelligent design isn’t science even though it pretends to be,…”

While the Catholic church obviously supports ‘intelligent design’, it also seems to realize that ‘Intelligent Design’ is scientifically vacuous.

I just stumbled on an interesting old article in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation (The ASA is the long-established organization of scientists who are evangelical Christians. The membership ranges from young-earth creationism to theistic evolution).

The article is creationist Nell Segraves’s contribution to a five-person response to the question, “Biblical Creation: Should It Be Taught in the Public Schools as a Mandated Subject Alongside Evolution?” Segraves replied:

Biblical Creation: Should It Be Taught in the Public Schools as a Mandated Subject Alongside Evolution?

From: JASA 33 (December 1981): 231-235

(A public discussion on May 14, 1980 sponsored by the Community Services Office, San Diego Community College, and the Biology Department of San Diego Mesa College.)

Nell Segraves

Nell Segraves is a co-founder and an administrative assistant at the Creation Science Research Center. She has been involved in the evaluation of science, social science and health textbooks for approximately eighteen years.

Those of us involved in the Creationist Movement are not attempting to legislate biblical creation into science classrooms. Biblical creation is a belief that we hold, but we are no more advocating our belief in the Scriptures as a science subject than is the humanist advocating atheism as a subject for classroom discussion in science. The Creation Science Research Center is not attempting to introduce to public schools Bible stories or Bible verses. Neither are the other established responsible Creationist organizations. What we are advocating, rather, is the introduction into the science classroom of scientific data which are currently being excluded…namely, scientific data which conflict with the evolutionary theories of origin, and which are needed for the critical evaluation of evolutionary theories as science.

Yep, all we want to do is just teach the “scientific data which are currently being excluded” and “conflict with the evolutionary theories of origin”, and do some “critical evaluation”! It seems like I’ve heard that before, somewhere.

From London comes the astonishing news that the unmistakable image of Charles Darwin has appeared in the bottom of a postdoc’s frying pan. Scientists around the world¹ are puzzled about the possible mechanism that might have resulted in the 19^th century naturalist’s portrait being deposited on the suface of a cooking utensil.

In one attempted application of the Explanatory Filter^TM it was found that the probability of this occurance is less than that of fairy circles appearing to form a mole on the face on Mars². (This is, coincidentally, precisely equal to the probability that Nicholas Caputo would have hit David Berlinski if he had fired an arrow at Albert Einstein’s door during a total solar eclipse.)

Scientists say that the object’s being specified is beyond doubt. An anonymous fellow of an anonymous Intelligent Design PR firm, when asked on background and off the record, responded that “Objectively, we can only conclude that the image was designed by an intelligence³, perhaps by means of infinite wavelength radiation emanating from the stove of the discoverer’s flat.”

It has not yet been ascertained whether the pan’s dicoverer was cooking spaghetti at the time the image appeared.

The owner and discoverer of the miraculous pan has opened bidding for the object on ebay. All proceeds from the sale will benefit the American Civil Liberties Union, which conserves the civic values – including freedom of religion supported by the separation of church and state – of the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights.

¹One in London, one in Princeton. ²Work not shown. ³Maybe supernatural, maybe not.

[Comments have been closed for this thread. Please continue the conversation at After the Bar Closes.]

A new fossil mosasaur, one of a group of non-dinosaurian reptiles that return to marine existence, has been found by an amateur fossil hunter (see? Science can be done by non-professionals) near Dallas Texas, appropriately called Dallasaurus turneri after the location and discoverer Van Turner who found it 16 years ago.

This fossil is interesting because it is one of your classical “missing links”. Mosasaurs, which ended up 40 feet long (12m) at the end of the Cretaceous when they and dinosaurs and a whole lot of other life went extinct from a bolide impact, evolved fins from their limbs, and many of the primitive mosasaurs had partial limbs/fins.

D turneri, however, has the complete set of limbs it shared with its reptilian ancestors and cousins. This is interesting for mosasaur specialists of course, but it also allows me an opportunity to talk about two often-misunderstood terms in evolution - “missing link” and “primitive”.

Continue reading “The Mosasaur and the missing link” on Evolving Thoughts…

I hate to divert attention from the fascinating serious discussion (for the most part) taking place in response to my last post, The fundamental (and wrong) religious argument of the IDists in Kansas, but you all really should take a look at the new website KansasMorons.com. (Motto: “Welcome to Kansas, please set your watch back 100 years.”)

For a start, read the first page of the “Kansas Teachers Guide to Intelligent Design”, a parody of a introductory letter by Kansas state Board member Connie Morris.

Here’s the text, but you really need to download the real thing to get the full flavor of this:

I first ran across the thylacine (aka “Tasmanian tiger” or “Tasmanian wolf”) when I was preparing to teach a summer course on vertebrate zoology for a local Catholic college during grad school. While I’d had a decent amount of organismal biology and zoology as a college undergrad, I was a bit rusty from a few years of only studying organisms lacking nuclei, so I was looking for a quick refresher as well as some interesting topics for final paper assignments for the course. Just announced around that time was a “breakthrough” in the attempt to clone the thylacine, so I introduced that to the class in a discussion of the effects of geographic isolation, and had a nice discussion of both the molecular techniques and the ethics of a Jurassic Park-type scenario.

(Continue reading at Aetiology)

Remember Steve Fuller who was a defense expert witness in the Kitzmiller trial? Steve Miller is also on the editorial board of the SciPolicy Journal.

His colleagues have filed an Amicus Curiae or Friends of the Courts, brief:

There is a logical fallacy in mandating the inclusion of intelligent design since it provides neither scientific explanation nor empirical evidence of the actual existence of a designer, but through fiat simply asserts that a designer must exist to explain the gap in knowledge. Stripped of its intellectual facade the announcement is nothing but a transparent effort to engraft religious dogma onto the classroom examination of scientific theory.

Just when I thought I’d seen it all, Red State Rabble notes that Kansas Board of Education chairman Steve Abrams has just published an op-ed entitled “Science standards aren’t about religion” in the Wichita Eagle. I can’t tell if it is the same op-ed that Abrams said in an interview yesterday he was sending to “newspapers across the state, as well as CNN, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post,” but it probably is.

To begin, Abrams declares that the changes to the Kansas science standards are not about religion, and then promptly makes it extremely clear that they actually are. Specifically, Abrams makes it clear that this really is about good old-fashioned creationism, when he writes this:

Resistance to antibiotics has been a concern of scientists almost since their widespread use began. In a 1945 interview with the New York Times, Alexander Fleming himself warned that the misuse of penicillin could lead to selection of resistant forms of bacteria, and indeed, he’d already derived such strains in the lab by varying doses of penicillin the bacteria were subjected to. A short 5 years later, several hospitals had reported that a majority of their Staph isolates were, as predicted, resistant to penicillin. This decline in effectiveness has led to a search for new sources and kinds of antimicrobial agents. One strategy involves going back to a decades-old approach researched by Soviet scientists: phage therapy. Here, they pit one microbe directly against another, using viruses called bacteriophage to infect, and kill, pathogenic bacteria. Vincent Fischetti at Rockefeller University has used this successfully to kill anthrax, Streptococcus pyogenes, and others. Another novel source of antibiotics has come from our own innate immune system, one of our initial defenses against microbial invaders.

Bestill your beating hearts, Darwin fans, for yet more Darwin texts are free online. Many have long known and loved the website The writings of Charles Darwin on the web run by John van Wyhe, at the British Library, which has virtually all of Darwin’s published books and articles online (yes, Virginia, Darwin wrote over 100 articles in addition to all his books). And, less well known but very useful, all the volumes of The Correspondance of Charles Darwin are searchable at Google Print.

Now, as reviewed by Niles Eldredge in PLoS Biology [1], we have online Darwin’s early notebooks – the “Red” and “Transmutation” notebooks – and manuscripts: the 1842 Sketch, the 1844 Essay, and the massive unpublished book for which Origin of Species was the “abstract”, Natural Selection. The website is The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution at the American Natural History Museum (http://darwinlibrary.amnh.org).

1. Eldredge, N. 2005. “Darwin’s Other Books: ‘Red’ and ‘Transmutation’ Notebooks, ‘Sketch,’ ‘Essay,’ and Natural Selection.” Public Library of Science: Biology, 3(11): e382. November 15, 2005.

PS: Hmm, the PLoS: Biology article says that the “Red” and “Transmutation” notebooks are online at the website, but I can’t find them. Post a think if you find them.

On a local discussion forum in Lawrence, Kansas today, a poster named “Conservativeman” wrote a nice succinct summary of the main arguments presented by the Intelligent Design advocates (IDists) at the Kansas “science” hearings last May, and of those arguments incessantly put forth by ID leader John Calvert.

It may be that I am being too repetitious in my posts here at the Panda’s thumb, making the same points over and over. However, I think these points may become critical in case the Kansas situation goes to court, so for me I think it’s worth my while (if not the readers) to try to get as clear of an understanding of the fundamental religious argument that is being made by the IDists in Kansas.

Conservativeman wrote,

The problem is that an “Evolution Only,” policy is not really scientific or constitutional. It is not scientific because it is officially biased rather than scientifically objective. Because it is biased, it is not religiously neutral. Evolution Only effectively requires our children to “know” that we come from a natural rather than an intelligent cause, that we are occurrences and not designs, and that we naturally arise without purpose from a purposeless process. It effectively teaches that no rational evidentiary basis exists for theistic beliefs. Evolution Only converts these scientific claims into dogmas that are the fundamental tenets of non-theistic religions and that directly contradict the fundamental tenets of theistic religions. Accordingly, in my opinion, Evolution Only is not “secular” or neutral. Rather it is an ideology that directly conflicts with the First Amendment rights of parents and students.

This argument is quite wrong in a number of fundamental and important ways – ways that may eventually be settled in a court case. I’d like to respond to these points a few lines at a time.

The Kansas Board of Education has rewritten the science standards so that they may include the supernatural. That’s OK with me, as long as they play fair: Scientists must now be allowed to investigate the supernatural, including the truth claims of religion, and their judgements must be taken seriously. Science is, after all, our most successful enterprise (especially if we count medicine and sanitation), and we should be allowed to apply the principles of science to religion or anything else that makes objective claims. I say, Bring science into the churches!

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on ID in college classrooms today.

AMES, Iowa – With a magician’s flourish, Thomas Ingebritsen pulled six mousetraps from a shopping bag and handed them out to students in his “God and Science” seminar. At his instruction, they removed one component – either the spring, hammer or holding bar – from each mousetrap. They then tested the traps, which all failed to snap.

“Is the mousetrap irreducibly complex?” the Iowa State University molecular biologist asked the class.

“Yes, definitely,” said Jason Mueller, a junior biochemistry major wearing a cross around his neck.

That’s the answer Mr. Ingebritsen was looking for. He was using the mousetrap to support the antievolution doctrine known as intelligent design. Like a mousetrap, the associate professor suggested, living cells are “irreducibly complex” – they can’t fulfill their functions without all of their parts. Hence, they could not have evolved bit by bit through natural selection but must have been devised by a creator. “This is the closest to a science class on campus where anybody’s going to talk about intelligent design,” the fatherly looking associate professor told his class. “At least for now.”

Overshadowed by attacks on evolution in high-school science curricula, intelligent design is gaining a precarious and hotly contested foothold in American higher education. Intelligent-design courses have cropped up at the state universities of Minnesota, Georgia and New Mexico, as well as Iowa State, and at private institutions such as Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon. Most of the courses, like Mr. Ingebritsen’s, are small seminars that don’t count for science credit. Many colleges have also hosted lectures by advocates of the doctrine.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Despite the complaints by ID proponents that Intelligent Design is not about religion or faith, they seem to have a hard time convincing even their fellow creationists.

In Lecture Planned on Intelligent Design we read the following

In the current controversy between scientific proponents and religious opponents of evolution, Hugh Ross concedes that scientists have a valid point.

“The most ubiquitous complaint from scientists is that evolution-bashers don’t have the courage to say what their model of the origin of life is. Frankly, I have to agree. All they’re doing is making negative arguments,” Ross said from his office in California. “We don’t critique the evolution model, we present our model.”

It only gets better:

Some of you may not know this, but the Panda’s Thumb does have a forum on AntiEvolution.org: After the Bar Closes.

For those of you missing the Bathroom Wall, you can post your pearls on the forum.

Check out this: “Backtracking Birds Show Islands are not Evolutionary Dead End” on the blog A Scientific Life (or Scientist, Interrupted), aka girlscientist.blogspot.com. The post reports on a paper on bird biogeography published in Nature, “Single origin of a pan-Pacific bird group and upstream colonization of Australasia.” The main point of the paper is that the biogeogaphy of a group of pacific island monarchs is not a simple matter of flow from the continental source to the island sink; instead, there has been some back-and-forth over the last few million years.