Recently in Assault on Science Category

The Austin American-Statesman reports that Thomas Ratliff has narrowly defeated Don McLeroy in the Republican primary race for Texas State Board of Education. McLeroy is the right-wing extremist who wants to doctor the state science standards so they reflect his own disbelief in the theory of evolution. Since there is no Democratic candidate, Ratliff will automatically assume McLeroy’s seat.

The Dallas Morning News reports that Ratliff had received the support of “mainstream public education groups” and quotes him as saying, “I want to take politics out of our public schools,” and added that Ratliff

told gatherings across the district that Texans are tired of political posturing on the board as the social conservative [sic] bloc – led by McLeroy – tries to impose its views in history, science and other areas of the curriculum.

“Our kids don’t go to red schools. They don’t go to blue schools. They go to local schools,” he said, also criticizing attempts by some board members to inject their religious beliefs into what children are taught.

The News reports further that McLeroy was “unapologetic about the actions of the social conservatives” and bragged about the “incredible accomplishments that will help our children.”

Thanks to a commenter known to me only as Aagcobb for the tip.

We often argue that saying that “God did it” is a science stopper. That claim is typically countered by pointing to numerous examples of scientists who were (Newton) or are (Kenneth Miller) Christians (though as we know, Newton was a peculiar sort of Christian, even for his time).

The Disco ‘Tute, of course, doesn’t think that positing an Intelligent Designer is a science-stopper. Their ‘solution,’ embodied in the Wedge strategy, is to redefine science to include God an unnamed intelligent designer with inscrutable goals and skills as an “explanation.”

One variety of Christian “science,” however, is clearly willing to stop science in its tracks, and Todd C. Wood, faculty member at Bryan College, has provided a stark illustration of that. While Wood has shocked his creationist peers on occasion, for example for saying that

Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well. (All bolding original)

However, Wood has clear boundaries. Writing on his blog more recently Wood says

That’s why I don’t care about the origin of life (and why I’ll probably never finish reading Meyer’s book). I already know where life came from. I open the book of Genesis, and the Bible tells me exactly where life came from. Speculating on how it might have happened in a naturalistic scenario seems like a waste of time to me. Just like it would seem like a waste of time to an atheist to study the logistics of Noah’s Ark.

Can’t get any clearer than that.

Writing in the journal First Things, University of Delaware physicist Stephen Barr offers some frank words for the ID movement:

It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.

Goodness! And that’s just the first paragraph.

It is hard not to like an essay that begins like that, and I certainly agree with his general assessment of the ID movement. This criticism is all the more significant for appearing in a religious venue by a writer who is himself religious. (Barr is the author of the book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith). Still, I found much to criticize in some of the specific arguments Barr offers. The details can be found in this post over at EvolutionBlog. Comments can be left there.

That is the title of an article to be published in The International Journal of Cardiology, a presumably reputable journal published by Elsevier. Avijit Roy, the editor of the pro-science website Mukto-Mona, published in both Bengali and English, takes Elsevier to task on Talk Reason here.

Yesterday, I showed how the treatment of information in Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, contains many misunderstandings and unjustified claims.

Today, I want to focus on what I call the “dishonesty factor” of the book: claims that are misleading or just plain false. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has stated that “Meyer’s book seems to me to be written in good faith.” Perhaps, after reading these examples, he might reconsider his assessment.

While the administrative hearing on the termination of John Freshwater as a Mt. Vernon, Ohio, middle school science teacher is slowly approaching a conclusion, the preliminaries to the two federal suits are in progress. Recall that the Dennis family’s suit against the school district was partly settled, with the district agreeing to pay attorney’s costs plus a small amount to the family. However, Freshwater remains a defendant in that suit. And Freshwater has sued a range of entities and people in federal court.

I recently obtained the transcript of a deposition made a year ago by another student in Freshwater’s class that academic year, 2007-2008, and that deposition corroborates two major allegations about Freshwater’s classroom behavior, the use of the Tesla coil to mark students’ arms with crosses and the showing of a creationist video, The Watchmaker in science class.

The deposition of the student, referred to in the deposition as “Student No. 5”, was taken on February 16, 2009 for the Dennis family’s federal suit. In it there are two passages of immediate interest. They’re below the fold.

A couple of months ago, I finished a first reading of Stephen Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell. It was very slow going because there is so much wrong with it, and I tried to take notes on everything that struck me.

Two things struck me as I read it: first, its essential dishonesty, and second, Meyer’s significant misunderstandings of information theory. I’ll devote a post to the book’s many mispresentations another day, and concentrate on information theory today. I’m not a biologist, so I’ll leave a detailed discussion of what’s wrong with his biology to others.

In Signature in the Cell, Meyer talks about three different kinds of information: Shannon information, Kolmogorov information, and a third kind that has been invented by ID creationists and has no coherent definition. I’ll call the third kind “creationist information”.

It’s been a long time since I’ve responded to an Uncommon Descent post, and I’m starting to remember why. There’s one that went up over there the other day on the fossil record that’s really almost mind numbing - starting with the title, which is “Why Not Accept the Fossil Record at Face Value Instead of Imposing a Theory on it?“

Here’s what seems to be the main argument:

Here’s a simple example - extinction estimates. Darwinists will say that 99.99% of species that have ever lived have gone extinct. Well, that’s actually a bunch of B.S. There are roughly 250,000 species that have been identified in the fossil record, and well over 1,000,000 species that exist today. Taken at face value, even if every species in the fossil record has gone extinct (which they haven’t), that means that 80% of species that ever existed ARE STILL ALIVE. That’s quite a stretch. So where do Darwinists get their number? By assuming that innumerable species existed in the transitional spaces. Why? Because they _must_ have existed there for their theory to be true.

Or: How creationism (its existence and persistence) tells us a lot about how people think, even when they’re not being creationists, and how all this affects the way freethought secularism ought to approach the bigger world.

By James Downard

In a comment on an earlier post James Downard mentioned his talk to the Kennewick Freethought Society linked below. Watching the video, it struck me that James had hit on a possible cognitive mechanism that explains the phenomenon we call “compartmentalization,” the ability of a person to apply different standards of evidence (and logic?) to propositions in different domains of inquiry. I asked James if we could publish a transcript of the talk, and he graciously provided it. It’s below, with appropriate formatting inserted for the Thumb’s requirements. —RBH

An address by James Downard, presented to the Kennewick, Washington Freethought Society on October 25, 2009.

A friend of mine and fellow member of our local Inland Northwest Freethought Society, Jason, kindly recorded my talk and the various questions afterward from the audience. The main speech itself he posted in three parts on Youtube and elsewhere (retitled for there as “The Absurdity of Religion: Tortucan Traps” to give it a bit more kick as a teaser title). I got into a pretty fast delivery speed for it, for which I apologize.

Bradley Monton thinks he understands intelligent-design creationism better than either its opponents proponents or its critics. He’s about half right.

Monton, a philosopher at the University of Colorado, has recently been making a bit of a name for himself by publicly debating ID creationism and also moderating a debate between Francisco Ayala and William Lane Craig. So I decided it was time I read his book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design from cover to cover. I am working from a proof copy that the author kindly sent me last spring, so I will not comment on minor errors. I thought the book was well and clearly written, if not always well argued, but I thought that if I saw one more instance of an awkward and wholly superfluous phrase such as “it is the case that,” I was going to scream or throw my shoe through the monitor.

That’s the headline of a short blurb in yesterday’s issue of Science. According to Science, the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy helped to fund and promote a creationist book that was edited by a vice-president of CNR. I have not investigated CNR, but I assume it has properties in common with the US National Science Foundation.

The book, Evolutionism: the decline of an hypothesis, was edited by a historian of Christianity at the European University of Rome and was based on the proceedings of a meeting at which scientists and philosophers argued, in the words of Science, “that conventional dating methods are wrong, that fossil strata resulted from the Deluge, and that dinosaurs died 40,000 years ago,” not to mention “why evolution is unscientific.”

… in bad science in the UK. Surely the U.S., the country with Senator Jim “climate change is a hoax” Inhofe, the anti-vaccination movement, and, of course, the ever-popular Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, can out-do those stodgy Brits in the bad science department! Post your best examples in the comments.

A pen-pal of mine sent me the following message regarding Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell:

The Dishonesty Institute is mounting a campaign in support of Meyer’s book over at Amazon.com. In the past day there have literally been scores of new positive 5 star reviews posted by those who have seen the Dishonesty Institute’s e-mail appeal. Please vote Nay on each of these reviews and Yea on the negative ones, especially mine and Donald Prothero’s, since ours are the most comprehensive negative one star reviews posted at Amazon.com.

As long as we’re piling on Stephen Meyer, there are a number of arguments for which Don Prothero was prepared that Meyer apparently didn’t make in the recent debate. A couple are worth posts of their own.

One of the problems intelligent design proponents face is how to deal with bad biological designs. There are lots of examples–Oolon Colluphid of The Secular Cafe has a handy annotated list of 96 of them.

In his doorstop Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer has an appendix with 12 alleged predictions of intelligent design “theory.” One of his purported predictions concerns putatively bad or suboptimal designs in biological processes and structures. First a little background.

Intelligent design creationists in general use three basic arguments in dealing with the issue of suboptimal designs. First, they argue that the suboptimality results from “devolution.” What were once optimal designs have degenerated due to the vicissitudes of time and the second law of thermodynamics, or for some, Adam and Eve’s screw-up in the Garden–those of the YEC persuasion commonly attribute that degeneration (along with predation and parasitism) to the Fall. This is one of AIG’s approaches. Meyer also has used the “design decay” argument–see here.

A second argument is to claim that a given design really isn’t suboptimal. For example, in an interview attributed to Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator, Meyer reportedly claimed that the inverted vertebrate retina was “a tradeoff that allows the eye to process the vast amount of oxygen it needs in vertebrates” [p.87] (and also see AIG’s argument to this effect).

The third approach is to wave off questions about purportedly bad design as a theological issue, not a scientific one: Who are we to make assumptions about the Designer’s unknowable (to science) intentions and motives? ‘ID is real science and we don’t do theology.’ See here and here for examples.

Scientists point out, quite rightly, that the religio-political charade known as “intelligent design” (ID) is not good science. But how do we know this?

One of the hallmarks of science is that it is fruitful. A good scientific paper will usually lead to much work along the same lines, work that confirms and extends the results, and work that produces more new ideas inspired by the paper. Although citation counts are not completely reliable metrics for evaluating scientific papers, they do give some general information about what papers are considered important.

ID advocates like to point to lists of “peer-reviewed publications” advocating their position. Upon closer examination, their lists are misleading, packed with publications that are either not in scientific journals, or that appeared in venues of questionable quality, or papers whose relationship to ID is tangential at best. Today, however, I’d like to look at a different issue: the fruitfulness of intelligent design. Let’s take a particular ID publication, one that was trumpeted by ID advocates as a “breakthrough”, and see how much further scientific work it inspired.

The paper I have in mind is Stephen Meyer’s paper “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories”, which was published, amid some controversy, in the relatively obscure journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in 2004. Critics pointed out that the paper was not suited to the journal, which is usually devoted to taxonomic issues, and that the paper was riddled with mistakes and misleading claims. In response, the editors of the journal issued a disclaimer repudiating the paper.

Putting these considerations aside, what I want to do here is look at every scientific publication that has cited Meyer’s paper to determine whether his work can fairly said to be “fruitful”. I used the ISI Web of Science Database to do a “cited reference” search on his article. This database, which used to be called Science Citation Index, is generally acknowledged to be one of the most comprehensive available. The search I did included Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Even such a search will miss some papers, of course, but it will still give a general idea of how much the scientific community has been inspired by Meyer’s work.

I found exactly 9 citations to Meyer’s paper in this database. Of these, counting generously, exactly 1 is a scientific research paper that cites Meyer approvingly.

Read more at Recursivity.

As a last treat for the 150^th anniversary of the Origin, have a look at young-earth creationist creationist Cornelius Hunter [Update: Hunter has stated he is not a young-earth creationist on his blog, so I guess he’s not, although that position directly follows from his stated theology/philosophy], author of the “Darwin’s God” book and blog. Hunter’s basic argument against virtually any common pro-evolution argument is, basically, “But you evolutionists are claiming that God wouldn’t have done it this way! You’re making an unscientific theological argument!”

Via John Pieret’s excellent Thoughts in a Haystack blog I learn of an ongoing controversy about the teaching of evolution at Adventist Universities. (See also this Sept. 1 article from Inside Higher Ed.) The latest event is that the board of trustess of La Sierra University in Riverside, California, voted to endorse young-earth creationism:

La Sierra’s board of trustees last week unanimously voted to endorse Adventist beliefs that the world was created in six 24-hour days and said the teaching of evolution must be “within the context of the Adventist belief regarding creation.”

The board also proposed that all 15 North American Adventist universities develop a curriculum that includes a “scientifically rigorous affirmation” of Adventist creation beliefs.

At first glance, it is confusing that this is news. Those of us who are familiar with the history of creationism and have read Ronald Numbers’ classic The Creationists, and learned that the Seventh-Day Adventists were virtually the only fundamentalists who produced major advocates supporting belief in a young earth and global flood in the early 20^th century – based on the literalist visions of Adventist founder and prophetess Ellen White. It was only in the 1960s that the young-earth/global view became dominant within American fundamentalism/conservative evangelicalism in general, primarily through the efforts of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb in The Genesis Flood.

For some reason or other I got on the email list of Ray Comfort’s mailing list. What can I say, I am a connoisseur of the weird. As I’ve learned a little bit about Comfort’s ministry, I have been beginning to wonder – is this whole “Darwin giveaway” thing actually going to happen? Or is it mostly imaginary – primarily a fundraising stunt? I have seen lots of evidence that Comfort et al. are good at publicity and producing videos – but no evidence that they are strong on the ground. If they were actually organized to distribute hundreds of thousands of books on hundreds of campuses, I kind of think there would be more evidence of that organization. But there is virtually no such evidence, despite there being plenty of fundamentalist student groups on campuses that might serve as the foot soldiers for this sort of thing.

Here’s the latest odd thing along these lines –

PRESS RELEASE - 5 of 7 - Militant Atheists Seek Details

Militant Atheists Seek Details of Darwin Book Giveaway

When 170,000 copies of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with Ray Comfort’s Introduction are given away at universities around the country, atheists plan to be waiting for them. But they don’t know the identity of the universities the books will be given out. Comfort said. “The reason atheists are finding nothing is because every school that is being visited is a closely guarded secret. We don’t want to cause a disturbance. We simply want to get books into the hands of students across the country.” Others advised those who see the books being handed out said, “Cut out the intro in front of them, leave it on the table and take the book.” Another said, “Get them to sign [the] book, thank them, and then make some devastating point that will shatter them forever.” See http://www.livingwaters.com/origin “Press kit” for textual, audio, and video sound bites.

What? The list of schools being visited is a closely-guarded secret? Then why what it on their website at one point (if I recall correctly – here’s a copy from September), and why did they proudly announce in the original video that the top 50 American universities would be targeted? In that video, they also said they were working with Campus Crusade, Answers in Genesis, and the Alliance Defense Fund – but I haven’t heard anything about the Origin-into-schools project from those groups.

Anyway, it doesn’t make much sense and I don’t have any firsthand information, but at the moment I’m wondering if this Origin-into-schools thing will poke above the background noise of random crazies who hand out stuff on the quads of college campuses every day. (You can be sure, though, that there will be one place with Ray Comfort and his camera crew, since in some arenas, a video is worth more than 1,000,000 words and 1,000 on-the-ground volunteers.)

I’ve received a letter from Iowa written by Dr. Hector Avalos, which, I think, may be of interest to many readers of this blog. In his letter Dr. Avalos reports about a defeat of ID advocates in one of the school boards in Iowa. The full text of Dr. Avalos’s letter can be seen here. I hope most of the PT’s denizens will join me in expressing our gratitude to Dr. Avalos for his letter.

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.