Jealousy is the hallmark of abusers

This is a bit of a ramble, but I think it makes sense.
I've told you before that I've been getting little daily e-mailings from the ICR. Today's is from Deuteronomy. It's a warning to all of us heathens that we will be punished for generations if we don't follow:

"Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me."

First, it's kind of hard to hate anything that you don't believe exists so we're really talking about finding an intentional object rather dreadful.

It blows me away that the ICR, many creationists, fundamentalists, dominionists, and dispensationalists believe that the iniquities of fathers should be visited "upon their children unto the third and fourth generation." Why would this blow me away?

Aren't conservative Christians some of the population who can't stand for the U.S. government to make reparations to African-Americans for slavery? They won't stand for it because they weren't the ones who enslaved people. Why should they be held responsible? Why should they be held responsible for the actions of our fathers or mothers, our grandfathers or grandmothers, great grandfathers or grandmothers, or even our great-great grandfathers or great-great grandmothers? Granted, this all makes sense to us coming from a myth that ascribes all of us with the sins of our alleged super-duper-double-plus-or-minus-a-lot-of-generations father and mother Adam and Eve so we can't be surprised that they'd tell us that we are enslaved by the sins of our ancestry. Those sins, we need to understand, are justly ascribed to us by YHWH, but we aren't to owe up to the massive sin (if you can swallow using the term as a fellow freethinker) of government-institutionalized slavery?

This is one of the many elements of hypocrisy that I read from these Bible belters every day. They want us to all bow in humility but then not act in humility. We are to be generous but only to those in our circumscribed tribe or sect. We should bow before God but what we are to do in this world to help this world is sometimes (not always surely) amorphous because good works matter not. Only salvation. It's a false consciousness.

And color me an idealist, but isn't jealousy one of those things that is generally good to unlearn if we want to live in cooperative societies? It gets you into fights over goods, makes you greedy, covetous, and hoard. Aren't those also specifically proscribed by other parts of the Bible? I don't have my concordance manual in front of me (and I'm not going to get it) but greed gets lots of play and it's never good. But if you're God, it's okay I guess.

This coveting of a jealous God, holding his jealousy close to you and your most sacred belief, has consequences. It idealizes some of the worst part of us. It sets up and authorizes double-talk family dynamics where husbands can tell wives that their jealousy is divinely sanctioned because it is a hallmark of the creator and because they act in accordance with the creator, wives and children should obey. If you think I'm making this stuff up, listen to Christian call-in talk radio and you'll hear what I mean. I don't mean to imply that this is across all denominations or even all Christian radio programming. But you'll hear this stuff...basically divinely sanctioned personality disorders.

I'd hope that we can help our children learn from our mistakes and not be slaves to them. But given the way that we inherit a great deal of our temperaments from our parents' genes and then are cultured in and adapt to particular family environments (greatly shaped by the temperaments of those genes already) and then the broader cultural and ecological environment, we in some sense trapped by the "sins" of our ancestors. Our genes and our culture do punish us. But there's no ghost outside of the machine punishing us. It's material in the machine driving us that is molded by our particular circumstances.

Why muddy those waters with a permanent castigation from the divine? Why sanction abuse?

Follow up on Jacoby's "Age of American Unreason"

I've also been perusing around and found that she was recently on Bill Moyers Journal as well on Feb. 15. Funny that the very things she and I are so highly critical of - video and the internet - have made it possible for me to get her message. Anyway, check it out here.

Florida gets some science standards with teeth...slightly dulled...but a lot sharper than before

Thanks to Jessica Bennett for the head's up. She pointed me to Glenn Branch over at the Beacon Broadside. As of yesterday, they have a post up on the Florida Science Standards which, after the endless shrieking of creationists who can't seem to understand what theory means. To quote the Oxford English Dictionary (subscription required):

4. a. A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

Branch gives us the scoop. He writes:

As the biologist T. Ryan Gregory recently observed, "That evolution is a theory in the proper scientific sense means that there is both a fact of evolution to be explained and a well-supported mechanistic framework to account for it. To claim that evolution is 'just a theory' is to reveal both a profound ignorance of modern biological knowledge and a deep misunderstanding of the basic nature of science."

Right. It didn't stop some caveats though that include the use of the word "theory" so that someone else can play semantic games and use people's ignorance and credulity to get their religious agendum wedged in there. But at least we can celebrate that evolution has gotten some support where it needs it.

Branch continues:

As the dust settled, though, it was increasingly clear that the revisions didn't, after all, succeed in materially compromising the scientific integrity of the standards. Evolution wasn't invidiously singled out for attention: plate tectonics, cell theory, atomic theory, electromagnetism, and the Big Bang all received the same treatment. Evolution is still described, correctly, as "the organizing principle of life science" and as "supported by multiple forms of evidence." And the standards distance themselves from the pejorative sense of "theory" that creationists from Bryan onward like to exploit: "a scientific theory is the culmination of many scientific investigations drawing together all the current evidence concerning a substantial range of phenomena; thus, a scientific theory represents the most powerful explanation scientists have to offer."

Exactly.

How dumb can we get? Pretty dumb I guess.

That's a basic summary of Susan Jacoby's newest editorial polemic, "The Dumbing of America," which we can take as something of a distillation of her new book, The Age of American Unreason (get it at your local independent bookseller), which I have yet to read. The editorial comes out hard against the American sound-bite, anti-reason, anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-freethinker, no-attention-span-having...(take a deep breath to go on)...arrogant, and just plain ignorant-and-proud-of-it public. In the broad sweeps, I agree with her even if her tone is a bit grating.

But let's face it. We are a country full of ignoramuses about so many things that it sort of boggles the, dare I say, well-informed brain. Gasp. Call me an elitist, but we've got a lot of work to do and Jacoby's right on as she comes out with both barrels showing us in short form where we are falling down on the job.

She writes:

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

It is not without a sense of irony, I should note, that I am blogging about this. But it is odd that we increasingly turn to virtual and video media when we can use print sources. Sure, there are a lot of things about the internet that I love and are worth enjoying and loving - well-informed blogs; readily available news sources from a broad range of sources like the BBC, NPR, New York Times, Times of London, Reuters, etc.; breaking science updates. But most of the internet is not for that. It, like TV, is basically entertainment that needs little to no active cognition. I'm far from a purist in arts and entertainment (I love death metal for Pete's sake). But the role of active cognition has been reduced the less that people have had to do to access information. The easier it is to get, the easier it is to not think about as well. That's my impression anyway. I'm open to suggestions.

Jacoby addresses the issue well. She writes

Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I'm celebrating the day we got rid of cable right now. I don't want my kid growing up in a house where people don't engage their media. He hasn't so far. We watch almost no movies (weird eh?) and there are books and magazines strewn about (mostly because I make piles) that he sees my wife and I read. We read. A lot. We read in bed.

I don't want a cookie or a prize but if you want people who can discern language, think critically, take apart and build arguments, then they have to actively engage the language that they speak. They have to hear it, read it, speak it, and write it. Otherwise, their going to miss out. Right now, it's pretty clear that the U.S. government's economy and the economy's government (to borrow from Wendell Berry) don't want us to think critically because they pump out garbage and we buy it. Jacoby's right to call it dumbing and say that it makes us dumb.

She laments that the presidential sound bites we expect to hear, down from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 7.8 seconds in 2000, can't tell us anything. What happened to FDR asking us to unfurl our maps to understand the incredible movements of the military in the South Pacific? The obvious answer is that we aren't faced with the incredible hardship of global war and the exigence for knowledge just isn't there. There is no space race a la Kennedy. We are faced with the Bible-thumping numbskullery of an inept "decider" president who can't lead us anywhere but into a mismanaged, ill-conceived, and unilateral war. A man who touted the virtues of intelligent design creationism in the interest of fairness to both sides, whose aides censor government scientific data to shield corporate oil from having to act in the global interest because of their combined role in climate change, and who can't seem to understand that compassionate conservatism doesn't mean throwing money at churches and setting up high-stakes testing that doesn't test children for anything but the most rote memorization.

I don't lament that we aren't in FDR's position and needing to educate people because we had to defeat the Axis. But I lament that we could all have been learning about what Jacoby rightly calls "general knowledge." The real mass extinction going on right now, the transformation of our climate, the emerging resource and territorial problems, and human beings - read: the industrialized nations and especially the United States - part in this could serve to massively educate us. But we are hamstrung by a proudly provincial anti-intellectualism that is more arrogant than any kind of intellectual elitism on the face of the planet. Having decried intellectualism, reason, freethinking, and science with our climate change and evolution denial...Jesus, 20% of American adults think the sun goes around the Earth...the U.S. has hoisted itself on its own petard. We need it to end.

Jacoby hopes that we can change:

It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

Right on. Teach your kids to read. Teach them to engage. You should read. You should engage. The active citizen can shape and active state and the actively intellectual citizen can shape an active intellectual state. I'm no Plato calling for an oligarchy of Guardians to lead us, or a philosopher monarch, but let's get the Enlightenment to brighten our futures.

[Jacoby also spoke at Politics and Prose in D.C. last weekend while I was there but I came down with the flu and missed it, among other things, during the Center for Inquiry's Civic Days. I'll get updates from other attendees and give a report later.]

I have been accepted to the Educational Theory and Policy Ph.D. program at Penn State

This past weekend I received my letter of acceptance from the Penn State Department of Educational Theory and Policy. I will begin this fall though I have gotten my foot in the door there with two classes already. In fact, this fell into my lap last semester.

I had started a secondary education social studies certification program. One of my courses, Philosophy of Education (EDTHP 440) was one of the best courses I had ever taken and the professor, Madhu Suri Prakash and I had many wonderful exchanges and each time she went to conferences she asked me to lead the class. It was a remarkable experience. After having taught for four years at Penn State in English, Integrative Arts, and Music, I had found a place where my self-motivation and integrated thinking (rhetoric, the arts, science, history, philosophy) all paid off. At the end of the fall semester, Madhu and I decided that I should apply to the Ph. D. program in EDTHP.

Here I am.

As a teacher and scholar I take interdisciplinary approaches. I hope to integrate history, anthropology, biology, ecology, rhetoric, philosophy, and the arts into the study of what, why, and how we learn and teach in American education. Currently, I am most interested in three lines of research and inquiry, though not necessarily in this order:
1. How does higher education affect democratic processes? How do different philosophical schools, disciplines, or institutions serve or impede democracy through education? What are faculty and students perceptions of this issue?
2. The human species effects climate change on an unprecedented scale. How is American education engaging this problem? Specifically, do higher education institutes with mandatory general education credits have ecological literacy requirements? If so, how are they constructed?
3. What are the scientific, religious, philosophical, legal, and political backdrops of the controversy over teaching evolution in the United States?

Now we wait to see what happens with money. I am in the running for a teaching assistantship but the money game is always what it is. Now we wait for that game to played and see what's up.

What are Florida's citizens saying about evolution?

On Sunday, the Miami Herald ran a bunch of letters to the editor about ID, evolution, and education. They run the gamut from the pointless to the informed. A few of them stick out.

First, the Reverend Bernie Diaz writes:

How did we get here? Did complex, rational, introspective humans with a conscience evolve from lower, simpler and mutative forms and primates? These two questions have never been settled as fact by natural science, since the origin of life on our planet has not been -- and cannot be -- empirically observed or tested.

This is the Ken Ham and YEC caveat every time. Creationists try to use the "you weren't here and neither was I" argument to refute the proposition of abiogenesis. The utterly ridiculous thing about saying "You weren't here..." is that they weren't either and it constitutes an utterly idiotic fiat. If no one was there, then how do you determine what actually happened?
1. You can come up with any idea you like and believe it.
2. You can accept some idea some guy told you and believe it because he told you so.
3. You can believe what a book written by some guys who weren't there believed and then some guy told you to believe it and you had an idea that it might be true so you believe it.
4. You can believe what some guy told you, then wonder if it's really a true reflection of reality, go out and gather a lot of evidence, test some hypotheses that challenge that evidence, and form an explanation that you can continue to test and so can others.

I'll take no. 4.

No. 4 also puts the early part of the Reverend's (who reveres these people anyway?) to shame. We do have some very good data on how we got here. Billions of points of data that show us that we - and all life on the planet - have emerged from a process of physical, chemical, and biological evolution. Throw in the social animals and you have the emergence of cultural evolution too. From the most simple beginnings we have come to be on an incredible river of replicating chemistry. Brilliant.

Human beings, the introspective, intelligent, loving, and social beings that we are have come from that same process. To question at this point whether we evolved from other primates is to show your ignorance. We don't have every piece of the puzzle but we have a good idea what the branch of hominen and hominid looks like. It's messy for sure. But no paleontologist or anthropologist really doubts any the broad sweep. There are details that we aren't sure about and orders can't be perfect and we know that things need to be reshuffled from time to time because new data moves them around. It's an imperfect procedure as are all human endeavors. So we concede our ignorance and throw out what's clearly incorrect and move on. That's what's funny about one of the late letters.

The Reverend (another one!) Robert Gray writes:

I would like to remind Christians that even one truly dedicated Christian life is sufficient answer to the theory of evolution.

I would like to remind parents that the things they say and do carry far more weight with children than anything said or done in schools.

I would like to remind scientists that there are many things that we will never know about the past, so a little humility is in order.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that while we are droning on about this, urgent human needs are going unmet.

I don't want to muck with the first sentence. He has a point that parents have a lot of say in what happens to their kids though learning about biology and evolution in particular changed my life. My parents didn't really have a whole lot to do with that beyond cultivating my interests like dinosaurs, sharks, snakes, and the like. But it wasn't until I took bio with Mrs. Holt in 10th grade that I really got a heady dose of the theory of evolution. Thanks Mrs. Holt!

When Gray admonishes scientists, saying "that there are many things that we will never know about the past, so a little humility is in order," I almost want to scream. Why are scientists, able to logically and reasonably extrapolate and infer from lots of data, to be humble? What does humility have to do with the facts of evolution or the apparent age of the universe? Granted, the Rev. doesn't name any particular branch of science or problem he has with this or that conclusion. But he implies that the field of science's ignorance about many things should make it cultivate a more humble position.

Has the man read a science textbook or looked into what the practice of science is? All of science is tentative. All of it. One of these days I am going to do a qualitative survey of 50 or 100 science textbook definitions of science because this is making me crazy. Scientists throw out bad ideas all the time. They come up with lots and lots of other bad ones after they've thrown those out, but the positive conclusions that they reach - like that gene frequency in populations changes over time - are mutable. They can be changed. There just has to be good reason to do it. Carl Sagan and Lawrence Krauss would surely tell this guy that there is NO human endeavor as humble as science because it's constantly sifting out nonsense, false conclusions, setting strict parameters, and smacking people's egos.

It would seem that the company that these Reverends keep might need the lesson in humility. How utterly arrogant is it that people who refuse to test their own beliefs about nature foist their own beliefs about nature onto the rest of us. Where is the humility there?

They say that they answer to a higher power that humbles them. [Granted, neither have done so in these letters...but you get the gist I'm reacting to I hope.] But they can't even wonder aloud whether those beliefs might be wrong. How could they know? They can't. It's irrefutable. That's fuzzy religion.

I'll end with one more letter. Sarah Cohen writes:

While I am relieved that teachers will utter the E-word, it doesn't make sense to continue befuddling evolution for the benefit of religion. To theorize a scientific explanation that is backed up by long-running evidence because it disagrees with religion -- a theory in itself -- is silly. How will Florida's children be able to form a well-founded opinion if they don't get the opportunity to do so? Regardless of belief, they deserve a straightforward lesson

I second that! If we want students to understand evolution, then they need to actually be taught what it is and how it works. It is in the interest of the state to work on a theory of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) in this matter and strictly separate public scientific claims from private religious claims. As the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study just wrote to the Texas Board of Education, "The quality of science is based on evidence, not personal beliefs or opinions[.]"

Texas primaries will have consequences

While the national media pays big attention to the big state's presidential voting in the Democratic primary, there is also the race for seats on the 15-member Texas Board of Education. Two seats are up for grabs and they have consequences for teaching evolution in Texas because the Board is split between the far right who want to wedge Intelligent Design into the classroom and/or "teach the controversy" to get religious ideas some airtime in science class and those who don't.

The Austin Statesman reports that "[i]ncumbents Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democrat, and Pat Hardy, a Republican, face primary challenges for another four-year term." These two have been part of the wall that has separated religious myths from creeping into Texas science classes. But their challengers would tear it down.

Berlanga's challenger, Lupe Gonzalez told the Statesman that he

"believes intelligent design — a recent theory that the universe is so complex that science alone cannot explain the origins of life — should be included in textbooks as an alternative to evolution."

"The ... issue can be minimized to a large extent if we present alternatives to the theory of evolution, give both of them equal weight and that's it," he said.

"I just think that there has to be something far more than just a big-bang theory ... that it just happened haphazardly. I just have a hard time believing that that would be the case."

He is welcome to that view. Problem is...it's an argument from ignorance. God of the gaps. An argument from personal incredulity. A failure of his imagination - having a hard time believing - does not science make.

And as we know, ID is not a theory in the strict scientific sense. It is a set of hunches that builds no framework that can be tested. It utterly fails as science.

The other candidate is running in District 11. He is a urologist named Barney Maddox. He "once testified that the state's science curriculum is an attempt to 'brainwash our children into believing in evolution.'" Brainwashing. Love it. You wouldn't want children (or adults for that matter) to look at any...I don't know...evidence or anything. That might prompt them to question any number of things and look for more evidence about how nature works.

I have a recent anecdote on this. I am an officer in the Penn State Atheist and Agnostic Association. We've been keen on getting some events up and running (James Randi is coming!) to get some more public discussion of religion's role in society and the alleged existence of god(s) and the supernatural. We thought it might be cool to have an Oxford-style 3 vs. 3 debate.

One of our officers approached a big Christian group on campus. The student leaders thought it was a cool idea. Then we went to the next ring and talked to the two junior pastors. They liked it. But we still had to talk to the head honcho. Cool.

He said absolutely, unequivocally, "No."

"Why?" we asked.

"Because it could hurt new Christians chances for salvation." This is a guy trying to keep a black box. He really doesn't want anything to get in or really let any uninitiated person to see what's going on inside. His followers mustn't see any evidence that could contradict their world view because it could hurt them. Let them remain like children and be ignorant. Facts don't matter. Truth is in your heart not in the apprehension of nature.

We were baffled and annoyed.

Some of you might think that by arguing to keep ID out of the classroom that we are being like Pastor Shadedog above. I submit not. We had invited him to a public forum to discuss his and his group's views and debate their efficacy on a circumscribed topic that is not, itself, science. We had not, for example, asked to come to his church and give a presentation about how belief in God is bad for you, me, and most other people because it hamstrings your rational thought and turns you into a slave...or something like that. If we had a "teach the controversy" agenda about God, we would do that. But we're civil libertarians who respect people's right to believe garbage if they want to whether it's in the healing power of crystals or that the earth was created by a magic sky man about 6,012 years ago. If they want to have those beliefs in their private churches, go to it.

But it isn't science. We aren't teaching about Wiccan or pseudo-Wiccan crystal healing in geology. We aren't going to teach Flood "geology" in science class. We aren't going to teach arguments from ignorance on the structure of bacterial flagellum in biology. We'll teach science in science class and leave the fight between science and religion outside.

Let's hope that Texas can do that too and that they vote smart.

My new (to me) Single-Speed Cyclocross bike

Love it folks.

I picked this baby up on Friday afternoon. It's an old Schwinn Cro Mo 41 50 frame. Cyclone Precision cranks and Time pedals running a 42:18 on a flippable freewheel or fixed gear hub on Alexrims 390 wheels running Michelin Transworld Sprint cross tires.

I got it at Freeze-Thaw Bikes.

Sharia law? Surely not.

There have been some fantastic ripostes to a recent Anglican minister's call (Rowan Williams) for the possibility and inevitability of Sharia law in the U.K. They have been resoundingly in the negative.

When pressed, some of the religious will stand for any other religion because it is all so murky as to be mad. You buy the Old Testament, then buy the Quran. Nutty really. Many many religious folks don't buy this line and reject the misogyny of both the Old Testament and the Quran. Nice of them be enlightened.

The responses have been good. Read Azar Majedi's over richarddawkins.net. The "west" mustn't tolerate a shred of Sharia law. It's inhumane and wicked.

As Ms. Majedi writes (as Ayan Hirsi Ali has elsewhere and many others have as well):

The status and rights of women in Islam is the Achilles heel of this religion, and I must add, ideology. Misogyny is the trade mark of Islam. The veil is its banner, and gender apartheid its main pillar. Moreover, today a very active reactionary political movement has based its ideology on Islam, namely political Islam. Anywhere they gain power the first thing they do is victimize women, strip them of all their rights, force them under the veil and segregate them in society. The same movement that laments lack of tolerance for Sharia law in western societies is terrorizing the population in societies under its rule to obey Sharia Law, observe the veil and gender apartheid and punishes the defiant by flogging, cutting their limbs and execution.

Read on.

Ben Stein wins back the money

Ben Stein has won an undisclosed amount of money from Biola University for its Phillip Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth. According to the Scientific American blog, Stein, who has been the public relations dude for the Disco 'Tute's new blathering pile of garbage EXPELLED!:

“In his new movie “Expelled,” Stein wonders whether humans were designed by an intelligent being or whether we were simply the result of an ancient natural accident. In his search for an answer, he discovers an elitist scientific establishment that punishes the scientific proponents of Intelligent Design because they reject some of the claims of Darwin’s theory of evolution. ‘Big science in this area of biology has lost its way,’ says Stein. ‘Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science.’



Here we go with the elitism thing. It's such a goofy...no...disigenuous thing to see free market capitalists who disdain the interference of the government in business, who go red in the face and cry about class warfare when taxes are raised on the economic "elite," and who can't tolerate affirmative action (read: Stein and the Disco 'Tute) go off on elitism. They talk out of both sides of their mouths at so many points it boggles the imagination. Characters of such incredible hypocrisy and opportunism don't even show up in Dostoyevsky because they aren't believable. Truth is, as usual, weirder than fiction.

Sorry dudes. Most high-powered scholarship...most high-powered anything is elitist. These guys aren't busting the NFL's chops because they won't let third-string walk-ons from Tulane or New Mexico State play on the Patriots or Giants. If you don't make the cut you don't make the cut. You can still play the game but not at the highest level. And at the highest levels of biology and related evolutionary sciences, you play hardball. And you work really really hard at science and not a lot on rhetoric.

Science, unlike the public media sphere, thrives on merit of analysis and fact. So the elites there drive forward as they make new discoveries and hone current theory and then every once in a while we get to see someone stand up on the shoulder of all of the giants who came before her/him and take us to a new level. The DI has done no such thing and I am pretty comfortable in predicting that they never will. For all of the verbiage they drop at Evolution New and Views, they haven't created any research at all. It's Lawyersville over there where a couple of scientists live who are more able to engage in misdirection and conjectured.

I think that we can all agree that scientists can go where the evidence leads them. They are also subject to the scrutiny of their peers. ID asserts that a designer designed x, y, and z. We want to know about that designer and the processes it used. They decline and instead posit negative arguments against evolution. An argument from ignorance does not a positive theory make.

Elitism or not. Ben Stein has been expelled for pressing for obscurantism and falsehood.

[Biola is actually an acronym of Bible Institute of Los Angeles. It's pretty shady that a Bible institute university won't use a real acronym like B.I.O.L.A. But that's neither here nor there]

In case there was any doubt what the ICR is about

I signed up for daily emails from the ICR to see what you get. Would I be inundated with anti-evolutionary screeds and challenges to materialism? No. It's all inspirational Christian schlock full of Paul's letters. Here's a quick sample:

"Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).

We are not told here to work for our salvation, but to work it out--that is, to demonstrate its reality in our daily lives. Our salvation must be received entirely by grace through faith, not of works (Ephesians 2:8,9), or else it is not true salvation. Works can no more keep our salvation than they can earn it for us in the first place. It is not faith plus works, but grace through faith.

Nevertheless, a Christian believer, if his salvation has been real, can testify that "I will show thee my faith by my works" (James 2:18). Good works--consisting of a righteous and gracious life-style, considerate of others and obedient to Christ's commands--are the visible evidences of salvation. We have been "created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10).

That's some good science.

Church and state already mix in the Huckster's campaign

Is there going to be a take down? This in from Yahoo News:

BUENA PARK, Calif. - A Southern Baptist preacher who endorsed GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee on church letterhead said Wednesday he was being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service for mixing religion with politics.

Churches can't enjoy their tax-exempt status if they meddle in the state's business. It's as if these pastors don't understand the calamity that has ensued everywhere and everywhen if the church and state enmesh themselves. Iran, Afghanistan, or 17th-century England, or the 30 years war? Come one guys. Learn.

On it goes with a sample:

"After very serious prayer and consideration, I announce today that I am going to personally endorse Mike Huckabee," the release said. "I ask all of my Southern Baptist brothers and sister to consider getting behind Mike and helping him all you can."

He continued: "I believe God has chosen Mike for such an hour, and I believe of all those running Mike Huckabee will listen to God."

Huckster has said that he believes that the United States Constitution should be remade to reflect the Bible more. If he were to be elected, I promise you, there would be some bad consequences. Very bad. The guy has already declared himself a would-be theocrat. Welcome the new ayatollha. This guy's letter is the beginning:

The letter sent to Drake by the IRS also quoted from segments of the pastor's church-based Internet show, "The Wiley Drake Show." In the quotes, Drake endorsed Huckabee again.

"Yes, I endorsed him personally and yes, we use the First Southern Baptist Church. Yes, we broadcast the 'Wiley Drake Show' from the First Southern Baptist Church. Everything we do is under the auspices of the church," Drake said on the show.

The damage is already done though. With an endorsement out there with a church's official insignia, they've made their choice. God has spoken through the new Elmer Gantry.

It's not the Virgin Mary! It's the Big Bang!

Atheist has seen the light!

Atheist Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast

For Immediate Release: Miracle Toast?

(ACPA-london) Excitement is growing in the Northern England town of Huddlesfield following the news that a local man saw an image of the big-bang in a piece of toast. atheist donald chapman, 36, told local newspaper, "the huddlesfield express" that he was sitting down to eat breakfast when an unusual toast pattern caught his eye.

"I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring. however the direction and splatter patterns of the crumbs as well as the changing shades emanating outwards from this black hole were very clearly similar to the chaotic-dynamic non-linear patterns that one would expect following the big bang". "It's the beginning of the world" he added excitedly.

Read on...

Slate picks up creation "science"

It's nice to see some media pick up on something I've been saying for weeks. Slate.com has picked up a tidbit I posted on a few weeks ago and derided: namely peer-reviewed Creation "science." A.K.A. bullshit of the century. They even have a bit about the microbe forum that I and Larry Moran at Sandwalk trashed before we even broke the journal. It's cool to be cutting-edge about utter quackery.

Anyway, the Slate article has some fine points. The folks at the Answers Research Journal think that the key to a good peer-review is to have someone of your choice read the piece. Hmm. That's fishy. I thought peer review was to supposed to have something to do with impartiality. Let me think...I'm sending a piece off to MAP/ACA and they will send it to:
A) My best friends,
B) my dad,
C) my pals in various departments,
D) metal heads,
E) people I don't know who want the field to grow apart from our personal ties.
DING! E!

Wait! Maybe they'll even look at my research methods and analysis and not just how I hold up their a priori assumptions. Maybe.

The best thing that Slate has done is given us a window into the process. You can look over the guidelines (available here at ARJ) and gasp. It's like instructions for how to give a testimonial in church so that you know that everyone will like what you have to say as you praise the holy spirit. Science doesn't work that way. I don't mean to imply that scientists can't suffer from group think. It's a natural human phenomena because we are powerfully social animals who want to belong and our amygdalas encode things in ways that don't always tell us what is real and what isn't. But the process of peer-review and double-blind testing and hypothesis jeopardy and theory-building is the best way we have to get around all of our assumptions and our self-deception. The ARJ has none of this. That makes it a laughing stock.

Let me briefly say that none of what I say makes me believe that peer-review is easy. Far from it. It's arduous. I have just submitted my first peer-review article. It probably won't get in. As a journalist, I've had it easy. But the thing about peer-review is its rigor. And that shouldn't be sacrificed for the feelings of the group.

So that leads me to this tidbit:
In evolutionary biology, there is, of course, an idea that you will proffer something that will move the field forward. This stuff that you proffer is called evidence. This evidence is culled from the observable world. The models that we build are based on that observable phenomena that presupposes a uniform universe. This bit to the left does not do that.

If presupposes a non-uniform universe that sets up the possibility of a global flood because they want to believe that a bunch of bronze age shepherds had a better idea about the operations of the universe than the thousands of biologists, geologists, astronomers, physicists, anthropologists, linguists, and even historians have had since the 19th century. Call me a temporal chauvanist, but I think it's safe to say that based on the predictions generated by modern science, we have a lot more of a clue about what happens than a bunch of barely literate men running around Sinai, Canaan, and the Fertile Crescent did about 3,000 years ago. If that makes me a bigot then sign me up.

The whole gist of the above-cited "Peer review process" is that they can't have their theological assumptions of the physical universe questioned. This makes them materialists when they don't want to admit it.

Their faith is resting on the assumption that the physical reality of Genesis be literally true. That means that their faith rests on material reality. Clearly, much of Christianity and the bulk of Christians think this is a bad idea because they think that Genesis has already lost this fight. It has. Lyell. Darwin. Continental drift. Ice core dating. Tree ring dating. Carbon dating. K-Ar dating. Ar-Ar dating. Religion cannot win a materialistic war because it looks for non-material explanations for material phenomenon when there are material explanations available. When those explanations aren't available because of ignorance of the topic or because we lack means, the appeal to that ignorance does not constitute evidence for non-material causes. It constitutes an argument for our ignorance and the need to declare that ignorance and keep looking for evidence. To say that "God did it" when we don't know the cause is to insert a non-explanation where the simple admission of our ignorance should do.

But the Young Earth Creationists can't handle uncertainty in their father in heaven. They have to uphold their blinders in the face of the evidence and oppose the "assumptions" of "evolutionists" and "Darwinists."

These folks, especially Ken Ham, are fond of saying, "You weren't there. No human was there. How do you know that the earth was formed from stardust and humans came from monkeys that came from slime?" He wasn't there either. And he uses no evidence other than myths and gut-feeling to hold up his beliefs. Compare that to the panoply of interconnected and integrated decades and decades of peer-reviewed jeopardized theory building that support evolution on the cosmic level or the biotic level and you see massive disparity.

I am happy to throw away my assumptions. There just needs to be good reasons to do so. But the call to "provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatical/historical/normative interpretation of Scripture" is a red flag to any scientist. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a good scientist is her/his openness to not just peer-review but peer-scrutiny. Here are some of the guidelines from Science magazine:

Data availability After publication, all data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science. We recognize that discipline-specific conventions or special circumstances may occasionally apply, and we will consider these in negotiating compliance with requests. Any concerns about your ability to meet Science's requirements must be disclosed and discussed with an editor. For further information about accessibility of data and materials, see the following resources[...]

That's a shred from Science.

If you'd like to be schooled in peer review, just go over to Nature's blog on the matter. And as for their standards of peer-review. There is nothing in either of them about upholding anything but rigorous method and openness to scrutiny.

To close this rant, I had received a few emails about what peer review means and how it's done. It is a quite tough process that hurts the ego. A few years ago, I saw Lawrence Krauss, by anyone' standard a good physicist, say that he had been rejected plenty of times by his peers when he was plenty excited about his research. It's not easy but it makes for good science. The ARJ is a sham.

African Theropods

Two new species of dinosaurs were found in North Africa. ScienceDaily reports:

Two new 110 million-year-old dinosaurs unearthed in the Sahara Desert highlight the unusual meat-eaters that prowled southern continents during the Cretaceous Period. Named Kryptops and Eocarcharia in a paper appearing this month in the scientific journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, the fossils were discovered in 2000 on an expedition led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno.

Paleontologists suspect that Kryptops palaios - meaning "old hidden face" (drawn on the right) - were scavengers like huge hyenas who lived on the supercontinent of Gondwana, the southern half of Pangaea. Measuring some 25 feet in length, they "had short, armored jaws with small teeth that would have been better at gobbling guts and gnawing on carcasses than snapping at live prey. About 25 feet in length, Kryptops was a voracious meat-eater."

Eocarcharia - meaning "fierce-eyed dawn shark" (drawn on the left) - was in the same line of dinosaurs as Spinosaurus, the huge Gondwana predator that exceeded T-Rex in size. "Unlike Kryptops, its teeth were designed for disabling live prey and severing body parts." Eocharcharia may have used its formidable brow to head-butt its prey.

For more information take a look at Palaeoblog's post on New African Theropods or the link to the article (pdf) in Brusatte Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Picture: Portraits of Eocarcharia and Kryptops. (Credit: Copyright Todd Marshall, courtesy of Project Exploration)

A rash of pro-evolution voices

It's about f***ing time people. The NCSE has some good stuff posted. There are a host of organizations coming out to say that evolution is the theory that underlies biology. After years and years of bloody nonsense and lies from the likes of Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research, Answers in Genesis, and the Disco 'Tute these groups have gotten fed up with it. The fight for reason has thickened and deepened and some people, slow to waken, have gotten on board to fight for reality.

They include:
The National Academy of Sciences who just released a new book.
The American Geophysical Union:

AGU affirms the central importance of including scientific theories of Earth history and biological evolution in science education. Within the scientific community, the theory of biological evolution is not controversial, nor have “alternative explanations” been found.

The Texas Academy of Sciences:

Today the theory of evolution remains the primary unifying cognitive framework in modern biology.

The United Church of Christ (hey...I guess it takes all kinds. Obama is in the UCC):

Evolution helps us see our faithful God in a new way. Our creator works patiently, calling forth life through complex processes spanning billions of years and waiting for us to awaken and respond in conscious participation in God's own overarching dream for all living things. Evolution also helps us see ourselves anew, as creatures who share a common origin with other species. Today we know that human bodies and brains share the same genetic and biochemical processes with other creatures, not just mammals but insects, plants, and bacteria. How then should we understand ourselves as evolved creatures, sharing much of our DNA with other species, and at the same time as distinct creatures in the image of God?

The American Fisheries Society:

Whereas, the body of knowledge encompassed by the theory of evolution is the foundation and unifying principle of the biological and ecological sciences and is supported by a vast body of interdisciplinary evidence...

The Indiana Academy of Science:

Therefore be it resolved that the Indiana Academy of Science, as a part of its commitment to educational excellence in science instruction, opposes any restriction or imposition on the teaching of biological and cosmic evolution in the curricula of Indiana's educational institutions.

...and the Oklahoma Academy of Science:

The Oklahoma Academy of Science strongly supports thorough teaching of evolution in biology classes. Evolution is one of the most important principles of science. A high school graduate who does not understand evolution is not prepared for college or for life in a technologically advanced world, in which the role of biology and biotechnology will continue to grow. ... There is no credible scientific evidence that the earth came into being recently or that evolution is not the best explanation of the origins of living organisms.

All of them also include a statement on the teaching of ID and/or creationism. The ID camp made this into a pointless numbers game with the Dissent from Darwin signing statement a few years ago. The Texas Academy outnumbers them. But it's not a numbers game and a game of how we feel and how satisfied we are. It's about how well our predictions align with reality. ID and creationism predict nothing and seek to conform reality to religious wishes. They should be expelled from the classroom.

Happy Darwin Day!

Today is Darwin's birthday. Take a minute and look around at the marvel of the evolved universe and give a nod to the guy that gave us a parsimonious explanation.

As they do at the Darwin Day website, I invite you to read from Chapter 4 of On the Origin of Species:

How will the struggle for existence, discussed too briefly in the last chapter, act in regard to variation? Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature? I think we shall see that it can act most effectually. Let it be borne in mind in what an endless number of strange peculiarities our domestic productions, and, in a lesser degree, those under nature, vary; and how strong the hereditary tendency is. Under domestication, it may be truly said that the, whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life. Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can possibly survive) that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection, and would be left a fluctuating element, as perhaps we see in the species called polymorphic.

We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct. We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would most seriously affect many of the others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be. But in the case of an island, or of a country partly surrounded by barriers, into which new and better adapted forms could not freely enter, we should then have places in the economy of nature which would assuredly be better filled up, if some of the original inhabitants were in some manner modified; for, had the area been open to immigration, these same places would have been seized on by intruders. In such case, every slight modification, which in the course of ages chanced to arise, and which in any way favoured the individuals of any of the species, by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved; and natural selection would thus have free scope for the work of improvement.

No doubt about it: Darwin matters a lot. For thousands of years people had no clue how life had come about on earth. We had superstitious myths and the proclamations of theistic wise men telling us how and why life existed. Beginning with the Greeks, evolutionary thinking came into being and then, more than two millenia later, the Enlightenment came along. Thinkers like Hume who had inherited the recent quantum leaps in science from Galileo and Newton and Lyell and Linnaeus began once again looking into the nature of things. And they were using science. Life was connected. But how? Why? What mechanisms were driving it?

People had hunches about evolution. But it wasn't until Wallace and really Darwin that a satisfactory natural explanation to replace the natural theology of Paley's or Descartes' watchmaker. With natural selection, human beings were finally gifted with the possibility of making sense of the emergence and transformation of life on Earth. Surely evolutionary theory has changed as new evidence has come in. But the central tenet of Darwin's theory - natural selection - has stood the test of time.

Our hats are off to you old boy. Thank you for the most powerful explanation of life I know of.

Bill Maher on Barack Obama and the upcoming movie 'Religulous'

Bill Maher went on Larry King to talk about how awesome Barack Obama, threats from Catholics, his new movie and that "faith" isn't a magic word. It's a way to defend yourself against rational scrutiny.

Check it here at richarddawkins.net. Watch the whole show here at CNN.

Jesus's last words? The Bible reports. You decide.

Over at By The Book Comics there's a fine comic about the dude's last words. I've always found this stunning. Why the inconsistent reporting? I don't mind this as different versions of a story to be interpreted metaphorically. Hell (hehe), it makes for some good reading and diversion. Which Jesus do you like? The scorned one? The certain one? The relieved one? But the Bible belters say that we have to read these literally.

Guys...they can't all be true. They are either exclusive or there are omissions.

Shuttle launch pic

One of my cousins lives near Cape Canaveral where the shuttle is launched. She sends us pics periodically from a pilot friend of hers. Quite stunning.

Lies and misdirection from Salvo

When I read press from any of the creationist and ID "think" tanks, I am prepared to read lies and misdirection. In today's perusal of the newest anti-science pro-nonsense screed against materialist science, we find Casey Luskin's (everyone's favorite pro-ID lawyer) primer on teaching evolution in schools, "Has ID Been Banned in Public Schools?" at Salvo.com.

The short answer is: Yes. The long answer? Let's take a look at Luskin's work and get the longer answer.

He starts by introducing America's love of banned ideas and that the ACLU did us a favor by getting "the mere favorable mention" of ID expunged from a statement to be read by the biology teachers before the unit on evolution. Never mind the fact that the Dover biology teachers refused to read the statement because it would constitute bad teaching on their parts and cast doubt on the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution. Strangely, the Dover teachers were not asked to read a statement on the fact of germs or the germ theory of disease. Neither germ theory nor evolutionary theory are in genuine doubt.

Luskin goes on:

But has ID therefore been banned from all US schools? No. In our three-tiered system of federal courts, the Kitzmiller ruling was issued by the lowest level, a federal trial court. No other court ruling has squarely dealt with the constitutionality of teaching ID. Thus, despite all its fanfare, the Kitzmiller ruling only applies to the parties in that case; no other public-school district in the United States is subject to the judge’s ruling banning ID.

Shouldn't lawyers who wade into constitutional issues - read: Luskin - be thorough in how jurisdiction works? He's been a bit short-shrift on this one. Judge Jones's ruling works as precedent in the the Middle District of Pennsylvania pictured to the left. Though it doesn't place an injunction against teaching ID per se across the state, under stare decicis, it functions as a ban in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Given the breadth and depth of the ruling, the outcry that threw the Dover School Board out before the ruling even came in, and the huge court fees associated with the decision, it makes it more powerful than a limited ruling might have been. Jones decision has chilled ID's ability to get into classrooms across the state and the country. Add on to all of that McLean v. Arkansas, Edwards v. Aguillard, Epperson v. Arkansas and the rest of the anti-creationist court cases and you have a legal climate that is pretty hostile to anti-science.

Luskin parades out some silliness about the popularity of ID on college campuses and at some high schools which leads him to conclude that we should teach "the scientific evidence that points to an intelligent design of life." It's all very interesting that a majority of Americans have an ID viewpoint though Luskin doesn't bother telling us the source for his statistic that 74% of Americans have an ID viewpoint. For all we know he's collapsed theistic evolutionists into the same category as IDCs and YECs. I guess we won't know what the actual question was. Typical sophistry from the IDCs. But the popularity of an idea is no determinant of its strength. Blacks were once 3/5 of a human in the U.S., people believed the sun went around the earth, people believed in astrology, we thought the Earth was flat, and that moral character and not pathogens caused disease.

What's the evidence behind ID? As usual, Luskin doesn't provide evidence for ID's predictive powers but appeals to the majority. That's not science folks. That's special pleading. You don't hear real minority scientific viewpoints bitching about their underrepresentation in high school science classrooms. Once again: If they want to start a scientific revolution then do the legwork. What scientific revolution - or paradigm shift in the words of Thomas Kuhn - started in high school classrooms?

Next we move onto Cornell's president's statement on ID. He said it's a religious idea. It is. He called the spade a spade. The IDCs can dress it up in "specified complexity" and "complex specified information" that has been gleaned from the "explanatory filter" (pictured left) and marvel at the "irreducible complexity" of flagella or immune systems until they turn red in the face. But they want everyone on their side to know that these are the endeavors of those who believe in theistic realism, mere creation, or the logos concept from the Book of John restated in information theory a la Dembski. It's a pseudo-scientific rendering of (usually) Protestant theology that has never generated and tested a jeopardizeable hypothesis.

Luskin says that more universities are engaging ID. You're right we are. I've taught English 202A: Writing for the Social Sciences several times. The last time I taught it we did a unit on the policy considerations, the rhetoric, and the evidence behind the proposition, "Intelligent design should be taught in American public school science classes." Students write papers on the topic and defend a position after having read Judge Jones, DI fellow's legal briefs, Jerry Coyne, Michael Behe, Barbara Forrest, the Chronicle of Higher Education, watched a Lehrer NewsHour spot that pitted Lawrence Krauss against Behe, and read various and sundry editorials.

We talk about the rules of science. What is evidence? What is a theory? What is a hypothesis? What is evolution? What is fairness? What is religion? What is public knowledge? What is private knowledge? How are they different?

No one in the class, even those students who have been quite sympathetic to ID's claims, have walked away from a really even-handed presentation of the sides and thought that the ID position is really science. I lead discussions and do not thrash ID the way I do on this blog. The cases that students for ID in their papers if they think a genuine presentation of ID should be given in public school science classes all come down to special pleading on behalf of some vague concept of fairness. It's pretty neat being with students as they hash through these things.

Of course we end up talking about God and religion's place in school and science class in particular. As contentious as you'd think students might get on the matter, they've been completely civil. My sample may not be representative, but these students have been engaged in the ideas of their identities and how their identities are shaped by the ways that we understand the world. Sometimes we use evidence and reason. Other times we use faith, tradition, and revelation.

ID is hopelessly tied to faith, tradition, and revelation. All of the major leaders of the ID movement say so to church crowds and values voter types. No amount of misdirection from Luskin can make it different. Just read The Wedge of Truth by Phillip Johnson. That should suffice.

We aren't trying to ban ID from the marketplace of ideas. Those of us with an understanding of what's at stake - the definition and use of science - fight it as dead anti-science. Until it is shown otherwise, it's religion.

Dualists talk out of both sides of their mouths

I've read so many things this weekend that my brain is a bit of a jumble. This month's Perspectives on Psychological Science is all on philosophy and psychology. Issues of free will and infant learning and morality. It's fantastic. I'm taking a class on intelligence and education and my professor has agreed with me and many many others: "The mind is what the brain does."

So when I read this crap from the Disco 'Tute, I am blown away. While modern science has eagerly engaged the questions of the brain as natural material entity, the Disco 'Tute hangs on to what we don't know as a form of dogma. Addressing Stephen Novella, they say:

Dr. Novella asse[r]ts that

"Every single question that can be answered scientifically - with observation and evidence...has been resolved in favor of that hypothesis [strict materialism]"

No. It is true that over the past century we have studied the electrochemistry, neuroanatomy, and molecular biology of the brain in remarkable detail, and our modern fund of knowledge of brain structure and function, even down to the molecular level, is vast. What is genuinely remarkable is what hasn't been found, and it's a real problem for materialism.

Why? Why is that a problem for materialism at all? We have seen over the course of ALL of science that the material and natural explanation of what we perceive to be reality is actually accountable to material causes. Surely that can't be everything because we can't solve every project at once. We aren't God. But neither are they. If they were, and they really had him/her/it/them on their side, then they could answer the question. Instead, they shriek that no one knows and decry people who make testable guesses.

They continue:

Consider this: if the mind arises entirely from the brain, materialism predicts that there must be a specific material cause for each mental state. That is, a specific mental state must be a specific brain state, nothing more or less. For example, if I am thinking “the White House is in Washington, D.C.”, there must be a specific arrangement of molecules and neurons and action potentials in my brain that are the thought itself. In the materialistic paradigm, please understand, matter doesn’t just correlate with the thought; matter is the thought. Materialism is the proposition that all things are material, including thoughts. Every time I think “the White House is in Washington D.C.”, there must exist in my brain that exact configuration of matter: 2,433 neurons with x concentration of acetylcholine located in 87,456 dendrites arrayed in a discrete geometrical pattern with action potentials precisely defined. That exact configuration is the thought. If I had a different configuration of matter— any difference— I would have a different thought. If each mental state is a brain state, then this reduction must hold for every thought. This is a straightforward prediction of materialism.

This is something of a straw man. We aren't necessarily advocating that we conclude 2,433 or whatever number do x, y, or z. But there must be some window of accuracy in the brain to bring up Washington, D.C. Is it so hard to believe that when we recall a physical place that we have experienced that the material entity that apprehended that object creates some material (e.g. physical and biochemical) representation of the place that we have been? What else would it be? A transcendental model that exists ex machina? Is there evidence for it? Are these people actually suggesting that our thoughts are so precise at every moment that we must pre-ordain them? Must it be the absolute neurochemical combinations that they posit? This isn't clear.

Maybe they should actually test them and find out instead of trying to bully their reading audience with jargon that supports a house of cards. We aren't arguing that every brain have the same exact wiring. Does every bicep produce the same chemical output as it lifts a dumbell or does every liver work exactly the same way as it breaks down a Luksusowa and tonic. No. They don't. Stop fighting straw men and insisting on a kind of Arcadian reductionism that we don't fight for.

What is clear is that we know that people overwrite their memories. It is the case that each time we revisit a memory that we modify and that new stimuli - material and energetic objects and events in material space and time - influence how we access those memories. So...my bet is that the configuration of matter in our brains matters. But we don't see it happen.

The brain...our own brains anyway, are something of black boxes to ourselves. We can't see it working or apprehend its functions. We feel and sense its emergent properties as aftershocks of the experiences that strike our sensory registers. Conscisousness is a late-comer to the game of nano and miliseconds of the brain. Executive control. It's after the limbic system and the amygdala. By the time our "me" gets there, it's often too late.

For the last year I taught the book The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. In it, O'Brien revisits the time that he killed a young Viet Kong, the day that one of his fellow soldiers died, and the various ways that his cowardice crippled him and others. Though a novel, it reveals the degree to which men deceive themselves or at least try. In the chapter, "The Man I Killed," O'Brien sees the scene differently each time and never knows what the real scene was. Every scene that he visits is true because it is the simulacrum that is there. But it has been so colored by his desires and the events between the actual event and each of the memorial visitations that he doesn't really know which one was real if any. This is classic and one of the powers of the brain. Brains are plastic.

So when the DI folks try to pigeonhole Novella in this posting they really are only showing their ignorance. We don't know this or that or that or that. Very good. Move on. So let's find out why and move beyond the argument from ignorance. Let's actually use science.

Yes! We! Can!

The pundits say that we are voting our identities in the 2008 election. That may be. We are voting for the new way vs. the old way. For legacies vs. destinies. For the pockets of the wealthy vs. the good of the many.

Go Obama!

Freedom of speech...it's all about context

Teaching the theory of evolution isn't a free speech issue. Neither is its professional discussion. Determining whether or not evolution is sound science is an issue for scientists to work out no matter what Robert Crowther has claimed: "America is supposed to believe in free speech, but on the issues of evolution and intelligent design right now, there is precious little freedom of discussion."

What a total misdirection. Freedom of Speech is precisely what has afforded the IDCers to make their case. The freedom of press has enabled them to press (no pun intended) their PR campaign. But science isn't a democracy. It's the closest thing to a meritocracy that we have. It's far from perfect but it beats hearsay and conjecture or revelation and authority every time.

It's simply a false claim that their is no "freedom of discussion." We have lots. As an observer I've been seeing people wondering about the order of the hominid and hominen fossil record, the degree to which evo-devo can predict morphological changes, how much group selection comes into play, and whether punctuated equilibrium might be real. But there is less than 1% of biologists seriously questioning evolution. Check out the new NAS pub on the matter.

Gonzalez denied tenure once and for all

Former Iowa State assistant professor of Astronomy Guillermo Gonzalez has officially been denied tenure. He is an ID proponent, author of The Privileged Planet, and a fellow at the Discovery Institute. After his first tenure denial, he and the DI went on a bullying PR campaign to say that this was discrimination and a violation of academic freedom.

They aren't about to stop now. In this post from February 7, Anika Smith at the 'Tute quotes Casey Luskin and Chuck Hurley saying:

“The Board of Regents would not allow into the record extensive e-mail documentation showing that Dr. Gonzalez was denied tenure not due to his academic record, but because he supports intelligent design,” said Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute, where Gonzalez is a senior fellow. “Then the Board refused to grant Dr. Gonzalez the right to be heard through oral arguments. Does it come as any surprise that now they denied his appeal?”

“They’ve denied his due process rights throughout this entire appeal,” Luskin continued. “This kangaroo court decided its verdict long before today’s deliberations even began.”

“The most disheartening part of this appeal is that they refused Dr. Gonzalez the opportunity to present his case fully to the Board and to have face-to-face contact with the Board through oral arguments,” said Chuck Hurley.

This "kangaroo court" sure has some funny qualities to it. Usually, everything in a kangaroo court is both opaque and expedient and denies due process. Well, Gonzalez was given the opportunity to present his CV and all supporting materials. He then got an appeal. The Board of Regents has considered the matter and decided that Gonzalez doesn't pass muster.

The DI and the Weekly Standard shriek about how "stellar" Gonzalez' research record is. Let's look at it one more time to see what they really mean. We're to buy that Gonzalez has a "stellar" record even though his publications crashed following his hire at ISU and his direct engagement with the DI and his writing of The Privileged Planet? The guy did a bunch of stuff before his hire and then seriously slowed down. It's clear that he :
a) wasn't producing as much research and
b) his research had turned to non-scientific goals that sought to rectify his religious beliefs about the nature of the universe with his scientific knowledge. If ISU doesn't find this to be the research that they promote and provide tenure to then they are free to do that.

Ed Brayton has pointed out that physicist Sean Carroll, a super-accomplished physicist was denied tenure at U of Chicago after publishing a great deal more than Gonzalez did. And Carroll didn't have the mitigating factor of ID to mess with his research. Some people, very good people, don't get tenure.

But this doesn't seem to be the case here.
Gonzalez's and the DI's hunt to claim that ID is science doesn't make it so. Calling something science doesn't make it so. Making subjective and intuitive inferences about the appearance of design doesn't make it design. That's a subjective reification: insisting that something that seems to suggest something else means that that something else is real. Gather the positive data and make the case the way everyone else does - by hashing it out in peer review and you can get your foot in the door. Jeopardize a hypothesis.

Sadly, Gonzalez got his fair days in court and lost. Maybe he can get a job elsewhere.

Obama on the environment

Check out Obama on climate change on Living on Earth. Challenging and laudatory. Good stuff.

What about nuclear power and nuclear weapons?

Lawrence Krauss has posted a fantastic piece at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It's titled, "Where the presidential candidates stand on nuclear issues." The long and short: Clinton and Obama seem pretty good though they may have an unwarranted faith in the safety of nuclear power and oppose the use of nukes against terrorists and want to reduce the arsenal. The Republicans have more nuances. Suffice it to say that their nuances are not good.

Read on...

Marching for the Christian darkness

The Christo-fascists at Christian Worldview Weekend believe the university is a bastion of anti-religion. They have just the book to perpetuate your ignorance as you go through the university. It's a survival kit to help wend your way through the terrors of enlightenment and...gasp...thinking and...bigger gasp...challenges to making "biblical life decisions."

They attack from every angle:

1. Why evil and injustice do not negate the reality of a good God;
2. Why the Bible can be trusted;
3. Why Darwinian evolution is a lie;
4. The liberal myth of "separation of church and state";
5. The authenticity of Jesus' resurrection;
6. What the fossil record really reveals;
7. The myth of global warming;
8. How dramatically crime would increase if guns were outlawed;
9. And more!

What's cool about studying at a university is that, assuming it has a good library, good labs, and provides its students with the opportunity to access lots of resources through the web and its professors, students can go investigate whether these things are true, false, or somewhere in between. It is a competing marketplace of ideas where some ideas do a lot better than others. Often (though not in some of the fluffy ideologically driven portions of the liberal arts) this requires evidence which is something revealed religion can't handle. So they have to attack evolution (can they at least get with the program and realize that we've moved way past Darwin?), the fossil record, Jefferson's wall of separation, and of course global warming. Throw in some Jew-baiting by making The Passion of the Christ mandatory with daily readings from the Gospel of John and we can get a ripe bed for Holocaust denial too.

Now I don't know about where you went to school, plan to go to school, or work, but we at Penn State have 52 religious student organizations (most of which are Christian and they include us atheists and agnostics too...grrr), a spiritual center that houses services, a Center for Ethics and Religious Affairs, and provides prayer rooms. We are a secular institution tolerant of and respectful towards our students' religious faiths, even those whose faiths place them at odds with modern political movements, philosophies, art, and science.

We can all agree that part of going to the university is and should be a time to explore a panoply of ideas, challenge assumptions, question your own beliefs rigorously, delve into the unknown with guiding hands and minds, and come out of the other side of the tunnel with new perspectives. Schooling and education induces metamorphosis whereas this book's brand of fundamentalism sanctions an impoverished and terrified view of the universe. We understand traditions and encourage people to understand their own and others without overtly sanctioning any of them at the expense of others. If these wingnuts had their way, we wouldn't be able to have the Penn State Atheist and Agnostic Association, the Muslim Student Organization, or the Dharma Drum Chan Association.

The whole department of Religious Studies and most of the philosophy department, plenty of biology, entymology, geography, epidemiology, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, English, women studies, health and human development, kinesiology, geology, astronomy, history (they use C.E. and B.C.E. designations), math, and education would be shut down. Why bother attending if it's that horrifying?

There are Christian colleges out there. Go to them and leave the business of understanding the world outside of the Land of Make Believe to us.

Small and independent media lives and works!

When journalism is done well and with depth and accuracy, it gets results. At Voices of Central Pennsylvania we are celebrating because we broke a story on Monsanto's pressure on the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture to ban milk sellers from labeling their milk free of rBST, a synthetic form of BGH. Our editor just sent this out:

After Voices broke the story on agri-giant Monsanto's attempts to extort Harrisburg and limit consumers' rights to information and choice, you all flooded the offices of the governor and agricultural secretary with phone calls demanding that they repeal the ban on labelling milk as free of the synthetic hormone rBST. Thanks to you and others around the state, the governor rescinded the label ban!

Keep small and independent media alive. Check out Voices if you live in Pennsylvania or support your local indie media.

Christo-fascists vs. Rick Warren

Over at Christian Worldview Network, they have a post up on how Rick Warren's embrace of religious pluralism and tolerance. Warren, who has written The Purpose-Driven Life wants people to come together. Gasp!
He recently addressed a crowd at Georgetown University stating that he wants governments, the private sector, and big religion to work together to fight disease and poverty. He hasn't forgotten about the secularists even if he glances askance at them. He said:

“I don’t care if you do good for political, economical, personal or religious reasons, as long as you do good; there is no ethical or moral aspect in that,” he said. “I serve a savior named Jesus Christ who said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ and that’s why I do what I do.”

That one statement brings some credibility. As much as his religion is hokum to me, when it comes to the utility of serving people, we need to come together. But it's a mistake to merge government and religion in this case. While disease and poverty are awful, the kind of turf war that emerges when government and church merge is as bad. The secular state can't be beholden to the theological dictates of any faith and the faiths oughtn't be beholden to Caesar. In this case, I think that we need to non-overlapping magisteria.

We need to work on the fight against poverty, pandemic disease, religious and ideological extremism, and global warming. No question about it. The answers are to have all people involved and increase the role of states. In the United States, Europe, and Asia we have some very wealthy countries who ought to be doing more. The U.S. really ought to do more and people should be compelled, by taxation, to give to what are now considered charities. They should become duties.

What Warren advocates in principle as utilitarian service to others is gorgeous and at the end of the day if he is helping to reduce suffering and increasing joy that's a good. I'd hope he wouldn't attach a lot of mumbo-jumbo to it but you have to pick your fights. But I dissent on the means. One of the reasons why I disagree with the means is perfectly illustrated by what the the folks at Christian Worldview Network spew this:

His beliefs about pluralism explain why he can go to Jewish synagogues and never mention the name of Christ, or appear at secular conferences or shows like Comedy Central and never once mention Jesus and the way of eternal salvation. He’s content to let them believe what they want, he’ll believe what he wants, while we meanwhile all hold hands, talk endlessly about “God” smiling down on us as we fulfill our purposes and work to solve the world’s problems. (Not, of course, the problem of eternal damnation of souls who are lost without Jesus Christ. I am not sure Rick even believes this any longer. You cannot believe in the Gospel and believe that Christ is the only way to heaven, and fail to share it with so many who are on their way to hell.)

That's exactly why we can't have religions with exclusive claims on "TRUTH" involved with government. The secular government needs to never partake in the business of saving souls. It should serve the material well-being of human beings so that they can be as happy as they can be. The Christo-fascists can only interfere with that by muddying the waters with senseless claims that steal people's dignity and turn them into agents of darkness.

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If you are interested in helping fight global disease and poverty go to:
OxFam International
Doctors Without Borders

The best way to play a semantic game? Use the word "objective"

In a recent post at the Disco 'Tute, Casey Luskin, their most active semantic gymnast, fights for students in Florida and Texas...wherever...to learn to be "objective." Yes. Those are mock quotes. Luskin writes:

Rob Crowther recently discussed the fact that the proposed Florida Science Standards take an extremely dogmatic approach towards evolution education. The proposed standards assert that evolution is “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology,” and they claim that it “is supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence.” There are no mention of any scientific problems with neo-Darwinism anywhere in Florida’s proposed standards.

Later he says that people from around the country have contacted them "about how they can teach evolution in a more objective fashion, and we help out whenever we can." When they say "teach evolution" they mean "impede understanding of the groundwork that underlies modern biology." When they say "objective" they mean "subjectively religiously friendly." When they say "help" they mean "encourage ignorance."

Objectivity is a funny thing. We can all look at the same set of facts and make inferences about those facts. The facts as objects or events in themselves have an order to them that exists independently from our apprehension of those facts. But how we choose to govern the interpretation of those facts emerges from intersubjective agreements. So a creationist, whether a young earther or an "cdesign proponentsist," will look at a set of facts and draw different conclusions and can (vainly try) to make predictions. Evolutionary biologists can look at the same set of facts and reach different conclusions and make predictions.

Science is really good at discovering what isn't working, what's really wrong, what might be right, or what seems to be quite right. The interrogation of nature by the scientific method has worked repeatedly and panned out with paradigms that make accurate predictions. Darwin and Wallace, like lots of people before them, posited that organisms descend with modification. But they recognized that there was an interaction between the variation of parents passed on to their offspring that was fit in degrees and that nature could select those organisms who were most fit and that they would survive and reproduce. Given eons, this process of evolution could yield the incredibly diverse life on earth.

Geology and astronomy have discovered the timescale. Genetics has emerged to give us the material of inheritance. Biochemistry has shown us mutations and mutation rates. Anthropology, archaeology, and paleontology have shown us the fossil record and biological variance through time. Biology and zoology show us that biogeography, the variance of species across space and that different species in similar niches have similar morphologies. We understand today that evolution is the change in allele frequency in populations over time as reproducing organisms differentially survive as they adapt (or don't) to their environments. Every branch of the above sciences pans this out.

What have the IDCers promoted as an alternative explanation? The designer did it. Really, God did it. That's not an answer. Where's the prediction? There isn't one. So they set up an attack on evolution to claim that it isn't doing anything either.

They attack biochemistry and the bacterial flagellum or the blood-clotting cascade or the RNA world or what have you. The YECs attack geology or physics to say that radioactive Ar-Ar dating methods or K-Ar dating doesn't work or that thermodynamics disproves evolution. Have they seen the sun? They try to say that scientists are attacking evolution.

If that's the case then they need to pull the rabbit of scientific attacks on evolution out of the hat of the scientific enterprise - the lab write-ups, the journal articles, the academy proceedings, the practical inventions of those who dissent from Darwin - and pass it through. Science is about the closest thing we have to a meritocracy in the whole world. People have different access to resources and the wealthy can unfortunately steer research in ways that don't best help inquiry and people. But the competition is real and it's fierce and errors get trounced when they are found.

If ID folks want to find the problems with evolution then there should be thousands of articles and data points out there for them to set up in their fight to make teaching evolution "objective." But there aren't any.

"Objective" in Luskin's and the DI's case means "fair." They play a semantic game here, trying to appeal to an American sense of fairness.

But science isn't fair. It says that bad ideas are bad and not worth our time. Evolution has shown itself repeatedly to be a good idea because it has predictive ability. ID hasn't predicted a thing. It's a great teaching tool in universities because it illustrates sloppy thinking and savvy rhetoric combined. Bad science. Beautiful sophistry. But science it isn't. And the sham of trying to poke holes in evolution doesn't actually do anything to help ID. It's a contrived dualism that if the theory of evolution has problem x (say the old punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualism debate that Aaron Filler seems to be trying to rekindle unsuccessfully) then ID must be right. Only if ID can explain that stuff better. But it doesn't.

We are more than happy to allow for controversies within biology. David Sloan Wilson is a group selectionist and Dawkins is not. Massimo Pigliucci (if memory serves) is weighing in on selection saying that it goes the whole way from the gene to the species. The range that natural selection affects organisms is complex and dynamic. But so few serious biologist in the field (less than 1%) question whether or not natural selection is operating that we don't care about it. When they get the data and the required analysis to back it up. Cool. But shit or get off the pot. Students can learn about the Filler stuff if they want to. It's been hashed out. Scientists can bicker about the mechanisms of changes in the morphogene and how powerful a single shift can be to the transformation of a species. Cool. Notice that they aren't saying that mutations aren't helpful or that there is a divine hand in these shifts. So the "objectivity" here that is to uphold some sort of "fairness" is actually to insert a "controversy" where there isn't one and to ignore the real controversies that scientists actually engage in. As I said. It's semantics. Sophistry. It's lying.

CFI's Civic Days Feb 22-25

Come all freethinkers and secular activists. We need to make a difference in our government. Stop grousing and get involved. Come to the Center for Inquiry's Civic Days from February 22 to 25.

Schedule:
Feb. 22 Friday
* 5:30 p.m. - Reception at the Center
Feb. 23 Saturday
* 8:30 - 9:30 a.m. - A briefing about climate change and global warming bills in Congress presented by Dr. Stuart Jordan, emeritus senior staff scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
* 10:00 - 11:30 a.m. - Trip to the Global Warming Exhibit at the Marian Koshland Science Museum
* 11:30 - 1 p.m. Lunch on your own
* 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. Tour of Capitol Building
* 3:30 - 5:30 p.m. Tour the Thomas Jefferson Library of Congress
* 7:00 p.m. Dinner at Union Station
Feb. 24 Sunday:
* 9:00 - 10:30 a.m. - Briefing by CFI Legal Director Ronald Lindsay on the current state of our legal cases.
* 10:30 - 12 p.m. - Briefing by Government Affairs Director Toni Van Pelt on what's moving through the Congress.
* 12:00 - 1:30 p.m. - Lunch on your own.
* 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. - "Ingersoll's Life in DC" 1.5 mile, 2 hour walking tour. Bring your favorite Ingersoll quotation to share.
* 3:30 - 6 p.m. - Training session, lobbying schedule.
* 7:30 p.m. - Reception & Movie at the Center
Feb. 25 Monday
* Meetings with legislators, attendance of congressional briefing or hearing. Fly home tonight.

We all know that the progressives, the energy companies, Israel, and the massive engine of the Christian right have lots of lobbying power on capital hill. Where are we? If we want the wall of separation to stand then we need to stand on it and man the towers. If we want reason and accountability and the defense of free speech, free inquiry, and free thought then we need to push for them. If you aren't already, you can join the Center for Inquiry today.

California predicted to go to Obama!

The newest Zogby Poll has Obama up in the race 45% to 41% over Senator Clinton. New Jersey is a dead heat. New York to Clinton. Illinois to Obama. Missouri to Obama.

Get out and vote!

Obama is closing the gap!

Get out there folks. We need accountability. Hope. A progressive view that combines unity and pragmatism to take care of people and the planet and sidesteps the dynasic nastiness that a Clinton presidency would bring. Let's dumpy the sectarian nonsense that Bush brought us and get out of the morass in Iraq. Let's clean up the environment and work to correct climate change. Healthcare. Solid education.

Check the most recent poll data for New York and New Jersey and California too. Bring it home guys! Obama in '08!

Hide the truth. Cover the criticism.

The Orlando Sentinel has a piece up, "Is Ben Stein the new face of creationism?" about the new propaganda film, EXPELLED! Curiously, Stein and his cronies have chosen to expel the movie from the broader public for its first showings. They can't take the public scrutiny so they have to arrange little back-alley dealings with religious groups to lay a groundwork for the bigger public relations thrust later. They had tidbits at the Family Research Council meeting late last year. Now they're blazing a trail across America fighting the dogmatism of science. Utter baloney.

Don't they see that this isn't how science is done? You don't have journals like Nature, Science, Cell, The Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society doing stealth campaigns to secure the base. You submit to the rigorous critique of your peers to see whether what you've done might hold some weight. Have you met muster with your methods and analysis? How productive will this research be? Does it have important ramifications? Have you made mistakes? Are you blinded by your own assumptions? ID and creationism totally abhor this kind of rigor. So they create stealth campaigns.

At the Orlando showing they tried to recant the invitation for the reviewer and get him to sign a "statement of confidentiality." Clearly the writer didn't do it. He writes:

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics. Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution by pitching this argument in terms of academic freedom. "Legitimate" learned scientists are being silenced by the Darwinian cabal of thought police. Says Stein.

He uses anecdotes from a few Fox-over-publicized cases of people who claim to have lost tenure/their jobs/their position in the scientific world for daring to suggest the hand of a supernatural being in the creation of life. He hasn't a scintilla of proof of, well, anything. Then he has the audacity to whine, "Where's the data" when questioning cellular biologists and other real scientists who build their lives around doubt, and finding testable, legitimate answers to those doubts. Where's YOUR data, Ben?

Exactly. They pull out Sternberg and Gonzalez whose credentials have been hammered at all over the blogosphere and in papers from Washington to Florida to show that academic freedom is being trodden upon by the cult of Darwin. Pay no attention to the fact that the Meyer article on the Cambrian explosion that landed Sternberg in his mess was disavowed by Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington after its publication. Never mind that Gonzalez has no positive evidence for the existence of the designer in his book The Privileged Planet and that his research output fell off a cliff while he worked on it. Guy jumped into the religion boat while he should have been working on the tenure boat. Behe waited. Why didn't Gonzalez?

But for all of the ID folks' chatter about how veiled "Darwinists" are, they sure are trying to cover their tracks. Notice that when the NOVA special on the Dover trial came out, they didn't stealth it. If there is truth in this, show it to us all. Not just the religious choir.

Justice Louis Brandeis said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." How about some sun then Ben?

The messy business of science

So when you deal with science, you know that you're dealing with competitive claims. I have posted some stuff by Aaron Filler in the last month or so. But the sudden steps that he has argued for might not be so likely. I had talked last week to an anthropologist at Penn State and he was skeptical. He talked to others. They're all skeptical of Filler's claims. Lots of people are.

Seems that Jerry Coyne would be too at Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom. He doesn't address Filler but rather he takes on Olivia Judson's argument about "hopeful monsters." Coyne's an ace writer and fantastic at explaining advanced concepts in simple terms. Enjoy.

New issue of Voices

The monthly paper I work for, Voices of Central Pennsylvania is out. I run the Community and Lifestyles section and wrote for the Arts and Entertainment section this month including two book reviews. One is on Ken Hull's going Local! (get it!) and Matthew Chapman's 40 Days and 40 Nights about the Dover trial. We also have a piece in on noted religious skeptic, Nebula-award-winner, and State College resident James Morrow's new book The Philosopher's Apprentice.

Sometimes you can't even make this stuff up

Over at the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research they have one of the greatest articles up I've ever seen on Flood "geology." "Mantle Rotation and the Flood" exceeds all expectations. The vapor canopy has officially been superseded by this incredible piece of nonsense.

After covering the name and parameters of a computer program designed to "the natural processes of our world" the author tells us that the program, named Epiphany, written by and ICR fellow, can model some pretty scientific sciencey science models for what might have happened to the earth's crust and mantle during the Flood. Too bad they don't make any sense.

One recent Epiphany project has explored the possibility that during the year of the Genesis Flood, the mantle and crust of the earth became rotationally unstable and rotated a few dozen times about an axis perpendicular to the earth's spin axis. (The earth's dense core, because the liquid outer core is only weakly coupled to the mantle, would not have participated in this auxiliary rotation.) The earth's rotation is described by the same equations that describe the motions of a gyroscope--the so-called Euler equations.

You got that? The earth's mantle and crust basically came loose and rotated perpendicular to the regular rotation. So the core went in its standard progression to the east and the crust rotated north? At this point, I am totally baffled. This is one of the most totally bizarre ideas I have ever read. Granted, quantum mechanics can be pretty strange, and the vapor canopy argument had kind of made my head spin but this takes the cake.

There are two reasons that this possible rotational behavior is important to understanding the Genesis Flood. First, it results in large-amplitude tsunami-like waves that sweep over the continents, which could explain the extensive sediment layers in the portion of the geologic record associated with the Flood. Second, such rotations potentially explain the record of magnetic polarity reversals observed in lava flows on the flanks of continental volcanoes, in the alternating directions of magnetization in basaltic rocks on either side of spreading ridges on the world's seafloors, and also in the orientations of grains of magnetic minerals in sediments extracted from drill cores into the ocean bottom. If such auxiliary rotation occurred during the Flood, the alternating directions of rock magnetization would be a result of the mantle and crust rotating with respect to a magnetic field with a fixed polarity and orientation. This is in contrast to the standard understanding that the alternating directions of magnetization are a consequence of changes in polarity of the field itself via complex dynamo processes within the core. Up to now, creationist scientists have had difficulty understanding how polarity reversals in the core could take place rapidly enough to fit within the time scale of the Flood.

Nothing in nature could lead you to such a thing. In the article they try to prop it up because the magnetic field flips and that there is uneven distribution of sediment on the earth's surface. Never mind the two places on the earth where the geological column goes the whole way down. But pay no attention to that or the reasonable explanations of uniform erosion, plate tectonics, or detected catastrophes like that asteroid that hit the Yucatan ca. 65 mya. Those explanations, which are parsimonious in comparison, don't hold up the bronze age myths.

So the article says that this shift in the mantle and crust would create tsunamis. Hell, I'm not a geologist or meteorologist but I can agree. But on what scale?

The kind of heat generated by such an event must have been beyond anything we've ever detected. The extinction events would have left traces that we would still see and would be easily detectable and there is no way that a piddly 300 cubit boat would survive either the tidal forces or the heat. We couldn't make that craft today.

What forces stopped this shift? Why one year? Why are there cities and settlement across the globe that apparently survived this event? This thing creates way more questions that it does answers. Well...it actually answers nothing so of course we should reject it. These people are endlessly chasing ghosts in labyrinths.

What boggles the mind is that people who hold onto this belief in an all powerful god are trying to make that god so small by quantifying him. Does he work in mysterious ways or not? The more they try to prove that their lord works within nature in such human ways they only show how much they have anthropomorphized the universe and are, in a strange way, as much a naturalist as I am.

What?

The more they try to chalk the workings of their creator's actions up to material causes the more they appeal to the material universe. So long as they can get the natural world to align with their theological claims, the more comfortable they are. But look at how much time and energy they put into it trying to show, through failed science, that the material universe holds up their claims. Maybe they should just give it up, get out Occam's Razor, and really ask nature some questions.

Really? Guitar playing at it's most insane`

I don't even know what to do with this except gawk.

Atheist interview

A fantastic interview and playset about the early 90s death metal scene. They interview Kelly Schaefer from Atheist (cool name eh?) and play some tunes that he apparently recommends including "Veil of Maya" by Cynic which might be my favorite song.

Check it out.

The DI gets a kick from Venter and Church

The Disco 'Tute guys are masters of rhetoric. Regular Greek Sopphists. Usually I don't much care that they are manned by lawyers and not scientists because I'm not keen on ad hominem attacks. I think a lot of people from various disciplines can weigh in on an issue and have important things to say. I know biology enough to read abstracts, make my way through books, and ask people who know what's going on what's going on. I've been a humanities person moving intp the social sciences. The 'Tute folks blow it and their most frequent propagandist is Casey Luskin. (You can link to his page from the Armies of the Night on the right.)

John Brockman hosted a recent event where some geneticists and genomists got together and discussed, among many other things, the complexity of the ribosome. It's posted here at Edge.

One thing I know about is rhetoric. Having taught it for five years, I've gotten a good idea of how people argue. And lawyers are great at it. Have you noticed the quote mining? Today's crap from Luskin works well.

He's constructed the idea that "irreducible complexity," the ultimate PR phrase, is justified because a guy who doesn't buy it says that a ribosome is the place to find it.

The ribosome, both looking at the past and at the future, is a very significant structure — it's the most complicated thing that is present in all organisms. Craig does comparative genomics, and you find that almost the only thing that's in common across all organisms is the ribosome. And it's recognizable; it's highly conserved. So the question is, how did that thing come to be? And if I were to be an intelligent design defender, that's what I would focus on; how did the ribosome come to be?

So Luskin takes the bait and tries to run with it. Having been given the merest shred of legitimacy by someone who finds ID vacuous, he jumps on it like a starving dog getting a scrap from the rich man's table. And he continues to play little games later, saying that Church "seems stymied to explain the naturalistic origin of the ribosome." As if Church might be considering another explanation at all. What is he supposed to consider? That aliens did it as Behe (at NPR via Free Inquiry) and the Raelians have proposed? That God or gods did it? That extradimensional robots did it? No. He is looking for something that might have actually happened and left a trace in the physical universe. We can suppose that aliens who Behe and the Raeliens know might have done something. That just backs up the regress though.

So Luskin has, as lawyers are wont to do, set up an argument to say, "Look! They don't know what it is! It must have been created...err...designed!" It's the god of the gaps. Over and over again with Luskin you find this sloppy thinking and skulduggery. They have no positive theory of their own and so they wait, like vultures, to feast upon the bits and pieces of people at the cutting edge who they might get some glory from for their rhetorical battle. Their inability to generate positive research shows their vacuity. They try to knock back evolutionary science by attacking each thing as it comes out and pretending that the whole of science that upholds evolution didn't come before it.