February 2007 Archives

Joseph Meert, a professor of Hydrocephalic Earth Studies and Structure at Bayou University in Gainesville, Florida (I guess in plain English it has something to do with geology) reports on an appearance there of an Islamic advocate of creationism who explained to the audience of a few tens of students that evolution is impossible because fish is very different from land walking animals. Dr. Meert’s post can be seen here.

I only today ran across this speech Christopher Hitchens gave in September of 2005 at Monticello, to commemorate his book on Thomas Jefferson. In the question and answer session, he was asked about the attempt by some pseudo-historians to portray America as an essentially Christian nation, and he had a few choice words to say about church, state, and Intelligent Design.

A Blog Around the Clock and The Intersection have recently posted some pictures that I took of Prof. Steve Steve: gallery.

Professor Steve Steve - new pictures

Prof. Steve-Steve Drinks Me Under the Table

In the next few days, I’ll post pictures from the Triangle meetup.

On Wesley R. Elsberry’s blog at antievolution.org, Wesley discusses the recently stated position of the Templeton Foundation on “Intelligent Design”.

The Templeton Foundation, the deep pockets people for science and religion studies, says that its stance has been misconstrued on “intelligent design” in letters to the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street journal.

Pamela Thompson, Templeton Foundation spokesperson, says in her letter to the LA Times:

We do not believe that the science underpinning the intelligent-design movement is sound, we do not support research or programs that deny large areas of well-documented scientific knowledge, and the foundation is a nonpolitical entity and does not engage in or support political movements.

The statement is probably overdone a bit. The Templeton Foundation did fund a number of projects and people in the “intelligent design” creationism movement. While early recognition of the depth of worthlessness and the essential political nature of “intelligent design” creationism was probably too much to ask, certainly by mid-2000 these elements should have been clear to granting entities like the Templeton Foundation. Templeton’s retreat from IDC, though, only became apparent in 2005.

Good to know that even foundations like the Templeton Foundation are taking a clear distance from the scientific vacuity known as Intelligent Design. Not surprising, ID has remained void of scientific research and proposals. At best, we have some pseudo-mathematical musings and an overarching appeal to ignorance.

There’s a recent interview with Sean Carroll, author of Endless Forms Most Beautiful and The Making of the Fittest on the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers podcast. Carroll has some pointed remarks about efforts to weaken the teaching of evolution in the public schools:

I really can’t paint this in too rosy of a picture. We’ve been the destination for the rest of the world for education and for training and even without this controversy the rest of the world has been catching up in various ways. But now if you look at the climate in the United States, we’ve so handcuffed things like stem cell research with public officials making preposterous statements about evolutionary science. We have an administration that has denied the global warming data until I guess it probably just couldn’t resist it any longer and you have if you look at some of the agencies, I will point the finger at the FDA, you have scientific decisions being made by ideologues. Now, [if] that goes on for a number of years it’s demoralizing to the scientific community.

And more. (He also talks about icefish.)

There’s a bunch of other podcasts on their site that look good too, especially for teachers.

RBH

A little more than a week ago, word went around our circles here at The Thumb regarding a paper published on Public Library of Science on the use of the word evolution in medical journal articles. In essence, the authors compare the use of the word evolution in articles written by and published in journals generally read by evolutionary biologists versus physicians. Unsurprisingly, the evolutionary biologists mentioned evolution more by name, even if both groups appealed to the same concepts. Why physicians don’t use the word evolution to describe implications or the concept of evolution is the issue.

Other authors (PZ Myers, Orac, and Sequiteur, among others) have dealt with the topic, but it hasn’t appeared here on PT yet, so I thought I’d just ditto Orac’s opinion with a few thoughts of my own. Find them below, after the jump.

Hewlett and Peters are the next scientists, in a long line of scientists, who have written about the scientific vacuity of Intelligent Design. The understanding that it is unnecessary to argue about whether or not ID is science has allowed scientists to focus on the lack of fertility or as others call it the ‘scientific vacuity’ of Intelligent Design. In their paper, Who Sets the Evolution Agenda? published in Theology and Science, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2006, Martinez Hewlett, a professor Emeritus at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the University of Arizona and Ted Peters, a professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, explain their objections to Intelligent Design:

In the meantime, we work with the premise that the Darwinian model is the best model for apprehending evolutionary biology. We believe the Darwinian model has proved itself the most fertile. It leads to new knowledge, which demonstrates its fertility. The difficulty with the Intelligent Design and Creationist models is that they lack fertility. They fail to produce progressive research programs. In a scientific sense, they cannot produce testable models. We believe that the dialogue with theology must take place with the best of science, not with a substitute that is a philosophical position and not science at all.

Some time ago I wrote about the evolution of novel strategies for cooperation in computer models of evolutionary processes involving artificial agents with very rudimentary sensory-motor capabilities. Now another such study has appeared showing evolution of the communication of meaningful signals among artificial agents. I was in the process of writing a PT post on it when I was beaten to it by Carl Zimmer. So I’ll only say that starting from scratch (random neural nets), robots who could sense their environments and move and emit light themselves, evolved in a ‘field’ in which there was a food source and a poison source, both of which also emitted light. Under those conditions the robots evolved to signal either the location of the food or the location of the poison. Especially in populations composed of ‘kin’ – genetically related robots – the evolution of signaling resulted in substantially more efficient food gathering and poison avoidance.

Zimmer’s post is here and the original paper is here. Read and enjoy.

RBH

I’m just here reminding y’all that Prof. Steve Steve will have lunch at Cafe Cyclo in Raleigh, NC’s Cameron Village today (Saturday). Come by at 1 PM if you want to hang out with a septuple-PhD.

Directions

Via From Right 2 Left, I see that U of Iowa physics professor. Fred Skiff, will be speaking on intelligent design next week:

At the next “Finding God at Iowa” Lunch Forum, Fred Skiff, University of Iowa professor of physics and astronomy, will speak on the theory of intelligent design. The forum will be held from noon to 1 p.m. March 2, in the Ohio State Room (Room 343) on the third floor of the Iowa Memorial Union.

Skiff will offer “A ‘Fireside Chat’ on Intelligent Design.” He will discuss some of the questions underlying the debate over intelligent design in nature, such as: What are the appropriate assumptions, methods, and limits of science? Can the intelligent design argument be properly made within the realm of science?

Why am I so dismayed (well, besides the obvious)? Read more about it at Aetiology…

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland featured a strange creature called the Cheshire Cat, which could disappear gradually until nothing was left but its toothy grin.

I was reminded of this strange feline by a recent mailing from a new group calling itself the “New Mexico Science Foundation.”

The group recently sent a package of materials to science teachers in the embattled Rio Rancho School District, where the Intelligent Design/Creationist-friendly Science Policy 401 was adopted, and then amended after strong protests.

You wouldn’t know who is behind this mailing from the group’s website, which has quotes from Einstein, captions like “Dedicated to the pursuit of the scientific method,” and links to bonafide science organizations, like the National Science Foundation, the National Science Teachers Association, the Institute for Systems Biology, and more.

The NMSF site does have a few hints of its real agenda online, for example, links to “Scientific Dissent From Darwinism,” and articles titled “Historical Science versus Empirical Science.”

Some colleagues and I thought it might be a new cover organization for the New Mexico branch of the Intelligent Design Network, or perhaps something done under the auspices of the Discovery Institute.

We were wrong.

The New Mexico Science Foundation website is the work of Bible-believing young-earth creationists (YECs), but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at it. All that’s left of its original YEC incarnation is a toothy grin.

Tomorrow, Talk of the Nation/Science Friday is doing a show with Edward Humes, author of Monkey Girl (blog, website), Randy Olson, director of Flock of Dodos, and yours truly, author of this spiffy blogpost.

We are in the second hour, so it should be on from 12-1 Pacific time. Apart from the radio, NPR is streamed live from many websites, and the Talk of the Nation archived shows are put online a few hours later.

Greetings again!

I’ve just returned from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS for you acronymophiles) in San Francisco. What a city! I mean, sure, I hang out here a lot with the NCSE folks, but I rarely have a chance to schmooze with other scientists of my caliber from out of town. I mean, not that anyone I met has quite my qualifications, but I had a lot of fun meeting people (including the hottie in the picture) and, of course, hearing more about evolutionary biology in the meantime. Read all about it over at Aetiology.

Well, I was having a hard time imagining this one anyway:

Anti-Darwin Suit Dismissed

The Oktyabrsky District Court in St. Petersburg on Wednesday threw out a lawsuit filed by Maria Shraiber, a 15-year-old who argued that being taught the theory of evolution in school violated her civil rights, Interfax reported.

The court also dismissed Shraiber’s request that the government provide her with a written apology for offending her religious beliefs. Shraiber’s representatives vowed to appeal the ruling to St. Petersburg’s City Court. (MT)

Next country to watch: the Dominican Republic.

Everyone remembers Utah state senator Chris Buttars, who pushed the “divine design” legislation last year? Looks like someone else remembers him also…

Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, left, and Lee Gardner, Salt Lake County assessor, are oblivious to the fact that they are being stalked by an extinct dodo roaming between the East and West Capitol buildings on Monday. The dodo visited the state Legislature to drum up interest for the documentary film “Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus.” The local showing is sponsored by the Salt Lake City Film Center and Utah Museum of Natural History. It will be be shown at 7 tonight at the Rose Wagner Center. (Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Last week I went to a colloquium given by Douglas Robertson of the University of Colorado. Professor Robertson began with two observations:

Changes in fitness functions can cause changes in the distributions of phenotypes.

Changes in the distribution of phenotypes can cause changes in fitness functions.

Biologists, according to Professor Robertson, agree with the statements but yawn. Electrical engineers, by contrast, immediately recognize the possibility for positive feedback and announce, “That population is toast.” I am not an electrical engineer, but I am a fellow traveler, and Professor Robertson’s work, um, resonated with me.

Previous activity on Intelligent Design/Creationist bills in the New Mexico Legislature were discussed here and here.

Today, House Bill 506, “AN ACT RELATING TO PUBLIC EDUCATION; PROVIDING FOR SCHOOL SCIENCE CONTENT STANDARDS AND RULES REGARDING THE TEACHING OF THEORIES OF BIOLOGICAL ORIGINS.” was heard today in the NM House Education Committee: only Mike Edenburn, at sponsor Dub Williams’ side, spoke in favor of the bill. Speaking against were several scientists and educators, myself included.

After the comments, sponsor Dub Williams himself voted to table the bill, which was then tabled 8-4. (I was expecting the same 7-5 split as for the bill on teaching Bible as History, HB 498, which was tabled just before the HB 506 discussion.) But Williams himself moved to table his bill.

Only the Senate measures (Senate Bill 371, “SCHOOL SCIENCE CONTENT STANDARDS,” and Senate Joint Memorial 9, “OBJECTIVE TEACHING OF BIOLOGICAL ORIGINS.”) remain under consideration in the current session.

Two down, two to go.

From the NCSE Eugenie C. Scott honored by AAAS

NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott, along with nine science teachers who have been on the front lines of the evolution wars, is receiving the American Association for Advancement of Science’s 2006 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. A press release from AAAS describes Scott as “tireless in her efforts to offer assistance and information to those trying to stop local and statewide efforts to undermine science education,” adding, “She has led workshops, conferences and seminars for teachers and others to explain the well-established scientific basis for evolutionary theory and why ‘intelligent design’ fails to meet science criteria.” Scott will receive the award on February 17, 2007, at the AAAS’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

ROBERT JOHN RUSSELL ”Intelligent Design is Not Science and Does Not Qualify to be Taught in Public School Science Classes” Theology and Science, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2005

Russell points out correctly that ID provides two alternatives for “agency”: either a natural agent or God.

The theory of ID does not qualify to be taught in public school science classes as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. The reason is straightforward. Even though ID supporters will not specify what they mean by the intelligent agency that supposedly accounts for the origin and evolution of life, there are only two options for what ”agency” could possibly mean: either a natural agent or God. The first option ultimately relies on the very theory, Darwinian evolution, that it proposes to challenge and the second option is a theological claim. Thus, ID does not qualify to be taught in public school science classes as an alternative scientific theory to Darwinian evolution.

He ends with a warning to Christians

The lesson to Christians is that we should abandon ID as fools’ gold and accept the challenge of true discipleship and dialogue—to engage contemporary science as it describes the universe by working out a challenging but immanently more honest interpretation of science in light of Christian faith. So where does one start? Check out the CTNS website (www.ctns.org) and its links to a world of Christian friends who are ready to offer hope that is worthy of being believed.

Bill (aka William Demsbki) reports on the problem Airbus is experiencing because two design teams used different CAD software and uses the following ‘argument’.

Bill Wrote:

Meanwhile, climatic scientists have nevertheless created absolutely perfect models for the world’s weather patterns extending 100,000 years back and forwards in time (and yet they still can’t tell you if it’s going to rain on the weekend). Likewise, Darwinists have conclusively shown that living creatures, far more complex than the new Airbus plane, are the result of blind evolutionary processes in which the badly-functioning assemblies were filtered out by natural selection. Right.

Count the fallacies…

Following the publications by Ryan Nichols [1] and Patrick Frank [2] we now have a paper by Elliott Sober who explains in very accessible language why Intelligent Design is scientifically vacuous.

Elliott Sober, What is wrong with Intelligent Design?, The Quarterly Review of Biology, Volume 82, No. 1 March 2007

Abstract: This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.

Are any of our readers interested in meeting up for lunch in Raleigh next Saturday? Prof. Steve Steve will be there. You can have your picture taken with him.

Georgia State Rep. Ben Bridges of Cleveland, home of Cabbage Patch dolls and Babyland General Hospital, is a vocal critic of evolution. This former barber and captain in the state patrol has twice (1999 and 2005) introduced legislation to include non-existent evidence against evolution in public schools—one of the teach-the-controversy laws that the Discovery Institute is so fond of these days. In 2005, Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education testified against his bill, causing Bridges to remark that he could have gotten “experts” as well, if he’d known that GCISE was going to be there. Earlier this week, we learned the type of “experts” that Bridges relies on.

On Feb. 9, Texas State Rep. Warren Chisum, the second most powerful member, sent a memo from Bridges to every member of the Texas House of Representatives. This memo advertised a model bill and called for the end of “tax-supported evolution science” because it “is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings on the mystic ‘holy book’ kabbala dating back at least two millennia”. Talk about bringing the crazy—but wait there’s more. Bridges’s memo invites lawmakers to visit FixedEarth.com, the “non-moving Earth & anti-evolution web page of the Fair Education Foundation, Inc.” Yeap, you read that right, Fixed—WTF—Earth.com.

In 2006, the United States Supreme Court issued a little-noticed decision called Garcetti v. Ceballos, 126 S. Ct. 1951 (2006), that has some interesting—and disturbing—implications for how public employees can express themselves on the job. A January 24^th decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, called Mayer v. Monroe County Community Sch. Corp., has now applied the Ceballos doctrine to the case of a government school teacher who alleged that she was unconstitutionally fired for telling students how she felt about the war in Iraq. And this raises the issue of whether the doctrine might be applied in cases involving government teachers who express to their students their own views with regard to evolution and creationism.

Prof. Steve Steve and his trusty sidekick Nick Matzke plan to be at the NCSE booth at the AAAS Annual Meeting at the Hilton in downtown San Francisco from 10-5, Saturday, February 17. I know many PT people and ScienceBloggers are at the meeting, so stop by and see us! (transport info)

Prof. Steve Steve, and perhaps Nick, will also be in attendance on Sunday and Monday. It looks like Saturday and Sunday have free Exhibit Hall admission on account of 2007 Family Science Days.

As with every AAAS meeting, the true goal is to get invited to the Science Journalists’ Party, which I hope is Saturday night. They always throw quite a bash, although it will be hard to trump the molten chocolate fountain from the DC meeting a few years back.

Recent research has thrown an interesting spanner into one of the key, but slightly obscure claims Behe makes about “irreducible complex” (IC) systems. In Behe’s discussion of the mammalian clotting system (Darwin’s Black Box [DBB], 1996, page 86, 1^st edition) he claims:

”…none of the cascade proteins are used for anything other than the formation of a blood clot”.

This is a fundamental claim with important implications. If components of an allegedly IC system have other functions, this would violate his “well matched parts” condition for an IC system. Also, if these enzymes have other functions, they could be coopted from those functions to form a clotting system. If the clotting enzyme thrombin’s only function was to cut fibrinogen to make fibrin, then, if a mutation produced a thrombin-like enzyme in the absence of fibrin, natural selection would be unlikely to preserve this enzyme (but see below). On the other hand, if a general protease (an enzyme that cuts up lots of different proteins) were to gain the ability to break down fibrinogen, then its other functions would keep it preserved until a fibrinogen-like substrate appeared.

Contrary to Behe’s statement, many of the clotting proteins have other roles. Several of these non-clotting functions were known when Behe wrote DBB [1,2 and Note 1]. These roles, in wound healing and in tissue remodelling and embryogenesis, give us useful clues to their evolution. They also demolish Behe’s claims about IC.

Jack Cashill, the Worldnutdaily’s resident conspiracy loon, has a column up recounting the Sternberg saga in all its distorted and highly exaggerated glory. He’s swallowed every claim in the Souder report uncritically, and even added a few of his own distortions to the story.

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

This is pretty cool, a webpage full of videos about evolution and creationism with various scientists and philosophers that should be familiar to readers of this blog. They include Ken Miller, Genie Scott, Barbara Forrest and Kevin Padian.

I received this note from a Kansan who asked that it be posted on PT. She said Jack Krebs (head of Kansas Citizens for Science) might be too modest (or maybe he is trying to return to normal life!).

On the day after Charles Darwins’ birthday, and the day before Valentines Day, the Kansas State Board of Education delivered its much-anticipated reversal of the anti-science standards adopted in November 2005.

Although this outcome was expected after the August 2006 primary election resulted in a guaranteed moderate majority on the board, conservatives fought to the end to amend the standards to include their non-natural definition of science and their bogus evolution criticisms. Each motion to amend was defeated. Ultraconservative Ken Willard of Hutchinson requested that the board go into executive session just before the standards discussion. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, “He asked whether the state can endorse an idea that nature can be solely explained by material causes and whether the state can suppress information critical of evolution – two problems conservatives say the new standards would create, though opponents argue otherwise.” Willard never explained why no state includes supernatural explanations in its science standards, because he doesn’t like the answer: such topics are outside the domain of science.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Big Ideas–one of my favorite podcasts–presents Marydianne Andrade’s lecture on sexual dimorphism and mating strategies. You can listen online here.

I attended a screening of Flock of Dodos last night at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The film was shown in the IMAX theater – of course it was not filmed in the IMAX format, but anyone who’s been in an IMAX theater knows how many people will fit into one. And the place was packed. The filmmaker Randy Olson (and his mother, Muffy Moose, who was featured prominently in the film) were on hand to introduce the movie and to answer questions afterwards, which was a special treat.

Before I go into gripes about the film, I want to say that on the whole it was excellent and definitely worth seeing. It was above all entertaining. It made for a decent if somewhat incomplete exposé of the ID movement. And a number of nonsense arguments that the IDists promulgate were knocked down, in many cases through the documentary technique of just letting the silliness speak for itself. The recurring theme of Mt. Rushmore was the sterling example of this.

Nevertheless, in spite of the film’s strengths, my job as semi-obsessed-ID-watcher was to notice those parts of the movie where I think Olson missed the mark. Below I’m going to go into a lot of detail about this, and it could take awhile, so you might want to buckle in. This isn’t because I think Olson got a lot of things wrong – there are really only a few issues here – it’s that I think these are key points that are important to movie’s theme and the broader issue of defending science. They are therefore worth expounding upon at length.