[Editor's Note: This is cross-posted at Discovery Blog.]

Senior Fellows David Berlinski and Bruce Gordon spoke last week at the ninth annual “Physics and the God of Abraham” conference, held at Gonzaga University in Spokane. The event was organized by Fr. Robert Spitzer, President of Gonzaga, physicist and adjunct fellow of Discovery Institute. This year’s theme, “Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions,” was taken from the subtitle of Berlinski’s latest book, The Devil’s Delusion (Crown Forum, 2008).

The conference was organized by the Faith and Reason Institute at Gonzaga, an organization dedicated to an integrationist understanding of faith and reason through a philosophical investigation into both the nature and results of scientific research, and through critical discussion and reflection on topics in philosophical theology. To this end, “Physics and the God of Abraham” focuses on the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and the physical sciences, often dealing with the Judeo-Christian roots of modern science, the role that believers in the God of Abraham have played in scientific discovery, and the interpretation of modern physical theory in relation to philosophical-theological concerns.

In his lecture, “Naturalism’s Last Stand: Taking the Measure of the Multiverse,” Dr. Gordon explored the implausibilities and limitations of the speculative constructs offered by quantum cosmology, chaotic eternal inflation and the string-theoretic landscape to explain cosmological origins and fine-tuning. He argued that transcendent intelligent causation provides the only causally sufficient and metaphysically tenable explanation for what is known of the universe. Fr. Spitzer’s talk, “New Proofs for the Existence of God,” focused on evidence of creation and supernatural design in contemporary big bang cosmology, arguing for the inevitability of an initial singularity that requires a transcendent cause best described in the language of Thomistic apophatic theology. The final talk — entitled “Who’s Counting?” — was given by David Berlinski. Dr. Berlinski ventured beyond physical cosmology to the eternal verities of mathematics, examining the historical development of arithmetical conceptions from Euclid to Dedekind, and noting the independence of mathematical truth from physical reality; he thus ended his reflections with the provocative question, if 3+4=7 regardless of whether the universe exists, then who’s counting?

Further information about the conference may be found at:
http://www.gonzagafaithreason.org/physics-and-the-god-of-abraham.asp.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 4:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Harvard University's Harvey Mansfield has an excellent critique of evolution published by Forbes.com, where he is more commonly debating feminism or discussing Solzhenitsyn. In a book review of Men: Evolutionary and Life History, Mansfield takes a look at the moral implications of Darwinian theory when applied to the obvious differences between the sexes:

What ought a man to do, given this discrepancy between men and women? Like many scientists, Bribiescas lives under the yoke of a crude positivism which denies that scientific fact has any ethical implications. "Darwinian evolutionary theory does not support any moral stance." But of course it does. The trouble is not that Darwinian theory has no implications, but that it contradicts itself with two opposing implications.

Evolutionary theory is at odds with itself: It cannot accept that man is a special being, raised above all others in evolutionary history, and it cannot deny that only man is capable of science, which allows him to transcend his animal selfishness. In closing, I note that I have made no reference to religion but only brought out the inner contradiction of Darwinism.

Posted by Anika Smith at 2:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As I was listening online to last week’s Texas State Board of Education hearings, two comments by Board members stuck with me. The TSBE was in its final deliberations on science standards and liberal Republican Pat Hardy delivered an encomium to “experts.”

She went on about how if you get sick and require the medical knowledge of an expert in the field, why then you’d better go to that expert and follow his advice! She pleaded with other Board members to listen to the “experts” on evolution, which would mean voting to accept the “expert” view that there’s no debate on evolution worthy of being shared with high school biology students.

The same day, Board member Don McLeroy, who was on the dissenting side from majority “expert” opinion, delivered a stirring rebuttal. With marked irony, he asked what right he had, as a mere dentist by profession, to doubt the experts? In fact, despite being “only” a dentist, he took the view that as a citizen and an elected school board legislator, he had the right to think for himself. Indeed he had the responsibility. That was the case even if it meant, after study and reflection, rejecting what many experts say.

Then again, you don’t have to look too hard for genuine credentialed experts on the Darwin-doubting side -- quite a number of those testified before the TSBE. Yet it remains true that the skeptics on evolution represent a minority academic view.

As the world now knows, the TSBE ultimately voted with McLeroy and against the majority of experts, adopting science standards that specify the precise headings under which Darwinian theory most urgently needs to be questioned — or, in the Board’s preferred language, “analyzed and evaluated.”

To follow the experts unthinkingly is simply the prestige path for most people. Such docility also explains the resistance of certain constituencies, from whom you’d expert better, to thinking fresh thoughts about Darwinian evolution.

Sometimes, the temptation to surrender to expert opinion arises from nothing more complicated than laziness. I’m positive that’s the case with many in the politically conservative community of journalists and other intellectuals. Science bores or intimidates these folks, and they haven’t yet perceived the relevance of Darwinism to their other political and cultural concerns. Therefore expert opinion provides a welcome excuse, at least on this issue, to turn their brains off.

In other communities, there’s a tendency to be overly impressed by credentials, titles, honors, and offices. This is surely a big part of what keeps more Jews from “getting” the Darwin debate. You could call it a case of My Son the Doctor Syndrome. Just as the stereotypical coffee klatch of Jewish mothers will speak in absurdly hushed, reverential tones about the fact that one of them has a son in the medical profession — the technical Yiddish term here is kvelling — so too there’s something in recent Jewish culture that inclines us to revere “experts” to excess, no matter what the context. This is ironic given that Jews spent the previous 2,000 years refusing to defer to the dominant expert views of the culture around them.

With all that in mind, as a public service, I’ll devote the next couple of posts in a brief series to a look at the testimony of two experts who spoke before the Texas Board of Ed about science standards and evolution. One is molecular biologist and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award-winner David Hillis, who teaches at the University of Texas, Austin. Hillis stirred up the Darwin faithful with dire warnings of a coming blow to the state’s prestige if students were given occasion to doubt Darwin. That, he said in the Austin American-Statesman, would be

a huge embarrassment to Texas, a setback for science education and a terrible precedent for the state boards overriding academic experts in order to further their personal religious or political agendas. The victims will be the schoolchildren of Texas, who represent the future of our state.

And who can doubt he is right? My son the genius!

The other is Southern Methodist University anthropologist Ronald Wetherington, who, in the contest of dire warnings, would not be bested by Dr. Hillis. Director of SMU’s Center for Teaching Excellence, Wetherington demanded (in the San Antonio Express-News) that the Board’s enlightened members “stand firm and hold back that pitchfork crowd of the 16th century.”

What’s so delightful about these two gents is how marvelously they illustrate the maxim that being an expert doesn’t mean you are right. In fact, you may be wrong on point after point — objectively wrong, not simply as a matter of opinion. This turns out to be the case with Hillis and Wetherington

Tomorrow, then, Professor Hillis.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 7:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In all the excitement of the debate over Texas science standards last week, one thing was made eminently clear: generally speaking, there is one side of this debate that focuses on the science at hand, and another side that keeps bringing up religion.

Contrary to the stereotype (but not the actual experience of those who care to see things as they actually are), it's the Darwinists in this debate who keep wanting to talk about religion. People who question Darwin's theory want to talk about the scientific evidence for and against it, as John West explains in The Washington Post's "On Faith" blog:

Evolutionists typically cast themselves as the champions of secular reason against superstition, but in Texas they tried to inject religion into the debate at every turn.

Indeed, this past week it seemed that they couldn't stop talking about religion. They boasted about their credentials as Sunday School teachers and church elders. They quoted the Bible and appealed to theology. And, of course, they attacked the religious beliefs of their opponents, branding them religious fundamentalists.

By contrast, supporters of teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution focused mostly on science, not religion. They even had a procession of Ph.D. biologists and science teachers testify before the Board of Education about their scientific skepticism of key parts of modern evolutionary theory.

Posted by Anika Smith at 9:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From my Discovery Blog
The New York Times got the preview story wrong, and the Washington Post editorial writer probably was too rushed to question the charges of "creationism" coming from the National Center for Science Education, the Darwin-only lobby. So this week's important decisions by the Texas State Board of Education (TSBE) on how to teach evolution were predicated in the media by the big question of whether teachers should provide both "strengths and weaknesses" of Darwin's theory. Those words might sound benign, readers were told, but they really are "code words" (take the press' word for it) for creationism and religion.

To the media left, any questioning of Darwin is reserved for denizens of Dogpatch.

So, what did the TSBE do? Well, it turns out that they are fairly adroit politicians. They did remove language providing for "strengths and weaknesses" and then added new language--quite a lot of it--providing that students will learn, for example, to "analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations…including examining all sides of scientific evidence… so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Perfect! A policy distinction without a difference! In fact, the new standards are just fine, an improvement, in fact. Now teachers can tell the kids about the scientific evidence in a variety of fields that seems to contradict the Darwinian account as well as the supposed evidence in support.

Once again the NCSE was too-smart-by-half. It ran blogs making fun of religion, while organizing public speakers who gave fulsome testimony to their Christian faith and how compatible it is with "evolution" (meaning Darwinian evolution). To the purists like Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers it probably makes them look like toadies.

In the end, the rhetoric meant to evoke fundamentalist cranks was mixed with pious statements doing the very kind of religious posturing the Darwinists project onto their foes, and reminding me of the church scenes from Blazing Saddles. It all backfired.

By demonizing specific words--and making the elimination of them the test of "science"--the NCSE and its state distributor, the Orwellian-named Texas Freedom Network, simply allowed the Board to do the obvious word shuffle. Okay, no "strengths and weakness, " but instead, we'll pass similar ideas in different words, and everyone will be happy. Except, of course, the NCSE and the TFN.

Don't expect the media to figure this out from the NCSE Talking Points memo, but the insiders get the picture. Dawkins must be enjoying a caustic chuckle at the expense of the NCSE.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 10:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Although incorrect at points, the Wall Street Journal's article on the new Texas science standards is more accurate than some of the local reporting. The key thing the Journal gets right is that the Board definitely opened the door to critically analyzing evolution in the classroom. Unfortunately, the article omits or mangles a lot of the details. For one thing, the article doesn't mention the new critical inquiry standard requiring students to "analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations…including examining all sides of scientific evidence… so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." The story also garbles things when it states that "the board voted down curriculum standards questioning the evolutionary principle that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry." No, the Board rejected one such standard offered by Board chair Don McElroy, but it left untouched another standard that already required students to "analyze and evaluate how evidence of common ancestry among groups is provided by the fossil record, biogeography, and homologies, including anatomical, molecular, and developmental." This standard that was left intact clearly mandates that students "evaluate" the evidence for common ancestry. Moreover, McElroy's original amendment on common ancestry and the fossil record was rewritten and then reinserted. (The rewritten version requires students to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data of sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record.") The Journal article also misrepresents the language in the science standards about the Big Bang, implying that it was designed to allow the teaching of Biblical young-earth creationism. That's absolutely false, as the Board member who proposed the wording made crystal clear during the Board's deliberations.

Posted by John West at 12:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Austin, TX — Today, the Texas Board of Education chose science over dogma and adopted science standards improving on the old "strengths and weaknesses" language by requiring students to “critique” and examine “all sides of scientific evidence.” In addition, the Board—for the first time— specifically required high school students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations.

The new science standards mark a significant victory for scientists and educators in favor of teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution.

“Texas now has the most progressive science standards on evolution in the entire nation,” said Dr. John West, Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute. “Contrary to the claims of the evolution lobby, absolutely nothing the Board did promotes ‘creationism’ or religion in the classroom. Groups that assert otherwise are lying, plain and simple. Like the boy who cried ‘Wolf,’ the Darwin only lobby always screams ‘creationism!’ anytime educators or policymakers try to ensure a fair presentation of the scientific evidence both for and against evolution. Let’s be absolutely clear: Under the new standards, students will be expected to analyze and evaluate the scientific evidence for evolution, not religion. Period.”

The science standards approved today by the Texas State Board of Education include language requiring students to "analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations…including examining all sides of scientific evidence… so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Equally important, the high school biology standards now require students to “analyze and evaluate” the scientific evidence for key parts of evolutionary theory, including common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations.

The most significant changes are:

• The adoption of a new critical inquiry standard improving on the old "strengths and weaknesses" language: “in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student."
  
• The addition of "analyze and evaluate" to all of the high school biology evolution standards (no such language was included in the existing evolution standards). Students are now specifically required to evaluate the evidence regarding major evolutionary topics such as common ancestry, natural selection and mutations.
  
• The addition of two new standards in the high school biology evolution section of the TEKS requiring students to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the fossil record and the complexity of the cell.
  
• The adoption of a new high school biology standard dealing with origin of life research and chemical evolution that calls on students to "analyze and evaluate” the scientific evidence regarding formation of DNA molecules.

Texas becomes the seventh state to specifically require in its science standards that students critically analyze key aspects of evolutionary theory, joining Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Missouri, South Carolina, and Alabama. Two other states, Louisiana and Mississippi, have adopted legislation protecting the academic freedom of teachers and students to discuss scientific evidence critical of Darwin’s theory.

In January, a national Zogby telephone poll showed that more than 78% of likely voters favor teaching students the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, up from 69% in 2006.

Posted by Anika Smith at 5:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Unlike the slipshod Dallas Morning News article, the initial Associated Press report on the new Texas science standards acknowledges the "compromise" language requiring scientific critiques adopted by the Board and even quotes some of it:

The curriculum will require that students "in all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations ... including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student."

Although the AP story is clearly slanted toward the evolution lobby (and contains the obligatory inaccurate comments about intelligent design), it doesn't suppress the basic facts about what the Board did.

Posted by John West at 4:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One has to wonder whether the Dallas Morning News reporter even attended today’s meeting of the Texas State Board of Education. It’s hard to tell from the garbled account the paper just published, which pretty much claims that the evolution dogmatists won everything. Of course, the truth is almost exactly the opposite. The article is a classic example of either sloppy or selective reporting. For example, the piece talks about the removal of the “strengths and weaknesses provision” from the Texas science standards, but neglects to mention the adoption of even stronger language that requires students to "critique" and examine “all sides of scientific evidence"! The article likewise talks about the removal of Chairman Don McElroy's extra provisions on common ancestry and natural selection, but garbles the fact that the two "compromise" provisions later adopted about the fossil record and the complexity of the cell were offered as substitutes for McElroy's earlier provisions--and McElroy praised these substitutes for covering much of the same material he had proposed. Most egregiously, the article fails to mention that the final standards preserve amendments added in January requiring students to "analyze and evaluate" the evidence for major evolutionary claims such as natural selection, common ancestry, and mutations. The new "analyze and evaluate" language is a huge change from the one-sided evolution standards in the current Texas science standards and may well be the most significant revision adopted by the Board. The article also fails to report the addition of a new standard dealing with the origin of life in the high school biology standards. It's shoddy reporting like this that helps fuel the distrust many Americans feel toward the traditional newsmedia.

Posted by John West at 4:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In a huge victory for those who favor teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution, Texas today moved to the head of the class by requiring students to “critique” and examine “all sides of scientific evidence” and specifically requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations.

"Texas has sent a clear message that evolution should be taught as a scientific theory open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can't be questioned," said Dr. John West, Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute. “Contrary to the claims of the evolution lobby, absolutely nothing the Board did promotes ‘creationism’ or religion in the classroom. Groups that assert otherwise are lying, plain and simple. Under the new standards, students will be expected to analyze and evaluate the scientific evidence for evolution, not religion. Period.”

The new requirements were contained in revised science standards approved today by the Texas State Board of Education. The science standards include language requiring students to "analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations…including examining all sides of scientific evidence… so as to encourage critical thinking by the student." Equally important, the high school biology standards now require students to “analyze and evaluate” the scientific evidence for key parts of evolutionary theory, including common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations.

Discovery Institute has long endorsed the idea that evolution should be fully and completely presented to students, including its unresolved issues.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Chances are you have heard the story of Phineas Gage at some point. Most of us get it in our General Psychology courses in high school and college, the story of a man who had a horrible accident and was never the same again — sort of like Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry, but the other way around.

The idea this anecdote supposedly supports is that personality = the brain, as evidenced by changes to the brain (like a spike through the head) that cause changes in personality. Pretty straightforward stuff. There's only one problem.

It's not true. Denyse O'Leary explains at Uncommon Descent:

The story is that in 1848, a tamping rod went through Gage’s head and totally changed his personality. He was “no longer Gage.” Which demonstrates that the mind and the self are an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain. A textbook case.

I pointed out over dinner that there are good reasons to doubt this story. The prof was, of course, withering. Hundreds and hundreds of psych texts have told Gage’s story, he informed me, so how could it be false or questionable?

Well, I have written for newspapers most of my adult life, and one thing I know is this: Printing more copies of any type of information does not make it true. It makes it more widely disseminated.

Posted by Anika Smith at 8:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Texas Board of Education has finished the tweaking of its revised science standards for today. Unfortunately, an effort to reinstate the “strengths and weaknesses” language again failed on a vote of 7-7. Board member Bob Craig, one of the Republicans who has led opposition to the “strengths and weaknesses” language, offered an ambiguous and watered-down “compromise” that called for teachers to discuss “what is not fully understood so as to encourage critical thinking.” Although rejected by the full Board, Craig’s so-called compromise was supported by fellow Republicans Pat Hardy (Fort Worth) and Geraldine Miller (Dallas), both of whom have also crusaded against the “strengths and weaknesses” language and supported the Darwin-only crowd pretty much down the line. In defense of her views, Mrs. Miller launched into a remarkable speech about how she is a Christian and “a student of the Bible,” as if her personal religious beliefs have any relevance to what should be taught in science classes. Miller also lavished praise on Francis Collins’ book The Language of God for persuading her about the correct theological understanding of evolution. (Too bad Miller hasn’t bothered to read any of the critical reviews of the junk science in Collins’ book.) Once again, a defender of evolution has appealed to religion rather than science to justify his or her views. Mrs. Miller is certainly entitled to her religious views, but she wasn’t elected to serve on a state board of theology. While the government has a legitimate secular interest in teaching the science of evolution, it has no right whatever to try to dictate students’ theological beliefs about evolution, pro or con. The fact that evolution defenders can’t stick to science when justifying their censorship of the science curriculum is telling.

Posted by John West at 3:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently Texas Board of Education member Rick Agosto isn’t just content to censor science by removing any criticisms of evolution from the science curriculum. The San Antonio Democrat even wants to prevent citizens from expressing their disagreement with that censorship. This morning Agosto demanded that some citizens quietly holding signs stating “Don’t Censor Science” at the Board meeting take down their signs. He even called on security personnel to forcibly remove the signs, but Board chair Don McElroy intervened to stop that abuse of power. Agosto’s over-the-top behavior toward non-disruptive attendees at the meeting followed his earlier denunciation of intelligent design as not being based on science. Agosto doesn’t appear to have actually read anything by intelligent design proponents, and his comments attacking intelligent design were completely gratuitous since the Board isn’t even considering adding intelligent design to the science standards. Interestingly, at yesterday’s Board meeting Agosto used his right of personal privilege to bring back non-Texan Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education to speak before the Board. Because Scott spoke at the January meeting, she was supposed to be near the bottom of the speakers’ list yesterday in order to allow new people to testify. But Agosto seems to have been more interested in hearing from arch-Darwinist Scott than hearing from his own constituents or other Texans patiently waiting to testify.

Posted by John West at 9:56 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This morning the the Texas Board of Education has begun its deliberations on the final wording of the new Texas science standards. You can listen to the discussions live here.

Posted by John West at 9:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Steven Schafersman, self-proclaimed “secular humanist” and head of Texan Citizens for Science, is once again insisting that “language by the anti-evolutionists about doubt or weaknesses or controversy involving evolution is just rhetoric. Doubts or weaknesses don't exist among scientists.” Poor Dr. Schafersman needs to recheck some of his previous public statements, for despite what he says now, during the 2003 biology textbook adoption process in Texas he ultimately conceded that there are plenty of scientific controversies in modern evolutionary theory. As I pointed out in a podcast in January, Schafersman in 2003 did initially assert that there were no scientific controversies over evolution for textbooks to cover. But then he began to…well… evolve. By the time the adoption process was finished, Schafersman was admitting that there are in fact many scientific controversies raised by modern evolutionary theory, only he thought that students were too stupid to study them. Recounting Dr. Schafersman’s evolving statements is a great way to expose the sham claim we've been hearing throughout this week that evolution has no weaknesses.

Below is a step-by-step account Dr. Schafersman’s amazing evolution in 2003:

1. In his written testimony submitted to the Texas State Board of Education on July 9, 2003, Dr. Schafersman asserted categorically:

All the biology texts are factually accurate and free of errors concerning evolution; the books do not misrepresent any details of the modern scientific understanding of evolution, nor do they omit scientific information critical of evolution, because there isn’t any such information, contrary to what you have led to believe. (emphasis added)

2. In his oral testimony before the Board on July 9, 2003, Dr. Schafersman made the same general point but added a slight, unexplained qualification:

There is no scientific controversy about the fact of evolution and, thus, no weakness concerning its occurrence. There are also no weaknesses about the theory of evolution at the level it is presented in these textbooks. [Transcript of Hearing on July 9, pp. 112-113] (emphasis added)

3. In the web version of Dr. Schafersman’s written testimony of July 9, 2003, a more extensive qualification suddenly appeared (which was not in the version of his testimony he actually submitted to the Board). In his revised written testimony, Dr. Schafersman explicitly acknowledged that there are in fact “disagreements and controversies (‘weaknesses’) concerning evolutionary theory,” but he implied they are only appropriate for professional researchers and graduate students to hear about:

There is no scientific controversy about the fact of evolution and thus no scientific weaknesses concerning its occurrence. There are also no weaknesses about the theory of evolution at the level it is presented in these textbooks. Disagreements and controversies ("weaknesses") concerning evolutionary theory are found at the frontiers of research and graduate education, not at the level of introductory biology textbooks. [originally posted at http://www.txscience.org/files/testimony.htm] (emphasis added)

4. Finally, in the web version of Dr. Schafersman’s written testimony submitted to the Board for the Sept. 10, 2003 hearing, Dr. Schafersman acknowledged that there are in fact “many disagreements among scientists” about evolution, and he even conceded that learning about these disagreements need not be limited to just graduate students and researchers, but also some upper-division undergraduate students might be able to study them. Dr. Schafersman also provided a detailed list of what he regarded as the genuine scientific controversies over evolution. Notably, Schafersman's list included some of the key controversies previously raised by critics of evolution (such as the sufficiency of microevolution to explain macroevolution, and questions about the primacy of natural selection):

There are many disagreements among scientists about the correct nature or explanation of the evolutionary process. These should be studied in a university evolution class, usually taught in the senior year because of the great amount of prior biological knowledge needed to understand the issues. Their existence indicates that evolutionary science is a very healthy, active, and productive field. Here are some of them, including all the most contentious ones:

A. The sufficiency of microevolution to explain macroevolution v. the existence of specific macroevolutionary processes such as mass extinction, species selection, macromutation, etc.

B. Disagreements about the tempo and mode of evolution under different circumstances: slow v. fast, gradual v. punctuated, before and after a mass extinction event, background evolution v. adaptive radiation, etc.

C. Adaptation of all features in evolution via natural selection v. features resulting from non-adaptive events and processes, such as correlation of growth, body constraints, neutral theory, genetic drift, etc.

D. The role of contingency and non-progression in evolutionary history v. evolutionary progress, improvement, and repetition due to convergent evolution.

E. Disagreements about the primacy of natural selection of individuals compared to other levels of the evolutionary hierarchy, such as gene selection, group selection, and species selection.

F. Nature v. Nurture, Genes v. Environment--this is the most divisive controversy. There are at least three positions: blank slate/human potential proponents v. sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists v. biological determinists and IQ and race investigators.

G. The extent to which evolutionary theory can explain or account for human morality, religion, behaviors, self-awareness, free will, etc.

H. The reality or not of memes in the human population; memes are similar to genes, but are actually ideas or concepts that evolve throughout the human population and are affected by similar processes that affect genes, such as natural selection, genetic drift, founder effect, etc. Memes affect cultural evolution in the same way that genes affect physical evolution.
[originally posted at http://www.txscience.org/files/icons-revealed/index.htm ] (emphasis added)

5. So Dr. Schafersman eventually conceded that there are many scientific controversies over evolutionary theory, and he was even willing to allow some undergraduate students to study them. But he continued to oppose the right of high school students to learn about them. Why? To be blunt, he seemed to think that high school students are too dumb to understand scientific controversies. So in his view, even “Real scientific problems, controversies, etc., should not be included in introductory science textbooks." It’s better for high school students to simply accept existing theory and learn not to question:

Scientific theories are too massive and established to expect any high school student to critique or question. The vast majority of high school students would not be able to perform such critiques in a scientific way. Scientific theories should be accepted as reliable knowledge in K-12 classes, and not made the object of questioning until they have the educational training necessary to do so, which consists of years of graduate study at universities.

Real scientific problems, controversies, etc., should not be included in introductory science textbooks, because they are almost always too difficult to understand and their presence would only lead to student confusion and frustration.

There are certainly problems, controversies, difficulties, and knowledge gaps with the modern theory of evolution--the explanation of how the mechanism of the evolutionary process operates over time--but for the reasons stated above, these topics are just too complex to be dealt with in high school. They almost never are, and the textbooks need not and usually do not cover them.

The concept of students learning about the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ in scientific ‘hypotheses and theories’ in high school is unscientific and pedagogically useless.

[originally posted at http://www.txscience.org/files/icons-revealed/index.htm] (emphasis added)

6. So who are the ones trying to “dumb-down” how biology texts cover evolution? Those who want textbooks to cover evolutionary controversies, or Darwinists like Steve Schafersman who think allowing students to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of existing theories (as mandated by Texas law) is “unscientific and pedagogically useless”?

Posted by John West at 12:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

AUSTIN, Texas—Having watched most of the testimony today before the Texas State Board of Education, the contrast between the pro-strengths-and-weaknesses side and the evolution lobby could not be clearer. The evolution lobby continually focused on religion, trying to distract from the real issue by telling the Board that they should not teach both the evidence for and against evolution because somehow that brings religion into the curriculum. Our side focused overwhelmingly on science.

Ph.D. biologists who testified in favor of the teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” included Ray Bohlin, Don Ewert, Wade Warren, and Sara Kolb Hicks. Warren and Hicks gave striking testimony about the lack of academic freedom for university researchers. Warren testified about how a non-mandatory discussion on the pros and cons of evolution that he wanted to hold while a graduate student in biology was shut down. Specifically, Hicks, who holds a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Rice University, lamented the fact that "science censorship permeates education and the undergraduate and graduate level." These biologists testified about weaknesses in evolution including the limits to the amount of biological change that can be effected by natural selection, the lack of evidence for evolution in the fossil record, the inability of Darwinian evolution to produce the complexity of cellular processes, and the fact that evolution is not even required to do most biology research.

Additionally, LeTourneau biology professor Karen Rispin testified about scientific weaknesses in evolution pertaining to the presentation of evolution in biology textbooks, and discrepancies between fossil and molecular dates for alleged common ancestors of species. By the end of the day, no one could say with a straight face that there are no scientific weaknesses in evolution, or that no credible scientists doubt neo-Darwinism.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You can listen live to today’s hearing before the Texas State Board of Education on the Texas science standards here.

Posted by John West at 10:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has just posted its list of testifiers for today’s public hearing before the Texas Board of Education on the revised Texas science standards. Testifiers are supposed to alternate between those who support and those who oppose requiring students to examine the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories. There are a number of strange things about the list, but the strangest thing of all has to be the listed viewpoints of the two people signed up to testify from the evolution-only National Center for Science Education (NCSE)—Josh Rosenau and Eugenie Scott. Both are listed as favoring the inclusion of “strengths and weaknesses” in the Texas science standards! That’s news to me. While I’d certainly be delighted to see the NCSE support genuine science education on evolution rather than the teaching of one-sided dogma, I very much doubt Scott and Rosenau have suddenly changed their position. Did Rosenau and Scott misrepresent their positions in an attempt to get a better slot to speak? Or did they simply misunderstand what they were being asked? Or were TEA officials so oblivious that they somehow didn’t know that the NCSE is the leading national group opposing the teaching of strengths and weaknesses in Texas? It will be interesting to find out the truth. Another strange thing: We’ve been getting numerous reports from people who really do favor teaching strengths and weaknesses that they’ve been relegated to the bottom of the list despite the fact that they registered just a few minutes after registration opened and were previously told they were high up in the list. It also appears that at least some of the people classified as “other” on the list are in fact speaking against “strengths and weaknesses.” The sum result is to skew the list of testifiers in favor of those who oppose the teaching of strengths and weaknesses.

Posted by John West at 10:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The op-ed page of today's Dallas Morning News features a revealing exchange on the Texas science standards. Medical professor and evolution supporter Daniel Foster devotes his column to religion, while biology professor Amiel Jarstfer and lawyer Kelly Coghlan focus on science. Foster is completely out-gunned; if I supported his side of the debate, I’d be more than a little embarrassed.

Part of the problem is that Foster doesn’t seem to know anything about what the State Board of Education is actually doing. He starts out with a giant blooper: “This week the Texas State Board of Education will vote, for the third time, on wording in science textbooks.” (emphasis added) No, Dr. Foster, Board members aren’t voting on “wording in science textbooks” this week. They are voting on science standards to govern what students should learn in the science classroom. Those science standards eventually will have an impact on the textbook selection process, but biology textbooks aren’t even up for adoption in Texas this year. The debate right now is over science standards, not textbooks.

It gets worse. Foster next insists that

There are multiple proposed amendments to texts suggesting that experimental and confirmed scientific facts be treated as if they are no more valid than religious beliefs. An example: the promotion of the “young earth” view — that humans and all creatures, including dinosaurs, appeared 6,000 to 10,000 years ago and implying that the scientific view that the universe is 13.7 billion years old is wrong.

To reiterate: the Board is not amending textbooks, so it can’t possibly be considering “multiple proposed amendments” to textbooks. I suppose what Dr. Foster meant to say was that there are multiple amendments to add things like the “young earth” to the science standards. Except he’s wrong about that too. There are no proposals to add young earth creationism to the science standards. None. Such ill-informed comments make one wonder whether Foster has even read the proposed science standards. I hope he doesn’t practice medicine with as blithe regard to the facts as he comments on public affairs.

Foster ends by touting his own religious credentials and even engaging in Biblical interpretation. He says he is an elder in a Presbyterian Church, has taught Sunday School for over 30 years, and argues that the Board should base its science education policy on his interpretation of Matthew 22:21. No, I’m not kidding.

It’s curious that evolutionists keep insisting their views are based on science when they spend so much time trying to turn the spotlight on religion. If teaching evolution is about science, why does Foster expend so much effort touting his religious credentials and interpreting scripture?

The opposing piece by Jarstfer and Coghlan, by contrast, tries to return the focus to science. Jarstfer and Coghlan actually describe the point at issue—whether to scrap the “strengths and weaknesses” language that has been applied to schools in Texas for two decades. They also highlight the red herrings put forward by the evolution lobby to divert attention from the real debate—red herrings like the false claim that people are trying to insert young earth creationism into the science standards. Finally, Jarstfer and Coghlan concisely summarize the scientific challenges to modern Darwinian theory, including the Cambrian explosion, irreducibly complex biological structures, and the harmfulness of random mutations.

Kudos to the Dallas Morning News for airing both sides of the debate—even if the evolution side was so poorly represented.

Posted by John West at 12:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

An article in the San Antonio Express misstates some facts in its coverage of this week’s upcoming Texas Board of Education vote on evolution. The article isn’t all bad: It allows Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin to offer an opposing view, and Luskin’s views are described accurately. But the article also states that the Texas Board of Education "voted with the science experts in January to remove the 'strengths and weaknesses' standard" from Texas science standards. The Board did indeed vote to do this (to its shame). But in repealing the strengths and weaknesses language, Board members did not vote "with the science experts." The Board appointed six science experts to review the draft standards. Three of the experts opposed the “strengths and weaknesses” provision, but three of the experts supported the “strengths and weaknesses” language! So it would be much more accurate to say that the Board in January sided with some of their experts while ignoring others.

The article also erroneously claims that in 2005 the Kansas Board of Education “approved new science standards allowing the teaching of intelligent design, which posits that a supernatural creator is required to explain life's complexity.”

Actually, the Kansas science standards adopted in 2005 did not include intelligent design. Here is a direct quote from the introduction to those science standards (since repealed): “We also emphasize that the Science Curriculum Standards do not include Intelligent Design, the scientific disagreement with the claim of many evolutionary biologists that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion."

Of course, the article’s definition of intelligent design (ID) is equally fallacious. Intelligent design does not posit "that a supernatural creator is required to explain life's complexity." ID claims that we can use empirical evidence and logic to detect whether some features of life and the universe are better explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected cause of chance and necessity. ID scientists have been clear that they don't think that science can tell you whether the intelligent cause detected through the scientific method is natural or "supernatural." One needs additional evidence and arguments to make that determination.

Posted by John West at 3:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Later this week the Texas State Board of Education will vote to adopt standards overseeing the state's science education curriculum for the next ten years.

Monday, Stephanie Simon of the Wall Street Journal highlighted the importance of this week's vote and how there's more at stake than just the "strengths and weaknesses" language usually discussed.

Simon stereotypically boils things down to a point that isn't accurate:

The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry.

wouldn't be raising "doubts," they would be presenting to students not just a one-sided, dogmatic lesson that only discusses evidence for evolution, but also the scientific evidence that challenges the theory. This might best be summed up by saying they would teach both the strengths and weaknesses. And it's a position that is supported by the vast majority of the public.

However, there is much more going on than just a debate over the phrase "strengths and weaknesses." There is a very big debate over whether or not students should simply be force-fed a set of debatable facts about modern evolutionary theory and not encouraged to learn how to critically analyze and think about them.

In January the Board added the words "analyze and evaluate" to each of the student expectations dealing with evolution in the high school biology standards. The revised student expectations included:

(A) analyze and evaluate how evidence of common ancestry among groups is provided by the fossil record, biogeography, and homologies, including anatomical, molecular, and developmental;

(E) analyze and evaluate the relationship of natural selection to adaptation and to the development of diversity in and among species;

Note that this is not about "denigrating Darwin," but simply thinking critically about the evidence for and against evolution. Now Darwinists are pushing to have this approved language removed, proposing that the above expectations instead read:

(A) identify how evidence of common ancestry among groups is provided by the fossil record, biogeography, and homologies including anatomical, molecular, and developmental;

(D) recognize the relationship of natural selection to adaptation, and to the development of diversity in and among species; and

Above and beyond the important issue of whether or not the standards should include the long-standing phrase "strengths and weaknesses" (we think they should), there are a number of other equally important issues that will be addressed by the Board this week.

What will the media write about? Sure, they will cover "strengths and weaknesses" because that has been the story thus far. But will they go the extra mile and really report on the other important sections of the standards up for debate? We can only hope.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 9:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) usually tries to puts forth a religion-friendly image, despite the fact that the NCSE's executive director, Eugenie Scott, is a signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto. Something must have slipped through the cracks, because the NCSE’s talking points for Texas have encouraged activists to testify not just that science doesn't study the supernatural, but to expressly testify that science denies the existence of the supernatural:

Science posits that there are no forces outside of nature. Science cannot be neutral on this issue. The history of science is a long comment denying that forces outside of nature exist, and proving that this is the case again and again. There is simply zero scientific evidence for forces outside of the natural world. Scientific experiments do not rely on “magic” in order to explain their results. Magic—as magicians Penn & Teller and James Randi hasten to point out—does not exist. ... By implying that there exist explanations outside of nature, [a scientist skeptical of Darwinism] posits supernatural, mystical phenomena. The assumption that “the only explanations that count are those that rely on nature” is indeed an important part of science; in fact, this is a foundational axiom for any rational thinking. ... It needs to be said clearly: All educated people understand there are no forces outside of nature.

(Steven Newton, NCSE "Preparatory Materials for Speakers at the 21 January 2009 Texas SBOE Meeting," pp. 32, 44. Note: The NCSE's "Talking Points" document was previously linked at http://skepchick.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/prep_materials_21janmeeting1.pdf, which is where I first found the document online, and which is where I linked to it when I first posted this commentary. Apparently soon after I posted this commentary, the NCSE's talking points were removed from that website.)

Not only does it assert that “rational thinking” denies the supernatural, but it unambiguously states that “[s]cience posits that there are no forces outside of nature. Science cannot be neutral on this issue. The history of science is a long comment denying that forces outside of nature exist, and proving that this is the case again and again.” To be clear: the NCSE isn't saying that science denies the influence of the supernatural on science, it clearly tries to say that science denies "that forces outside of nature exist." Such rhetoric doesn't say that science is merely a way of knowing—it clearly implies that science is the only way of knowing. There’s a term for this position: scientism.

Let’s imagine, hypothetically, that activists took the NCSE's advice and offer such testimony before the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), and the TSBOE proceeded to take the NCSE’s advice and adopt evolution standards stating the following: “There are no forces outside of nature; science cannot be neutral on this issue; the history of science is a long comment denying that forces outside of nature exist, and proving that this is the case again and again; the only explanations that count are those that rely on nature; this view is a foundational axiom for any rational thinking.” What would happen? The TSBOE would quickly be in court for showing government hostility and opposition towards religion (such hostility is illegal under much long-standing Supreme Court precedent) and perhaps also for showing a preference for atheistic religion. In other words, it’s fine if private individuals at the NCSE hold the views expressed in their “Talking Points” document, but it has no place in a public school science classroom.

Eugenie Scott better rein in her staff members or the NCSE will not only lose its religion-friendly image—it may land some school districts or state boards of education in court if their advice is followed.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's always amusing how evolutionists continually proclaim, and then re-proclaim, the apparent demise of intelligent design (ID) (i.e. 'no really, this time ID actually is dead!'). We're pretty used to that, but then it gets a little creepy when they exude what appears to be an unhealthy pleasure in ID's (purported) demise. Such was recently the exact case when National Center for Science Education (NCSE) president Kevin Padian and former NCSE spokesman Nick Matzke, in a January issue of Biochemical Journal, published a “review article" claiming that the "case for ID" has "collapsed," gleefully asserting that "no one with scientific or philosophical integrity is going to take [Discovery Institute or ID] seriously in future."

I challenged Nick on his words and he replied "I stand by that comment" (see here for the exchange). And Biochemical Journal clearly wants the world to read the Padian/Matzke article, as they’re making it available free on their website, and I am told they reprinted it in the February issue of their more popular journal, The Biochemist, the membership magazine of the Biochemical Society.

Fair enough. I have no objection whatsoever to scientists publishing views that criticize ID in scientific journals. ID-critics have every right to try to persuade people with reason and scientific arguments. But the Padian/Matzke lead review article, the kind that’s supposed to summarize the state of a field, does not try to persuade with mere reason and arguments, but with veiled threats (and with a few less-veiled insults thrown in, just for good measure). This affront to academic freedom should concern everyone, whether you oppose or support ID. Let me explain further.

Imagine that you’re a pro-ID research biologist and you see leading research journals publishing lead review articles (not editorials, and not letters to the editor, but review articles) declaring that anyone who has “scientific or philosophical integrity” will not take intelligent design “seriously in the future.” What is the effect of such statements? The effect is that the authoritative reviewers send a message to you and others in the community that if you merely hint that you even so much as “take intelligent design seriously,” then you will be subject to all kinds of ridicule and your integrity will be tarnished.

In this style, reason and arguments are secondary, for it's all about attacks on the person — if you support ID, you lack integrity. Period. Since reputation and integrity means so much in science and academia, this effectively puts a taboo on anything that hints of ID. The message is this: “Taking ID seriously could be harmful to the health of your career, so banish these thoughts from your mind (or keep them to yourself), and fall into line.”

This message is dangerous to freedom of inquiry and the progress of science on a general level. But this is of course the precise message that is being comunicated by the NCSE. And certain influential factions in the scientific community seem more than happy to oblige them in these efforts

In any case, a pro-ID Ph.D. research biologist — the kind of biologist whose career could be negatively impacted by the kind of veiled threats being promoted by the Padian / Matzke/ Biochemical Journal review article — wrote me a response to the piece. This biologist, who wished to remain anonymous, has printed their reply below:

Junk Science

The Biochemical Journal is a respectable journal publishing articles and reviews about serious scientific research. Their masthead lists various areas of biochemical research, including cell biology, disease, energy, genes, plants, signaling, and structures. In their guideline to authors the journal editors state:

The Biochemical Journal publishes papers in English in all fields of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology, provided that they make a sufficient contribution to knowledge in these fields.... All work presented should have as its aim the development of biochemical concepts rather than the mere recording of facts.[1]

Reviews are usually solicited from eminent scientists in their particular fields. For example, recent issues include a review by Chothia and Gough[2], and another by Gustavo Caetano- Anollés et al.[3] all of whom are well known for their work in the area of protein evolution. Why then, I wonder, did the journal see fit to publish a “review article” titled “Darwin, Dover, ‘Intelligent Design’ and textbooks” by Kevin Padian and Nicholas Matzke[4]?

The “review article” in question contains nothing of scientific merit. There are no interpretations of experimental results, no theories advanced, no biochemical concepts developed. There is no review of the current state of a particular scientific field, either. Instead, the review by Padian and Matzke is a one-sided retelling of a legal trial[5] with some simplistic historical analysis and ersatz theology thrown in. The article conflates creationism and intelligent design, misrepresents the views of intelligent design scientists and the Discovery Institute, and engages in vicious character assassination. It is a blatant attempt to scare people away from intelligent design by proclaiming that “no one with scientific or philosophical integrity is going to take [ID] seriously in future.”

The simple reality is that this article is a polemical hit piece. It’s not a scholarly work of history or theology, let alone science. It is biased and prejudicial in its retelling of events, imputing motives to people without first-hand knowledge of events. It makes sweeping statements and broad generalizations with no independent verifiability. It puffs the credentials of one of its authors while snidely referring to the “allegedly peer-reviewed books” of a scientist it attacks and calling him “chicken”.

There have been, and continue to be a stream of articles attacking intelligent design published in science journals, especially in this so-called year of Darwin. But this article is the nastiest I have seen. So my question remains — why did a respectable scientific journal print it? It would appear that, contrary to their guideline to authors, they’ll print anything as long as it denigrates and disparages the right people. And that’s no way to do science.

References Cited:

1. http://www.biochemj.org/bj/bji2a.htm

2. Chothia C and Gough J (2009) Genomic and structural aspects of protein evolution. Biochem J 419: 15-28.

3. Caetano-Anollés G et al. (2009) The origin, evolution and structure of the protein world. Biochem J 417: 621–637.

4. Padian K and Matzke N (2009) Darwin, Dover, ‘Intelligent Design’ and textbooks. Biochem J 417: 29-42.

5. There is another side to the story on Dover. To learn about it, see TraipsingIntoEvolution.com.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As we reported earlier, Michael Behe has been responding to critics of his scientific arguments in Edge of Evolution over at his Amazon blog, concluding with this thought:

Here’s a final important point. Genetics is an excellent journal; its editors and reviewers are top notch; and Durrett and Schmidt themselves are fine researchers. Yet, as I show above, when simple mistakes in the application of their model to malaria are corrected, it agrees closely with empirical results reported from the field that I cited. This is very strong support that the central contention of The Edge of Evolution is correct: that it is an extremely difficult evolutionary task for multiple required mutations to occur through Darwinian means, especially if one of the mutations is deleterious. And, as I argue in the book, reasonable application of this point to the protein machinery of the cell makes it very unlikely that life developed through a Darwinian mechanism.

• Waiting Longer for Two Mutations, Part 1
  
• Waiting Longer for Two Mutations, Part 2
  
• Waiting Longer for Two Mutations, Part 3
  
• Waiting Longer for Two Mutations, Part 4
  
• Waiting Longer for Two Mutations, Part 5

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last month, NCSE staffer Joshua Rosenau complained on his blog that I failed to report on his talk, "Why We Need to Apply Dobzhansky's Maxim Today," which opened the February 15, 2009 AAAS session, Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. Instead, he says, my blog post focused on issues of my own manufacture, and missed the point, not only of his talk, but of the entire session -- evolution, not intelligent design.

Did I miss the point? Here's the evidence:

1. The AAAS audience, given the chance in the Q & A to respond to Rosenau, asked him not about evolution, but about intelligent design (ID) and "creationism."

One question concerned the supposedly creationist views of ABC News medical correspondent Dr. Timothy Johnson, and what could be done about that problem. Another question, from National Academy of Sciences representative Jay Labov, addressed what Labov saw as the relative weakness of the NCSE pro-evolution public relations campaign, compared with effectiveness of the ID slogan "Teach the controversy."

In short, no one asked about the science of evolution. That was the case for the questions after most of the other lectures as well (see forthcoming entries in this blog series). The audience wanted to talk about controversies over ID, or "creationism," and what was could be done to respond to these ideas. (Anyone curious about verifying this can purchase the MP3 files from AVEN, session number AS963.)

Rosenau also said that I gave his lecture too cursory a summary, and failed to rebut his arguments. Taking the trouble to rebut, however, requires a proposition worth rebutting, and I focused on the implicit theology in Rosenau's recommended source materials. The science was mostly using "evolution" to name for all kinds of different things (from pest management to the evolution of universes), in a fashion either question-begging or irrelevant.

For instance, Rosenau described the discovery of the medicine Taxol (paclitaxel) and the use of phylogenetic methods to identify plant sources for this compound, other than the limited supply available in the bark of the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia. Why didn't I reply to this example? Rosenau asks:

Nelson is free to disagree that an understanding of common ancestry was essential to producing enough Taxol to treat hundreds of thousands of patients, but he never explains why.

I didn't explain why, because the common ancestry of Taxus brevifolia and Taxus baccata (the European yew, whose needles provide additional sources for synthesizing Taxol) is a phylogenetic hypothesis not even the most doctrinaire young-earth creationist would challenge. If this is "evolution," then everyone accepts evolution.

But both the AAAS and the NCSE mean a great deal more than this by "evolution." Using the same word to refer to species of yew within the genus Taxus, and (say) to the origin of life by some unknown natural pathway, is the sort of equivocation that engenders skepticism. (Rosenau's other uses of "evolution" suffered from the same equivocation.)

2. The NCSE does not promote theistic evolution, says Rosenau. But that's exactly what they promote, whether they are conscious of doing so or not.

Like Molière's Monsieur Jourdain, who speaks prose without knowing it, many evolutionary biologists advocate theological views with genuine (and highly debatable) content. That they may not be conscious of doing so doesn't affect the content of their arguments. Prose is prose, and theology is theology.

Here is Rosenau's view of Dobzhansky's famous 1973 essay, "Nothing In Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." Rosenau writes:

It is simply and demonstrably false, however, to claim that Dobzhansky's essay is any sort of theological argument...Three paragraphs out of ~75 can hardly be claimed as proof that Dobzhansky is mounting a theological case for anything.

Below, I've excerpted the parts of the 1973 essay where Dobzhansky makes theological claims. After each, I give a short summary of the particular theological argument or assertion. Roughly one fifth of the essay (912 words / 4460 words = .204) is either explicitly or implicitly theological in content.

The Koran and the Bible do not contradict Copernicus, nor does Copernicus contradict them. It is ludicrous to mistake the Bible and the Koran for primers of natural science. They treat of matters even more important: the meaning of man and his relations to God. They are written in poetic symbols that were understandable to people of the age when they were written, as well as to peoples of all other ages. (p. 125)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #1: Sacred writings do not assert matters of empirical fact.

The earth is not the geometric center of the universe, although it may be its spiritual center. (p. 125)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #2: The Earth may be the spiritual center of the universe.

One can suppose that the Creator saw fit to play deceitful tricks on geologists and biologists. He carefully arranged to have various rocks provided with isotope ratios just right to mislead us into thinking that certain rocks are 2 billion years old, others 2 million, which in fact they are only some 6,000 years old. This kind of pseudo-explanation is not very new. One of the early anti-evolutionists, P. H. Gosse, published a book entitled Omphalos ("the Navel"). The gist of this amazing book is that Adam, though he had no mother, was created with a navel, and that fossils were placed by the Creator where we find them now -- a deliberate act on His part, to give the appearance of great antiquity and geologic upheavals. It is easy to see the fatal flaw in all such notions. They are blasphemies, accusing God of absurd deceitfulness. This is as revolting as it is uncalled for. (p. 126)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #3: It is blasphemy to say that God created with the appearance of age.

Organisms now living are successful descendants of only a minority of the species that lived in the past and of smaller and smaller minorities the farther back you look. Nevertheless, the number of living species has not dwindled; indeed, it has probably grown with time. All this is understandable in the light of evolution theory; but what a senseless operation it would have been, on God's part, to fabricate a multitude of species ex nihilo and then let most of them die out! (pp. 126-7)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #4: God would not have created species only to let them become extinct.

Was the Creator in a jocular mood when he made Psilopa petrolei for California oil fields and species of Drosophila to live exclusively on some body-parts of certain land crabs on only certain islands in the Caribbean? The organic diversity becomes, however, reasonable and understandable if the Creator has created the living world not by caprice but by evolution propelled by natural selection. It is wrong to hold creation and evolution as mutually exclusive alternatives. I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God's, or Nature's method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way. (p. 127)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #5: God creates not directly but by using evolution. God's creative activity is ongoing.

But what if there was no evolution and every one of the millions of species were created by separate fiat? However offensive the notion may be to religious feeling and to reason, the anti-evolutionists must again accuse the Creator of cheating. They must insist that He deliberately arranged things exactly as if his method of creation was evolution, intentionally to mislead sincere seekers of truth. (p. 127)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #6: Skeptics of evolution impute deliberate deception to God.

The presence of gill slits in human embryos and in embryos of other terrestrial vertebrates is another famous example. Of course, at no stage of its development is a human embryo a fish, nor does it ever have functioning gills. But why should it have unmistakable gill slits unless its remote ancestors did respire with the aid of gills? It is the Creator again playing practical jokes? (p. 128)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #7: God would not have made terrestrial vertebrates appear to possess gill slits during development. Therefore, these animals descended from ancestors with gills.

Oceanic islands other than Hawaii, scattered over the wide Pacific Ocean, are not conspicuously rich in endemic species of drosophilids. The most probable explanation of this fact is that these other islands were colonized by drosophilid after most ecologic niches had already been filled by earlier arrivals. This surely is a hypothesis, but it is a reasonable one. Anti-evolutionists might perhaps suggest an alternative hypothesis: in a fit of absentmindedness, the Creator went on manufacturing more and more drosophilid species for Hawaii, until there was an extravagant surfeit of them in this archipelago. (p. 129)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #8: It is nonsenical to impute the creation of Hawaiian drosopholids to God.

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness. (p. 129)

Dobzhansky's theological claim #9: Restatement or combination of claims 1 and 6.

Evolutionary biologists since Darwin's time have used theological language or concepts (Nelson 1996; Lustig 2004) to support evolutionary theory. In conversation with me, some biologists have justified this practice as mere rhetoric -- tweaking believers with their own terms, and nothing more. It's fun and easy to use theology to mock theists.

Other biologists, however, acknowledge the genuine theological content of the arguments, but see that as unavoidable, given the historical relation of evolutionary theory to its theological antecedents. As historian Abigal Lustig notes:

But evolutionary biology, perhaps more than any other science, not only is not nonepistemic-value-free, but, by virtue of its descent, cannot be so. Born in theology, its goals entail the extension of an a priori metaphysical rationalism whose aim at its origin was to upset the strongest rational argument for the existence of God. (2004, 70)

By promoting Dobzhansky's 1973 essay, however, Rosenau and the NCSE both stake a claim in ongoing theological controversies, and give the lie to their organization's simultaneous promotion of methodological naturalism as the only acceptable philosophy of science.

If you speak in prose, you're using prose, whether consciously or not. The same is true of theology.

References

Lustig, Abigail. 2004. Natural Atheology. In A. Lustig, R. Richards, and M. Ruse, eds., Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge University Press), pp. 69-83.

Nelson, Paul. 1996. The Role of Theology in Current Evolutionary Reasoning. Biology & Philosophy 11:493-517.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 8:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The power of a slogan is that if you say it over and over again enough times, the effect is like brainwashing on yourself and many of the people who listen to you. It crowds out thought, to the point where, when a particular topic comes up in conversation, the slogan-imprinted mind simply spits back the slogan.

You’ll see this at work among scientists, journalists, and the general public.

Take, for example, a slogan that dogs the evolution debate: “There is no debate,” along with its variant, “There is no controversy.” A Google search on those two, linked with the word “evolution,” produces 20,800 and 18,800 hits respectively. One of those hits, I noticed, was from a piece I wrote in Publishers Weekly about the market for books on Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design. The editor of Eugenie C. Scott’s book Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction at the University of California Press was Scott Crumly, and he had this to say to me: “There is no debate about evolution. ID is not an alternative to evolution. It’s bogus.”

I remember having tentatively posed to him the question of whether the sheer volume of books being published on the subject indicated otherwise. His response was vehement and contemptuous. It would have been funnier and more fitting if he’d said it in the far-off brainwashed tone of, say, Frank Sinatra and others in the cast of The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

One of the pro-ID authors that appeared in the article was Michael Behe. Since then, Behe has come out with his most recent book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Repeat after me: There is no debate about the thesis Behe advances in his book. In this thesis, about which there is no controversy, he purports to show from field and lab experiments where exactly the limit lies to what Darwinian evolution can produce.

But it’s all bogus, right? If so, then I keep wondering why Darwinists are, uh, how to put it? They are sort of going back and forth with Behe about his book, in a prominent peer reviewed (!) journal. And why he is replying to their challenges, and they are answering him in turn? What does that sound like to you?

Last year in the journal Genetics (180: 1501-1509), two Cornell mathematicians challenged Behe in an article titled “Waiting For Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution.” In their Abstract, they make out as if the main point of interest were simply “regulatory sequence evolution in Drosophila and humans.” Only in the last sentence of the paragraph do they let on that their more elusive prey is not fruit flies but, more to the point, Dr. Behe.

Of the latter, they note as if in passing, “In addition, we use these results to expose flaws in some of Michael Behe’s arguments concerning mathematical limits to Darwinian evolution.”

The question is how many generations of organisms would be required to evolve chloronquine resistance in the malarial parasite. In their paper, the mathematicians develop a model indicating that two needed mutations would be far easier to come by than Behe suggests in his book -- by a factor of 5 million. They are criticizing Behe for wildly exaggerating the necessary waiting time. Who’s right?

Behe got his figure from empirical literature on the subject. He didn’t make it up. Durrett and Schmit, on the other hand, spin out a population genetics model that gives them a figure more comfortably in line with Darwinian expectations that winning mutations are as forthcoming in the history of life as winning numbers in the New Jersey lottery -- an analogy that Durrett and Schmit actually cite in their reply. They introduce us to Evelyn Adams, who won the lottery twice in consecutive years (1985 and 1986).

Well, as I say, they go back and forth on this: first in a letter to the editor of Genetics by Behe, then in the authors’ reply, then in a series of posts on Behe’s Amazon blog. On one issue having to do with the value of a mutation rate, which may have been underestimated by a factor of 30, the two forthrightly admit, “Behe is right on this point.” On other questions, there is attack and counterattack.

The details of the debate are fascinating but more so the fact that -- wait, did I say debate?

No, there is no debate. There is no controversy! Repeat 1,000 times!

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 7:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When large-scale function was detected for non-coding DNA (once called "junk" DNA) Darwinists, knowing that their viewpoint had long boasted that junk-DNA was evidence for common ancestry and that they were losing that argument, responded in one of two ways: Some sought to rewrite history by claiming that evolutionary biology predicted all along that we'd find function for junk-DNA. Others, however, pushed the "junk" back to RNA. They effectively argued, "Sure, we know that most of the genome is being transcribed into RNA, but that doesn't mean that the RNAs have function. Much of the transcriptome might in fact be junk." Evolutionist biochemist Larry Moran, for example, argued that either "[t]he so-called transcripts are just noise from accidental transcription" or "[t]he regions of junk DNA could be transcribed regularly but the transcripts are rapidly degraded. They do not have a biological function. They are junk RNA." Intelligent design (ID) proponents were quick to predict the demise of that argument, and if a recent paper in Nature is any indication, "junk RNA" may have the same fate as "junk DNA."

The Nature article, titled, "Chromatin signature reveals over a thousand highly conserved large non-coding RNAs in mammals," finds that rather than being "transcriptional noise," over 95% of the non-coding RNAs studied in the paper show "clear evolutionary conservation." That's another way of saying that their sequences are more similar than would be expected if they were functionless and their encoding DNA was accumulating neutral mutations at a constant rate. After all, if such RNA has no function, you can mutate their encoding DNA with no negative consequences to the organism. But if they have function, then mutations in their encoding DNA would tend to be highly deleterious. By finding that they have highly similar sequences, we find evidence of stabilizing selection, which is strong evidence of function. The abstract of the article is worth reading in full:

There is growing recognition that mammalian cells produce many thousands of large intergenic transcripts1–4. However, the functional significance of these transcripts has been particularly controversial. Although there are some well-characterized examples, most (.95%) show little evidence of evolutionary conservation and have been suggested to represent transcriptional noise5,6. Here we report a new approach to identifying large non-coding RNAs using chromatin-state maps to discover discrete transcriptional units intervening known protein-coding loci. Our approach identified 1,600 large multi-exonic RNAs across four mouse cell types. In sharp contrast to previous collections, these large intervening non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) show strong purifying selection in their genomic loci, exonic sequences and promoter regions, with greater than 95% showing clear evolutionary conservation. We also developed a functional genomics approach that assigns putative functions to each lincRNA, demonstrating a diverse range of roles for lincRNAs in processes from embryonic stem cell pluripotency to cell proliferation. We obtained independent functional validation for the predictions for over 100 lincRNAs, using cell-based assays. In particular, we demonstrate that specific lincRNAs are transcriptionally regulated by key transcription factors in these processes such as p53, NFkB, Sox2, Oct4 (also known as Pou5f1) and Nanog. Together, these results define a unique collection of functional lincRNAs that are highly conserved and implicated in diverse biological processes.

(Guttman et al., "Chromatin signature reveals over a thousand highly conserved large non-coding RNAs in mammals," Nature, Vol. 458:223-227 (March 12, 2009).)

Collins could have used the advice of this Nature paper, which warns that a lack of conservation does not necessarily imply a lack of function. For details on Collins’ mistake, see "A Reply to Francis Collins’s Darwinian Arguments for Common Ancestry of Apes and Humans."

In closing, the Nature article is a wonderful study on testing function for so-called junk-RNA by knocking out the RNA and assessing whether there is any deleterious effect on the organism (in this case, a mouse). The article states:

The ultimate proof-of-function will be to demonstrate that RNAinterference-mediated knockout of each lincRNAs has the predicted phenotypic consequences. Towards this end, we examined a recently published short hairpin RNA screen of (presumed) protein-coding genes to identify genes that regulate cell proliferation rates in mouse ESCs29. The screen involved genes and some unidentified transcripts that had been identified as expressed in ESCs and showing rapid decrease in expression after retinoic acid treatment. Of the top ten hits in the screen, one corresponded to a gene of unknown function. We discovered that this gene corresponds to one of our lincRNAs (located,181 kb from Enc1) contained in both the ‘cell cycle and cell proliferation’ cluster (FDR,0.001) and the ‘ESC’ cluster (FDR,0.001; Supplementary Fig. 9 and Supplementary Table 16). This provides functional confirmation that this lincRNA has a direct role in cell proliferation in ESCs, consistent with the analysis above.

"we speculate that many lincRNAs may be involved in transcriptional control—perhaps by guiding chromatin remodelling proteins to target loci—and that some transcription factors and lincRNAs may act together, with the transcription factor activating a transcriptional program and the lincRNA repressing a previous transcriptional program"

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:50 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This post is the second in a series reviewing the February 15, 2009 session at the AAAS annual meeting, Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. The first post is here.

David Deamer: Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biochemistry

…so-called prebiotic chemistry, which is of course falsely named, because we have no reason to believe that what they're doing would ever lead to life — I just call it 'investigator influenced abiotic organic chemistry'…

-- Robert Shapiro, Chemistry (NYU), at the roundtable “Life, What A Concept!” (p. 92), August 2007

First to the podium following Joshua Rosenau of the NCSE was David Deamer, a biochemist and leading origin of life researcher from UC-Santa Cruz. After outlining the Darwinian historical context – the famous “warm little pond” of Darwin’s 1871 letter to Hooker – and probable early Earth geochemistry, Deamer asked his motivating question: “What is needed for evolution itself to begin?”

What follows directly below is a summary, with links, of Deamer's talk, as he answers his motivating question. I then offer some critical reflections.

"We're Just About There"

Processes such as natural selection, Deamer said, require discrete entities that

-- are cell-like, existing in populations

-- take in nutrients and synthesize polymers

-- replicate information (i.e., direct their formation of polymers) by ‘genetic’ molecules

-- vary, that is, allow some errors in the replication of their informational molecules, which provides the raw materials for selection and hence, evolution

But “five milestones” in origin-of-life research, he argued, show that the goal of demonstrating a fully natural (undirected) pathway from prebiotic chemistry to the living state is within reach. These milestones are experiments and data showing the formation or appearance of

1. the monomers (building blocks) of proteins and nucleic acids

2. self-assembling stable membranes

3. protocells (vesicles)

4. the non-enzymatic synthesis of RNA molecules

5. genetic information, "from scratch," without any intelligent design

Lastly, milestone 5: Bartel and Szostak (1993) have answered a "bugaboo of those people of a creationist persuasion," Deamer said, by showing how "genetic information can appear out of nowhere" as "order emerging from chaos." Although their experiment of evolving ligase activity with engineered ribozymes (RNA catalysts) was not, Deamer cautioned, "meant to be a simulation" of early Earth processes, nevertheless Bartel and Szostak "proved the principle" that selection can generate information without the need for intelligent design.

"We're just about there," Deamer concluded. A demonstration of the natural pathway from chemicals to cells lies just at the horizon of current research, closer now than ever before.

The Frowning Face in the Notepad Margin

Would Deamer have given this same talk at an ISSOL meeting, or to a group of his colleagues?

Or let's imagine, rather than the overflow audience with hundreds of eager AAAS conferees (many of them high school students, sitting right behind me), a much smaller audience -- with the late Stanley Miller himself, or the late Leslie Orgel, or the very much alive Robert Shapiro, sitting in the room. As Deamer reached his description of milestones 4 and 5, I sketched a frowning face in the margin of my notepad. A tiny disgruntled biochemistry professor, holding up a skeptical hand questioning Deamer.

Miller, Orgel, Shapiro, and nearly all other origin-of-life researchers are (by definition, one might say) persuaded that a discoverable natural pathway from chemistry to life exists, awaiting elucidation. But these scientists, when alert, are also conscious of the role they play in affecting experimental outcomes.

This self-awareness matters, of course, when one claims (as Deamer did) that "no intelligent design" is needed to explain the origin of biological complexity. Consider Deamer's discussion, for instance, of his "milestone number 4," the work of Ferris et al., on the clay-templated assembly of RNA

The AAAS audience might have gone away thinking, 'wow -- RNA forms naturally given a pool of activated mononucleotides and a clay surface.' But that conclusion would be deeply misleading, with respect to Deamer's main thesis, namely, that intelligence is not required for real biochemistry to arise from non-living starting materials. For several decades, origin-of-life researchers have known that running abiogenesis simulations under plausible early Earth conditions yields "intractable mixtures" -- tar, or what 1999 Urey Medalist Alan Schwartz (2007, 656) calls "gunk":

For prebiotic chemistry, where the goal is often the simulation of conditions on the prebiotic Earth and the modeling of a spontaneous reaction, it is not surprising -- but nevertheless frustrating -- that the unwanted products may consume most of the starting material and lead to nothing more than an intractable mixture, or 'gunk'.

Prebiotic syntheses conducted in the laboratory often involve multistep procedures, with purified reagents and very different conditions permitted at each step (Zubay 2000). The extensive purification procedures and changes of locale that would be needed to produce comparable results on the early Earth are seldom discussed, but must be taken into account when attempting to judge the plausibility of the entire sequence. (Shapiro 2006, 107)

This handicap was overcome in the synthetic experiments by titrating the clays to a monoionic form, generally sodium, before they were used. Even after this step, the activity of the montmorillionite depended strongly on its physical source, with samples from Wyoming yielding the best results....Eventually the experimenters settled on Volclay, a commercially processed Wyoming montmorillonite provided by the American Colloid Company. Further purification steps were applied to obtain the catalyst used for the "prebiotic" formation of RNA. (Shapiro 2006, 108)

But this is not an unreasonable demand that ID theorists make of the abiogenesis research community. It is, rather, what that community claims to be able to show -- namely, that functional complexity arises without intelligent intervention, strictly from physical precursors via natural regularities and chance events.

Thus, pointing out where intelligent intervention (design) is required for any product is hardly unfair sniping. It is simply realism: similar criticisms apply to the other steps in the Ferris et al. RNA experiments, such as the source of the activated mononucleotides employed, a point Ferris himself acknowledges:

A problem with the RNA world scenario is the absence of a plausible prebiotic synthesis of the requisite activated mononucleotides. (Huang and Ferris 2006, 8918)

Deamer did sound a note of caution about his milestone 5, the origin of genetic information. The ribozyme engineering of Bartel and Szostak 1993, he said, was "not meant to be a simulation" of plausible early Earth conditions. Indeed, since key steps in any RNA engineering experiment presuppose the intelligent intervention of clever biochemists, it is hard to see what relevance such experiments have to Deamer's No ID Needed thesis.

The experiments actually support the opposing thesis. That's why there's a little frowning chemistry professor in my AAAS notepad margin.

Milestones 2 and 3 have problems of their own, as Thomas and Rana (2007) argue.

Up next: Ken Miller on evolution, ID, and cell biology

References
Ertem, Gözen. 2004. Montmorillonite, oligonucleotides, RNA, and origin of life. Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 34: 549–570.

Huang, Wenhua and James P. Ferris. One-Step, Regioselective Synthesis of up to 50-mers of RNA Oligomers by Montmorillonite Catalysis. Journal of the American Chemical Society 128:8914-8.

Shapiro, Robert. 2006. Small molecule interactions were central to the origin of life. Quarterly Review of Biology 81:105-125.

Schwartz, Alan. 2007. Intractable Mixtures and the Origin of Life. Chemistry & Biodiversity 4:656-664.

Thomas, Jacquelyn A. and F. R. Rana. 2007. The Influence of Environmental Conditions, Lipid Composition, and Phase Behavior on the Origin of Cell Membranes. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 37:267-285.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 9:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Whether in science, politics, or religion, one of the qualities most lacking in modern culture is breadth of vision. This is the gift of being able to see and express the whole, not merely a part. In the fields of thought and endeavor that matter most, too many of our leading figures are caught up and blinded by the narrow view of their little area of interest. Such narrowness breeds timidity and a suffocating orthodoxy.

All too painfully, we were reminded of this with the passing of our friend David Medved, a model of broadmindedness, in Jerusalem on Wednesday. He was 83 and, last time we saw him, admirably vigorous in mind and body. Scientist, entrepreneur, and man of faith, father of radio host and Discovery Institute senior fellow Michael Medved, who is no less a dear friend, Dr. Medved was an amazing gentleman.

Accompanied by Michael and Michael's wife Diane, David visited our Seattle offices last May to speak about his recent book, Hidden Light: Science Secrets of the Bible. A particular moment in his lecture seemed to crystallize much of what made him so special. There he was, tall and lean, standing in front of a map of the universe, displayed on the wall by a projector at the back of the room -- the famous WMAP picture of the cosmic microwave background radiation. What could be a more appropriate image, symbolizing breadth of thought?

DI president Bruce Chapman was standing to one side and gestured with a pointer to a spot in the upper left hand corner, noting dryly, “Seattle is right here.” Dr. Medved smiled indulgently and carried on, mapping his own vision of the oneness of Biblical and scientific wisdom, hints of which he found scattered through the Hebrew Scriptures. You didn’t have to agree with every detail of his interpretation to appreciate the major thrust of his perspective on the world.

That perspective was, in the words of the central Jewish prayer Sh’mah, that “the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). For David Medved, there were no separate “magisteria,” in Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase, dividing religion from science. Ultimately, both describe the same reality, even if they use different vocabularies to do so. Coordinating the one with the other, encouraging mutual intelligibility, was Dr. Medved’s spiritual and intellectual passion. The Lord is One.

That kind of vision, increasingly rare today, is just part of what made David so unusual and so valuable. More personally, he was an exceptionally warm and charming man. A hero to his four sons -- Michael, Jonathan, Benjamin, and Harry -- he reminded other, younger fathers of the way we should hope to be regarded by our own sons and daughters some day.

He was a most kind and generous friend to the Discovery Institute. On trips to Israel, where he lived and worked, groups of DI-affiliated visitors sought to win allies among Israeli scientists and businessmen. Our success was thanks in large part to Dr. Medved. On these trips, he was our tireless guide, councilor, and chaperone. He seemed to know absolutely everyone, by whom he was held, without exception, in high and affectionate esteem.

David was, finally, an Orthodox Jew. From his viewpoint now in the supernal world, the Garden of Eden, he would no doubt be gratified if those he left behind would, according to Jewish custom, bless God in his merit with the brief prayer Baruch Dayan Ha’Emes, said upon hearing the news of a loved one’s death: “Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, the true Judge.” May his family be comforted.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 7:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In a stunningly biased headline this week, The Washington Post said "Obama Aims to Shield Science from Politics.” Well that is certainly one interpretation of the Administration's announcement that it will fund new embryo-destructive research! Of course, this is nothing new. It has been an anti-Bush mantra of the hard Left for some years now that there is "A Republican War on Science," to borrow Chris Mooney's delightfully fatuous phrase.

In the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools, we often hear Darwinists cry, "Science is not democratic." To which I've heard John West sagely reply a thousand times, "But public policy is!"

The recent headlines, and the Administration's own rhetoric, regarding the President's decision to have taxpayers (many of whom are morally opposed) fund new embryo-destructive research display the same naiveté in demarcating politics and science. It seems not to occur to certain folks that the answer to the question, "Is it good policy to Federally fund embryo-destructive research?" is not a scientific one. Rather, this sort of answer involves questions of a moral and prudential (political) nature.

As Robert George and Eric Cohen note, the new President's position is itself highly political:

It is red meat to his Bush-hating base, yet pays no more than lip service to recent scientific breakthroughs that make possible the production of cells that are biologically equivalent to embryonic stem cells without the need to create or kill human embryos. Inexplicably -- apart from political motivations -- Mr. Obama revoked not only the Bush restrictions on embryo destructive research funding, but also the 2007 executive order that encourages the National Institutes of Health to explore non-embryo-destructive sources of stem cells.

Posted by Logan Gage at 9:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

Alas, poor Richard. Ever since being thrashed by Ben Stein in Expelled he's just gotten more and more nonsensical. Then, it was that there is no intelligent design of life, except of course maybe alien-directed intelligent design. Now, it seems he has decided to follow some recent sage advice and avoid using the “d” word. And, he’s scrapped his previous idea of using designoid as a replacement.

Then Dawkins got to the essential framework of the rest of his talk, making a distinction within purpose between the purpose that comes about as adaptation via natural selection, which he called “archi-purpose”, and the purpose that comes about through the intent of a planning brain, which he called “neo-purpose”. Archi-purpose, then, resembles an intentional purpose, but is not such: the resemblance is an illusion. Neo-purpose, as Dawkins views it, is itself an evolved adaptation.

So, what do Lewis Carroll and Richard Dawkins have in common? They both taught at Oxford and they both spouted nonsense (but only in one case intentionally).

"You are old, Father Williams," the young man said, "And your hair has become very white; and yet you incessantly stand on your head. Do you think, at your age it is right?"

"In my youth," Father Williams replied to his son, "I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again." (Lewis Carroll)

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The debate that isn't supposed to exist in science continues in the science journal Genetics, where Michael Behe's book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, generated a response in the form of a paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, "Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution."

In their effort to refute Behe's claims, Durrett and Schmidt get a few things wrong, which Behe is able to point out in a reply published in Genetics, which Durrett and Schmidt also responded to in the journal.

What we have here is a full-fledged debate over the limits of Darwinian evolution, a debate that Behe raised with his book and continues to trouble Darwinists who respond in scientific journals because it's an interesting scientific question — and one that has yet to be answered satisfactorily.

Dr. Behe has more about the debate up at his Amazon blog, where he's running a series of posts this week discussing the Genetics paper:

As the title implies, it concerns the time one would have to wait for Darwinian processes to produce some helpful biological feature (here, regulatory sequences in DNA) if two mutations are required instead of just one. It is a theoretical paper, which uses models, math, and computer simulations to reach conclusions, rather than empirical data from field or lab experiments, as The Edge does. The authors declare in the abstract of their manuscript that they aim “to expose flaws in some of Michael Behe’s arguments concerning mathematical limits to Darwinian evolution.” Unsurprisingly (bless their hearts), they pretty much do the exact opposite.

Posted by Anika Smith at 3:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

At the risk of sounding a brief religious note and therefore inviting from ID critics the usual (and so extremely logical!) inference that the Discovery Institute supports theocratic rule, let’s consider for a moment the message of Purim. That Jewish festival is upon us today and, with its themes of randomness versus a guiding providence at work in history, it happens to be an excellent time for reflecting on themes relevant to ENV.

Celebrated with lots of eating, drinking, and charitable and other gift-giving, Purim recalls the events told in the Bible’s book of Esther. In the story, which is very much screenplay-ready, a conniving minister to the king of Persia uses his influence on the monarch to plot the destruction of the Jewish people. This fascinating villain, Haman, is no mere mindless anti-Semite. He is motivated by his own views about life’s ultimate meaning, or the lack thereof — a secular theology, a religion of a kind that’s precisely opposite to Biblical faith.

According to Scriptural tradition, Haman was a descendant of the Bible’s personification of wickedness, the mysterious tribe called Amalek. As recounted in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, Amalek, seemingly without reason, fell upon and slaughtered many Jews. That was back when the children of Israel were living in the desert, following their exodus from Egypt.

Actually, Amalek’s attack was not without reason. The Hebrew text associates Amalek with the word “keri,” which means a chance or random event: “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; How he happened upon thee (karecha) by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deuteronomy 25:17-18). The same Hebrew verbal root can mean to “cool” someone’s ardor, put a chill in his faith.

All these meanings are given by the classical medieval commentator Rashi in his notes. He in turn drew on midrashic works a thousand years older. The word “Amalek” also, according to Hebrew numerology, has a concealed meaning linking it with another Hebrew word, safek, or “doubt.”

As Biblical tradition clarifies, just as the Jews are intended to stand for certain ideas that remain controversial — ideas about God’s guiding providence, about faith — so the Amalekites stand for other, opposite ideas: randomness, chance, chilly rationalism, the spreading of doubt. So it comes as little surprise when, in planning his hoped for genocide against the Jews, Haman employs a system of casting lots, or “purim” (hence the name of the festival), with the purpose of randomly selecting the date of his assault

Seeing existence as random, unguided, and meaningless — that is the frosty faith of Amalek. It explains Haman's hatred of the Jews and their God.

The book of Esther is not an overtly theological story. In fact, unique among the books of the Hebrew Bible, it includes God nowhere at all as a character in the story -- not directly or by allusion. It is secular in that sense. Yet it’s nevertheless shot through with hints of a guiding hand behind events. When the story has reached its climax — at the moment when the secretly Jewish queen, Esther, has succeeded in saving her people from Haman’s plot though a series of highly unlikely “coincidences” — we look back and realize that for all that God’s hand works subtly, the evidence of its influence is still overwhelmingly powerful.

It would be Haman’s, and Amalek’s, main purpose in life to deny that this retrospective view possesses any validity. In the book of Esther, and at Purim, we are invited to reflect on the choice we all face between seeing existence as unguided or guided, meaningless or meaningful.

There is no need to belabor the significance here. In the debate about Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design, this is exactly the question with which we are all confronted.

Of course, some religiously committed individuals seek to abstract themselves from the debate, claiming it is all a waste of time, a distraction from more important issues. These “theistic evolutionists” argue that in the great debate, there is no need to take sides or take action. They figure that if only they solemnly maintain their neutral stance, then aggressive Darwinists, including Dawkinsesque atheist activists, will leave them alone. Their social prestige, as sophisticated and enlightened religious folk, remains intact.

The story of Esther has something to say to these theistic evolutions as well. It becomes clear that there were Jews in Persia who thought they, too, could get on the right side of the king and his Amalekite councilor, thereby escaping persecution. The opening chapter of Esther tells of how the king, Ahasuerus, conducted a great, months-long party for his loyal subjects and other flatterers and toadies. Tradition adds that the party’s attendants included many Jews, who were even served kosher food in conformity with their religious dietary needs. How thoughtful!

Yet when Haman proposed his scheme to rid the kingdom of Jews, Ahasuerus didn’t hesitate to condemn all his Jewish subjects to destruction, with no exception granted for the toadies (3:6). The latter, the theistic evolutionists of their day, were distraught to find that their long efforts to keep above the fray, to offend no one in the party of Haman, had been of no avail.

Even Esther herself was in doubt about what her own role should be in averting the planned destruction of her fellow Jews. Her own husband, the king, did not know that she was a Jew. She entertained the thought that perhaps the best plan was to keep her own head low and at least save herself.

Her uncle, the other hero of the Purim story, Mordecai, convinced her otherwise, saying: “Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king’s house, more than all the Jews. For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (4:13-14).

In that last sentence, Mordecai hinted at the guiding role of providence. In the heat of the action, you can’t know where events are heading. But be sure we are indeed being lead, to a destination that will become evident later.

Even then, the Hamans and the Amalekites will deny that this is the case. They're with us still today. So we have Purim, to remind us that for all that things seems to change, the dynamics at work in human belief and unbelief stay fundamentally the same.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 9:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Timothy Sandefur, a Panda’s Thumb contributor and an atheist, is a leader in the Darwinist crusade to censor balanced discussion of evolutionary theory in science classrooms. Mr Sandefur responded to my open letter to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, a Darwinist organization that lobbies for censorship of discussion of the weaknesses of evolution in public schools and has boycotted the citizens of Louisiana because they recently passed legislation protecting academic freedom in public schools.

Mr. Sandefur begins his post with a sneer:

With the possible exception of Casey Luskin, no Discovery Institute fellow seems more eager to embarrass himself in public than Michael Egnor…

Mr. Sandefur asserts:

The problem with creationism is precisely that creationists like Dr. Egnor want their religion to be taught in government classrooms.

This is my viewpoint on evolution:

I am a Christian and I believe that God created man and the universe. The Bible isn’t a science textbook, although it does offer insight into truth about the natural world. Reason, one form of which is science, can lead us to important truths about nature. I believe that faith and reason cannot ultimately be in conflict, because God is the source of both.

I believe that the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, and the universe is ~14 billion years old. Universal common ancestry is a reasonable inference from the evidence, and life evolved over several billion years. Some aspects of life arose by random variation and natural selection, and some aspects of life (e.g. the genetic code, molecular nanotechnology) show evidence for design by intelligent agency.

I’m not a young earth creationist. I respect young earth creationists and I strongly support their right to participate fully in public discourse, but I do not share some of their scientific viewpoints.

I believe that teaching public schoolchildren that the first two chapters of Genesis are literally true as science is unconstitutional, because it would constitute teaching a particular form of theistic religion on the public dime.

I also believe that teaching public schoolchildren and students that...

The diversity of life [all life] on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments...

By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of life superfluous. … Darwin's theory of evolution, followed by Marx's materialistic (even if inadequate or wrong) theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism--in short, to much of science--that has since been the stage of most Western thought.

Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products.

I believe that teaching schoolchildren about intelligent design (which is not young earth creationism) is constitutional, because it is intrinsically part of the scientific debate about biological origins. It is part of the debate because intelligent design and Darwinism are affirmative and negative answers to the same scientific question: is there teleology in biology? The Darwinian assertion of unguided processes is meaningless unless lack of unguidedness — design — can be tested scientifically. If a scientific question can meaningfully be answered in the negative, then there must be the logical possibility of answering the question in the affirmative. If intelligent design isn’t science, then Darwinism can’t be tested empirically, and is merely dogma.

I do not advocate teaching intelligent design in public schools, even though it is obviously constitutional to do so. The reason I don’t is that most teachers don't presently understand ID well enough to teach it accurately to students, and mandating ID tends to politicize the debate. As a scientist, I want to see intelligent design be developed as a science, not as political tool, and thus, like Discovery Institute, I oppose forcing it into public school curricula. Hopefully this approach will cut down on the Expelled effect while allowing ID to progress as a science.

I advocate teaching the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian theory in public schools, and I believe that such an evolutionary curricula should be implemented by states and local school boards, using traditional legislative and administrative processes, without undue interference by federal judges and litigious atheists. I believe in the democratic process, and I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and academic freedom. I abhor censorship.

My views accord with those of the Discovery Institute and the views of most intelligent design proponents. Mr. Sandefur may continue to misrepresent my views and the views of my colleagues, but he cannot do so honestly.

Mr. Sandefur insists:

[The Constitution] absolutely forbids the spending of taxpayer money for… the propagation of…religious viewpoints...

Mr. Sandefur wishes to exempt his own religious belief — atheism — from constitutional scrutiny.

More on Mr. Sandefur’s illiberal views to follow.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Oklahoma State Representative Todd Thomsen has filed a resolution in the Oklahoma State Legislature asking the University of Oklahoma to dis-invite Richard Dawkins, who was invited to speak at the university as a part of the university’s Darwin 200th birthday celebration. The proposed resolution reads:

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded institution which should be open to all ideas and should train students in all disciplines of study and research and to use independent thinking and free inquiry; and

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma has planned a year-long celebration of the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s theory of evolution, called the “Darwin 2009 Project,” which includes a series of lectures, public speakers, and a course on the history of evolution; and

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma, as a part of the Darwin 2009 Project, has invited as a public speaker on campus, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published opinions, as represented in his 2006 book The God Delusion and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma; and

WHEREAS, the invitation for Richard Dawkins to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma on Friday, March 6, 2009, will only serve to present a biased philosophy on the theory of evolution to the exclusion of all other divergent considerations rather than teaching a scientific concept.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 1ST SESSION OF THE 52ND OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives encourages the University of Oklahoma to engage in an open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories which is the approach that a public institution should be engaged in and which represents the desire and interest of the citizens of Oklahoma.

THAT a copy of this resolution be transmitted to the President of the University of Oklahoma, the Dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Oklahoma, and the Chair of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma.

I share Rep. Thomsen’s disdain for Dawkins, and Dawkins himself has certainly been a vocal supporter of censorship in education, but I strongly disagree with the proposed resolution and I hope it does not pass.

Dawkins has said and written many things that are deeply offensive to Christians and to all people who value academic freedom and civility in the public square. I disagree with him on many (most) issues, but it is imperative that he be allowed to speak without censorship of any kind. The issues that Dawkins raises are important issues about religion and science. We all gain by the free exchange of ideas. The intelligent design community has consistently supported unfettered discussion of these issues, and Rep. Thomsen’s effort to censor Dawkins is incompatible with our consistent philosophy of support for academic freedom.

I would suggest that the legislature consider a resolution condemning Dawkin's intolerance and his personal support for censorship in academia, and the resolution could request that the Darwin 2009 events include speakers (in addition to Dawkins) representing different viewpoints in the ID/Darwinsim debate. The appropriate response to Dawkins is more discussion and presentation of a broader range of views, not censorship.

I am not arguing that the proposed censorship of Dawkins is on a par with Darwinist censorship of discussion of the strengths and weakness of evolution in public schools. The citizens of Oklahoma have the right to invite or not invite speakers to public universities in Oklahoma. Dawkins has no right to be invited to give a lecture at the University of Oklahoma (such an invitation is a privilege, not a right), but I strongly believe that he should speak and that he should be welcomed as a participant in this very important debate.

On the other hand, I believe that people in public schools have a constitutional right, under the First Amendment, to freedom of speech regarding Darwin's theory. That right is held by the citizens in a school district, acting through their elected school boards and other representatives. Neither side in this debate is free of metaphysical and religious bias, but discussion of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Darwin’s theory in public schools obviously isn’t an “Establishment of Religion.” A teacher's classroom comments about gaps in the fossil record have little in common with Henry the VIII's establishment of the Church of England. Both the Darwinist and the non-Darwinist viewpoints in the evolution debate have religious presuppositions and implications, but the First Amendment guarantees the right to free expression of religion (for theists no less than for atheists) and the First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech. The citizens in a school district have the right to exercise these rights through the normal process of curriculum development. Darwinists’ efforts to enforce censorship of questions about evolution in schools are, in my view, without Constitutional warrant and are inconsistent with a commitment to freedom of speech and to academic freedom.

As an aside, I remind my Darwinist interlocutors that the anger and intolerance expressed in the Oklahoma resolution is much their own fault. Ben Stein was recently dis-invited from giving the commencement address at the University of Vermont by Darwinist censors. Ironically, Dawkins himself was one of these censors. Dawkins wrote a letter to the president of the University of Vermont in which he asked the president to rescind Stein's invitation to speak. Darwinists continue to vigorously oppose academic freedom to critique Darwin's theory, and they respond to critiques of Darwin's theory and of materialist ideology in universities with remarkable vitriol and spite. Virtually all of the censorship in this debate has been by Darwinists.

As I expressed in my recent open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, there is a backlash building against Darwinist ideology and tactics, and Oklahoma resolution may be just the tip of the iceberg. Much of the anger and censorship expressed in this resolution is a reaction to years of Darwinist vitriol and censorship. Darwinists are well advised to remember that in our society they are on the fringe — enormous majorities of Americans disagree with their tactics, their science, and their metaphysics. Academic freedom is good for fringe ideologies, and Darwinists oppose it at their own risk.

Censorship has no place in our society. The academic freedom of all people — even of people like Richard Dawkins who don't respect academic freedom for others — should be protected. I support academic freedom, and I oppose the Oklahoma resolution, just as I oppose Darwinist censorship of open discussion of evolution in public schools. Richard Dawkins should speak at the University of Oklahoma, and he should be treated with courtesy and respect. Ben Stein should have been allowed to give the commencement address at the University of Vermont, and he should have been treated with courtesy and respect. Teachers and administrators and students who have questions about Darwin’s theory should speak up in schools, and they should be treated with courtesy and respect. We should hear more from Dawkins and Darwinists, and we should hear more from those who disagree with them as well. These issues should be discussed freely and vigorously in the public forum, including public universities and public schools.

Sunlight is a remarkable disinfectant.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 2:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

"Do you know who funded it?" asked the email from the AP reporter. She and a number of other people read my post from three days ago about the Darwin conference being held in Rome.

I took a deep breath and replied to the AP email, "Yes, I know who funded it." It was the Templeton Foundation.

I took a deep breath because Templeton is a powerful and well-connected. You don't want to cross Charles Harper of Templeton if you can help it. But in public and private Harper has attacked intelligent design and Discovery Institute. He is not just interested in discussion, but in molding the discussion in certain ways. To that end, Templeton funds go to many groups and individual writers who, perhaps coincidentally, could have an interest in how the Darwin versus design issue is discussed.

Here is today's AP story. Among other things, in my email last night to Nicole Winfield of the AP, I pointed out the following:

• The Pontifical Council on Culture has little money of its own for science programs. The staff explained this to me and so, too, did others in the Vatican. How much money Templeton is providing has not yet been reported anywhere.
  
• What you have in Rome right now is largely a Templeton-directed conference. There are many fine speakers. But not only were funds put up by the Templeton Foundation, but leading organizers and speakers and their organizations separately are recipients of Templeton grants. There's nothing wrong with that, but perhaps it does help explain the animus toward Darwin critics and ID supporters.

• At a June, 2007 meeting in the science office of the Council on Culture, Fr. Tomasz Tramfe acknowledged to me that there was a problem with inviting scientists who openly doubt Darwin and support intelligent design. When I asked further, he somewhat reluctantly advised me that the prohibition on scientists who support intelligent design came from the foundation that provided the funds, and he then acknowledged that that was the Templeton Foundation.
  
• As one official elsewhere quipped to me at the time, when it comes to conferences like these in Rome, "He who pays the piper calls the tune." Holding such a conference at the Vatican, however, doesn't commit the pope or the Church to the organizers' views.
  
• Templeton has done this sort of thing before, so I wasn't completely shocked. Still I was disappointed. The late Sir John Templeton accomplished much good and his foundation has been a positive force on other subjects, such as economics. My Discovery Institute colleague, George Gilder, was a speaker at a dinner honoring Sir John a few years ago. A couple of Discovery scientists once did get grants from Templeton Foundation.
  
• Therefore, I thought maybe we could talk to them about this conference. Last year I called another Templeton official I know slightly, who checked and told me that it was not the foundation's decision to exclude scientists who support intelligent design. But when I again talked (by phone) with Fr. Tramfe, he confirmed that, indeed, it was Templeton.
  
• I had even provided Fr. Tramfe with a list of scientists — many of them who happen to be orthodox Catholics — who would have been appropriate to invite. I understand that some of those scientists, such as Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, are being criticized at this conference, and, of course, they are unable to defend themselves.
  
• It is Templeton and its "advisors" (such as Francisco Ayala) who have the position that ID is not science and not theology.
  
• Ironically, Templeton itself is steeped in its own religious views and perspectives. I don't think the Catholic Church would embrace some of those views.
  
• It is surely another irony this week that some of those present who hold official advisory posts with Templeton and seem to be trying to pressure the Catholic Church — such as Dr. Ayala — are elsewhere prominently at odds with Catholic positions on social issues.
  
• This week's conference in Rome apparently is doing a good job of explaining how the Templeton Foundation, its grantees and chosen allies regard science. Some of the speeches undoubtedly are sturdy and sound. However, as I have been assured elsewhere, this conference should not be confused with the position of the Pope or of the Church as a whole, where evolution and design remain in serious and fruitful dialogue.

Postscripts to the above post:

1. Reporters often point out that the pope and Church accept "evolution," as if that somehow repudiates criticism of Darwinian theory. But I don't know anyone at Discovery Institute who doubts that some form of evolution has taken place. The questions are whether Darwinian theory or any process of evolution that is inherently unguided, can adequately explain the origin of the universe or the development of life on Earth, let alone man's place in the world. That is a different set of issues, isn't it?

2. The AP story reports that Cardinal Schoenborn supports intelligent design. I don't know of any occasion when the cardinal has said that. He has questioned the way Darwinists exaggerate claims for their theory.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 4:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula has responded to my open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. In my letter, I strongly criticized the Darwinist organization’s endorsement of censorship and its disrespect for academic freedom. I reminded its members that they have a responsibility to the millions of taxpayers who fund their grants, and part of that responsibility entails a modicum of respect and a willingness to accept an open discussion of evolutionary theory in public schools.

Myers replies:

Now we see exposed the Discovery Institute's opinion of scientists: they are parasites, suckling at the public teat…and that we should be divorced from civic responsibilities altogether.

Scientists aren’t parasites. Experimental biologists, physicists, astronomers, chemists, and medical researchers are employees of the people who fund them, generally taxpayers. Most scientists do their work with humility and integrity. They understand, at least implicitly, that they have a responsibility to the public that pays their way. Few scientists engage in censorship, restriction of academic freedom, and boycotts. And they don’t consider such anti-science advocacy a ‘civic responsibility;’ they exercise civic responsibility by welcoming and even encouraging questions about their scientific theories. They respectfully engage those who disagree with their scientific viewpoints. They don’t censor and they don’t boycott, because boycotts and censorship are ideological tactics, not scientific discourse.

I reserve the appellation "parasites" for Darwinists, at least those Darwinists who oppose academic freedom and who sneer at most Americans for whom scientific explanations in nature need not be restricted to unintelligent causes. Many Darwinists — at least Darwinian fundamentalists like Myers — are atheist ideologues who despise the religious beliefs of ordinary Americans who pay their way. Darwinist ‘civic responsibility’ consists of denying other people the freedom to act in accordance with their own views of civic responsibility, which include the civic responsibility to establish educational policy for their own children in their own schools.

Darwinists make their living from ordinary people who they ridicule, censor, and boycott. In this respect they’re not scientists at all; they’re ideologues — atheist fundamentalists — who use science and public funding to advance their metaphysics.

Myers writes:

... What Egnor proposes here is nothing less than a naked threat to use the ignorance of the mob to attack science. [emphasis mine]

American taxpayers who fund scientific research are not "ignorant" and they're not a "mob."

The American public is Dr. Myers’ employer, and for many years it has patiently underwritten the Darwinist ideological crusade. Americans’ patience will run out someday, and they will decide to use their hard-earned tax money to employ ethical scientists who respect academic freedom and who advance real science, not atheist metaphysics.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Roddy Bollock over at ARN's ID Report has an excellent post illustrating the difficulty Darwinists have with explaining design:

What if you were lied to all your life that a square was a circle? Oh yes, you were told, it's natural to have contrary thoughts, but you must not be deceived by appearances; those things that look like squares are not. They are merely apparent squares. And in reality, you are politely informed, they not only are circles, they must be, because an all encompassing Theory of Circumfusion requires them to be, and you must believe the Theory of Circumfusion. And what if you did? Despite all that was in you; despite what you instinctively and empirically knew, what if you believed? What if?

Imagine that you really bought the lie. You began to see reality not as circles and squares, but as circles and the illusion of squares. And suppose over time you trained yourself, through constant reminder that what you see as squares are not squares, but circles; you actually saw only circles. Now where others see circles and squares you see only circles and imperfect circles. In fact, you find you are somewhat proud of the fact that you seem to be one of the very few people that can understand the Theory of Circumfusion to the extent that you see reality so wonderfully enveloped with circles. You teach with grand authority that your discipline is that of the study of circles that give the appearance of being squares. In fact, your reality becomes so self-evidently true you almost forget that others still see squares.

But you can't forget. Picture your constant chagrin, if not downright irritation, at the constant use among lay people and uninformed (redneck, you say) scientists of the language of squareness. To make matters worse, squareness is always insisted on by the "straight" and "square" crowd, those who speak in vexatious pleonasms such as reference to "straight-edged squares" (as if there are any other kind). They are not squares! you want to shout, they are circles that only have the appearance of squareness! You try your best to be nice, but you find yourself blogging about imbeciles and the mentally ill who adamantly refuse to believe the scientific Theory of Circumfusion and persist in the delusion of the existence of true squareness.

Posted by Anika Smith at 2:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This week's conference in Rome on Darwin and evolution, nominally sponsored by the Gregorian University and Notre Dame "under the High Patronage of the Pontifical Council on Culture," has a public relations budget to promote some conclusions that would seem to vary from the positions of Pope Benedict. The Council on Culture has little or no funding of its own for such science conferences and has had to accept non-Vatican funding — and the guidance and other strings that go with it.

Intelligent design scientists not only are not present, as a consequence, but their views were misrepresented and trashed ahead of time by the conference organizers. Instead, alongside some rather interesting speakers, you will hear a parade of atheists, agnostics and theistic evolutionists whose common theme is that intelligent design is not science, not theology, nothing at all, really — merely a reactionary sociological phenomenon, a "Protestant" idea, as one source opined recently. This last will be news to the likes of biochemist Michael Behe, biologist Dean Kenyon and neuroscientist Michael Egnor. Such faithful, church-going Catholics "never got the memo," it seems.

But who sent the memo?

Certainly not Pope Benedict XVI. Easily obtained at dozens of kiosks around Vatican City are holy cards with the message from the Holy Father's very first homily as pope: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution," it says. "Each of us is the result of a thought of God."

Later in 2005, Pope Benedict greeted one of his Wednesday audiences with a statement affirming our Earth as "this intelligent project of the Cosmos." (It was also translated as "this intelligent design of the Cosmos.") At the famous Castel Gandolfo meeting with his former theology students in 2006, the pope said that "...(T)he theory of evolution is still not a complete, scientifically verified theory."

Given the outstanding lectures on Creation and the Fall that he gave in Munich — printed in English as "In the Beginning..." (Eerdmans, 1986) — these positions of Pope Benedict are hardly surprising. Indeed, given the Catholic Catechism and, oh, about half the Psalms, Romans 1-20 and many other books, chapters and verses of the Bible, it would be remarkable (as philosopher Benjamin Wiker has stated) if the Catholic Church did not support some version of intelligent design. Of course, to define intelligent design accurately, you really ought to let scientists who support it explain it.

In contrast, brought together to attack ID this week are a number of experts in the erection of straw man arguments — and whose own, seldom inspected theological presuppositions are heterodox, to say the least. It shouldn't matter, of course, what they think about religion. But if it doesn't matter, as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things asked last fall when he read about the conference plan, why hold the conference down the way from St. Peter's?

In the December First Things Fr. Neuhaus noted the organizers' statement that "proponents of 'creationism and intelligent design' will not be invited."

"The lumping together of creationism and intelligent design is telling," he continued. "They are quite distinct enterprises; the former is typically in defense of a literal reading of Genesis while the latter is a scientifically based theory of purpose or teleology in natural development."

In other words, the conference, Neuhaus went on to observe, will exclude "scientists who, on the basis of scientific evidence, contend, as the Catholic Church contends, for design and purpose in nature. The organizers seem to think they are being even-handed, but it is all quite confusing. One would not like to think that the purpose of the March conference is to secure for the Catholic Church a clean bill of health from (those) who condemn any deviation from scientistic ideology as anti-intellectualism."

Very droll and very correct.

The conference this week takes place in Rome, but it actually is a rally of the organizers, by the organizers and for the organizers. It will reflect their views, not the Vatican's. The issue of evolution and design is still very much alive in the Catholic Church, just as it is — if truth be known — in science.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 11:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Stuart Derbyshire, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Birmingham, has an absolutely scathing review (at Spiked) of the latest nonsense emanating from evolutionary psychologists. As Derbyshire has it in the first line:

Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World is an unbearably stupid book.

The authors, Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, ‘explain’ war and violence by treating human beings as machines programmed by evolution to grab resources, form in-groups and pass on their genes. Women, according to the authors, are naturally more passive because they must invest more effort into rearing offspring, and men are naturally more aggressive because they can produce lots of offspring by being dominant. It is a commonly told tale that explains little and confuses an awful lot.

challenge the overly-simplified biological similarities between humans and apes upon which much of evo-psycho rests:

Even the basic differences escape the authors. Potts and Hayden suggest we share a tendency towards war with chimpanzees because, ‘just as we have the same bones in our hands and feet as chimpanzees and the same networks of neurons in our brains as chimpanzees, so we also share with chimpanzees a predisposition for adult males to team up, attack, and kill other groups of our own species’. In fact, human hands and feet are radically different from those of chimpanzees. Our hands have the famous fully opposable thumb, which means we can grasp small items and bring them into closer view for inspection and manipulation (3). Our feet, in contrast, have an adducted (non-opposable) hallux and shortened toes, which means we can’t hold on to a branch or a banana with our feet like a chimpanzee can. We also do not have the same networks of neurons in our brains. There are similarities, but the brains of humans and chimpanzees do not weigh the same, look the same or respond the same. The precise details are discussed in detail elsewhere (4), but it is obviously the case that our bodily and neural anatomy differ importantly from those of chimpanzees, or else we would be chimpanzees. And we aren’t. The anatomical differences reflect massive differences in the actual and potential behaviour of humans and chimpanzees.

If I have any difference with Derbyshire, it is that I wish he would have dug down to the last layer at the core of this view: Namely, Darwinian evolution. If it is true that the mechanism by which biological change happens is merely random mutation and natural selection, then the evo-psychologist can say, 'sure, these just-so stories may be wrong, but there must be some sort of biological explanation of our behavior in terms of reproduction advantage' (mutation and selection). Many critics of evo-psycho want to keep Darwinism but contain it so that it does not affect humans. This is untenable. If Darwinism is true, and we were built by this process which did not have us in mind but is merely tuned for survival, then, like it or not, there must be a Darwinian explanation for our thoughts and behavior. Put another way, one cannot claim that Darwinism made our brains but has no bearing on the brain's contents. Derbyshire may of course see this, but one wishes he would have said it.

-----

(3) The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being, Raymond Tallis, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh), 2003

(4) From Monkey Brain to Human Brain,S Dehaene, J-R Duhamel, MD Hauser, G Rizzolatti, Bradford Books, 2005

Posted by Logan Gage at 9:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) has announced its decision to boycott the State of Louisiana in retaliation for Louisiana Science Education Act passed last year by the Louisiana Legislature and signed by Governor Jindal. The effect of the new law is to allow teachers in Louisiana to use supplementary materials to teach controversial scientific theories without threat of recrimination.

In a letter to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, SICB president Dr. Richard Satterlie has announced that his organization will hold its 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City, rather than in New Orleans as had been planned. Dr. Satterlie wrote:

We will not hold the Society’s 2011 annual meeting in New Orleans…the Executive Committee voted to hold the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City in large part because of legislation SB 561, which you signed into law in June 2008…SICB wrote to the Louisiana legislators opposing SB 561. After the bill passed both the House and the Senate, we joined the American Institute of Biological Sciences (ABIS) and other national scientific organizations in urging you to veto this legislation…[t]he SICB leadership could not support New Orleans as our meeting venue because of the official position of the state in weakening science education and specifically attacking evolution in science curricula. SICB is joining other scientific organizations in suggesting professional societies reconsider any plans to host meetings in Louisiana. As scientists, it is our responsibility to oppose anti-science initiatives. We urge you to take actions to repeal SB 561 in the upcoming legislative session.

Of course, the SICB's censorship is the real "anti-science initiative" that "weakens science education." The Louisiana Science Education Act strengthens science education by promoting academic freedom and promoting open discussion of scientific evidence, which are indispensible to science. It protects teachers who present various sides of scientific controversies, and doesn't "attack evolution in science curricula," unless one accepts Dr. Satterlie’s inference that open discussion of biological evidence inherently "attacks evolution."

The SICB’s opposition to academic freedom in science classrooms and its interference in the right of the citizens of Louisiana to set educational policy for their children in their schools without interference by national scientific organizations is repellant. The lobbying and boycott conducted by the SICB is contrary to fundamental scientific ethics, which encourages free inquiry and respect for differences of opinion. Such unethical tactics demean the scientific profession. In fact, they show precisely why these academic freedom bills are needed.

This is my open letter to Dr. Satterlie and the SICB:

Dear Dr. Satterlie and the membership of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology,

I have learned of your decision to boycott the state of Louisiana because of the recently enacted Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA). The LSEA is a landmark academic freedom bill that allows teachers to use supplementary materials to teach controversial scientific theories without threat of recrimination. Your organization lobbied against this law, and has lobbied in support of censorship in public school science classes and in support of punishment of teachers who use supplementary materials to teach their students about scientific controversies. You have now announced your decision to change the planned venue for the 2011 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting from New Orleans to Salt Lake City in retaliation for the decision of the citizens of Louisiana to allow academic freedom in their science classrooms.

Your organization has now gone on record as opposing academic freedom in public schools. The formal alignment of several organizations of professional scientists — of which you are the most recent — with censorship of scientific discussion is an ominous development.

Your opposition to academic freedom and your astonishing decision to boycott the people that you unsuccessfully tried to censor will only serve to further alienate ordinary Americans who already doubt your commitment to honest non-ideological science. Your attempt at censorship and your boycott are a sneer at the citizens of Louisiana. They will no doubt draw the obvious inference that you wish to insulate your scientific viewpoints from public scrutiny and that you endorse censorship in their schools because you think that the citizens of Louisiana don’t have the same right to educate their children in their schools as you have to educate your children in yours.

But you misunderstand the people for whom you clearly have such disdain.

Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don’t accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life. And they think that they ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in their own public schools. They don’t share your passion for ideological purity in science classes. They have a quaint notion that science depends on the freedom to ask questions, and their insistence on academic freedom is catching on. They don't want religion taught in the science classroom, but they know that students are not learning about all of the science surrounding evolution. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support academic freedom in the teaching of evolution in schools, and that number is rising fast — it’s up 9% in the past 3 years. People clearly resent your demand for censorship. After all, it’s their children in their schools, and they aren’t happy with a bunch of supercilious Darwinists telling them that they can’t even question Darwinism in their own classrooms. So if you’re going to boycott all the creationists who despise you, you’ll eventually have to hold all of your conventions in Madison or Ann Arbor. Keep up the arrogance and eventually you won’t have to boycott people at all. People will boycott you.

Folks in Louisiana don’t actually care if the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology cancels its convention in New Orleans. There are a lot of other organizations that will be delighted to hold their conventions in cities you boycott. There are a lot of big organizations out there who don’t exactly like you. The National Association of Evangelicals represents 40,000,000 people and represents 40,000 churches. The Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology has 2300 members. Just one organization of evangelicals has 17 times as many churches as you have members. There are thousands of churches that are larger than your organization, and I’m sure many members would be happy to come to New Orleans for tourism or meetings.

In fact, if I were Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, I’d change the Louisiana State Motto to "Boycotted by Darwinists Since 2009." It’d be a stroke of advertising genius. Boycotted cities could market themselves as "Darwinist-Free Zones." I doubt that many localities could even accommodate all of the new visitors.

Worst of all, "boycott" is a very bad meme for Darwinists to be spreading. Where do you think the money that you’re denying the citizens of New Orleans came from? Your grants, mostly, which come from… creationists. You guys are utterly dependent on taxpayers, most of whom are creationists of one stripe or another, and most of whom rank Darwinists on an ethical scale somewhere below Caribbean hedge fund operators. They think you’re a bunch of atheist brownshirts — can’t imagine why. These ordinary citizens might notice that you boycotted them while suckling at the public teat — their teat. The ordinary taxpaying God-fearing Americans you tried to slap down in Louisiana are paying your way, and they’ve always paid your way, while you sneered at them, ridiculed their faith, and used a judicial cudgel to indoctrinate their children in their schools. And now you think that you can blackmail them by…refusing to visit their state?

My suggestion: lose your attitude. Boycotting true academic freedom — which is what this law is all about — is bad p.r. Your grants to study evolution don’t really come from NIH or NSF. They come from creationists, the ones you take to court and censor all the time. You’ve always played them for dupes, but "boycott" is a word you don’t want them to learn. There are a couple hundred million of them, they don’t much like or trust you anyway. Times are hard, and don’t make the mistake of thinking that the work of evolutionary biologists is indispensible. Evolution is worthless to experimental biology and worthless to medical research. The most "evolution-denying" country in the Western world — the United States — is the world’s undisputed scientific leader. A lot of taxpayers realize that Darwinist "just-so stories" are of little value to the real research going on in biology and medicine. Evolutionary research — like the research that claimed that the human brain evolved because apes got better spit — is a real "shovel ready" project, in the sense that a lot of folks would like to take a shovel to it.

If you're not careful, "creationists" (80% of Americans) might notice this irony: you boycott their states, but you forgot to boycott their money. If one percent of the people you've censored and boycotted wrote letters to their congressmen demanding a defunding of evolutionary research — a boycott of you — the grant money currently allocated to advancing Darwinist ideology (it's ideologues, not scientists, who censor) would be re-allocated to genuine non-ideological science.

Do you think they'd be successful? The arguments that your allies have used would be the basis for defunding you. The appellation "consensus science" could be used as a litmus test for withdrawal of funding. Why fund research on "settled" science? Why waste precious research dollars on studying a "fact" like Darwinism, when there are so many pressing problems in medicine and other sciences that remain unsolved? Research funding properly goes to controversies, not settled issues. How many scientific theories that are taught to public school students as non-controversial are the basis for substantial federal funding? How much money does the NSF devote to research on Newtonian gravitation or heliocentrism?

How's this for a rallying cry:

"Americans should be allowed to teach their children about the evolutionary controversies in which publicly-funded research is being conducted."

or

"Evolution: No controversy? — no funding."

Fits nicely on a bumper sticker. It could catch on.

Your arrogance and disrespect for academic freedom demeans the scientific profession, and your boycott of people who don't capitulate to your censorship is risible. You're actually debasing Darwinism, which, after eugenics and a century and a half of third-rate science, is no mean accomplishment. Most people don’t see your refusal to visit their state as a "threat." Honestly, they’d rather you made your boycott all-inclusive, so you’d miss all of their legislative sessions and federal court hearings as well. So back off the "boycott" stuff. Just say you misspoke, or pretend you never said it at all. You Darwinists are good at covering your tracks (remember "junk DNA"?). Keep in mind that you’re living off the people you’re censoring and boycotting. Your livelihood is dependent on their largesse, and, in "comparative biology" vernacular, it’s unwise for parasites to boycott their hosts.

My advice: just keep suckling at the public teat and pretend the boycott never happened.

Cordially,

Mike Egnor, M.D.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 5:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The latest anti-intelligent design book to hit the shelves is a 2009 collection published by University of California Press, For the Rock Record: Geologists On Intelligent Design. Many of the contributors seem stuck in a timewarp, as if the last time they checked into the debate was 1980 when evolutionary geologists were fighting against young earth creationists. The book thus opens with a comparison of intelligent design (ID) to young earth creationism, proclaiming the "enormous joy and relief" (p. 1) that came when the authors read the Kitzmiller ruling that declared ID “a particularly pernicious variant of creationism we had hoped was banished a quarter-century before.” (p. 1) If you haven’t already guessed, the book reads more like a polemic than a serious treatment of the subject, yet it was published by University of California Press. Conflations between ID and young earth creationism abound thereafter:

ID is part and parcel of pseudoscientific explanations for numerous geological phenomena--from the caves of Tennessee to global climate change to erosive mud flows from Mount Saint Helens. The first Conference on Creation Geology, held at Cerdarville, Ohio in May, 2007 in Petersburg Kentucky, reflect this resurgent interest in the search not just for biological but geological 'evidence' for design. So too does the recent publications of books such as Geology by Design: Interpreting Rocks and Their Catastrophic Record (2007), The Earth Will Reel from Its Place: Scientific Confirmation for Bible Predictions of Geological Upheaval (2006), and Geology in the Bible: Earth's Evidence for Intelligent Design (2005). (pg. 2)

The subtitle, For the Rock Record: Geologists on Intelligent Design, is misleading. There’s geology in For the Rock Record — but much of it doesn't deal with ID. There are attacks on ID in For the Rock Record, but most of the attacks on ID don’t deal with science or geology (many of them deal with philosophy of science or theology). The chapter with the lengthiest discussion of science and ID also happens to be the most polemical chapter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was written by Donald Prothero. Prothero’s harshest attacks are built upon blatant factual errors and misrepresentations of ID literature and history.

Misrepresenting Meyer
The punchline of Prothero’s chapter is that ID proponents promote “lies and deception.” As a part of his "deception" narrative, Prothero (citing the NCSE and “Expelled Exposed” as his sources) asserts the false claim that Stephen C. Meyer’s article in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington was “snuck into the journal by an editor.” Prothero must actually believe what he reads on anti-ID blogs and websites, because the reality is that Dr. Roy McDiarmid, the President of the Biological Society of Washington and a scientist at the Smithsonian, admitted that there was no wrongdoing regarding the peer-review process of Meyer’s paper:

I have seen the review file and comments from 3 reviewers on the Meyer paper. All three with some differences among the comments recommended or suggested publication. I was surprised but concluded that there was not inappropriate behavior vs a vis [sic] the review process. (See Congressional Staff Report, e-mail from Roy McDiarmid, “Re: Request for information,” January 28, 2005, 2:25 PM to Hans Sues, emphasis added.)

Prothero’s Case for Demonization of Intelligent Design Collapses
As I read further in Prothero’s chapter, I found it very odd that he repeatedly made the erroneous claim that the second edition of the pro-ID textbook Of Pandas and People was published in the year “2004.” The facts on this point are well known: the first edition of Pandas was published in 1989, and the second edition was published way back in 1993. In this regard, it’s odd that Prothero’s chapter focuses intensely upon Pandas, even though it was a very early ID book that predates much cutting-edge ID thinking. A reprint of Pandas was published in 2004, but the copyright dates and publication dates were stated, accurately, as 1989 & 1993, and for recent books like this, it’s not customary to cite a book based upon its reprint date, but based upon its copyright/publication date. As the textbook’s publisher page states:

I could not understand why Prothero continually misrepresented the textbook’s publication and copyright date as 2004 until I got to the end of the chapter and realized this was no trivial or unintentional error.

Prothero is known for his highly charged rhetoric, and his chapter gets more polemical as it goes on, ending by asserting that “ID creationists” are guilty of promoting “lies and deception,” and having “un-Christian behavior.” The words “lie,” “deception,” and “dishonesty” are scattered quite liberally throughout Prothero’s chapter, and his punchline is a quote from the Bible: “Perhaps they should go back to their Bibles, where Proverbs 12:22 states ‘Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.’” (p. 56) If we evaluate these uncivil and inflammatory arguments, Prothero’s centerpiece evidence that ID proponents have purportedly “lying lips” is a quote from Pandas’ 1st and 2nd editions which says that “there are no transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales.” Prothero then argues that the “1980s and 1990s yielded an amazing array of transitional fossils that clearly link terrestrial land mammals to full-fledged aquatic whales” and therefore “there is no excuse for creationist ignorance or denial of these fossils,” (p. 51) citing to “Davis and Kenyon (2004, p. 101).” So his argument is built upon the claim that Pandas was published in 2004, and therefore came out after all these fossils were known, and thus the authors of Pandas have acted inappropriately by failing to mention them.

Here are the fossils Prothero mentions, with their first publication dates, as well as the actual publication dates of both editions of Pandas: