Behe and the Design in Biology: Part Two

In my previous post on this topic, I covered roughly the first half of Michael Behe's lecture on ID at Penn State. In what follows, I will finish summarizing his lecture, intersperse questions that relate to his points, and end with a final reaction and fun picture.

We ended last time by addressing the "structural obstacles" that Behe notes exist that might block, in principle, Darwinian evolution. (I'll get to this Darwinian business later.) He used the poster child of the ID movement, the bacterial flagellum, to explore "irreducible complexity" (IC). This concept is simple enough. Any IC system is defined in Darwin's Black Box as follows:

"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution."

Behe notes that we use IC machines all the time. Look at the mouse trap for example. It has five parts that work together to catch mice: a platform, a catch, a spring, a hammer, and a hold-down bar. This looks reasonable enough. Remove one part and you lose the mouse-traps function. Behe used the mousetrap in both parts of his lecture so we'll go with it.

There is a lot wrong with this definition and the analogy to the mousetrap. Mostly what's wrong with them are the facts that they aren't true. If you want a good first go at what's wrong with IC then take a look at Ken Miller's "The Flagellum Unspun," at some of the chapters in Why Intelligent Design Fails like David Ussery's "Darwin's Transparent Box," or numerous essays over at Talk Origins. I'll just very briefly note two things. First, in the years since Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box and testified at the Dover trial, there has been a fair amount of work that shows the possible evolutionary pathways that led to the bacterial flagellum including the Type Three Secretory System injectisome (TTSS) aptly shown by Nick Matzke. Three people asked questions about this and he tried to talk his way out of them but he couldn't say why, based on the definition he has written, the TTSS couldn't have been exapted and become a flagellum.

This is point two: exaptation follows from the discussion of the TTSS. Behe's definition does not take into account that structures are exapted or reappropriated for another purpose. For example, feathers may have started as a way to stay warm but now serve as flight mechanisms and for sexual displays. In the case of a bacteria's flagellum, you can remove lots of parts from the flagellum and you have a working injector like the one we find in the Bubonic plague. It has a fully functioning nano-pump that could serve as the basic driver for a flagellum. If Behe was right, the removal of all of those parts should be, by definition, non-functional. They aren't and Behe really has no response for it despite the fact that he's been promising for years that he would answer these criticisms. Last night he still didn't.

He did respond quite thoroughly to critiques of his mousetrap argument. John McDonald has purported to show that you can make a mousetrap with fewer parts, whittling them down from five to four to three to two and eventually one. If you want to read more about it check out McDonald's take here and then Behe's reply here. It's fun to read and think about. But there is a huge problem with the analogy.

Mouse traps do not reproduce sexually or asexually. They have no analogue for self-producing mutations that would or could generate a novel mechanism. We know that human beings design, fashion, and select mouse traps. There is no empirically verified external intelligent agent to the bacteria designing, fashioning, and selecting the flagellum. We do know that the bacteria mutates, giving rise to slight changes in genotype and phenotype, and that nature selects those things that make the bacteria fit. Simply stated, the mouse trap analogy is so laden with subjectivity that it ends up kind of begging the question of design about any seeming IC system. Behe was questioned about this and admitted that the issue of replication is an important distinction but he doesn't really think it's problematic. I disagree.

Behe also said that there is a lot of evidence for design and little for Darwinian evolution. Once again, he quoted Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, "Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker." And as he did elsewhere, he provided no discussion of what the blind watchmaker thesis is at all or how evolution through mutation, natural selection, gene flow, and genetic drift could result in the biological structures around us. The Blind Watchmaker is a 400+ page book with a breathtaking explanation of how complexity emerges from such simple processes. Behe paid it no mind at all. Really, it was a shameful caricature.

To this end, I'd like to note that he never defined intelligent design. He referred a great deal to "Darwinian evolution by mutation and natural selection" but didn't care to define those terms either. He assumed that people knew what he was talking about. Maybe they did.

After this, he responded to his critics. I collapsed the mouse trap discussion into the IC section above so I won't rehash. The bulk of his response dealt with Judge Jones 139-page decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover. Honestly, it was just a bunch of sour grapes because Jones derived most of his decision directly from Eric Rothschild's final submission for the prosecution. Behe, like Casey Luskin and others, complained that Jones had basically plagiarized his decision. This seems like it might be reasonable. It's not.

A judge might not want to say things differently than they were argued to her/him because s/he needs to represent the arguments as they were. To this end, we should expect that judges will be as accurate as possible. Accomplishing that goal might entail very extensive quotations. His decision represents the logic of the winning case. So it goes.

Jones listened to many dozens of hours of testimony and read hundreds and thousands of pages of submissions and depositions and selected the arguments that won. We hear complaints, particularly from conservative Christians, that there are too many activist judges interpreting things and legislating from the bench. I don't think that we want them getting too much into interpretation and reinterpretation. Jones kept his hands off of the arguments themselves, let them quite literally speak for themselves, and used them to form a well-reasoned argument that concluded that ID is repackaged creationism, that it is therefore religion, and that it is also not science. Behe would have loved to have had his side quoted extensively and had his argument lead the way to ID's inclusion in science classrooms. He didn't.

Additionally, Behe did not substantively deal with the arguments that Judge Jones included. Instead, he went after Jones himself. He picked out some of Jones's statements from well after the trial. Jones said that some of the presentations at the trial were "mind-numbingly technical" and that "the highly technical scientific testimony [was] rapidly disappearing" from his memory. Of course it was. In the nine months following Kitzmiller Jones was listening to other cases and ruling on them. It requires a lot of work and all of that information gets overwritten with other stuff. That's what happens to active federal judges. I don't remember a lot of my students' papers from last year. I don't think that I am of low intelligence for this. It's part of being an active thinker and learner that the transient stuff is transient. Why should we expect that Jones would be able to recall the "highly technical" information later? We shouldn't. Instead we expect that he should be able to sift through a lot of information, evaluate it, and rule accordingly. He did that.

Behe didn't like it. And just to show his persecution complex, Behe compared himself to the main character in Franz Kafka's The Trial. Once again: sour grapes.

During Q & A a few questions came up worth noting. Some people asked how IC can be tested. He said two things: 1. ID is not opposed to evolution and that he in fact accepts common descent and the age of the earth and universe as currently measured by physicists. 2. The claim is falsifiable if someone were to get some bacteria to develop a novel IC structure. He talked a great deal about Richard Lenski who has been running the E. coli Long-term Experimental Evolution Project for about twenty years. Behe thinks that perhaps we should see a novel structure evolve. He notes that genes get dropped and other mutations emerge but nothing IC comes about.

I would have loved to ask, "Why aren't those intelligently designed? How do you know?" He doesn't and can't. You can't tell if there is actually some invisible superbeing tinkering with the bacterial genome while all of this is happening. Maybe all of nature is being constantly tinkered with by the intelligent designer but we just can't tell. That's why it is parsimonious to conclude that there is a blind watchmaker at work all the time - natural selection.

Anyway, Behe doesn't say why nor what conditions we should set up to create selective pressures that would effect these changes in E. coli. Another questioner responded to this saying that an organism as simple and ancient and well-adapted as the current E. coli would not be the ideal candidate for such an experiment but something more complex and prone to large morphological changes. This and three other exchanges on approximately the same topic went on for some time.

Someone asked who the intelligent designer is? He said that ID can't answer that question because it is outside of the scope of the inferences we can make. All we can do is say that if something looks designed then it was. What does he think? He thinks the intelligent designer is God but that it could be an angel, angels, demons, or aliens. Hey! Even Francis Crick floated the idea that we could be the result of aliens seeding the earth through a process called directed panspermia. Not many people actually believe that though.

Who designed the designer? How would we know. Once again, Behe doesn't know. Maybe that's for philosophers and theologians to figure out.

These two questions should raise some flags for us. The reason we infer design in human artifacts is because we know who designed them: us! We have no such empirical knowledge about flagella, cilia, or anything else. Dogs make dogs. Ciclids make ciclids. We observe them subtly change generation to generation. Where's the designer? We have to ask who it is. Saying otherwise is disingenuous. Everyone knows that he's talking about God.

I got the last question of the night. Cool. He said that this is all about scientific inferences. Religion does not guide this. But his colleagues at the Disco 'Tute are overtly religious in much of their writing. Johnathan Wells has admitted that he got a Ph.D. in evolutionary developmental biology to dismantle evolution. William Dembski has called ID the "logos theology of John stated in the idiom of information theory." Phillip Johnson sees ID as part of "theistic realism." How do you you not conclude that this isn't religious? It's full of God and Jesus.

He said that you can make a scientific inference that can have philosophical aspects. Wells and Dembski both have degrees in theology and so it's important to them. They are going to find those connections and make them and that's their business to do. But Behe is just a scientist.

Thus ended the presentation. Afterward, I got my picture taken with him and got his autograph. On Darwin's Black Box you might ask? No sir. On the David Ussery's chapter I alluded to earlier titled "Darwin's Transparent Box." Check it out! I thought he was quite a sport for doing it.

Having now seen Behe talk in person I want to wrap up some of my thinking on him for the time being. None of this talk in any way persuaded me that he is remotely credible as a critic of evolution. If he were, I think that we would see him performing the kinds of experiments that Lenski is doing only doing so to create the selective pressures that might generate the kinds of IC systems he thinks can't happen. He could also generate a whole bunch of other ID predictions and test those too and get a lab going and work it out. The Disco 'Tute has a $4 million annual budget. Let's get some research going.

But he hasn't and I don't guess that he will based on the utter lack of ID research out there. Their one peer-reviewed paper was thrashed for its faulty reasoning and there is no research to speak of. Search PubMed or Web of Science and you'll find 80-some articles that include the words "intelligent design" in them. Most of those are engineering articles and the remainder are scathing critiques of ID. No research. So what is this?

Just look at who invited Behe to talk. The Science and the Bible club. Not the Biology Club or the Anthropology Graduate Student Association. A club about the Bible whose purpose is religious. That's a fine club to have. I appreciate that they are seeking to understand something about their faiths and hoping to accord science to it. We are people seeking meaning and part of the modern condition of educated people is trying to figure out how our beliefs can and do align with science. So it is no surprise that they invited Behe because he has been so celebrated by leading evangelists and Christian publications like Christianity Today. Behe is a guy in a labcoat that Christians can use to prop up parts of their faith.

But we have to note that Behe's arguments have been thoroughly dismantled and discarded by scientists. There is no ID research program working on ID hypotheses. Why not? Because it can't generate testable predictions and it uses dressed-up ideas like "irreducible complexity" that are essentially an argument from personal incredulity. "I can't think of how X could have evolved so it must have been designed." Well, what's the designing mechanism?

Silence.

The designer's mechanisms, sans evolutionary mechanisms, are still the same that they were in 1802 when Paley wrote Natural Theology, when Hume dismantled the argument from design in Dialogues Concerning Natural Theology, when Augustine wrote, or when the ancient Greeks argued about design. God did it. Obviously, that's not a mechanism.

So most of what Behe and ID proponents do is argue against evolution. They have nothing positive to offer in the scientific literature of their own so they cherry pick and quote mine and decontextualize guys like Richard Dawkins or Richard Lenski. Instead of taking on any of Dawkins specific points or dealing with the substantive points of how Lenski has shown the power of natural selection, they make straw men and knock them down. Even their arguments against evolution don't engage evolution responsibly or cogently. So the support that Behe gives to the Science and Bible Club members is poorly done and has been and continues to be thoroughly refuted.

But even if all of this were thoroughly shown to the Science and the Bible Club, most of them would still believe what they believe because they believe that believing matters and that somehow their belief is true. It's not really about science at all. It's about faith and meaning. Behe tells them they're right. Sigh.

To close this out, I was glad to have seen Behe. It was interesting to be in a room of people eager to hear him, most of whom are believers. And I was glad to see science faculty, staff, and students there trying to disabuse people of their belief that Behe's arguments are scientifically legitimate. Most of all, I was glad to see people actively engaging their beliefs in a quite open forum. It pays to be thoughtful.

For a really different take on the talk go to the SENtinel.

Tonight: Matt Dilhaunty comes to Penn State

Tuesday night, at Penn State we are going to hear the arguments from Matt Dilhunty to see if the arguments for God are true and real. For all of Behe's chatting, this might be what it comes down to.

What do we believe? Or not believe?

In the last few years the "new atheists" have made a big splash. The Australian show Compass has taken a view. Have a watch.

Behe and the Design in Biology: Part One

As I noted earlier, "cdesign proponentsist," also known as an "intelligent design" proponent, Dr. Michael Behe (Biochemist at Lehigh University) delivered a lecture at Penn State's University Park campus, titled "The Argument for Intelligent Design in Biology." It was sponsored by the Science and the Bible Club, attended by about 200 or so people, and probably generally enjoyed. Behe began the lecture with a thank you, then moved into a lecture in two parts, and then took questions. In what follows, I'll summarize some of his main points and go over a few of the questions. The post will come in two parts, one tonight and one tomorrow.

First, let me say that Behe is, as I expected, a very friendly and personable guy. He is a pretty good lecturer with an engaging sense of humor that is augmented by his sort of unassuming stature (maybe 5'7"). There is none of the elitist sensibility you find in some other scientists or philosophers - whether it's Paul Nelson for the ID camp or Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennett for our camp. That's also not to say that an elitist sensibility doesn't have its place. But Behe is very good at being a down-to-earth, polite, and articulate person who can pretty agilely go from simple formulations of ideas (about which he isn't always honest admittedly) to rather convoluted jargon (about which I wasn't able to judge him because I don't have the requisite biochemical training). But I have to say that he is sort of disarmingly friendly and it definitely helps.

While the projector was being figured out, he thanked the Penn State audience noting that his brother had gone to Penn State and that he liked the Creamery Ice Cream he had. We have great ice cream if you're into it. The best according to some. It was a cold and windy day but the ice cream was superior nonetheless. Then we get to ID.

He wanted us to know that he wasn't representing Lehigh University. As some of us know, and he didn't tell us, his own department has separated themselves from him in a joint statement that says that ID is not science. His mother doesn't even agree with him and he was only speaking for himself.

The lecture that followed came in two parts. First, he presented the Argument for ID. Second, he provided some rebuttals to his critics. I should note that the arguments for ID are no different than those already found in his two books, Darwin's Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. If you have read those or his testimony at the Dover trial or the digested versions in The New York Times (three here, here, and here) then you know the arguments. They haven't changed much.

His argument for ID rests on five interconnected parts. First, it is not a mystical theory but a scientific theory based on inferences and inductions. Second, people all over the sciences and outside of the sciences agree that things look designed. Third, there are structural obstacles to evolution. Fourth, there are "grand Darwinian claims" that come from undisciplined imagination or "Just-So Stories." Fifth and finally, there is a lot of evidence for design and little for Darwinism. Strangely, on that last point, he conceded common descent of organisms which seems to imply the broad scope of evolution. Apparently for him, that is neither here nor there.

He supported these five statements by talking about his notion of a "purposeful arrangement of parts." This is to primarily address the second point regarding the appearance of design. He said that it is a scientific deduction. Later he said that it is an induction. He did not adequately delineate at which time he was deducing and at which points he was inducing but instead relied on the audience to think that he was in the know and knew the difference without having to show it. This is at least a little suspicious but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. If we start getting upset now, there is no way to make it to the end. I knew what he was talking about, but I'm not sure others did. I digress...

We all know that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck. So when we look at the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho we don't think, "Wow. Those peaks are really well designed!" We probably don't infer that the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire (pictured at right) is intelligently designed. But when we look at Mount Rushmore we say, "Ah-ha! Intelligently designed!" We might also add, "Ah-ha! Intelligently and specially created too!" Nonetheless, he asserted that this can be quantitatively determined in part through applying the criteria of irreducible complexity to it. Then he didn't really explain how. He came back to it later by talking about the bacterial flagellum.

To show that we all think that we see design everywhere, he quoted Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker (a must read) a lot. Dawkins notes that organisms and their constituent parts look designed and that biology is the study of things that have "the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." But what Behe failed to do here, and I find it quite disingenuous, was to explain adequately at all, how Dawkins concludes that these objects are designoid objects. I think that it is disingenuous sophistry to leave Dawkins so plainly misunderstood and decontextualized. It's a quote mine cherry picked from a book with a sweeping explanation of how natural selection works. I don't expect that Behe would give Dawkins his fair show but it was a kind of remarkable piece of selective rhetoric. Sadly, it is all too typical of ID proponents.

Anyway, why would Dawkins be wrong? Because, Behe told us, there are "structural obstacles" to Darwinian evolution through mutation and natural selection. Darwin recognized in The Origin of Species that anything that could falsify that "numerous, successive, slight modifications" occurred would bomb his theory of evolution. This is where Behe put forward his best bets for "irreducible complexity" which is tied to the "purposeful arrangement of parts" such that if we removed any part of the system it would cease to function. This is when he explained the workings of the bacterial flagellum in overtly mechanistic terms talking about the "outboard motor...pump...bushings...universal joint...drive shaft" and so on.

He took an issue of the journal Cell that devoted itself to molecular machinery as proof of design. Perhaps it never struck him that the proof there is that human beings can't help but anthropomorphize nature. Where we think we would design something then nature must have designed it in a purposeful fashion. We make "machines" with a "purpose." These bacterial flagella are like machines. Therefore, they have a purpose. Therefore, something like us made them. This is something of the chain of reasoning he purports that we should follow, the process of induction or deduction we are to follow (once again, which one we aren't told). If the purpose is motor motion, then what's the religious quibble here? Why are so many Christians involved? Hmmm. More on that later.

I will post the rest tomorrow. But for now, have a picture of me with Behe. An even cooler pic will show up tomorrow! Heh.
Pretty fun. I told you he was friendly.

Michael Behe: Tonight at Penn State

Tonight famed "cdesign proponentsist" Michael Behe will be speaking in 101 Thomas Building at Penn State's University Park campus. [Click here for a Facebook page on it.] He is being brought here by the Science and the Bible Club whose mission "is to research connections and relationships between science and scripture, to educate others concerning these relationships, and to provide a place for discussions/debates on these topics."

I am really looking forward to the talk tonight to see if there has been any progress on the critiques leveled against him since Darwin's Black Box came out. It's doubtful. He still hasn't responded to the plethora of problems with "irreducible complexity" and he only made things much worse by bringing malaria into the picture in The Edge of Evolution. I'm hoping that it will be an engaging talk and that we can ask some good follow-up questions. Perhaps I should ask him how old he really thinks the universe is; he's flip-flopped that a couple of times.

Richard Dawkins on anti-Dawkins legislation

When silly people waste the public's time and money passing anti-Dawkins and anti-evolution legislation, I guess the best tactic is mockery and derision. Dawkins strikes back. I love the dig on Ben Stein and Expelled.

The manufactroversy regarding the Penn State Atheists and Agnostics

Wow. Recently the Daily Collegian ran a story regarding the Penn State Atheist Agnostics Association called "Pasquerilla presence questioned." The Pasquerilla center is Penn State's omnibus spiritual center. Religious groups on campus can be housed there and so can the non-religious groups related to religion. Apparently a couple of people in a pair of groups are mildly annoyed at our presence there or think that because we are a non-religious group that we should be housed in some other place, like our union building.

This story quickly brought out a strong reaction from three different sources. Dan Farbowitz the current president of PSAAA has denounced the story as a "manufactured controversy." I'll say. When he and I talked about this, he was very angry and had marched down to the Daily Collegian to say, in no uncertain terms, that this was a sham.

Things have been corrected.

Farbowitz said he did not agree with Thursday's story compiled by the reporter. The reporter was a member of the Newman Catholic Student Association and quoted a fellow member who opposed the PSAAA's presence in Pasquerilla. The reporter's affiliation posed a conflict of interest in writing the story, according to Collegian policy.

"What the reporter did was take the views of two groups and parlay them into a story," Farbowitz said. "It is a very manufactured controversy."

Terry Casey, Collegian editor in chief, said the reporter has been suspended indefinitely and removed from her position as a religion and morality reporter.

Good. What we have found, in fact, is that most people find it fine or even cool:

Robert Smith, director of the Center for Ethics and Religious Affairs at Penn State, confirmed Farbowitz' remarks and said more than a dozen people have given positive feedback regarding the group.

"Individuals have commented to us that they really like that we have the atheists and agnostics here because it would make for a better exchange of ideas, which it does," he said. "They can't believe that we have such a group here at the spiritual center and they think it's pretty cool."

Smith said he has received no formal complaints about the PSAAA's presence in the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center.

That's great. I know from personal experience that members of Hillel (Jewish Life) and the Muslim Student Association are down with it.

But the cat had already been let out of the bag and the national spokesman of the American Atheists let our campus know in what might not be the most elegant or conciliatory prose I've read. His point in the letter is well-taken though:

In this era of growing tolerance and understanding toward atheists, it is understandable that those still professing to have religious faith to try to force atheists back in the closet -- or, in this case, into another building.

It's easy to develop some kind of complex as an atheist. We are the socially, morally, and politically least trusted people in the United States as measured by recent polling. There might be some other group out there - like NAMBLA members - who are less trusted. But the perception that because we lack a belief in God is equal to a lack of morality is built on mammoth misunderstandings and lazy thinking instead of empirical evidence or lived experience. It's easy for us to believe that people are so against us.

There have been letters to this effect. One letter states the following:

Further, why is the PSAAA listed as a religious organization on the Penn State Student Organization Directory when the organization clearly claims that "Atheism is not a religion?" Isn't all of this a bit hypocritical?

Could it be that they are only trying to spark controversy by placing themselves in the religious center on campus?

Hmmm. No. It's true that we are interested in stirring the pot and generating tense discussions. That is part of our role as outsiders who are radicalized by the nature of our position. Controversy is inevitable in some way. However, we are active explorers of religion and its many aspects. We probe them much more than most religionists do in our attempts to find something of value in them. Some of us do and some of us do not. I think to call us hypocritical is a bit silly.

But it seems that another writer agrees:

There is nothing spiritual about not believing in God. Thus, it does not make any logical sense for this organization to have a presence in a spiritual center.

We are spiritual people even if we think that the word "spiritual" need convey the supernatural. Neither do Zen Buddhists. Zen Buddhists are an orthopraxy but their beliefs are materialist and atheistic. There is nothing but the here and now and ideas about the supernatural are essentially so much distraction from living in the present. As spiritual, though not supernaturalist, people, we are keyed into the thing for which the Pasquerilla Center exists - the cultivation of spiritual life through belief, practice, or both.

He continues,

Why have a group that does nothing besides criticize religion? If you don't believe in God, that is your decision, but I can't see any reason to unite behind disbelief. Is it really that enjoyable to spend your time criticizing something that gives so many people hope and joy?

Because so much of religion doesn't make sense when it is examined closely, especially the toxic fundamentalist faiths to which some students are adherents. And some of us believe that the religious moderates of the world provide cover for the toxically religious and think there needs to be further reformation that could, though almost certainly won't, result in the decay and death of much religious belief. So, yes, it is quite enjoyable to spend my time criticizing religion even if it gives people hope and joy.

That something gives people hope and joy is not a quality of its claims to reality. I can believe that I have a group of invisible winged shepherds that watch my son all day while he is away from me. They watch him and protect him. They would come and tell me what was wrong if something were to go horribly awry. I can "know" that this is true and derive immense comfort and joy from it, write songs about it, write poetry and share this joy and hope with others. All of that might happen and it might drive my life. However, none of that indicates that my belief is built on anything besides my wishes shared with and by others. I can believe in a total falsehood and think it's wonderful.

But I don't and I don't think that other people should either, especially when people believe that the Earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, think that it is legitimate and moral for God to allow Jepthah to kill his daughter as a sacrifice, to think that might is right as it is represented in Job, to think that God was just for the Noachian deluge, or that using a human scapegoat - Jesus - is righteous. Those beliefs are factually errant and/or morally lacking to say the least. And I think that we should have a place at the same table to talk about our own and other people's beliefs.

As I've written before, I have some minor misgivings about the PSAAA having a presence in a religious center. The problem is that we are listed as a religious organization. As regular participants in the ethical and spiritual fora that the center provides we are actively engaged in and interested in religious life and parsing what makes sense within it and what does not. It makes sense, then, for us to be housed there. Clearly we have active "spiritual" lives as we search for meaning, value, and truth. To argue otherwise is irresponsible.

I'll let PSAAA member, Valerie Lute, finish it out:

Atheism is the lack of belief in god. That may not be religion, but it is a position on religion and it does address spiritual questions. Some of our members have spiritual beliefs that do not involve a deity, and many of us attend religious organizations both inside and outside of the Spiritual Center. In the past our group has been involved in the Interfaith Dialogues hosted at Pasquerilla where people of different ideologies can share their beliefs. We are in fact, very involved in addressing spiritual questions.

Exactly.

Fail Blog Wins

Bah!



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Science organizations crack the whip on Texas

After all of the nuttiness in Texas, fifty-four science organizations have sent the Texas Board of Education a letter urging them to stop messing with evolution (letter below). The board has been playing around with its standards and the creationists on the board led by Don McElroy have managed to play word twist and get some of the "strengths and weaknesses" language - a.k.a. Christian creationist apologetics hiding in politically correct language - back into the standards. As we know, McElroy thinks evolution is only one big plot to kill God. There is no scientific credibility to this at all.

If we value public schools, then we ought to value public knowledge. If we value public knowledge then we should use the most carefully arrived at public knowledge we have available to us. Science is the best tool that we have at arriving at public knowledge about how nature works. Evolution is the best scientific explanation we have for the emergence and proliferating diversity of life on Earth. Therefore, evolution is the best public knowledge we have on these matters and public schools should teach it. The Texas board, as a body working to disseminate public knowledge to the public, should stop impeding the best available public knowledge we have.

Additionally, it should astound any professional teacher or scientist that a board of officials who are not themselves classroom teachers should determine standards and curriculum that are opposed to the testimony and recommendations of relevant teachers and scientists. In some ways, this is like a state version of what happened in Dover, PA. Get some input from your teachers and then railroad them. The single-minded anti-evolutionism (opposed by the vast majority of Texas scientists themselves) must win!

The amount of work that has gone into testing, corroborating, and checking evolution has placed it as perhaps the most powerful idea in science. Short of a unified theory in physics, evolution will maintain that spot in perpetuity.

The letter:

A Message to the Texas State Board of Education

The undersigned scientific and educational societies call on the Texas
State Board of Education to support accurate science education for all
students by adopting the science standards (Texas Essential Knowledge
and Skills or TEKS) as recommended to you by the scientists and
educators on your writing committees.

Evolution is the foundation of modern biology, and is also crucial in
fields as diverse as agriculture, computer science, engineering,
geology, and medicine. We oppose any efforts to undermine the teaching
of biological evolution and related topics in the earth and space
sciences, whether by misrepresenting those subjects, or by inaccurately
and misleadingly describing them as controversial and in need of special
scrutiny.

At its January 2009 meeting, the Texas Board of Education rightly
rejected attempts to add language to the TEKS about “strengths and
weaknesses” — used in past efforts to undermine the teaching of
evolution in Texas. We urge the Board to stand firm in rejecting any
such attempts to compromise the teaching of evolution.

At its January 2009 meeting, the Board also adopted a series of
amendments to the TEKS that misrepresent biological evolution and
related topics in the earth and space sciences. We urge the Board to
heed the advice of the scientific community and the experienced
scientists and educators who drafted the TEKS: reject these and any
other amendments which single out evolution for scrutiny beyond that
applied to other scientific theories.

By adopting the TEKS crafted by your expert writing committees, the
Board will serve the best educational interests of students in Texas’s
public schools.


American Anthropological Association
American Association of Physical Anthropologists
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Chairs
Association of College & University Biology Educators
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Southwestern Association of Naturalists
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Understanding Evolution lawsuit dies

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Supreme Court has declined to take up Caldwell v. Caldwell without comment. Jeanne Caldwell alleged that the UC Berkeley (amazing!) website Understanding Evolution violated her constitutional rights by stating a simple point of fact: that evolution can be compatible with some religious beliefs. But since it doesn't comply with hers she took them to court.

Under "Misconceptions: Evolution and Religion are Incompatible" the website states:

The misconception that one always has to choose between science and religion is incorrect. Of course, some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science (e.g., the belief that the world and all life on it was created in six literal days); however, most religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. In fact, many religious people, including theologians, feel that a deeper understanding of nature actually enriches their faith. Moreover, in the scientific community there are thousands of scientists who are devoutly religious and also accept evolution.

This doesn't comply with my non-religious beliefs either. In some sense I agree with her as a philosophical matter. If evolution is true and real, then it obviates God as the designer and creator of life. There's not much left to do except be an impartial and uncaring demiurge or maybe be nature itself. Nevertheless, a public university stating the fact that many people merge evolution with their theism in no way compromises my ability to believe what I am compelled to believe. They don't advocate that position. This is a case of someone mistaking an "is" for an "ought." Some scientists are religious. Some religious people like evolution. Why go to court over this? What a totally misguided endeavor.

After the lower courts rejected her, she filed with the Supreme Court in January. They dissed her. Good.

For more round up go to the NCSE.

NCSE YouTube Channel

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has put up its own YouTube channel. Pretty rad. Watch Eugenie Scott explain evolution to the Texas State Board of Education or see the 1000th signatory to Project Steve - a guy named Steve Darwin.

Religious "Nones" on the rise

Check it out. The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 has been released. Guess whose grown even more? People who self-identify as having no religion, called the religious "Nones." Check it:

The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent. Given the estimated growth of the American adult population since the last census from 207 million to 228 million, that reflects an additional 4.7 million "Nones." Northern New England has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country, with Vermont, at 34 percent "Nones," leading all other states by a full 9 points.

"Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly," Keysar said. We now know it wasn't. The 'Nones' are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union."

One of my peers in the Penn State sociology program is studying why the "Nones" have proliferated. Are people more comfortable self-identifying as non-religious? Few of them are actually self-identified atheists or agnostics. However, "based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million. Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death." Is this due to comfort? Is there some other force in our culture that is actually eroding religious belief some? Is the change cosmetic or real? For example, have some formerly religious people become disillusioned with their faiths because of political entanglements? I don't know. I hope that Steve can discern something with a thorough demographic inquiry.

Think we have problems with noise pollution?

We have lots of noise pollution. Being modern homo economicus means that we are surrounded by a dizzying number of gadgets and doodads, many of which are frankly dangerous no matter how you parse them. And...they make a lot of noise. Cars. Buses. Planes. Subs. Boats. Lots of noise.

How do you think fish feel with the constant buzz and bang, swoosh and swang, and booms of homo economicus smashing around in the ocean with his machines? We have an answer.

From Observations of a Nerd comes the problem. Check it.

The atheist contagion

Paul Fidalgo of the DC Secular Examiner has an interesting piece up about how atheist marginalization is different. The discrimination against us might be different because what is different about us can actually be spread laterally. Hanging out with black guys won't make you black if you're not black. Hanging out with gay guys won't make you gay. But hanging out with atheists whose belief - or lack thereof regarding God(s) - opposes yours and can erode your own faith. Uh oh.

Fidalgo says, "To religionists this is a very real threat, and one that they have every reason to fear. And it is a "threat" they can trumpet when trying to silence atheists who wish to have a voice in society that is equal to that of their theistic neighbors." True. I am out in some sense to deconvert people or at the very least invite uncertainty into their lives. I am a vector for the meme of atheism and I hope to be quite contagious. The antibodies of the religious right exist to keep me at bay. Heh.

In Oklahoma, they don't like atheists.

Recently, the Oklahoma House of Representatives has had some anti-Richard Dawkins and anti-evolution legislation proposed to it. Yes. You read that right. Anti-Dawkins legislation. The University of Oklahoma hosted Dawkins as part of their Darwin 200 and Origin 150 celebrations. The author of both bills, Rep. Thomsen doesn't like Dawkins. He's mean and intolerant.

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

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

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

Why is this going through a legislature? Who legislates their personal gripes with a scientist and public figure? This is just sort of baffling to see someone use their public office to bash an atheist and defend his religious sensibilities. It kind of proves Dawkins's point that you can criticize just about anything except religion. Doesn't this seem like something from a political satire? Bill Maher couldn't have made this up.

But Thomsen didn't stop there. In the other bill, he alleges that the zoology department has been indoctrinating people into some sort of cabal.

WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded institution which should be open to all ideas and should train students in all disciplines of study and research and to use independent thinking and free inquiry, not indoctrinate students in one-sided study and thinking; and

WHEREAS, the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma has, as evidenced on the departmental homepage, been framing the Darwinian theory of evolution as doctrinal dogmatism rather than a hypothetical construction within the disciplines of the sciences; and

WHEREAS, not only has the Department of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma been engaged in one-sided indoctrination of an unproven and unpopular theory but has made an effort to brand all thinking in dissent of this theory as anti-intellectual and backward rather than nurturing such free thinking and allowing a free discussion of all ideas which is the primary purpose of a university...

Oh wait. This is a dressed-up version of the "Evolution is just a theory" game creationists have been playing for years. Thomsen just used a fancy shmancy term, "hypothetical construction." To bang it home, he accuses the department of indoctrinating people into "an unproven and unpopular theory" that suppresses free thinking. Seems he's the one trying to suppress free thinking by making a paltry blacklist attempt. And evolution sure seems quite popular among practicing zoologists. Where is the other side's research program? Then there'd be something for a university science program to debate. But there isn't one.

Zac Smith, a student for the OU paper, has a nice opinion piece up about the whole thing with a thoughtful reflection on how despised atheists are.

Americans find atheists a particularly repugnant minority. According to Gallup, they are more disliked than any other major religious group, with the exception of Scientologists.

Research by Gallup also indicates the majority of Americans would not vote for a well-qualified atheistic presidential candidate. Even a gay candidate, the data suggest, would face less formidable discrimination.

But what is it about atheists that makes the American public revile them so intensely?

Nice to know that someone there is engaging in a real discussion of diversity and intolerance.

Florida is at it again. And it was already bad!

This is an extensive revision of a Florida bill I had misread. In my excitement to go after the anti-evolution statute contained in SB2396, I got ahead of myself and was, luckily corrected by Glenn Branch at NCSE. [Hangs head a bit but feels glad to be corrected.]

The bill wants to amend Florida's s. 1003.42, F.S. which calls for reinvigorating efficient and faithful teaching from "the books and materials required to [] meet the highest standards for professionalism and historic accuracy, following the prescribed courses of study, and employing approved methods of instruction[.]" In general, this seems to have the students' and the state's best interests at heart by holding to high standards and an adherence to curriculum that are both professional and accurate. Additionally, we might assume that whatever follows will be done in a manner that adheres, or at least attempts to adhere, to the best methods available to any given teacher. Reading the statute with the added "critical analysis" language about evolution, this segment reads like a preemptive disarm of the reader. All seems well. But what follows is an unfortunate exercise in the power of politicians to create narrow ideological education.

Floridian schooling as told by s. 1003.42 is already a pretty awful bag of anti-social reconstructive education, American Christian revisionism (a.k.a. American Christo-fascism and Dominionism), abstinence-only education, Holocaust education, and values education that emphasizes patriotism (see revisionism above). There are a few additions only one of which I will focus on here. It, of course, regards evolution. Following that, I will take a harsh look at the section on the Holocaust. Then I will conclude with some short remarks.

I.

Section (a) is an addition to the existing language and clearly attempts to undermine evolution education. It wants to implement "(a) A thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution." As I and many others have noted before (not the least of whom are Judge Jones and the National Center for Science Education), these "critical analysis" bills are ways of sneaking creationism into the public school science classrooms. Last year, the Florida legislature played this game with a so-called "academic freedom" bill SB2692 put forward by Sen. Ronda Storms. She was responding to reinvigorated attempts to create good evolution education in Florida. Luckily, the bill died as it should have. The new Florida bill SB2396 seems a descendant of last year's bill with a similar goal but with much less verbiage.

If we consider the current state of scientific literature regarding the theory of evolution, we find the elements of criticism to be narrow and specialized in such a way as to lie beyond the purview of all but the most well-informed high school students who have taken time themselves to immerse themselves in literature that, frankly, eludes most of their teachers. The critical analysis of evolution bandied back and forth among evolutionary scientists over the last 15 years has been about the relative effect of one mechanism among many - natural selection, genetic drift, geographic isolation, mutation, etc. - and how powerful each might affect such things as speciation.

These are interesting topics. Smart and motivated students might well make a project about something as involved as the sympatric speciation of cichlids in Lake Malawi (that link has about 1450 sources on this one topic!). How have the fish evolved into each of those niches and with what force has any given evolutionary mechanism played into the evolution of any single cichlid species? That's a lot of work beyond the scope of what the average biology teacher can or will do in a 9th or 10th grade class especially regarding evolution. A student perusing that literature would find researchers squabbling over details. It is a null possibility that they are going to find a creationist/ID hypothesis in any of that literature or anything questioning whether or not the cichlids. In fact, they would find exactly the opposite: that cichlids are exemplars of evolution. A critical analysis of the literature, already done by numerous researchers and authors with years of experience studying biology finds that evolution is extraordinarily robust.

The general hope of such a bill's proponents is to sneak some form of creationism into the public school system. All of the proposed bills thus far that contain "critical analysis" language come from creationist individuals or organizations like the Discovery Institute or affiliates of Focus on the Family, the Institute for Creation Research, or Answers in Genesis. In the last five years it has happened in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Michigan (trackback through the NCSE news for lots of examples), and I'm sure places that we just don't hear about. This bills seems to be no different from its predecessors.

II.

I will say that I applaud some the Holocaust awareness material in the bill. It reads:

The history of the Holocaust (1933-1945), the systematic, planned annihilation of European Jews and other groups by Nazi Germany, a watershed event in the history of humanity, to be taught in a manner that leads to an investigation of human behavior, an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping, and an examination of what it means to be a responsible and respectful person, for the purposes of encouraging tolerance of diversity in a pluralistic society and for nurturing and protecting democratic values and institutions.

U.S. students should be well aware of genocide. Clearly, the Nazi Final Solution should be a formative educational experience in how power and will united behind God and state can destroy people's moral sense and destroy nearly a whole people. It should lead people to understand the corrosive power of racism, ethno-centrism, pluralism, tolerance, respect, and responsibility. I wonder why Floridians are asked to stop there.

We might wonder why the bill doesn't go further and ask that Florida students also learn about how entrenched attitudes in German Christianity from Luther led to the Holocaust, the white Spanish and American genocide and displacement of American Indians including Seminoles, Mao's Great Leap Forward, the Soviet Gulag, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Turkish annihilation of the Armenians, the Rwandan genocide, or the ongoing atrocities in Darfur or Congo. We might further ask what role European and American governments and corporations have played in these places. That might strike a bit close to home though for American Christian ultra-nationalists more interested in projecting American power and supposed moral rectitude (it does mention contributions by minorities) than in actually examining the effects of our foreign policy and the easy misuse of governmental might. While I applaud the sentiment behind the bill, it is clear that by reading its other sections (sections b - i, t, and v) that the goal of much of this new plan is to inoculate students against some sort of anti-American virus with a hardy dose of "patriotism" as outlined in section v and continue an uncritical monologue about U.S. history instead of a dialogue about the character of our historical and contemporary practices. That would be a real exercise in character education.

III.

Florida, like every state, needs school reform. This bill is a further step in the wrong direction. Last year's shenanigans over so-called "academic freedom" should have shut stopped it but the armies of the night still march. SB 2396 offsets potentially good science education with religious canoodling. Unfortunately, Florida's school system already seems ideally set up for sectarian Christian revisionism in not only biology but also social studies as well.

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Once again, I apologize for the mistakes from the previous edition of this post. The devil was in the details and I am glad to be corrected. The general critique remained the same but its context needed to be corrected.

Who consumes the most porn?

This killed me. New Scientist followed up on a study that finds that conservative states consume the most porn. The lure of forbidden fruit is too much for some I guess.

What's the best part? Here:

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000.

Read the article here.

When creationists deal with climate change

Larry Vardiman of the Institute for Creation Research has a piece up, "Evidence for Global Warming." He takes a reasonable look (as far as I can tell) at three data to see if these data support whether or not climate change is happening. Thankfully, after having looked at sea temperatures, hurricane frequency, and the Arctic sea-ice he concludes that Earth has been warming for the last thirty to fifty years. But that's where the sanity ends because wrapped around all of the sane data analysis, there is some toxic belief.

Vardiman and the ICR are biblical literalists whose total view has to go through these glasses. So climate change might be a good thing. He writes,

"Global warming may affect some parts of our society negatively but would likely benefit others. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. Compared to climate changes which have occurred in earth history, a temperature rise of a few degrees is a small fluctuation which will not lead to a complete melting of the polar caps or another ice age. Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God's intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times (II Peter 3:1-12)."

It's hard to read things like this and not be totally outraged. Stating that the polar ice cap won't melt because of a faith claim is inappropriate and dangerous. We do have very strong reason to think that the polar ice caps will continue to diminish, that Greenland's ice is melting quite rapidly, that a piece of ice broke free from Antarctica, that icebergs are calving, and much much more. There are plenty of reasons to suspect that human beings will fair very poorly as a result.

The notion that Earth might be some Garden of Eden in the near future as a result of climate change is preposterous. More than likely, we will see something on the order of the Genesis Flood protracted over the course of decades as hundreds of millions of people try to move inland and compete with one another and with other species for food and water. That mass migration and its ensuing wars are infinitely more likely to be the conflagration of planet Earth brought on by humans and than by some Middle Eastern sky God. It is wish-thinking at its worst.

I rail against creationists a lot because of their denial of evolution. But this belief is much more dangerous. Believing that some supernatural being keeps the world's ecosystems in balance is insane. It does nothing to prevent us from consuming our way through the biosphere because it deflects responsibility, reason, evidence, and sensible decision-making. It is a side of faith that must stop.