Recently in Assault on Science Category

As everyone in the science blogosphere knows by now, banana man Ray Comfort, he who cannot understand sex, is planning to distribute on the order of 170,000 (his claim) copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in late November on various U.S. and Canadian university campuses. The book is prefaced by an introduction (2 Meg PDF) by Ray that contains the standard creationist argle bargle.

NCSE has created a page in response called Don’t Diss Darwin that has a variety of resources and suggestions. It has an appropriate flier, posters, and a lovely banana bookmark ready for downloading.

Most important for our immediate purposes, it contains a list of universities currently targeted. That list is reproduced below the fold. (I note that Lehigh is on the list; I wonder if Michael Behe will avail himself of the opportunity to learn some evolution.)

I urge scientists and interested folks on the infected campuses to seek immunization from the NCSE page.

Hat tip to Florida Citizens for Science.

The Education Life supplement of last Sunday’s New York Times contained a little blurb that claimed college students who majored in the humanities and social sciences were apt to become less religiously observant after college. According to the Times, you may credit or blame postmodernism because it stresses that truth is relative rather than absolute. Small solace, as far as I am concerned.

We have a twofer! In his account of his visit with Stephen Meyer to Norman, Oklahoma, a couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Wells made another totally stupid remark just following the one for which he got an earlier award. This one contains a deceptive analogy that the ID creationists have grown fond of lately. Recall that their recent mantra has been ‘evolution can’t increase “biological” information.’ That’s the shorthand gloss of Dembski’s so-called Law of Conservation of Information.

In the Q&A Wells ‘explained’ to a questioner that HOX genes are remarkably non-specific, and burped up the egregiously stupid remark for which he got the earlier award:

If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse?

To win his second award, Wells went on to write another truly dumb thing.

This is discussed in an earlier comment thread but I thought I’d promote it. The Disco ‘Tute is in a swivet over the California Science Center’s cancellation of a showing of Darwin’s Dilemma, the latest excretion of Illustrata Media, producer of the late unlamented Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (at the Disco ‘Tute). Disco Dancer Robert Crowther, of course, attributes the cancellation to the machinations of the Loyal Order of Dogmatic Darwin Conspirators. However, Doc Bill of antievolution.org has the story. In its glee about the showing, the ‘Tuters issued a press release that strongly implied that the Science Center and Smithsonian are somehow involved in the film’s premiere.

Now, there may be some question about whether the press release actually violated the Science Center’s contract with the ostensible sponsor of the showing, the American Freedom Alliance – IANAL, and don’t know the connection, if any, between AFA and the Disco ‘Tute. However, the first sentence of the Disco ‘Tute’s press release says

The debate over Darwin will come to California on October 25^th, when the Smithsonian Institution’s west coast affiliate premieres Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record, a new intelligent design film which challenges Darwinian evolution.

That plainly says it’s the Smithsonian that’s doing the premiering. And that’s flatly false. It’s the institutional version of inflationary credentialism, one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience. Note that the press release also identifies Stephen Meyer as a scientist, more inflationary credentialism.

Hat tip to Abbie.

It was a tough call given Casey Luskin’s stupidity about Ardipithecus, but we have a winner. In an account of Stephen Meyer’s talk at the University of Oklahoma last week, Jonathan Wells wrote

Furthermore, the similarity of HOX genes in so many animal phyla is actually a problem for neo-Darwinism: If evolutionary changes in body plans are due to changes in genes, and flies have HOX genes similar to those in a horse, why is a fly not a horse?

Hat tip to John Pieret.

(Photo courtesy LDEO)

September 29^th, 2009 Project UPDATE

Courtesy the University of Oregon, which reports on Sept. 22^nd that

After 30 days at sea and 16 days of successful seismic surveying of deep-sea hydrothermal ecosystems on the Pacific Ocean floor off British Columbia, researchers from two Northwest institutions have returned to dry land. Their mission to study the deep crustal structure of the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca ridge had drawn last-minute opposition by environmental groups, who in court filings had sought to stop the seismic surveying because of potential harm to whales and other mammals. A portion of the ridge includes the Endeavour Marine Protected Area that was established to foster conservation and responsible scientific study. Canadian courts rejected the groups’ cases. Prior to sailing, the project – the Endeavour Seismic Tomography Experiment – underwent a thorough environmental assessment by Canadian and U.S. regulators. The timing of the expedition was chosen to minimize marine mammal encounters. During the survey, certified marine mammal observers monitored the region on a 24-hour per-day basis. “Not a single marine mammal was either visually observed or acoustically detected during the seismic survey,” said Doug Toomey, professor of geological sciences at the University of Oregon and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded project that was done from the research vessel Marcus G. Langseth.

Update continues below the fold…

With all the hagiography going on for conservative “intellectual” Irving Kristol, who died on September 18, let’s not forget one of his many idiotic statements: that Darwinism is on the way out because it “is really no longer accepted so easily by [many] biologists and scientists.”

As Glenn Morton has exhaustively shown, the trope that “more and more scientists doubt evolution” is one of the oldest falsehoods in creationism. But then, Kristol believed that not all truths were suitable for all people, an echo of Martin Luther’s view that lying for his god was acceptable.

Anti-evolution idiocy seemingly ran in the family. In 1959, Kristol’s wife Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote a terrible book, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, demonstrating a lack of understanding of biology and a warped view of Darwin’s influence. One perceptive reviewer penned that Himmelfarb had “an advanced case of Darwinitis, a complaint that afflicts those of a literary bent and strong attachments to pre-scientific culture, who find in the theory of evolution a disturbing and mysterious challenge to their values”. Kristol wrote a favorable review of Himmelfarb’s book for Encounter, without bothering to mention that he was Himmelfarb’s husband. So much for Kristol’s ethics.

Read more at Recursivity…

To add to the various accounts of tours of Ken Ham’s creationism museum, Rationality Now has an excellent series of six posts starting here The posts are particularly noteworthy for the excellent photographs, and I commend them to your attention. The last two paragraphs of the last post are quoteworthy. Referring to children with their families he saw in the museum, Dan writes:

Some of those kids will be stuck in that world for their entire lives. They’ll be raised that way and protected from any alternate viewpoints or ideas. They’ll be shuttered away from any kind of real, intellectually challenging science. They’ll be constantly given misleading or incorrect information about our world. Their parents will steep them in dogma, ritual, and ancient scripture for as long as they can manage… and the Creation Museum will be right there to back them up with pretty lights, bells, and whistles.

The museum is loathsome and its creators should be very, very ashamed.

But they aren’t, of course.

Hat tip to the Friendly Atheist.

As most readers know, William Dembski and Robert Marks recently published a paper in an IEEE journal that purports to show that

In critiquing his [Dawkins’] example and arguing that information is not created by unguided evolutionary processes, we are indeed making an argument that supports ID.

Various science bloggers have critiqued it; see here, here, and here for examples.

Now the Metropolis Sampler has published a more technical analysis of the paper, concluding that

The fundamental lesson here is that the Dembski-Marks approach to evaluating model assumptions is both arbitrary and a poor reflection of scientific reasoning. Model assumptions are not accepted or rejected based on a numerical measure of how many logical possibilities that are ruled out or how far probability distributions deviate from uniform measures. Rather, model assumptions are accepted or rejected based on predictive and descriptive accuracy, domain of applicability, ability to unify existing models and empirical knowledge, and so on.

ID creationists persistently use models that misrepresent theories (or in the case of the WEASEL hoorah, misrepresent what the model is intended to represent), and then conclude (on the basis of syntactic manipulations of the model) that the theories are invalid. Dembski, of course, is a serial offender in this respect, and it’s a pity that he’s inveigled Marks into sharing his delusions.

Most have by now heard about the kerfuffle over Bloggingheads.tv hosting creationists. As a consequence, four of the most prominent science bloggers, physicist Sean Carroll, science writer Carl Zimmer, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, and Pharyngula’s PZ Myers, have elected to not participate further on Bloggingheads. There are comment threads attached to each of the posts linked, with some split in the comments concerning whether the decisions to withdraw are well advised. I myself think they are well advised to withdraw, and I describe why I think that below the fold.

In addition, the Disco ‘Tute’s Bruce Chapman has weighed in, his post invoking the metaphor of the guillotine to describe Blogginghead’s fate.

You will recall that in June John Freshwater filed a federal suit (see PT post here) against the Mt. Vernon City School District, several Board members, several administrators, and a bunch of John and Jane Does. Included among the defendants was David Millstone, attorney for the Board.

Now, according to news reports, Millstone has moved to be dropped as a defendant, arguing that it is improper to sue an attorney in order to pressure the attorney’s client. The news report describes a June 9, 2009, letter from R. Kelly Hamilton to the Board of Education that apparently suggested a settlement, including this sentence: “It will be interesting to observe the developments between Mr. Millstone’s representation and the interests of the Mount Vernon City School System.” According to the news report, Millstone’s filing characterized that sentence as “a ‘veiled threat’ to force Millstone out of representing the school board.”

The news report quotes Millstone’s attorney as saying “The claim against Mr. Millstone appears to be a pressure tactic aimed at the administrative process to terminate Mr. Freshwater’s contract.”

This is of a piece with Freshwater’s basic strategy, which is apparently to attempt to force a settlement one way or another. Freshwater’s pastor, Don Matolyak, has been making noises about settlement for some time now, always, of course, on Freshwater’s terms.

In other legal news, responses to Freshwater’s application to the Ohio Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus to compel testimony from Board members are coming in. They’re linked from here. The administrative hearing was due to resume September 10, but I strongly doubt it’ll happen that soon.

As everybody should be aware by now, Denyse O’Leary is offering a prize for the original code for Dawkins’ Weasel program which illustrates cumulative selection [1]. O’Leary’s offer arises from people challenging Dembski’s misrepresentation of the Weasel program, as he has misrepresented it yet again in a trivial non-id paper. To get some much needed perspective, read Joe Felsenstein’s excellent article (and its follow-up) and those of Chris Mark Chu Carroll (here and here)

Seriously, arguing over whether Dawkins “weasel” program implements locking is a bit like arguing over whether the measuring cylinder in the Measuring Cylinder/Tap model of drug clearance is emptied by a tube or a bloke with a cup. Both are simplified systems that make demonstrating a concept easy, and do much the same thing.

The point is that a leading light of the cdesignproponentsits has spent an enormous amount of time critiquing a toy demonstration of selection, and can’t even get the toy example right. Not only that, they can’t admit when they were wrong. Heck, no one in the cdesign proponetsists can admit Dembski is wrong about a toy program, even when presented with video evidence.

Let’s emphasise this again. It’s a non-issue except for the way it highlights the determined cluelessness of cdesign proponetsists. To use the metaphor of the Measuring Cylinder/Tap model of drug clearance again, Dembski is effectively arguing that Dawkins said the measuring cylinder is emptied by a man with a cup in his book, but anyone can go to Dawkins original book, read how he set it up, and understand that Dawkins specified a tube. Dawkins doesn’t specify how big the tube, or the flow rate of the tap, but it’s sort of obvious and you can easily make an analogous system which demonstrates the same things that Dawkins does. Everyone understands except Dembski who then makes a convoluted argument over the whole thing (see www.evoinfo.org and read their “explanation” of Dawkins program if you have a spare half-hour of your life you don’t mind wasting).

Now there is a video showing a measuring cylinder with a tube (metaphorically, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sUQIpFajsg (go to 6:15) for the real video showing the weasel program), Dembski goes “oh, Dawkins must have REALLY have used a cup in his book, then swapped to a tube for the video”. Aside from the convoluted mentality involved in this staggering piece of “reasoning”, it goes to the heart of the cdesign proponentists reliability.

When Dembski claims that Lenski et al., have “smuggled in information”, explaining why they are wrong can get quite technical, but when they claim Dawkins has “smuggled in information”, one can simply point to how deeply they have misunderstood Dawkins model, and if they can’t get Dawkins right (after being told repeatedly, having it explicitly demonstrated to them and being shown a video), what hope is there that they got Lenski right.

For more information on Dembski’s denial of the video evidence, see Dembski Weasels Out, for a wide compendium of Weasel programs old and new, including head to head comparisons of Dawkins version vs Demski’s locking version see Weasels on Parade (note it took over 23 days for the Uncommon Descent people to come up with any programs themselves). To see where I completely reconstruct the output shown in Dawkins book, see here.

[1] Why doesn’t O’Leary just ask Dawkins? The whole concept of running a competition to get Dawkins code instead of asking Dawkins is rather bizarre. While he may not have the original code, he can tell her how he did it.[2] [2] People have asked Dawkins before. It no longer exists. Just like the AppleBasic programs I wrote to calculate stimulation-induced radioactive outflow for our laboratory. Used for years but vanished into the mists of time. Seriously, even if there was a disk around with AppleBasic finding a machine to run it and make copies would be an adventure in itself.

… another shark appears, begging to be jumped.

One of Ray Comfort’s favorite examples of the invalidity of evolution (besides the banana) is sex. A while back Comfort objected to critical remarks about his book by PZ Myers. Comfort is quoted as saying

“Let’s go back even further (100 million years ago) to pre-pre-elephants that also contained males and females. At what point of time in evolutionary history did the female evolve alongside the male? And why did she evolve? Then explain, if you would professor, why horses, giraffes, cattle, zebras, leopards, primates, antelopes, pigs, dogs, sheep, fish, goats, mice, squirrels, whales, chickens, dinosaurs, beavers, cats, human beings and rats also evolved with a female, at some point of time in evolutionary history. Professor, I know you believe, but please, give us who are healthy skeptics some empirical evidence. Remember, stupid people like me want good hard evidence before we, like you, become believers in Darwin’s theory,” Comfort said.

In other words, if evolution is true who were Cain and Abel canoodling with? Erm, sorry about that. Wrong story line. PZ then smacked Ray around in more detail here. Comfort’s remarks are at the level of the old creationist question, “If we evolved from monkeys how come there are still monkeys?”

However, intelligent design, we are told, is not creationism and is a much more sophisticated and ‘scientific’ enterprise. Or is it? On Uncommonly Dense, William Dembski’s group blog, we find this gem in a post by “niwrad”::

It is unimaginable that reproduction and genitals arose by Darwinian evolution (that is for random mutations and natural selection). First, as a matter of principle: evolution needs reproduction; without reproduction no evolution. Therefore how can reproduction be the effect of evolution if evolution is an effect of reproduction? It’s an impossible causality inversion. Second, for a technical reason: how could the male organs arise independently from the female organs given the cCSI they share? In fact the Darwinian processes work in the single individual. They are blind and unaware of the processes running in other individuals. Random mutations that happen in a genome have nothing to do with the mutations in another one.

”.… Darwinian processes work in the single individual”? It’s hard to conceive of the level of ignorance necessary to make the argument in that post. Apparently the notion of “coevolution” is foreign to the UD poster. But then, it only yields 186,000 hits on Google Scholar.

It’s fun to see UD in bed with Ray Comfort. Somehow I think they were made for each other. And I don’t think it was coevolution: It’s a straight lineage, ancestor to descendant.

Denyse O’Leary, she of the multiple blogs and little reliable knowledge of evolution, is offering a prize for the original code for Dawkins’ cumulative selection demonstration program (‘METHINKS …”), described in The Blind Watchmaker, originally published in 1986. The winner actually gets to choose between two prizes, a copy of Stephen Meyer’s new elaboration of the standard ID argument from ignorance, Signature in the Cell, or a copy of Dawkins’ forthcoming The Greatest Show on Earth. (Actually, for the latter prize, O’Leary says she will ask Dawkins’ publicist to provide the prize. Strange to offer a prize she can’t herself deliver.)

The comment thread is strangely reminiscent of the recent “birther” rhetoric in the U.S. A commenter called “kibitzer” replicates the birther script almost flawlessly. For example

It is simply unconscionable that over 20 years after the program has been out and used to argue for Darwinism, Dawkins still has not made this code publicly available.

and

But the program has been much discussed on the Internet in the last decade. So where is the code?

and

Then provide the original code. Repeat after me: WE WANT TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CODE, WE WANT TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CODE, WE WANT TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CODE …

and

Of course, as programs go, Dawkins’ WEASEL is trivial and it’s easy enough to reconstruct something that’s close to it. But given the controversy surrounding it, let’s see the original program. Why is that so difficult?

and

We’re all beating our gums. Please, let’s see the original code. Why is that so much to ask? To paraphrase Ben Stein, Does anyone have it? Anyone?

Controversy? Only in the fevered imagination of Bill Dembski, who has now infected Robert Marks.

Hat tip to Glenn Branch.

In BBC blog comments I find this:

Let me repeat it for you, because you seem to be determined to misunderstand. NO-ONE is a priori excluding the presence of some sort of Primary Intelligent Cosmic Creator (PICC, pronounced “pixie”). There is no need to either include or exclude such a beastie; the only way of addressing that question is NOT by cod philosophy, but by scientific evidence.

I love the British way with words.

Hat tip to Heliopolitan, who coined the phrase.

Video of Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, commenting on the Creationism Museum at Netroots Nation. Pull quote:

It’s a simulacrum of a museum.

Hat tip to Burt Humburg.

Answers in Genesis is gearing up for a science fair in February 2009 2010. The rules are here. Note that they are parasitic on the Intel Science and Engineering guidelines with two minor exceptions:

3, All projects should be clearly aligned with a biblical principle from a passage or verse.

The student should be able to explain why the verse or passage selected relates to their project. (Students should read the article “God and Natural Law” by Dr. Jason Lisle for an explanation of this concept.)

* Students should consider the context of the verse(s) they are using.

* The verse chosen does not have to directly apply to the project topic (e.g., Scripture does not directly address radio waves), but may simply relate the project to the Creator of the universe.

* Students should read the article “God and Natural Law.”

and

4. Students should be able, with a clear conscience, to sign the AiG Statement of Faith, which upholds the belief in the creation of the universe in six, twenty-four-hour days about 6,000 years ago by the Creator God as revealed in the Bible.

Translation of the “The verse chosen does not have to directly apply to the project topic” is “However my experiment came out, God did it.”

If it weren’t so hot and I weren’t so tired I’d get indignant. But mostly I’m sad: Those kids don’t have a chance. This is part of Ken Ham’s solution to the Already Gone problem he sees: The abandonment of fundamentalism by young people whose doubts start in middle school and high school. Ham’s solution is simple: Lie to them earlier and more often. Pity he isn’t self-aware enough to realize that those doubts begin to arise when kids learn that Ham and their pastor have been lying to them. And that’s the counter to the Hamster: Let ‘em know they’re being lied to in the plainest possible terms.

Hat tip to Dan Phelps.

The NCSE reported on August 13^th that

Chris Comer, whose lawsuit challenging the Texas Education Agency’s policy of requiring neutrality about evolution and creationism was dismissed on March 31, 2009, is now appealing the decision. Formerly the director of science at the TEA, Comer was forced to resign in November 2007 after she forwarded a note announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest in Austin; according to a memorandum recommending her dismissal, “the TEA requires, as agency policy, neutrality when talking about evolution and creationism.” In June 2008, Comer filed suit in federal court in the Western District of Texas, arguing that the policy violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: “By professing ‘neutrality,’ the Agency credits creationism as a valid scientific theory.” The judge ruled (PDF, p. 18) otherwise, however … In her appellate brief, submitted to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Comer asked (PDF, p. 39) the court to “review the record de novo and reverse and vacate the district court’s decision. Specifically, it should grant Comer’s motion for summary judgment, and vacate the grant of summary judgment for defendants, as well as the dismissal of plaintiff’s complaint. At a minimum, this Court should vacate the grant of summary judgment to defendants, plus the order dismissing the complaint, and remand for further proceedings.”

Hat Tip: Tony Whitson’s blog on curriculum-related matters

Update:: I received an email from the Managing Editor of National Geographic News this afternoon notifying me that the headline has been changed to “Extinct Walking Bat Found.” The email explains that they intended only to suggest (in the original headline) that a particular explanation for the New Zealand walking bat had been overturned, not that all of evolutionary theory had fallen:

As is often the case with news headlines, there was not enough space to accommodate “Extinct Walking Bat Found; Upends an Evolutionary Theory” and so we removed “an,” thinking that readers’ would fill in the blank.

Unfortunately, it seems that some readers filled the blank with “all” as opposed to “an.”

Would that they used “explanation” or “account” rather than “theory” in the first place. However, kudos to NatGeo News for modifying the headline.

(However, the link from NatGeo News’ front page still has the “upends” language.)

==================================

The National Geographic News seems to be slipping into the New Scientist mode of sensationalist science headlines. In 1999 it was taken in by the fabricated Archaeoraptor fossil. Now in National Geographic News we see this bizarre headline:

Extinct Walking Bat Found; Upends Evolutionary Theory

And how is evolutionary theory upended? It appears that instead of acquiring the walking habit via loss of flight due to lack of predators, the lesser short-tailed bat of New Zealand inherited its walking habit from Australian ancestors who walked. To be fair, the reporter, Carolyn Barry in Sydney, did a quite respectable job with no hint of the sensationalism injected by the headline writer. How the Hell finding a potential ancestor for an extant species “upends evolutionary theory” is beyond me. Shame on you, National Geographic News.