Recently in What motivates creationism Category

This week I was invited out to Oklahoma to speak in the University of Oklahoma’s Darwin 2009 speaker series. It was quite a trip – I got to meet the Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education, and breakfast with Richard Dawkins himself. The evolution issue is still hot in Oklahoma, and my visit coincided with a general cultural fracas in the state over evolution, creationism/ID, and what attention these issues should receive in public schools and in universities. I’ll attempt to give a brief snapshot of how things currently look in one of the reddest of the red states.

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to the theory of evolution, Roger Moore, a film critic for The Orlando Sentinel, learned that his invitation had been revoked by the film’s marketers.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

Oops, someone pointed out to me that this publication preceded the DI’s press tour.

Poor Discovery Institute, after spending much time and effort on trying, unsuccessfully, to generate some media interest on the Gonzalez tenure case, all they got was a cynical response from Mac Johnson at the conservative site Human Events.com.

So in light of the issue’s new prominence and with a desire to improve the mental hygiene of others, I would just like to say that Intelligent Design is a really, really bad idea –scientifically, politically, and theologically. I say this as a dedicated conservative, who has on many occasions defended and espoused religion and religious conservatism. I also say it as a professional molecular biologist, who has worked daily (or at least week-daily) for years with biological problems to which the theory of evolution has contributed significant understanding – and to which Intelligent Design is incapable of contributing any understanding at all.

The Discovery Institute, after having realized that Intelligent Design is doomed to remain scientifically infertile and vacuous and after their devastating loss at the Dover trial, seems to have retreated to their fundamental opposition to materialism. Hopelessly confused by Phil Johnson’s misunderstanding of methodological and philosophical naturalism, the DI seems to be intent to blame evil Darwinists for immoral behaviors such as eugenics.

Let me start of by pointing out that any such attempt is doomed from the beginning for the simple reason that the Discovery Institute and other ID Creationists have claimed that Darwinism cannot provide foundation for morality, or in other words, Darwinism cannot serve as a principle on which to build a decision of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. This means that Eugenics cannot have a foundation in amoral scientific concepts lest there exists an external principle on which to base the decision as to what is good and bad for society.

People should therefor not be surprised that eugenics has been a principle which preceded Darwinism. Equally unsurprised will be the well informed readers who are familiar with the eugenic history of Christian evangelicals in the United States.

But I digress. The Discovery Institute, after having come to the inevitable conclusion that Intelligent Design is likely to remain without scientific relevance has changed its approach. While I predict that their attempts will become an ever greater disaster than their attempts to introduce the concept of Intelligent Design into schools, there is an even greater concern. Namely by violating St Augustine’s fair warnings about Christians saying foolish things (about science), an observer may easily come to reject the whole teaching of Christianity as a similarly foolish enterprise.

Hat tip Sparc

Editors in chief Dr. Niles Eldredge, Ph.D., Curator of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, New York and Gregory Eldredge, M.A. at the John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx, New York have announced a new journal titled Evolution: Education and Outreach Launching at the conference of the National Association of Biology Teachers, November 28-December 2, Atlanta.

*** Evolution: Education and Outreach will be free online during 2008! ***

Hat tip Sparc

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution revolutionized scientific thinking. Since the publication of The Origin of Species 147 years ago, this theory has been extensively and rigorously tested. Overwhelming scientific evidence from many disciplines exists to support this theory. From the vast body of scientific evidence that has accumulated, we have come to an understanding of all areas of the biological world - from our cells and DNA to our lakes and forests. Evolutionary principles are the foundation of all modern biology and have led to major advances in fields as diverse as molecular biology, developmental biology, genetics, behavior, and paleontology. As such, evolutionary theory is a fundamental and necessary component of modern science education.

Evolution: Education and Outreach will promote accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience. Targeting K-16 students, teachers and scientists alike, the journal will publish articles to aid members of these communities in the teaching of evolutionary theory.

Just in time for Halloween, the latest edition of Newsweek has a neat article about the psychology of supernatural belief. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The mind also sees patterns in random data, which is why the sky is speckled with bears and big dippers. This drive to perceive patterns—which is very useful in interpreting experimental data as well as understanding people’s behavior—can also underlie such supernatural beliefs as seeing Jesus in the scorch marks and flecks of grain on a grilled-cheese sandwich. “If a stain looks like the Virgin Mary,” says Hood, “then it is a divine sign and not a coincidence. If the wind in the cave sounds like a voice, then it is a voice.” […]

The mind also tends to impute consciousness to inanimate objects (ever yell at a balky computer?). This leads us to believe that natural phenomena are “purposeful, caused by agents with sentient minds,” says Hood, whose book “The Supernatural Sense” is due next year. It’s only a short step to thinking that “ ‘things that go bump in the night’ are the result of some spirit or agent,” not branches brushing against your drainpipe.

Sound like anyone you know?

An important point made in the article is that the tendency to see patters that aren’t there or to impart consciousness to things that aren’t conscious is a normal outcome of the way the human brain functions, due in large part to having to deal with incomplete sensory input. A couple of important lesson to draw from this (to me anyway) is that, first of all, rigorous empirical testing is necessary in science precisely because everyday perception can be so badly misleading. And secondly, the brain’s wiring can make it very difficult for people to disabuse themselves of supernatural beliefs. I still don’t know what the best method of doing that is, but getting them to understand the underlying means by which such beliefs form is probably a useful exercise.

In the post about my review of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution, many complained that they couldn’t access the full text without a university subscription or paying a huge fee. I have checked Elsevier’s policies on this. Authors are not allowed to post the published PDF to their websites (you have to get that from Elsevier), but they can put up the unformatted, submitted preprint version of their articles, as long as they include the reference and DOI to the published version. So here is the reference: Nicholas J. Matzke (2007). “The edge of creationism.” Trends In Ecology and Evolution, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 24 October 2007. ScienceDirect, doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2007.09.004.

…and the full text is below the fold. Note that the unpublished version has a few minor differences from the published version. For example, it has more emphases which were kind of my way of jumping up and down on the smoking ruins of Behe’s core arguments in The Edge of Evolution.

I am pleased to announce that Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE) has just put up the article-in-press version of my book review of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution. Here is the reference and link:

Nicholas J. Matzke (2007). “The edge of creationism.” Trends In Ecology and Evolution, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 24 October 2007. ScienceDirect, DOI.

The DOI link doesn’t seem to be working just yet, presumably that is temporary. And the other link is one of those nasty superlong ones, so if nothing works, go to the TREE website and click on “Articles in Press” to see it (you will have to have a subscription or university access to get the article; I will provide a partial quote below).

Writing this review was challenging. There are a great many things wrong with Behe’s book, and attempting to hit the most important points effectively, with just 750 words to work with, was quite a challenge. For example, there was no way to fit in anything about HIV, even though some really good points have emerged on that front in the last few months. Thanks to the PT crew for a great many helpful discussions, comments, etc. I also had Cavalier-Smith’s (1997) TREE review of Darwin’s Black Box, literally the article that got me into ID criticism in a serious way, to inspire me (despite some flaws in that review).

I tried to make every word count, so it is hard to pick a summary quote, but here is a bit from the middle:

The Alliance for Science, a wonderful group of which I am a member, has a link about a survey that examines public perception of the new Creation Museum. Having recently visited the Propoganda Ministry Museum myself, I was very underwhelmed. I will report my experiences there in a future post replete with pictures over at Neurotopia. I feel bad because I haven’t been keeping up on the evolution/science activism side of my life for a very long time now, aside from this post and pushing the Alliance for Science’s Evolution Essay Contest, I have done very little this year to even address the issue. Might have something to do with my dad dying and whatnot, I’m not sure.

The interesting part of the survey is that “white evangelicals” or “fundamentalists” weren’t particularly approving of the intellectual travesty Museum either. Maybe there is hope for America after all. Or, maybe the “Museum” really is such a shoddy, transparent attempt at evangelizing that nobody is fooled.

Do stop by and check it out.

I was back in Ohio last week to celebrate my grandparents’ 60^th wedding anniversary. While I was in the area, a number of the PT regulars also met up south of Cincinnati to take our own tour of Answers in Genesis’ Creation Museum. (Wesley has a picture of the group here; I’ll also try to scan in another “official” picture tomorrow).

My brain still hurts. My thoughts on everything over at Aetiology (with photos, of course).

The PNAS Early Edition webpage has just posted a series of papers from the December 2006 National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquium, “In the Light of Evolution: Adaptation and Complex Design,” organized by Francisco Ayala and John Avise. The series of papers, on topics ranging from color vision to beetle horns, is now available (I will post the list below the fold). Eugenie C. Scott (aka Genie) was invited to speak at this meeting about evolution education and the history of opposition to it, and the speakers wrote papers to be published in PNAS and a forthcoming NAS volume.

Genie brought me on as a coauthor on the paper she was asked to write. This became:

I have just read the latest post of young-earth creationist/Discovery Institute fellow/Biola professor/blogger John Mark Reynolds. I think I am just going to have to occasionally serve the role of his guilty conscience in matters scientific. He has apparently thrown his own scientific conscience down a well somewhere, or he wouldn’t be able to say the wildly hypocritical things he does.

Today, we have part 3 of John Mark Reynold’s four six-part exercise in rationalizing institutionalized ignorance of geology, aka young-earth creationism. See previous discussion of part 1 and part 2. The really fascinating thing about Reynolds is how he can contradict his own professed high principles within seconds of stating them. For example:

The question is: “What is true?”, not what fits my preconceived philosophy of science or theology.

Way to go, great sentiment. Clearly, then, we should look at the physical evidence and conclude that the earth is not young and the global flood of Noah did not happen – oh, wait:

Few things are more ironic than young-earth creationist John Mark Reynolds (theologian at Biola, Discovery Institute fellow, leader in the ID movement) lecturing scientists about truth, stubborn facts, and having an “open philosophy of science.” If there’s an earthquake in LA today, it won’t be the tectonic plates shifting, it will be the simultaneous detonation of thousands of irony meters. How does the man get up in morning, when young-earth creationism is as hopelessly false on the empirical facts as anything ever has been in the whole history of science, and when the fundamentalist movement’s promotion of young-earth creationism is perhaps the biggest example of systematic fraud ever perpetrated on the American public? If you ever need an example of an ID advocate blathering lip service about “truth”, while shamelessly disregarding it in practice at the exact same time, here you go.

In 2001, evolution was poised to return to the the Kansas Science Standards. The Intelligent Design Network objected to them and proposed changes that would have left open the door to teaching creationism. Kansas Citizens for Science responded to their proposal, which was sent to all members of the state board. One might suspect the response to have been too parochial for anything other than Kansas creationism; one would be wrong: the response serves as a prototype response for many creationist arguments and works nicely as a reference for letters to the editor even today.

Find it below, after the fold. It is also available in PDF and RTF formats.

In 1999-2000, the Kansas State Board of Education was running their PR machine full-bore, trying to convince the public that the central organizing theory of modern biology and biotechnology was a dead idea. Creationist speaker after creationist speaker was flown into town to put on a dog and pony show. If you were a Young-Earth Creationist, you might have seen Duane Gish/Fred Whitehead nondebate. If you liked ID creationism, you might have seen Johnson or Wells. Back then, it was a very big tent.

Well, KCFS wasn’t going to take things lying down, so we thought we’d prepare a few flyers to inform the audience to help them be ready for the creationists when they arrived. One of those flyers, “Jonathan Wells: Who is He, What is He Doing, and Why?” turned out to be pretty important.

Fast forward to Spring 2005, after the creationists had taken over the state board of education again and ran roughshod over the accepted processes of curricular review. They rejected the recommendations of the experts who developed very good standards and held a show trial, in which evolution would be dragged before them to answer the tough ID creationists’ questions.

The details of the story are described elsewhere, but one of the “witnesses” was Jonathan Wells, who during his testimony claimed that he was not influenced by religion. Within the span of an hour, KCFS was able to print several copies of our Wells flyer to distribute to interested members of the press. The result was that in the following day’s newspapers, Jonathan Wells testimony and his quotations were seen in juxtaposition to each other, making of his credibility to journalists what those in the know had deemed of it for years.

Find the flyer on the flipside. It’s also available in RTF format. Please note that the DI has since changed their name from the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture to simply the Center for Science and Culture. So clearly it’s no longer religious.

A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No matter how often evolutionary biologists and informed respondents try to point out that the sense of “accident” in biology is based on the lack of correlation between the future needs of organisms, the trope is repeated ad nauseum.

Why?

Read on at Evolving Thoughts

Over at Uncommon Descent, Gil Dodgen asks the question of why so many engineers reject evolution. Dave Scot then asks a similar question about doctors. Not surprisingly, their answers to these questions are self-serving and backed up only by wishful thinking. Dodgen quotes Stephen Meyer as saying that because engineers know all about “design”, they are therefore in a unique position to know about biology. (As a corollary, I suppose biologists must have special insight when it comes to designing bridges.) Even more amusing is Dave Scot’s explanation for why doctors supposedly reject evolution. They are risk adverse. I’ll let others ponder the logic of that one. But all of this begs the question: How many doctors (or engineers) reject evolution, and why do they do so? I think the question is worth looking at, even if just for fun. So let’s do something that the denizens of UD would consider totally alien – let’s look at some data.

If you needed another proof that the Founding Fathers were pretty smart guys when they noted that fights over religion are intractable and produce strife because they involve ultimate questions decided according to dictates of conscience, we have yet another proof. In recent weeks there has been a resurgence of internicine fighting amongst the pro-science blogging community over the issue of religion. The Holy Wars threads involve the debate between two camps: I think the camps are neutrally described as follows (feel free to hurl invective my way if you disagree).

William Saletan of Slate writes occasionally about ID, and usually has some good insights. Here’s his latest:

Fantasy Island

The money shot:

This, more than monkey ancestors, is what alarms creationists. Larson lists the social ills they blame on the teaching of evolution: abortion, eugenics, homosexuality, effeminacy, divorce, communism, long hair. He’s been told that Phillip Johnson, the founder of the intelligent design movement, brought up cross-dressing three times in his most recent book. “And those are important issues,” Larson adds, trying to sound even-handed, but the journalists laugh. “It is important,” a colleague next to me whispers. “There’s a lot of shopping involved. You have to buy for two.”

Cross-dressing? I was taught all those other things in my homo-abortion evolution classes, including the fact that evolution leads inexorably to both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism at the same time, but I was never taught how to cross-dress. How could my home state of South Carolina ever have received an “A” while leaving out the cross-dressing?

Anyway, this is the fourth article that Saletan has written on ID in the last few years. Here are the earlier ones in chronological order:

Unintelligible Redesign

What Matters in Kansas

Grow Some Testables

I didn’t care much for the second one, but he makes up for it with the third one.