Recently in War 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.

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.

Over on the T-urf13 thread we had a request for an open thread for questions and answers. In the spirit of the holiday season, I’m happy to oblige. However, let’s make this an experiment in attempting to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in blog comments. I suggest:

1. This thread is not for arguing, it is for explaining.

2. Thus the issue is not whether or not person X believes viewpoint Y, the only issue is to understand/explain the science relating to Y.

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.

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…

Sorry for the late notice, but there’s a webcast tonight at 8:00 Eastern time from Harvard on “The World Before Darwin,” by Everett Mendelsohn, a social historian of science. A friend who was a teaching fellow for Mendelsohn tells me he’s a very good speaker. The webcast is free, but you must register. When I registered a few minutes ago there were 599 699 webcast ‘tickets’ left.

This is apparently the first in a series of talks in Harvard’s “Darwin150” program celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the publication of OoS.

Hat tip to Patricia Princehouse, the former Harvard Teaching Fellow mentioned above.

I probably made my first purchase from Edmund Scientific in 1956, when they sold a lot of military surplus optics. Since then, they have grown into a fairly respectable supplier of scientific instruments to both professionals and hobbyists. I was dismayed, therefore, to learn yesterday that they also sell pseudoscientific instruments:

Remote Viewing DVD. Remote viewing is described as “similar to clairvoyance or ESP.”

EMF Ghost Meter for detecting “paranormal presences.”

3-in-1 Paranormal Research Instrument for hunting ghosts.

This is appallingly bad stuff, but especially so for a scientific supplier. It is as bad as lying to people about evolution. Edmund’s allows comments, and if you wanted to let them know of your opinion, I would not try to stop you.

Acknowledgment. Thanks to Glenn Branch for the tip.

Benjamin Wiker, a senior fellow of the Disco ‘Tute, has made a cottage industry of linking Darwin to Hitler, evolution to Nazi ideology, and that meme is perpetuated by a variety of ID creationist flacks.

Wiker’s view depends in large part on the supposition that German evolutionary thinking about evolution actually followed Darwin. However, as a recent book review in PLoS Biology points out, what reached Germany was not the English version of Origin of Species, it was a translation by German paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn that was a main source of German notions of Darwinian evolution, and those notions were a distortion of Darwin’s views. Bronn had a substantially different conception of evolution than Darwin, and Bronn’s translation apparently incorporated a good bit of his own conception rather than being a straight translation of Darwin. Bronn even added an extra chapter to OoS incorporate his own ideas.

The NCSE started publishing a journal called Creation/Evolution in 1980. In 1996 it was merged with Reports of the National Center for Science Education. Now the entire run of Creation/Evolution Journal has been put online. It was OCRed so it’s searchable, but it has not yet been proofread so searches may be a little wonky sometimes.

Via John Pieret.

I’m back from field work, and have finally gotten enough time to get my photos web-ready after returning from Batholiths Onland. (see Blogging Batholiths: Part 1 for a summary of the 1^st 8 days of the adventure, and a description of the scientific goals of the project; the part 1 photo essay is here.)

The updated photo tour includes reactions to the activist who tried to sabotage the project, finally getting some data, splendid photos from team members, and more. Part 2 starts off with a hike up to the gorgeous falls in Hagensborg, BC, and can be found here.

Comments may be left here or there, but nowhere in between.

Update: a piece about the failed attempt to sabotage the project, “Eco-warrior trashes seismic experiment” by Rex Dalton, appears in the 23 July 2009 issue of Nature.

Update, Aug. 5^th, 2009: Forest fires have come to the region. More below the fold.

No.

Update at the bottom

In the context of some flailing against theistic evolution, Denyse O’Leary has finally scraped the bottom of the barrel. On Uncommon Descent she writes

I just got done reading a book published in Turkey called Evolution Deceit, which helps me understand why Turkey alarms many materialists - but more on that later.

“Evolution Deceit” is by Adnan Oktar, who publishes under the name Harun Yahya and is a Turkish creationist. It’s a standard issue creationist diatribe; nothing new to see there. That O’Leary cites it as a reason to be alarmed about Turkey is entirely appropriate, but not for the reason O’Leary wants us to believe. In fact it’s an indication that the creationist pathology infests more countries than just the U.S.

Recall that Harun Yahya is also the purported author of The Atlas of Creation that was mailed to thousands of scientists a while back. It’s also the book in which a fly fishing lure was presented as a photograph of an insect along with other obvious mistakes. I knew the ID creationists were getting desperate for allies, but this is a new low. Soon I expect to see Denyse wearing a burqa.

Update: Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservative notes that Denyse has now interviewed Oktar. See Arnhart’s post linked above for commentary on the interview, particularly Oktar’s claim that intelligent design is the product of a Masonic conspiracy to promote atheism and Deism. This just gets weirder and weirder.

I just got a notice from Michael Zimmerman of The Clergy Letter Project that the Project has developed a new Web page, Teach Them Science. The Web page was developed in conjunction with the Center for Inquiry Austin, and was released now “because the Texas State Board of Education is poised to vote on new science standards for the State of Texas.” Professor Zimmerman adds that the Web page contains “an enormous amount of information about the evolution/creation controversy on it.”

Professor Zimmerman continues,

Although a committee of teachers and scientists has written a K-12 curriculum of which all of us could be proud, the State Board of Education’s composition is such that just about half of the members hold a worldview incompatible with modern science. Our new web page explains the situation and provides ways for people to get involved. Something to keep in mind is that textbook publishers are well aware of what the State of Texas requires. Because of the huge Texas market, changes to the Texas curriculum are likely to have an effect throughout the country. In short, an anti-science vote in Texas may affect science teaching in local communities throughout the United States. Read more about the situation, and how you can get involved, on our Teach them Science (www.teachthemscience.org) web page and in a news report at the National Center for Science Education’s web page (www.ncseweb.org).

Ebonmuse has an excellent short piece on the Disco Dancers’ “teach the controversy” ploy. The money paragraph:

The problem with “teaching all sides” is that it can give fringe ideas a credibility they have not earned. Excessive concern for “balance” leads to presenting the speculations of cranks and crackpots as if they were on equal footing with the positions defended by vast majorities of qualified experts. (The media has a similar problem.) And this is very useful to advocates of pseudoscience, who often do not need to win the rhetorical battle outright; they can triumph merely by muddying the waters and preventing a consensus from forming around the truth. This is the same strategy employed by tobacco companies, as we can see from the second excerpt above, as well as by oil companies seeking to forestall regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

To Ebonmuse’s list of movements employing the same tactic one can add HIV denial (cf. Phillip E. Johnson and Jonathan Wells).

And Ebonmuse adds a nice touch:

But with all that said, the idea of teaching the controversy isn’t an intrinsically bad one. There are plenty of subjects that have legitimate controversies where this commendable call for fairness could be better applied.

For example, how about sex ed? A great many religious conservatives - many of the same ones who call for teaching the controversy on evolution, I don’t doubt - change their tune when it comes to public-school health classes, demanding that students be taught an “abstinence-only” program that omits contraception, or mentions it only to discuss its failure rates. How strange. Whatever happened to fairness? Whatever happened to learning about all sides? Why can students make up their own minds about evolution, but not about how to protect themselves from STDs?

Just so.

Daniel J. Phelps is President of the Kentucky Section of the American Institute of Professional Geologists and Chairman of the Geology Section of the Kentucky Academy of Science. He is also founder and President of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, a well-respected amateur paleontological organization.

Dan is also among the most active scientists in debunking Answers in Genesis’ Creationism Museum, to the point that AIG whines about it. Dan has been tireless in critiquing the museum and the faux “science” it promotes.

Now Dan has been named Distinguished Professional Scientist in a Non-academic Position by the Kentucky Academy of Science. Congratulations to a committed supporter of science and honest science education!

Updated: Disclaimer appears below. Link to journal endorsement is here.

This journal does not have a vote, and does not claim any particular standing from which to instruct those who do. But if it did, it would cast its vote for Barack Obama.

Politics impacts science. From which research emphases get funded to which school board member to vote for, science and politics often cross paths. PT’s supporters come from all walks of life and bring to the pro-evolution discussion opinions on other matters that span everything from conservative to liberal. To the extent possible, PT tries to avoid overtly being political, partly because we don’t want to needlessly alienate those supporters, but mainly because it’s beyond the charter of this website and that there are many other blogs that serve that purpose better than ours. Occasionally, though, this blog encounters a crossroads between science and politics, entailing posts that necessarily make political statements. This is one.

During this election, there is a difference between the candidates running for president. Palin is a creationist of the first water. Her disbelief that money spent in support of autism research was going to labs in France that used fruit fly models, reported at Pharyngula, speaks volumes.

At least from the standpoint of science advocacy and at least to this PT contributor, the decision during this election appears straightforward. Nature’s endorsement is timely and appropriate.

BCH

PS - And novel! According to this post from DailyKos.com, it would appear that this is first time Nature has endorsed a candidate.

Allen MacNeill has yet another interesting contribution (as well as an announcement about a new course). Allen MacNeill:It’s very gratifying to see Lynn Margulis finally getting the recognition that she deserves. As the originator of the serial endosymbiosis theory (SET) for the origin of eukaryotes, Lynn’s work provides an excellent example of how ID should (but currently doesn’t) proceed. During the late 1960s, Lynn published a series of revolutionary papers on the evolution of eukaryotic cells, culminating in her landmark book Symbiosis and Cell Evolution, in which she carefully laid out the empirical evidence supporting the theory that mitochondria, choloroplasts, and undulapodia (eukaryotic cilia and flagella) were once free living bacteria (purple sulfur bacteria, cyanobacteria, and spirochaetes, respectively).

Read the rest at Serial Endosymbiosis and Intelligent Design

Allen makes an excellent case how science progresses and that while science may resist change, the only way to change science is to do hard work, research and show how your ideas form scientifically relevant contributions. This is particularly relevant when it comes to Intelligent Design, whose proponents have chosen it to remain scientifically vacuous, without content. And still they whine about being ‘expelled’ when in fact they are ‘exposed’.

Allen is also organizing Seminar in History of Biology: Evolution and Ethics: Is Morality Natural? at Cornell

COURSE LISTING: BioEE 467/B&Soc 447/Hist 415/S&TS 447 Seminar in History of Biology

SEMESTER: Cornell Six-Week Summer Session, 06/24/08 to 07/31/08

The New York Times reports in an article titled Disinvited to a Screening, a Critic Ends Up in a Faith-Based Crossfire how a critic was invited and then disinvited from attending the screening of Expelled and how the critic still attended the showing.

Shortly before he was to attend a screening in January of the documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” which is about alternatives to the theory of evolution, Roger Moore, a film critic for The Orlando Sentinel, learned that his invitation had been revoked by the film’s marketers.

But Roger Moore decided to attend anyway

Jonathan Wells has an article at Evolution News and Views which is, typically for Wells, chock full of misinformation. But, as almost anyone could refute his central contentions with one minute on Wikipedia, you have to wonder just how stupid the Discovery Institute and its Fellows think we are.

The Colorado Daily reports that Michael Korn, the person who emailed death threats to biology faculty at Colorado University - Boulder was sent a restraining order in email on December 6^th, and agreed to its terms in minutes. They apparently used email because no one seems to know just where Michael Korn might reside.

The article relies in part upon material quoted here on Panda’s Thumb.