Our ancestors were too apes
This comes from the same news article cited in the last post, but I thought it deserved its own entry.
I think it's hugely annoying when people supporting evolution try to cover it with this fig leaf:
Buttars said he doesn't believe the defeat means that most House members think the Darwinian theory of evolution is correct.
"Absolutely not. It means the vote was wrong in my opinion," Buttars said. "I don't believe that anybody in there really wants their kids to be taught that their great-grandfather was an ape."
In fact, evolutionary theory does not assert that humans were descended directly from apes, but rather holds that apes and humans -- and all other species -- are descended from common ancestors.
That's the same old saw you hear a lot: "Evolution doesn't say our ancestors were apes, it just says we share common ancestors with apes."
That's true to a point -- our ancestors were not chimpanzees, or gorillas, or any other living species of ape. Those species did not exist at the time of our common ancestry with them.
But the thrust of the claim is that these ancestors weren't apes at all -- that they were some kind of mysterious other-being that somehow isn't quite so repulsive as an ape. That is just a lie. Our common ancestors with chimpanzees were not chimps, but they were apes. Ditto for all our ancestors from around 7 million years ago all the way back to around 30 million or more -- they were all apes!
The arm-waving sophistry that tries to escape this fact just makes evolution look bad -- like whiny wishy-washery. After all, those arms can wave because they inherited shoulder mobility from our arboreal ape ancestors! Accept it! Embrace it!
UC-Berkeley sued for promulgating evolution
From the AP story:
BERKELEY, Calif. - A California couple has sued the operators of a University of California-Berkeley Web site designed to help teachers teach evolution, claiming it improperly strays into religion.
Jeanne and Larry Caldwell of Granite Bay say portions of the Understanding Evolution Web site amount to a government endorsement of certain religious groups over others because the site is partly funded through a public money grant from the National Science Foundation.
I wouldn't post this, except it's a good excuse for me to point out the website in question, Understanding Evolution. It's put together by the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and although it has been around almost as long as the web itself, it has really improved over the years into a strong resource for biology teachers.
The President and the teaching of evolution
In a roundtable interview yesterday, President Bush commented to reporters that "both sides [i.e. evolution and intelligent design] should be properly taught." This has inspired much comment in the blogosphere. For a roundup, try Instapundit (scroll down) or Pharyngula.
After reading what others have posted, I think there has been far too much foaming at the mouth, and far too little constructive thought. It's time to step back and consider the situation "on the ground." This post is long enough that it can't be scanned easily, so I include a synopsis:
ABSTRACT: Here, I argue that Bush's comments, while damaging to the cause of evolution education, are representative of most Americans' opinions. They reflect our public discourse, which emphasizes fairness. Being (or appearing) fair is much more important to the vast majority of Americans than knowing about the scientific method. Intelligent design creationism violates the scientific method in many ways, but most people neither understand nor care about this: this objection is perceived as "a technicality" rather than a fair division of content. For many years, science and religion have operated in "separate spheres" as a compromise, but the boundary between these has been greatly weakened. The best argument against including intelligent design in schools is that it simply doesn't work: it has led to no new insights, no discoveries, and no scientific results. Creationists continue to argue that this is because of widespread bias among the scientific community. I suggest the establishment of a monetary prize to find solid evidence of intelligent design, along the lines of the "X Prize" in aeronautics, or the "Millennium Prizes" in mathematics. If, as I expect, no evidence of intelligent design comes forward, it would be a solid step toward raising public awareness that ID has no place in the science classroom.
In two previous posts concerning the Kansas science standards hearings ("Has anybody read the Kansas proposed science standards?" and "Back to the drawing board"), I included some of my thoughts about the politics of evolution and intelligent design. From my core, I think that most scientists are taking the wrong approach to persuading people of their point of view.
Make no mistake; I study evolution every day. I see no value in any other way of understanding human origins. But consider the post at Pharyngula, which was endorsed in Newsweek this week as a valuable source for its critique of intelligent design:
Oh, yeah, and we also have to work to make sure that every goddamned Republican in our capitols is out on their ear in the next couple of election cycles. The root of our problem is that the know-nothings and lunatics are in power, and are trying to wreck anything that does not pander to their ideology -- and science opposes the Republican agenda.
This is what I said in May:
If scientists sincerely want to affect the science standards in public schools across this nation in the next several years, they are going to have to find more persuasive ways to communicate their values. The more scientists sound off like Democratic flaks, the more scientific positions will be confused with partisan ones.
I want to improve the teaching of evolution. Taking an adversarial position toward religious viewpoints or political parties is not the way to make education better. Sometimes such conflicts are unavoidable. Some religious beliefs are just scientifically wrong. The Earth was not created 6,000 years ago, and any scientific understanding of the past must repudiate this particular religious view. But many deeply religious people, and entire faiths, have no conflict with evolution. Even so, they may believe that alternative views should be available in schools.
Would it help to have a biology teacher call a child's parents "lunatics"? Certainly not. But parents, community members, churches, and other people that children know and respect are precisely the people that one is attacking, when one uses derisive rhetoric.
I understand the frustration that leads some evolutionists to extreme language. It seems that some people just never learn. But any teacher who has been at his work for as long as I have understands that the task of teaching always involves repetition. New year, new students, same lessons. The nature of teaching is patience, and any teenager knows how to drive a frustrated teacher insane within three minutes.
The thing is, teenagers are following this argument, both broadly between evolutionists and intelligent design, and narrowly in this episode. And they can see for themselves who looks more reasonable. And it isn't us.
What Bush said
Most sites commenting on today's story have just taken quotes from news stories. Few have posted the remarks in full. Here they are:
Q I wanted to ask you about the -- what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?
THE PRESIDENT: I think -- as I said, harking back to my days as my governor -- both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.
Q Both sides should be properly taught?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people -- so people can understand what the debate is about.
Q So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?
THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting -- you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.
There is no sense parsing this for deep meaning. Bush said what he probably believes: students should be exposed to alternative views, intelligent design is an alternative view to evolution, both sides should be taught, and the decision about what to teach should be made by local school districts, not the federal government. None of this should be a surprise to anyone -- as Bush pointed out, this has been his position since he was governor of Texas.
Many who have commented on the remarks have criticized Bush for his anti-science agenda. Or his pandering to the right wing of his party. Or his stupidity.
Like most Americans, Bush is no expert on any scientific issue, certainly not biology. A biologist making these statements would be rightly pilloried by evolutionists, because he ought to know better. And in detail, Bush's idea to "teach both sides" fails since one side has utterly no support from science. A good follow-up question to Bush is suggested by Carl Zimmer:
Mr. President, I would ask, how do you reconcile your statement that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution with the fact that your administration, like both Republican and Democratic administrations before it, has supported research in evolution by our country's leading scientists, while failing to support a single study that is explicitly based on Intelligent Design? The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and even the Department of Energy have all decided that evolution is a cornerstone to advances in our understanding of diseases, the environment, and even biotechnology. They have found no such value in Intelligent Design. Are they wrong? Can you tell us why?
We might say, if he were to look dispassionately at the data like any good scientist, surely he would see that Intelligent Design has no support at all, certainly not a good thing to be teaching our students about science.
But as good scientists, we should consider another source of data: sociological data.
What exactly do average Americans think about evolution? Let's consider the facts. According to this CBS News poll, 65 percent of Americans favor teaching both creationism and evolution in schools, including 56 percent of Kerry voters and 71 percent of Bush voters. Fifty-five percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form; 47 percent Kerry voters, 67 percent Bush voters. Thirty-seven percent of Americans want evolution to be replaced by creationism; this number includes 24 percent of Kerry voters.
I'm not here to defend Bush. He may have an anti-science agenda, for all I know. But his remarks aren't evidence of it. To the contrary, most Americans find them eminently reasonable.
Bush is hardly pandering to the right wing with this position. He has staked out a position that a large majority of Americans share -- from both parties. If voters decided the presidency on this single issue, it would be madness for any candidate to side with the evolutionists.
If evolutionists want to change this public, they are going to have to change their strategy.
The root of the problem
Americans fundamentally believe that hearing both sides of a debate is fair. Our public discourse takes for granted that all disagreements have two sides, and that neither should be silenced.
This is true even in cases that have multiple facets, as many complex public problems have. It is very rare for a newspaper story to include more than two points of view, and television programs never do. We live in a binary nation.
Public understanding of science is no exception. Science reporting unfailingly includes two sides to every story, even when their "opposing view" is well known to be a marginal nutcase. And what scientist has not watched "science education programs" on television and noticed the conspicuous absence of many of the best-respected scientists and the conspicuous inclusion of blowhards who represent a contrarian view? (Hey, nothing against blowhards; I'm trying my best to be one here!)
People can judge science by its record, at least as far as they know it. Science put people on the moon. It thinks that some dinosaurs had feathers. It has found the full sequence of the human genome, but hasn't yet found much to do with it. Last week, it told us that echinacea would prevent cold; this week it tells us all those echinacea supplements are worthless. It tells us that saturated fat will kill us, but our uncles ate four eggs and bacon for breakfast every day and lived to be 93. And so on. Scientists say a lot of things they can't prove, and a lot of those things turn out to be wrong.
People who think intelligent design should be heard have a healthy dose of doubt in their minds. They doubt that science can provide all the answers. They doubt that their deep faith is misguided. And they increasingly doubt that scientists are telling the whole truth.
The task of science education should be to explain scientific failures as well as successes, by explaining how science leads to changes in ideas. Right now, science education does a really bad job of this.
So people turn to common sense. Common sense expects fairness. It is usually more important to people than correctness. And rightly so: most people will never be judged by their knowledge of the scientific method, but everyone is judged by whether they are fair in their dealings with other people. Advocates of creationism -- including intelligent design -- have had their greatest successes by arguing that presenting a critique of evolutionary theory is fair in a way that science classes presently are not.
Up to now, many evolutionists have argued against intelligent design creationism by making strong claims about what science is, or ought to be. According to this argument, science just is a naturalistic account of the world, or a method demanding the most parsimonious answer, or a method devoted to testable hypotheses. It doesn't help their case that scientists seem not to be able to agree which of these conditions is fundamental. To ordinary non-scientists, this just sounds like sophistry. There is no way to tell whether scientists are giving a true account of their discipline, or whether instead they have formulated an account specifically to exclude creationist ideas. To many, it seems like science is excluding intelligent design "on a technicality", and there is no way for a non-scientist to be sure that the technical reason for that exclusion is actually true. It seems unfair.
The problem of separate spheres
There are two approaches to the evolution-creation issue that emphasize fairness in a commonsensical way. The first is the "separate spheres" argument, the notion that religion and science both apply to different aspects of understanding. The physical world is the domain of science, while morality, divinity, the existence of life after death, and other metaphysical matters are the domain of faith.
This idea has been the compromise that has kept evolution in education for most of the past fifty years. Scientists often assert this separation as a fundamental truth -- Stephen Jay Gould certainly did with his "nonoverlapping magisteria" arguments. But it is in fact a doctrine of political compromise, an argument about the nature of science that has successfully persuaded courts as well as many school boards and legislatures that intelligent design creationism cannot be fairly applied without reference to religious principles.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer expressed the idea in a column in Time, lamenting the recent abandonment of the principle by intelligent design creationists:
This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.
How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.
This is true enough, but it overlooks a history or border disputes that people of deep faith must surely recognize but scientists often ignore. Certainly some religious ideas have been content within their separate sphere -- young Earth creationism is alive and well, after all.
But science has been transgressing its own sphere for over thirty years. Scientists have clearly crossed a boundary into the investigation of the moral and spiritual. Scientists actively seek rational explanations for miracles, naturalistic explanations of inspiration and spirituality, evolutionary explanations of moral principles. It is for this reason that the "separate spheres" compromise is beginning to crumble: not the observation that science cannot explain the spiritual, but the unjustified fear that religion may be left with nothing to explain.
The fear is unjustified because there is nothing wrong with a religious faith conditioned by science. Indeed, to my mind a religious faith that ignores scientific truths is worse than a lie; it is toxic. If the Shroud of Turin were real evidence of the resurrection, then it ought to be the right age; if it is not, then people should not revere it in its falsehood. Evolutionary theory does permit a moral understanding of humanity, and people do accord with its predictions. Some religions accommodate these insights.
Others are threatened by them. There is no way that a literal interpretation of the Bible can be accommodated into evolutionary theory. Nor can the Koran. Nor can the Book of Mormon. Nor can most of the creation myths of indigenous societies around the world. Science assaults creationist beliefs directly by showing them to be false. There is no avoiding this conflict: if students with these beliefs are in science education, they will be told their religion is a lie.
Intelligent design creationism may be an underground conspiracy by some religious believers, but it is not a tunnel under an impermeable border separating religion and science. Scientists blasted the border defenses long ago. Intelligent design is a rearguard defense for a retreating viewpoint.
The real solution to fairness
The other approach to fairness is much more brutal, but much more scientific. Science demands that any theory stands or falls on its empirical success or failure. Treated fairly as any other scientific theory, intelligent design creationism simply fails. It explains no empirical data that are not explained by evolution. It has inspired no research program, no new scientific discoveries, and no graduate training programs. Advances in genetics, medicine, biotechnology, or any other aspect of biology owe nothing to it. It is an intellectual dead end.
Creationists argue that this failure to produce results is a result of a conspiracy. According to this conspiracy theory, mainstream scientists don't want their evolutionist beliefs to be threatened, so they do not fund research into intelligent design. These nameless conspirators drum students out of biology if they show any interest in creation. They ensure that the editorships and reviewers of biology journals will reject any scientific paper on intelligent design. And so on.
Any practicing scientist understands that such a conspiracy is completely impossible in practice. First of all, abundant financial incentives ensure that any research into intelligent design will be supported. The government is not the only source of funding, after all -- any researcher with a claim to prove "Biblical history" is abundantly funded by private sources, money that would easily flow to any molecular biologist who could show a substantial likelihood of an intelligently designed entity. The financial considerations for any individual young scientist are also overwhelming: the defection of a young researcher to the intelligent design movement would immediately allow substantial financial opportunities in publishing books, lecturing, and -- of course -- appearing on television. And peer review is no barrier to an argument that is correct; any research can be made available on the internet and judged on its own merits.
This argument is easy to grasp but scientists rarely make it to good effect. Everyday hypothesis-testing is rarely news. New, significant discoveries are trumpeted around the world; new failures to refute a null hypothesis are ignored. As long as intelligent design creationism can continue to make public appearances while hiding its long record of failure, most people will continue to think it "only fair" that it should be taught alongside evolution.
What science needs is a high profile way to bring attention to this record of failure.
There is one proven method that has brought so much attention to repeated failures that scientists and engineers have devoted their energies to defeating it: a prize. The Ansari X Prize was founded to bring attention to the lack of commercial spaceflight research. It encouraged this research by awarding a $10 million prize to the first repeatable flight into space by a private entity. Last year, Mohave Aerospace Ventures claimed the prize with two flights into space by its Space Ship 1 vehicle. The Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a series of seven Millennium Prizes, of $1 million each, to be awarded for the first solution to each of seven significant problems in mathematics.
Of course, one assumption beneath a prize is that the task is not impossible. The X Prize worked precisely because it stimulated interest in a task that ought to have been technically achievable, but that private industry was simply not pursuing. But the Millennium Prizes offer no such guarantees: no one knows whether a proof of the Poincaré conjecture is possible -- that's what makes it a uniquely challenging problem.
No biologist or anyone else has yet found evidence for an intelligently designed system that cannot be explained by evolution. For such evidence, it is not enough to claim that evolutionary theory has not yet explained the system -- science has not yet explained most of nature. It must be proved that the system could not have evolved; that it must have been designed. Intelligent design creationists have often claimed that such systems exist in nature, but they have never offered a proof.
I propose the formation of a prize for the production of such a proof. The matter is of paramount importance to public education, and the prize should have a magnitude reflecting this importance. I suggest $10 million. Indeed I think the matter is so important that the prize should be offered by a public or governmental agency, as a voucher of trust in science. Naturally, a fully qualified judging committee must be formed; I would suggest the National Academy of Science. But to put to rest all question of a conspiracy, I propose that every attempted proof to be submitted should be published along with a scientific critique, if one exists.
If, as I expect, no proof arises for the foreseeable future, it would be a strong public demonstration that intelligent design has nothing to explain about the rise of life on Earth. As long as no proof is produced, there is no reason to raise the question of teaching intelligent design in schools. If its advocates cannot even show one natural system that cannot be explained by evolution, clearly there is nothing to be gained by bringing ID into the classroom.
The prize is something that most Americans understand even better than fairness. It is a dare.
UPDATE: P. Z. Myers responds. Take a look at his opinion, and the many thoughtful comments. This might appear to be a disagreement on strategy rather than substance. I disagree.
There are many in science (and not only in science) who sincerely believe that most Americans are sheep, who are easily misled into voting against their interests by narrow-minded bigots.
I think that anyone who thinks this must have grown up in a different America than I did. But then, I was raised in a small town in Kansas. I learned that the more shrill you are, the less people listen. I never found anyone who had any success in persuasion by using invective. And I learned that losing a fight doesn't mean you failed. People don't vote against their interests. They are just interested in different things than you may think they should be.
Let's review the situation regarding ID in public schools. A handful of school districts have tried to adopt it (and other evolution-doubting curricula). Not all these have yet been defeated, but all are embattled. Several state boards of education have attempted to insert ID-friendly provisions into science standards. But these are hardly significant next to the thousands of school boards who continue to promote strong science standards, and the vast majority of states that haven't been friendly to ID creationism. And no federal court has supported the notion that ID should be taught as science, nor is there any real prospect that any will do so. This does not mean there is no threat, but that our successes vastly outnumber our failures.
But these successes are far from enough. We have a much bigger job in building up education than in destroying creationism. To my mind, the biggest problem is in states like Wisconsin, where there is no substantial threat of ID at the state level (although some local districts remain vulnerable). Even so, evolution teaching is just a lot weaker than it could be -- the state got a "D" in that 2000 report on science standards. Some of this weakness is political compromise; a lot of it is apathy. This problem is related to ID, indeed it is what allows ID to spread and flourish. But it cannot be solved in court cases, it can only be changed by changing the public.
The truth is, Bush cannot control science education in America. He can, however, exert a strong influence to the extent he can persuade people to his point of view. This is an easy task, since a large majority of Americans think his opinion is quite reasonable.
Scientists cannot defeat this common sense with extremism. It does not help to call Bush a lunatic: if most people were prepared to agree, they wouldn't have elected him. This kind of invective can only persuade people of the political bias of scientists, not the correct interpretation of science. Political parties may use or abuse science, but that doesn't mean that science is partisan. Science is, and must be, an impartial search for explanations of nature. Even the best science has always been used to give a superficial veneer to socially respectable, but ultimately non-scientific positions -- from race in the nineteenth century to eugenics in the twentieth. It cannot be avoided.
Those who think that ordinary scientists have no duty to speak out are entitled to this opinion. Indeed, no citizen has an obligation to oppose what is wrong.
But scientists who choose to speak out succeed when they rise above, not when they sink below. Einstein influenced nuclear policy by using his reputation wisely. Leading up to the war, he succeeded; after it, he failed. But is there any chance that calling Truman and Eisenhower lunatics would have helped his cause? Sure, many well-thinking physicists might have cheered. But that's not success.
We don't have an Einstein to help us today. We don't even have a Stephen Jay Gould anymore. We can't afford to turn more people off. We should make evolution inspiring to others, as it inspires us.
Science and religion symposium
Here's an online symposium on science and religion at the Cosmic Log site sponsored by MSNBC. The thing consists of a series of excerpted letters from readers discussing creationism and evolution. It is at a very superficial level, but contains lots of links to sites with more information.
Some of those links follow:
- Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science, online for free from National Academies Press
- Talk.Origins
- Talk Design
- National Center for Science Education
- Darwin's The Origin of Species online for free
An insider's view of the Kansas hearings
In an article on AlterNet, plant breeder Stan Cox gives an eyewitness account of the Kansas Board of Education hearings on the proposed statewide science standards (hat tip: Panda's Thumb).
His questions and answers from the board members are the most informative part:
But it will be teachers and administrators, not university professors, who determine what actually happens in Kansas public schools under the new standards -- and the pro-ID members of the state Board of Education do not appear to be so circumspect when it comes to religion. During an intermission, I asked board member Kathy Martin whether, as Menuge suggested, a teacher should cut off discussion of the designer's identity.
"Oh, no," she said. "If a student wants to have that conversation, there's nothing wrong with the teacher discussing that. It's all about the students' needs, and as you know, they have a lot of needs these days. I was a teacher myself. If, say, a student's puppy has been run over by a car, the student and I might pray about it together, privately. It's not about religion -- it's about helping the student."
Connie Morris, another pro-ID school board member, told me, "No, we can't mandate intelligent design or creationism in the school standards. But as the fellow from Ohio said, we have to let students go where the evidence leads. I'll give you an example. Did you know there is evidence now that prayer is beneficial in treating cancer?" I asked if teachers should be able to teach about that. Morris, her eyes brightening, said, "Absolutely!"
Can evolution exist in the classroom in a way that is not antagonistic to faith? Certainly it can, as evidenced by letter signed by thousands of clergy members. But not every kind of faith is compatible with Earth's history as uncovered by science:
Irigonegaray's second and third questions went to the core of what ID proponents call "the controversy." He asked each witness if she or he agreed that life as we see it today is the result of "common descent" (that is, that species evolve from other species through purely natural causes) and that humans are descended from pre-hominid ancestors. Eleven of 13 witnesses rejected both statements, with varying degrees of force.
It is really a small subset of religious beliefs that conflict with scientific knowledge of the Earth. If you believe that our planet originated within the past 10,000 years, then there is no adequate presentation of evolution that will be consistent with that belief. If you believe that humans were ther result of a special creation, and bear no relationship to other animals, then evolution cannot satisfy your belief. As long as our schools educate children who have been raised under these beliefs, there will be a conflict in the classroom.
The strategy of ID proponents and other supporters of creationism is to maximize the contradiction; to show that evolution is atheistic and therefore necessarily antagonistic to religion. The best strategy for evolutionists is clearly to continue to emphasize the lack of contradiction with most religions, while maximizing the value of understanding the scientific principles underlying the study of the Earth's history.
The last post on the Niobrara formation has me thinking: wouldn't it be great if a lesson plan for Kansas high schools covered the geological history of several of the state's regions? The Niobrara itself covers a lot of oil, which has a great economic importance for the state, especially with today's rising oil prices. That oil got there because of the deposit of a lot of ancient organisms; ditto for the coal fields of southeastern Kansas. Most of Kansas bears the marks of ancient seas, from the salt deposits outside Hutchinson to the Cambrian limestones under the Flint Hills. Much later, people came and lived on the land, first using the flint from those limestones and trading them around the Midwest; later finding the other resources. So human history and paleontological history meet and intersect in the lives of today's Kansans. But what proportion of Kansas high school students can tell you about this history?
Recent posts on the hearings:
Has anybody read the proposed Kansas science standards?
Intelligent design "a sterile philosophy"
Back to the drawing board?
"The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design
A picture of creationism in geology today
Religion writer Hanna Rosin has an article in the New York Times Magazine on the creationist "avant-garde": trained geologists arguing that Noah's flood can explain the fossil record.
The point of departure is the Creation Museum:
The museum expected about 250,000 visitors in the first year. Instead, despite its $20 entry fee, it has had that many in six months, according to Michael Matthews, the museum's content manager. Almost every day, minivans and buses from Christian schools fill the parking lot, sometimes after 10-hour road trips.
Rosin attended a meeting of geologists committed to establishing creationist doctrine as a scientific inquiry. She does not explain the obvious barrier to doing so: creationist doctrine disregards all evidence that rejects its assumptions; such a practice cannot be reconciled with the scientific method. Still, they meet and try to hash out working hypotheses for the flood and post-Noahic biogeography. You can see the agenda for the "First Conference on Creationist Geology" here. The meeting attended by Rosin included some of the Creation Museum's geological consultants, who promote Young Earth Creationism as a necessary tenet of Christian belief.
The article describes the increasing successes of Young Earth Creationists -- they are dominating the Christian publishing industry and increasingly training students at Christian colleges to be "make their creationist logic more consistent" -- as long as "consistency" means the earth is less than 10,000 years old. I thought the quoted reaction by Stephen Moshier, a geologist at Wheaton College who qualifies as an "old-earther" according to the article, is profound:
These numbers [about the effectiveness of Young Earth Creationists in changing students' ideas] make Moshier cringe. "It can get so frustrating," he said. "Many of us at Christian colleges really grieve at what a problem this young-earth creationism makes for the Christian witness. It's almost like they're adding another thing you have to believe to become a Christian. It's like saying, You have to believe the world is flat to be a Christian, and that's absolutely unreasonable."
But probably the most illustrative section is the anectodal portion where Rosin describes her perception of these creationists' attitudes:
Like any group of elites, they were snobs about their superior degrees. During lunch breaks or car rides, they traded jokes about the "vulgar creationists" and the "uneducated masses," and, in their least Christian moments, the "idiots on the Web." One leader of a creationist institute complained about all the cranks who call on the phone claiming to have seen dinosaurs or to have had a vision of Noah's ark. (How Noah fit the entire animal kingdom onto the ark is a perennial obsession.)
Yet, the conference program on the Answers in Genesis site lists a presentation on "The housing and care of the cargo on Noah's Ark".
I wonder how they got the weta just to New Zealand and nowhere else. And amazing how none of those mimic butterflies got confused for each other...
Answers in the New York Times
So I was reading yesterday's total softball exhibition review in the New York Times, on the new Ken Ham-built Creation Museum:
For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.
I mean, really softball:
The Creation Museum offers an alternate world that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.
You see, all freshness and light. But aside from being fantastically wrong, the thing sounds very creepy. I mean, it's like a Simpsons parody of itself:
Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled "Millions of Years," that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.
Clearly, the teenager is teenage Milhouse!
Well, the article is fairly clever, but not in the least bit critical of all this nonsense. Wondering who wrote it, I looked -- Edward Rothstein, the arts and culture reporter.
So I got to thinking, hmmm.... Why did the Times send their culture reporter to cover this museum in such a friendly way, when they assigned science reporter John Noble Wilford to cover this year's opening of the new Human Origins Hall at the American Museum of Natural History? I mean, they're on the same subject, right? Shouldn't they get the same reviewer?
Huh. So I got a little interested in what else Rothstein had written lately. I mean, didn't his trip on the Grand Canyon skywalk give him some insight into the Creation Museum's claim that it formed in 40 days and 40 nights?
And then I saw Rothstein's article from today's paper -- reviewing another new exhibit at the AMNH:
They lure children into dank swamps and devour them. They live in caves or among high rocks or deep in dense forests. They are covered with scales or thick fur. They have hands at the ends of their tails or a single glaring eye. They exhale fire, cause hurricanes with their wings or feast on human eyes, teeth and nails. They might also whimsically help the unwitting, but they are almost all mercurial, unreliable, tricksters.
Such are the mythic creatures of our earth.
The AMNH unicorn. Don't tell Henry Gee!
Ah-ha! This is all becoming clear now. The Times wasn't really softballing the Answers in Genesis museum. It's just that Rothstein covers the unicorn and dragon beat!
How else to explain the uncanny similarities between these articles? For example, here is a passage from the Creation Museum review:
It is a measure of the museum's daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible's creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah's flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.
And here is a passage from today's "Mythic Creatures" review:
But these mythic creatures are actually transformations of real creatures glimpsed but barely understood. A sea serpent might be simulated by enormous schools of large fish leaping in the waves, the rise and fall of their bodies seeming to be knit into an enormous undulating being; turn a wheel at the exhibition, and miniature dolphins leap in the waves in a display case, appearing to form a single organism.
The kraken might have evolved from sightings of enormous squids, one of which was recently found in New Zealand, with single arms over 19 feet long. Nature sometimes trumps the human imagination.
OK, I admit it's confusing. One museum teaches mythology as science, another teaches mythology transformed by science. Read both reviews and see which is more interesting.
But what does the merit badge look like?
Man, camp has gotten a lot more boring since I was a kid:
At the summer camp at Timber-lee Christian Center in East Troy, Wis., for example, campers can go on a seven-room "Creation Walk," where each room showcases one of the Bible's seven days of Creation. Says Karen Good, outdoor education director at Timber-lee, "The curriculum is designed to open their eyes so when they go back to school [and hear about evolution] they say, 'Oh, that sounds goofy!' "
Other camps are fighting back by offering summer programs teaching evolution. In late June, the Unitarian Universalist Church in Fresno, Calif., sponsored the fourth season of Chalice Camp, a science camp that uses song, dance and drama to teach children about scientific discoveries about human origins.
Well, maybe it's better than it sounds. Hey, maybe I should start offering song, dance and drama here! Woo-hoo!
Janet Monge, Darwinista
The AP is running an article about Darwin Day this Sunday, and Gretchen spotted it on MSNBC accompanied by a photo of Janet Monge!
Very cool! Here's some of the article:
PHILADELPHIA - Thanks to the "intelligent design" movement, Charles Darwin's birthday is evolving into everything from a badminton party to church sermons this weekend.
Defenders of Darwin's theory of natural selection are planning hundreds of events around the world Sunday, the 197th anniversary of his birth, saying recent challenges to the teaching of evolution have re-emphasized the need to promote his work.
"The people who believe in evolution ... really just sort of need to stand up and be counted," said Richard Leventhal, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. "Evolution is the model that drives science. It's time to recognize that."
No corporate support for Darwin exhibit
Now this (Sydney Morning Herald) is just sad:
An exhibition celebrating the life of Charles Darwin, which is slated for the National Museum of Australia later this decade, has failed to find a corporate sponsor in the United States because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution.
The entire $US3 million ($1.7 million) cost of Darwin, which opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York at the weekend, is instead being borne by wealthy individuals and private donations.
Seems like a simple calculation, though: who will notice a company and remember their philanthropy -- the grateful museum-goers or a phalanx of anti-evolutionists?
Well, it's still sad:
The museum will have to depend more heavily upon the profits of its Darwin-related merchandise to finance the cost of staging the exhibition, including a 30-centimetre Darwin doll, Darwin finger puppets and, for $950, a replica of Darwin's ship, the Beagle, made in China and assembled in Vietnam.
Our educational legacy safeguarded by Darwin finger-puppets. Well, I guess they're a more going business than William Paley finger-puppets....
Darwinian policy briefs?
Patricia Cohen's piece in the New York Times today is headlined, "A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin." It's interesting:
Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin's scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today's patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.
"I do indeed believe conservatives need Charles Darwin," said Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, who has spearheaded the cause. "The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the 21st century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought."
The point of departure is a conference last week at the American Enterprise Institute, put into context with the disdain that many conservative commentators (George Will and Charles Krauthammer are mentioned) have shown for the creationism-in-schools movement.
The article stretches its standard "To be sure..." paragraph into three, and they're full of fun historical references:
It is true that political interpretations of Darwinism have turned out to be quite pliable. Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy. Francis Galton based his "science" of eugenics on it. Arguing that cooperation was actually what enabled the species to survive, Pyotr Kropotkin used it to justify anarchism.
Karl Marx wrote that "Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history." Woodrow Wilson declared, "Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice."
More recently the bioethicist and animal rights activist Peter Singer's "Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation" (1999) urged people to reject the notion that there is a "fundamental difference in kind between human beings and nonhuman animals."
Well, "so there", I guess. Colonialism, eugenics, anarchism, Marxism, oooooohh! Protect us from the shades of the past! Save us, Woodrow Wilson!
I will only say that it is hard to take a position appealing to "human nature" if nobody can agree on what "human nature" is. Ignoring Darwin is clearly the wrong move. But the "Darwinian human nature" position has many scientific interlocutors, and they all seem to have trouble agreeing with each other. It's going to be a shaky foundation for moral absolutism. That's why evolutionary psychology (and sociobiology before it) has so many opponents in the academy. It's also why pragmatic conservatives may have a Darwinian perspective on human origins, but moral absolutists never will.
Let's de-emphasize Einstein instead
I got e-mailed this terrible article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It covers some of the discussion from the AAAS meetings last week, where one of the themes was "de-emphasizing Darwin". Some of you may have been e-mailed this too. I think the most appropriate response is parody:
De-emphasizing Einstein Might Advance the Argument for Relativity, Physicist Says at Scientists' Meeting
In his controversial book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins insisted that scientists should work to dispel the idea that God exists. Without religion, Mr. Dawkins has said, the conflict between quantum physicists' beliefs about chance and the cryptoreligious belief that "God does not play dice" would vanish. Now an astrophysicist has proposed a different tack. In a meeting last weekend in San Francisco, he suggested scientists might win the argument by ditching Einstein.
"Astrophysics is a branch of natural science that is far beyond anything Einstein could have imagined," said the cosmologist, Rebus Antikythera, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday.
Mr. Antikythera, a professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Dornhelm in Germany, said scientists should emphasize that astrophysics is a fully formed field of biological study "built up by generations of non-dogmatic scientists." Terms like general relativity can make astrophysics seem like an ideology, rather than a focus of empirical work, he said.
Few think that Einstein himself is such a divisive figure. But at a session on growing anti-relativistic sentiment in Europe, scholars from both sides of the Atlantic agreed that scientists should change the way they present their views.
Pressure from religious groups to teach alternatives to general relativity, such as Ptolemaic epicycles, in science classes once seemed mostly an American problem, but that is no longer true.
In September a Ptolemism group called Truth in Motion mailed teaching packets that promote geocentric physics as an alternative to general relativity to every secondary school in Britain. In October, Dean Wormer, a member of the European Parliament from Poland who has a Ph.D. in planetary science, organized a workshop for other members of parliament called "Teaching Newtonian Theory in Europe: Is Your Child Being Indoctrinated in the Classroom?"
And a book called Physics - A Critical Textbook, which describes a version of geocentrism, has been published in Germany and has been translated into 10 European languages, Mr. Antikythera said.
The book presents the view that a creator made basic spheres of the universe: sublunary and superlunary, for example, and then harmonic vibrations from the crystal spheres caused slight scintillations in the position of fixed stars, causing the phenomenon of "parallax".
The belief in human uniqueness lies at the heart of the problem, said Don J. Fuller, a professor of integrative studies at Minnesota State University, in a separate briefing on scientific literacy. "As you begin to really unravel the mysteries of this world, the true understanding of the structure and nature of life will be a challenge. These issues come closer to people."
Antonia Rockelyn, an associate professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Boston, agreed. "It is the dethronement of humans that is so scary," she said.
Ms. Rockelyn thinks that part of the solution is to bring God back into the classroom, just not in science classes. "Scientific literacy is very important, but we also need to raise religious literacy," she said. A broader understanding of religion, its historical background, and its role in cultures might lead to more reasoned views, she said. "The only religious education that most American children get is in their Sunday school, where some teachers presuppose a conflict that is not really there, that doesn't need to be there."
Including a scholarly approach to religion in public education might help in the United States particularly, said Stanislaw Brzezinski, a sociologist and philosopher of science, technology, and religion at Exeter University, in England. Where religion is woven into the fabric of society, he said, "there's less resentment, a sense of banging on the door to be let in."
So in March 2009, should we celebrate the 130th anniversary of Einstein's birth? That was the question posed by Adam Bluth, a neuroscientist and development manager for the Wellcome Trust, an independent charity in London that finances biomedical research. He is contemplating such a celebration for the trust. Mr. Fuller, of Minnesota State, replied that he doesn't think Einstein's birthday party should be canceled. "I think we should treat Einstein as the person who got the general relativity idea right."
Biochemistry and intelligent design
Thanks to a student, I have a link to an opinion in the online edition of the Valley Morning Star from Harlingen, Texas. The column is a long declaration of the ridiculousness of evolution, since life was obviously far too complex to have arisen by chance. The student sent it along because of the surprising claim at the bottom that all fossil hominid remains had been males:
As a side note, isnÕt it incredible that of all the discovered human skeletons--Neanderthal man, Piltdown man, Orce man and Java man--none of them were women?
For the record, "Java Man" is a sample of skeletal remains from many individuals, around half female. The same is true of "Peking Man." These and others are subject to an unfortunate penchant of pre-1985 English speakers to call the entire human species, "men." As in, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." "Piltdown Man" was about half man (the other half was all orangutan), while "Orce Man" appears to be all horse. But this part of the column wasn't intended seriously anyway (I hope).
The part that concerns me is the long argument about the complexity of human biochemical systems. This is the standard argument from design, dating to William Paley and discussed well by Stephen Jay Gould in his Structure of Evolutionary Theory. The current "Intelligent Design" movement is based on the same argument, applied largely to biochemistry (a subject upon which Paley had little to say). This column uses one of the standard Intelligent Design examples, the mechanism of blood clotting in humans and other vertebrates.
A list of Intelligent Design arguments is treated in depth by the good people who maintain TalkDesign. Normally I wouldn't try to duplicate this effort.
But I think that has become the problem with many of us in the evolution community. Not wanting to take the effort to become expert enough in these issues to address them publicly, and not doing our part as educators to ensure that people do not hear this kind of ignorance without having access to the facts. We cannot make everyone take the time to learn how evolution works, or the full value of its accounts of life. But we can at least spread the facts as widely as we are able, and have answers ready for those who take the effort to question. This is especially easy nowadays, when pretty good answers are available to anybody with the wherewithal to google them.
So I inaugurate my list of links to answers to Intelligent Design arguments. I will add more as I run across them. The first entry is an evolutionary account of the origin of clotting systems in vertebrates. These are discussed in some detail by Kenneth R. Miller in his book, Finding Darwin's God. He has provided an account online of the vertebrate system and its possible origins. This includes references into the primary research on clotting factors and the gene duplications involved in their evolution.
More on Intelligent Design
An excellent discussion of the legal issues involved in current attempts to put intelligent design in public school curricula is an article by Michael C. Dorf on FindLaw. In particular, he focuses on the legal argument around legislative intent that featured in Edwards v. Aguilard, and why that may or may not make a difference in challenges based on intelligent design.
Dorf also includes a thumbnail description of why ID is not science. Good reading.
Evolution trial experts speak out
Nature is carrying an interview with Kenneth Miller and Kevin Padian about their recent experience as expert witnesses in the Dover trial:
Why did you feel it was important to testify?
Padian: It's an opportunity when it really counts. One person can't be everywhere around the country talking to every school board and every parent group. But this is a case where, ultimately, these decisions are going to clarify things in a formal setting.
Miller: It is the right thing to do. The battle in Dover is just one example of local battles for scientific education all over the country. If people in the scientific community turn their backs on people in the front lines, then ultimately the cause of science in public education is doomed.
On the trial:
Padian: I didn't feel nervous. The judge was great. He is very smart, he is very attentive and he is running a tight ship, but it's not stiff. The defence lawyers are good people, and our counsel is just fabulous. The testimony took most of the day, and I was glad to relax after a process that had taken months of preparation.
On communicating science to the public:
Padian: If you want to explain something to people, it has to be put in terms of the issues that they find important. Politicians, judges and the media are not impressed by someone thundering in and claiming that they have all the right answers.
The Panda's Thumb is giving full coverage to the Dover trial with links to stories and a full timeline.
Dover ID trial comes to judgment
Check out the judge's opinion if you are interested. Ann Althouse cites from the text, including this portion:
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
Of course people may support many kinds of public initiatives for religious reasons, and there's nothing wrong with that. But in the case of Intelligent Design, there is no possible justification that is non-religious, except for unalloyed ignorance. Not even lies -- and the Dover trial revealed plenty -- can hide the fact that ID is a religious viewpoint and not science.
I'm keeping Althouse's emphases in the next passage:
With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
The Panda's Thumb, naturally, has much more.
Scientists and religion, part 1
American Scientist has an article by Gregory Graffin and William Provine on scientists' self-described religious beliefs. They conducted a poll of "prominent" evolutionary biologists and found that the vast majority (79 percent) describe themselves as "naturalists". That's in line with previous surveys.
They suggest that a second finding of their poll is more interesting: that a similar majority (72 percent) view religion as an adaptive product of human evolution. Only 3 percent voice the Stephen Jay Gould position, that religion and science are "non-overlapping magisteria" (although, despite Gould's incessant repetition of the phrase, it is quite possible that the usual response to this idea is, "magic-what? You mean, like cafeteria?).
After some discussion of Darwin's changing public attitude toward religious explanations, they claim an analogy:
Eminent evolutionists are now caught in a bind that reminds us of Darwin in 1859. They worry that the public association of evolution with atheism or at least nonreligion will hurt evolutionary biology, perhaps impeding its funding or acceptance. Asa Gray's gloss and that of the evolutionists in this poll, however, differ fundamentally. Gray offered a theological synthesis with natural selection that Darwin carefully used for a few years before extracting himself from it. Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths. A recent informal poll of our religious acquaintances suggests that they are not pleased by the thought that their religions originated in sociobiology.
Well, that does seem like a problem for the "non-overlapping magisteria" idea...
The rest of the article discussed the fact that some 90 percent of the evolutionary biologists believe that humans have free will, even though Provine doesn't. At least, that's the way it seems:
In other words, although eminent, our respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes. Evolutionary biology is increasingly applied to psychology. Belief in free will adds nothing to the science of human behavior.
I think if a pool is worded in such an abtruse way that 90 percent of scientists answer in the opposite way from the pollers' expectation, then "eminence" probably doesn't have anything to do with it. Probably there is something more to this "free will" idea than one might expect. I mean, these days, even fruit flies are supposed to have it.
(via Sandwalk)
Evolution in less than 10 words
Razib has a challenge: "If you had 10 words or less, what would you have the public master about evolutionary theory?"
Here's a short credo that I give to my students:
No evolution means equal offspring for everyone!It's not exactly true, of course, since a population with no variance in reproduction can still evolve, drift will still fix alleles. Heck, even if they were clones, there would still be mutations! But it does get you started thinking about how hard it would be to have a population that doesn't evolve.
And that means that evolution is ubiquitous.
UPDATE (6-16-2006): A reader clearly wishing he was in Zagreb e-mails:
Try these 10:
Evolution means change; take it or leave it (nature does!)
An "emerging" problem
Notably not good:
The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word "evolution" is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to "emerge," "arise," or "spread" rather than "evolve." Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word "evolution" by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives.
This is the first paragraph of a study by Janis Antonovics and colleagues, who surveyed the use of "evolution" and other related descriptors (like "adaptation" and "selection") in biomedical papers related to microbial resistance. The evolution of drug resistance in microbes is one of the most important examples of evolution as applied to human lives -- aside from domestication, pathogens probably have the largest economic, medical, and practical impact of any evolving biological system. For this reason, one might expect that the importance of the unifying theory of biology should be rightly emphasized.
Here's why it is important:
A critical question is whether avoidance of the word "evolution" has had an impact on the public perception of science. To investigate this, we examined whether the use of the term "evolution" in the scientific literature affects the use of this word in the popular press, i.e., whether there is evidence for "cultural inheritance" of word use. We searched articles on antimicrobial resistance in national media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and the BBC (Text S1). Our results showed that the proportion of times the word "evolution" was used in a popular article was highly correlated with how often it was used in the original scientific paper to which the popular article referred (Figure 2). This clearly shows that the public is more likely to be exposed to the idea of evolution and its real-world consequences if the word "evolution" is also being used in the technical literature.
In other words, if you use the word "evolution" in your article, the press will use the word "evolution" when they describe it.
The main concern raised in the article is that biomedical research doesn't tend to use the term "evolution" when studying the evolution of microbial resistance. That's an important concern to raise, which I think is readily explained by the fact that a small minority of biomedical researchers actually have any non-microbial experience in evolutionary biology.
This problem was also raised by Randy Nesse, Stephen Stearns and Gilbert Omenn in an editorial in Science last year:
Although anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and embryology are recognized as basic sciences for medicine, evolutionary biology is not. Future clinicians are generally not taught evolutionary explanations for why our bodies are vulnerable to certain kinds of failure. The narrowness of the birth canal, the existence of wisdom teeth, and the persistence of genes that cause bipolar disease and senescence all have their origins in our evolutionary history. In a whole array of clinical and basic science challenges, evolutionary biology is turning out to be crucial. For example, the evolution of antibiotic resistance is widely recognized, but few appreciate how competition among bacteria has shaped chemical weapons and resistance factors in an arms race that has been going on for hundreds of millions of years. The incorrect idea that selection reliably shapes a happy coexistence of hosts and pathogens persists, despite evidence for the evolution of increased virulence when disease transmission occurs through vectors such as insects, needles, or clinicians' hands. There is growing recognition that cough, fever, and diarrhea are useful responses shaped by natural selection, but knowing when is it safe to block them will require studies grounded in an understanding of how selection shaped the systems that regulate such defenses and the compromises that had to be struck (Nesse et al. 2006:1071).
I think these little warnings are valuable, but I have a more positive outlook. For one thing, I know how many doctors and clinicians are reading this site regularly, finding out about new evolutionary insights on human history and health. Also, I see a much greater awareness in my courses of aspects of human variability that relate to diet and health, like lactase persistence variation.
Antonovics and colleagues' data also presents a hopeful trend: the proportion and research reports and grants that mention "evolution" has been increasing for the last dozen years. Part of this trend may be a growing ability to assess evolution with molecular markers, and the sheer proliferation of resistant microbes as a medical problem. The proliferation of resistant microbes is best combated with methods that recognize their evolution.
References:
Antonovics J, Abbate JL, Baker CH, Daley D, Hood ME, et al. 2007. Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word. PLoS Biol 5(2): e30. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050030
Nesse RM, Stearns SC, Omenn GS. 2006. Medicine needs evolution. Science 311:1071. doi:10.1126/science.1125956
If you absolutely cannot ignore "Expelled"...
...please reconsider, because it is an absolute waste of your time. Spend the time watching Nova's Judgment Day" documentary instead, which actually conveys both evolution and Intelligent Design creationism in a more intelligible way.
But if you absolutely, absolutely cannot ignore it -- for example, because you have students asking you what you think about it -- then you could do worse than Arthur Caplan's review of the movie. Caplan takes the focus off the distraction of the movie's premise, and back on to the movie's shortfalls in accurately describing Intelligent Design creationism, the historical context of the Holocaust, and the role of evolutionary theory in explaining life's diversification as opposed to its origin:
What is it that devotees of intelligent design believe that gets their colleagues in such a rage? Do they just want to invoke god as the starting point of the universe? Do they see god's hand in the design of every creature? Are they asking us to see the gods of every faith and tradition -- those posited in Catholicism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Rastafarianism, etc. -- in our DNA? Do they believe that competitive accounts of creation based on the Bible need to be in every American classroom? Do they see empirical proof of god in every molecule, plant, animal, rock, vegetable and fungus? "Expelled" never really tells us.
One suspects that sympathy for those portrayed in the movie as hapless pariahs might be reduced if the movie spent more time describing what it is this tiny handful of Ben Stein-proclaimed martyrs actually believe.
This paragraph seems to have the filmmaking style down to a T:
The movie's faux tale of an evolutionist led Inquisition is followed by Stein interviewing a short parade of self-avowed atheists who also are fervent Darwinians as they mock intelligent design in particular and religion in general. They also look frumpy. As an antidote we get deep, sincere ruminations mainly from some monumentally pompous thinker no one has ever heard of who is nevertheless stylishly attired and living in a gorgeous apartment in Paris. He assures what is hopefully an increasingly irritated audience that god and science can live together in peace. They can but for no reasons ever articulated by this fellow or in this film.
Maybe they're just saving the real explanations for "Expelled 2! The Wrath of Dawkins" or something?
"A greater fear of boredom than of poverty"
The New York Times has a profile of "Flock of Dodos" filmmaker Randy Olson:
The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design's embrace of a supernatural "agent" puts it outside the realm of science.
But when he watches the advocates of intelligent design at work, he sees pleasant people who speak plainly, convincingly and with humor. When scientists he knows talk about evolution, they can be dour, pompous and disagreeable, even with one another. His film challenges them to get off their collective high horse and make their case to ordinary people with -- if they can muster it -- a smile.
Otherwise, he suggests, they will end up in the collective cultural backwash just like the dodo.
The story about the colleague who said "um" every seven seconds and only talked to his slides instead of the audience will be familiar to anyone who's attended a scientific meeting. Or, for that matter, college.
The film has gotten a lot of press for its illustration of scientists who can't articulate their work or beliefs to the public.
Though many in science bemoan their collective inability to get their messages across to the public, big grant-makers have yet to embrace Dr. Olson's approach.
"I get hundreds of inquiries from students and graduate students wanting to do what I am doing, to get into this interface between science and the media," Dr. Olson said. "There just isn't any financial support for it. The science world does not understand media, does not support it. They don't see the need for innovation."
Dr. Jackson said some scientists, even those interested in communicating science, "squirm" at Dr. Olson's irreverent approach. Others wonder whether his wry humor will translate to a wider audience.
I hope it does great business -- it really seems like a worthwhile message. If you don't like the way science is marketed, then market it yourself!
Looking back on the Scopes trial
In his current Newsweek column, George Will writes a short retrospective on the Scopes evolution trial, which happened 80 years ago. The piece contains nothing that new for people who are Scopes trial junkies, but it is a good illustration of the time that has passed since then, with reference to the current intelligent design controversy:
Today's proponents of "intelligent design" theory are doing nothing novel when they say the complexity of nature is more plausibly explained by postulating a designing mind -- a.k.a. God -- than by natural adaptation and selection. By 1925, Larson's book notes, ''Christian apologists had long regarded the intricate design of the eye as a 'cure for atheism'."
The problem with intelligent-design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet -- a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.
Will notes not only the problems with the creationists of today, but also with the evolutionists of the past, making particular reference to eugenics and William Jennings Bryan's revulsion for social Darwinism. And it has a priceless ending:
The argument about science, religion, the rights of communities' majorities and academic freedom rolled on, but not everywhere. When an anti-evolution bill was introduced in the Rhode Island Legislature, it was referred to the Committee on Fish and Game.
Background to global creationism
The Economist had a recent story about the global reach of creationism. I found the first few paragraphs to be the most informative. First, the article describes the efforts of Adnan Oktar, a Turkish "preacher" who disseminates creationist literature in many countries under the name Harun Yahya.
In his native Turkey there are many people, including devout Muslims, who feel uncomfortable about the 51-year-old Mr Oktar's strong appeal to young women and his political sympathies for the nationalist right. But across the Muslim world he seems to be riding high. Many of the most popular Islamic websites refer readers to his vast canon.
The spread of counterscientific information of various kinds through the Muslim world is a story that receives too little attention, and this story gives some needed attention to a small aspect of this campaign.
The story also includes a brief mention of recent protests by evangelical Bishop Boniface Adoyo at the National Museums of Kenya, and the efforts by Richard Leakey to resist his demands.
The insight to draw away is that there are many different political motivations for rejecting science, and these have united a surprising group of people. Later in the article, we are shown the Discovery Institute's tendrils bringing these disparate groups together:
In February several luminaries of the anti-evolution movement in the United States went to Istanbul for a grand conference where Darwin's ideas were roundly denounced. The organiser of the gathering was a Turkish Muslim author and columnist, Mustafa Akyol, who forged strong American connections during a fellowship at the Discovery Institute.
To the dismay of some Americans and the delight of others, Mr Akyol was invited to give evidence (against Darwin's ideas) at hearings held by the Kansas school board in 2005 on how science should be taught. Mr Akyol, an advocate of reconciliation between Muslims and the West who is much in demand at conferences on the future of Islam, is careful to distinguish his position from that of the extravagant publishing venture in his home city. "They make some valid criticisms of Darwinism, but I disagree with most of their other views," insists the young author, whose other favourite cause is the compatibility between Islam and Western liberal ideals, including human rights and capitalism. But a multi-layered anti-Darwin movement has certainly brought about a climate in Turkey and other Muslim countries that makes sure challenges to evolution theory, be they sophisticated or crude, are often well received.
From Istanbul to Kansas. Yes, the conservatives on the Kansas Board of Education consulted with Turkish creationists on how to teach biology to Kansas kids. Talkorigins.org has the transcript, which is good background for the current article:
AKYOL: And I could say in recent years, I can claim to be an expert on Islamic radicalism. That's what I write especially in the United States in the media, in Turkey. We know that view that we have is a problem, Islamic radicalism. Why is there hatred of America and the west in general in the Islamic world? And it's because of many reasons, sociological reasons it has about Muslim failure of Muslim world in the 20th Century.
But one reason of the widespread resentment is that Muslims think the west and, of course, the United States is completely a materialistic civilization. They think that when they watch western films, when they read western media, and when the kids take western education, they think that they will be poisoned by an ideology, materialism. That's why they just don't like it. They just want to get away from it. And at the very extreme, it creates what we have, anti-American sentiment among those populations. And I remember that, for example.
...
But it also has a philosophical side, and that philosophy, as we all know, is also called naturalism, the idea that nature is all there is. And when that idea, when that philosophy, which has no scientific justification at all, becomes the dominant force in science education in the United States, what you have is that you will have alienated people. You will-- for example, Muslims. They will feel alienated. They will think that there's a school system which imposes on them, on their kids, a philosophy which they don't believe, and which they find to be poisonous, and which doesn't have any scientific evidence at all. That's the important point.
Now, is the alienation due to science? Is it spread by MTV and Hollywood (that is Akyol's point in the ellipsis)? Or is it generated by the deniers of science, these people spreading counterinformation that says that science alienates, equating it with immorality, meaninglessness, and attacks on religious belief?
I think the article misfires a bit by bringing in the recent discussions of evolution and intelligent design by Pope Benedict XVI. Not that it isn't relevant, just that the complexities (and the Pope's prominent defense of rationalism) make it harder to link this with the spread of global creationism.
While avoiding the cruder arguments that have been used to challenge Darwin's theories, the pope asserts that evolution cannot be conclusively proved; and that the manner in which life developed was indicative of a "divine reason" which could not be discerned by scientific methods alone.
Both in his previous role as the chief enforcer of Catholic doctrine and since his enthronement, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has made clear his profound belief that man has a unique, God-given role in the animal kingdom; and that a divine creator has an ongoing role in sustaining the universe, something far more than just "lighting the blue touch paper" for the Big Bang, the event that scientists think set the universe in motion.
Reading that, I didn't think that really captured the substance of the Pope's position. After all, Catholic doctrine posits the existence of supernatural entities in the world, such as souls, that evolution cannot explain. Likewise, it posits a role for human uniqueness and purpose beyond that compatible with undirected evolutionary processes. So what else is the Pope supposed to say?
I guess the Pope probably gave the story its hook, since he happens to have published a book a couple of weeks ago discussing evolution and creation. The book's in German, and should be translated into other languages eventually. In the meantime, it got a lot of press when it came out a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't take notes on any of the stories at the time, so I went looking through Google News looking for a decent review.
You can certainly tell that something is confusing (or politically loaded) when the first two headlines are like this:
Pope Benedict XVI Backs Darwin's Insights
Pope Benedict Casts Doubt on Darwin
I suppose the third headline is the most neutral:
Pope stokes debate on Darwin and evolution
Anyway, this issue will be worth revisiting when a good English translation of the full book becomes available.
Hawks op/ed in Wisconsin State Journal
Thanks to all those who wrote after yesterday's opinion column ran. I really want to thank the WSJ editorial staff, and opinion editor Scott Milfred in particular, for giving it such a quick treatment and prominent placement --- right at the top-center of the Sunday Forum opinion page. I certainly couldn't have asked for any better, and I'm grateful for it.
I don't know how long those archives will stay available, so I'm posting the column in full below:
Science Picks Sides In Evolution Debate
Sunday, August 7, 2005
John Hawks
Last week, President Bush said this about presenting "intelligent design" alongside evolution in science classrooms: "That decision ought to be made by local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught."
National organizations of scientists immediately condemned his view. The American Geophysical Union released a statement saying Bush's position "puts America's schoolchildren at risk."
Most Americans do not share this outrage. According to a 2004 CBS News poll, 65 percent of Americans favor teaching both creationism and evolution in schools, including 56 percent of Kerry voters. To most people, teaching both sides of a controversial issue seems like the fair solution. As Bush said, "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."
I learned evolution as a boy in Kansas in public school. Now, its state school board proposes teaching intelligent design - the idea that a natural system incapable of explanation by evolutionary theory must prove the existence of God. I taught college-level human evolution both in Kansas and in Utah before I came to Wisconsin. A 2000 report placed Wisconsin in the bottom 18 states for its public school treatment of evolution. I've had my work cut out for me.
What I've learned is that scientists do a poor job communicating to people about fairness in science. In America, people expect to hear both sides - even when there are more than two.
Science is different: Every new idea has a chance to stand or fall based on whether it accords with nature. As a scientist my job is to attack both new and established ideas. That is how science proceeds, and nature is the impartial judge that keeps science fair. Well-accepted scientific theories do not teeter on one leg; they are supported by a long record of explaining nature well.
Evolutionary theory predicts nature incredibly well: Breeders use it to improve the production of dairy cattle, doctors use it to understand and arrest the spread of diseases, naturalists use it to protect fragile ecosystems, and medical researchers use it to develop new cures.
And I use it to understand human origins. This last aspect has been controversial, but it is incontrovertible. Our genetic similarities to other primates highlight our common ancestry. I study evolutionary changes in the brain: The same equations that predict changes in animal breeding also describe the gradual expansion of our ancestors' brains - to three times their original size. This history is part of our humanity.
Many faiths accept the evidence that evolution explains life's diversity and history. Many also believe that God started the process at the origin of the universe, and that He may have helped guide evolution to life's present form.
Science does not contradict the idea that the evolution on Earth may have been divinely inspired. Many scientists themselves believe it. Indeed, science has nothing whatsoever to say about God, His intentions, or His past actions - these are matters of faith, not of scientific proof. There is no conflict between science and faith: Each addresses its own proper sphere.
But other deeply sincere people believe that evolution robs life of meaning. Some seek evidence that evolution is wrong. The strongest possible evidence would be to find a natural system that could not possibly have arisen by evolutionary change - a "smoking gun" with the fingerprints of the Creator. Intelligent design, or ID for short, is this idea.
No such natural system explaining the existence of God has ever been found, but ID proponents keep their ideas alive by seizing any unexplained fact as evidence that evolution is about to crumble. This is not science. Scientists cannot yet predict when and where earthquakes will happen. The logic of ID would call this proof of divine tectonics.
ID explains nothing in nature. Compared to the long and successful record of evolutionary theory, ID is a fruitless quest. ID has led to no substantial discoveries, no body of knowledge, no understanding of nature. It presents no future for students who learn it, no prospect of training, no chance of understanding the mysteries that still remain.
ID proponents hope to cheat into schools what they cannot win fairly in science. They hope to persuade fair-minded people that their children should hear "both sides."
The truth is, only one side is science. The other is the vain hope that God left the lid off the cookie jar, just enough to prove He was there. Tomorrow's engineers, architects, doctors, and scientists deserve better. ID should stay out of school.
So does "Dawkins" get to put the screws to "Galileo"?
Here's a line from a Reuters story about intelligent design education in Britain:
Among the guidelines, applying to children up to the age of 14, is a suggestion that pupils act out the debate by playing the roles of Galileo, Charles Darwin and the current best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins.
It's sort of a non-story, really. The British public school curriculum honchos are suggesting that religion classes include a discussion of intelligent design and evolution. They have religion classes in public schools in Britain, unlike America.
I just don't get the Galileo, Dawkins, Darwin triad. There must be something missing here...
Has anybody read the Kansas proposed science standards?
Via the Kansas City Star (sign-up required), John Hanna of the Associated Press has reported that two Kansas Board of Education members have not actually read the proposed standards:
Board member Kathy Martin, of Clay Center, elicited groans of disbelief from a few audience members when she acknowledged she had only scanned the proposal, which is more than 100 pages. Later, board member Connie Morris, of St. Francis, also said she had only scanned it.
Martin said during a break: "I'm not a word-for-word reader in this kind of technical information."
This is really no surprise; I said in a previous post that the initiators of the hearings clearly had no sincere interest in finding out the truth about evolution. I mainly said this because anybody can find pretty good information to refute creationist claims online with five minutes of searching. The Science Standards Draft from the Kansas Department of Education is also available online for anyone to read. None of this information is hidden or obscure.
I'm sure that many of the people who elected these board members are getting exactly what they expected: advocates for an agenda, regardless of the evidence. But some of the people who elected these board members did so with the expectation that they would read the material before them and make informed judgments. I hope those people are paying attention now.
So far, attorney Pedro Irigonegaray appears to be doing a good job standing up to the Discovery Institute and the other creationism advocates. He hammered at the point that no one has actually read the science standards they are criticizing. This from a Knight-Ridder article by Josh Funk, also via the Kansas City Star:
None of the eight intelligent design proponents who testified at the Kansas State Board of Education's evolution hearings Friday have read the science standards they want changed.
Under cross-examination, all eight admitted they simply read the 28-page minority report and not the full 107-page draft of proposed science standards, most of which is not controversial.
The "minority report" is a document critical of the proposed standards, drafted at the behest of some of the conservative members of the board. Later in the article:
Pedro Irigonegaray, the Topeka lawyer cross-examining witnesses, reacted incredulously every time one of the witnesses admitted to not reading the standards.
"You have been brought to Kansas to tell us how to educate our Kansas children, and you have not bothered to read the majority draft?" Irigonegaray asked as a follow-up question.
Irigonegaray is the only advocate for evolution within the hearings; scientists have refused to participate. The following quotes are from Alex Johnson's MSNBC report:
[M]ainstream science organizations spurned invitations to participate, dismissing the hearings as an effort "to attack and undermine science," in the view of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science.
As a result, the only witnesses being heard are advocates of intelligent design or critics of evolution. Pedro Irigonegaray, a Topeka lawyer representing what he called mainstream science, dismissed the event as a "kangaroo court."
Some scientists are set up outside the capitol, providing information about evolution and staging their own press events. From the coverage so far, they seem to have been notably unhelpful to their own case:
But opponents said the idea was bad science that threatened to make Kansas a laughingstock.
"They want a theocracy," Harry McDonald, a former science teacher who is president of the group Kansas Citizens for Science, told the Kansas City Star. "Ev