Skeptico

Why Religion Really Doesn’t Have the Upper Hand over Science

There have been numerous anti-atheist articles popping up recently, mostly on Salon but elsewhere too. That’s their right, but you would think they would at least limit their articles to well argued ones. Or at least exclude arguments that have not already been easily refuted numerous times. (Admittedly that might not leave them with much to say, but that’s hardly atheists’ fault.) Case in point, today’s article at The Week by Damon Linker, Why atheism doesn’t have the upper hand over religion. Apparently this is something of a series from him, as he starts:

In my last column, I examined some of the challenges facing religion today. Those challenges are serious. But that doesn't mean that atheism has the upper hand. On the contrary, as I've argued many times before, atheism in its currently fashionable form is an intellectual sham. As Exhibit 653, I give you Jerry Coyne's latest diatribe in The New Republic, which amounts to a little more than an inadvertent confession that he's incapable of following a philosophical argument.

Except he gives us no example of how Coyne can’t follow a philosophical argument. Argument by assertion is rarely convincing, and is a poor start to his article. Regardless, what is Linker’s argument for how religion trumps atheism? It’s altruism. Seriously, get a load of this:

Or consider Thomas S. Vander Woude, the subject of an unforgettable 2011 article by the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. One day in September 2008, Vander Woude's 20-year-old son Josie, who has Down syndrome, fell through a broken septic tank cover in their yard. The tank was eight feet deep and filled with sewage. After trying and failing to rescue his son by pulling on his arm from above, Vander Woude jumped into the tank, held his breath, dove [sic] under the surface of the waste, and hoisted his son onto his shoulders. Josie was rescued a few minutes later. By then his 66-year-old father was dead.

This is something that any father, atheist or believer, might do for his son. But only the believer can make sense of the deed.

Nonsense. The theory of evolution explains this very well. Those who were prepared to sacrifice themselves for their offspring were more likely to pass on their genes, since their offspring themselves were more likely to live longer and have offspring of their own. Also, our ancestors lived in large social groups, and those who helped other group members were more likely to be accepted by the group, and were therefore more likely to find mates and reproduce.

The funny thing is that Linker has heard of this, but the way he refutes it shows he has not understood it.

But of course, as someone with Down syndrome, Vander Woude's son is probably sterile and possesses defective genes that, judged from a purely evolutionary standpoint, deserve to die off anyway. So Vander Woude's sacrifice of himself seems to make him, once again, a fool.

Linker seems to think that evolved kin selection (which is what he is talking about) is a rational decision making process. Linker is suggesting that the father’s thought processes would be something like: ‘My son is going to die. If he does I won’t pass on my genes, so I must rescue him, even if I die myself. Oh wait – my son is sterile. No point in risking my life then, I’ll let him die.’ But that is an incredibly naive way of looking at it and not how it actually works. What actually happened in our evolutionary past is that those who developed altruistic feelings, especially those feelings towards their kin, were more likely to pass on their genes (because they were more likely to save their kin from dying young). Consequently, altruism became prevalent in human populations and now many humans are altruistic, especially towards their kin. It doesn’t matter if some of that altruism is “wasted” in evolutionary terms. Altruism has an evolutionary advantage in enough cases, that the few “foolish” acts (ie acts that don’t actually result in genes being passed on), are not significant. Linker would know that if he had spent five minutes researching the subject (and perhaps even reading Coyne’s book).

Those of us who have been debating creationists on the internet for years have heard such silly arguments from commenters numerous times and are not surprised to hear them again. However, I think we have a right to expect better argued articles than this one from a supposedly proper news outlet. Linker has the nerve to say that Coyne can’t follow an opposing argument, and yet Linker shows quite clearly his own inability to follow a well known, simple, evolutionary explanation. Talk about an intellectual sham. Linker’s hubris can not be demonstrated any better than by just quoting the last line of his article:

Don't buy it? I dare you to come up with something better.

You dare me? You moron, I just did. Unfortunately Linker’s article doesn’t allow comments, so his “dare” is just empty posturing. But at least it keeps him insulated from the uncomfortable feeling of learning about his errors. Which is why he will probably keep making them.

Michael Egnor's Straw Colloquialism

I’m a bit late to this one. Over three months late, to be precise. But I came across this this piece again by accident last week, and was reminded how bad it was, and I had to write something about it anyway. Especially as I just found the follow up post (more on that later). I’m talking about Michael Egnor’s defense of Ann Coulter: In which I take up P.Z. Myers' challenge on Ann Coulter and Evolution. The main thrust of Egnor’s post is to reduce evolution (actually just natural selection) to “stuff changes and survivors survive.” Egnor says this shows that evolution is mere tautology.

Before I start, a reminder of the definition of a straw man argument: it’s when you present a weakened, distorted, over simplified or absurd version of your opponent’s argument, and then you ridicule that weakened, distorted over simplified or absurd version of his argument and ignore the actual argument. When you refute the straw man version of an argument, you may to create the illusion of having refuted your opponent’s argument, but in fact you have only refuted your own weakened version of it. For that reason, attacking a straw man argument is fallacious.

OK, let’s look at Egnor’s post. He writes:

‘Stuff changes and survivors survive' isn't a scientific theory

Well, no it isn’t. But then that isn’t what the theory of evolution says. What Egnor appears to be describing is natural selection (which is part of the scientific theory of evolution). The critical piece he’s missing is the bit about favorable traits getting passed to descendants. That bit is essential for natural selection to work. And it isn’t tautology. Here’s a more accurate, although still simplified, description of natural selection:

1. The genetic variation within a population of organisms improve the chances of some organisms to survive longer than others
2. Survivors survive long enough to reproduce
3. The traits that enabled an organism to survive long enough to reproduce, are passed to its descendants.

This isn’t a comprehensive definition. Point #2 should probably be something like, ‘survivors that survive longer are statistically more likely to reproduce.’  Point #3 should say something about the increased probability of passing on the survivor traits to the descendants – perhaps that relatively more of the traits get passed to descendants. Also, it is not just survivors that are more likely to reproduce. A stronger male might reproduce more than a weaker one by fighting off its weaker opponents. The weaker one might still survive, it just might not mate. But I tried to keep my definition as close to Egnor’s version of it as I could get. That way, it’s easier to see where Egnor is going wrong. I think my definition is good enough. But is it tautology?

A tautology is a formula which is true in every possible interpretation. For example, “all bachelors are unmarried.” So Egnor is right that “survivors survive” is tautology. But consider my more correct version of natural selection:

The genetic variation within a population of organisms improve the chances of some organisms to survive longer than others

Genetic variation also reduces the chances of some organisms to survive longer than others. Sometimes it has no effect. Point #1 therefore isn’t true in every possible interpretation and so is not tautology.

Survivors survive long enough to reproduce

But not all who survive long enough to reproduce, get to reproduce. They might still not find a mate, might get frightened off by stronger competitors, or might be sterile. Also, some organisms that survive for less time (without the beneficial genetic variation) still reproduce. Point #2 therefore isn’t true in every possible interpretation and so is not tautology either. Egnor’s error is to say just “survivors survive” (which is tautology) without the “long enough to reproduce” (or the “statistically more likely to reproduce”) part. The scientific theory requires “long enough to reproduce” or “statistically more likely to reproduce” because without that part, point three won’t follow.

The traits that enabled an organism to survive long enough to reproduce, are passed to its descendants

But some traits are not heritable, and so will not be passed on. Also, those that are heritable don’t always get passed on since descendants get their genes from both parents – only one parent might have the “survivor” trait. It is not tautological that any random variable traits get inherited. Point #3 therefore isn’t true in every possible interpretation and so is clearly not tautology.

None of my three points are tautological. And you need all three for natural selection.

At this point I refer you again to my definition of a straw man argument. Compare “Stuff changes and survivors survive” with my three points, and tell me if Egnor’s version isn’t a weakened, distorted over simplified or absurd version. And we know that Egnor is really impressed with this argument because he repeats it 11 times. So add argumentum ad nauseam to straw man.

But (as the infomercial presenters say), that’s not all. PZ replied to Egnor. He ends with:

Every study of evolution is built around specific hypotheses about mechanisms, not dumb blind counts of nothing but the living and the dead, but measures of differential reproductive success against some detailed parameter of their genetics. All those terms Egnor cluelessly throws around — "natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection, group selection, reciprocal altruism, disruptive selection, diversifying selection, selective sweeps, background selection, adaptive radiation, punctuated equilibrium" — have specific, different meanings, and do not reduce to merely "survival".

PZ doesn’t actually use the term “straw man,” but that’s what he means. But here’s the really funny bit: Egnor replies to PZ in My reply to P.Z.Myers: atheism is a small cup. In this post Egnor really surpasses himself. He has an almost brilliant response to the straw man claim, one I’ve never seen before: he renames it as a colloquialism:

"Differential reproductive success of variants in populations", which means precisely that "relatively more successful replicators relatively more successfully replicate". Colloquially, 'survivors survive'.

It wasn’t a straw man, oh no, it was a colloquialism. Brilliant.

Except, when you think about it, not so brilliant. A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday conversation rather than in formal speech. For example, “it’s raining cats and dogs.” The difference between this and Egnor’s “survivors survive” should be obvious. First, I don’t think many people (other than professional creationists like Egnor) use the phrase “survivors survive” to describe evolution. Second, and more importantly, a colloquial expression is not meant to be taken literally. So if “survivors survive” is colloquial then Egnor can’t use it to say that evolution is tautological. It’s as though someone looked out the window, saw it wasn’t literally raining cats and dogs, and concluded that it wasn’t raining. Of course, Egnor wants it both ways. When a biologist points out that “survivors survive” is not what evolution says, Egnor says, well it’s just colloquial. But when he wants to refute evolution, he uses it literally. Egnor needs to make his mind up.

What else does Egnor have? Well, in a masterpiece of cherry picking he refers us to Galton and eugenics (presumably an attempt to link evolution to the Nazis, although who can be sure what he is really getting at?), Haeckel’s faked embryos (irrelevant - early embryos do show many similarities) and Piltdown Man (a known fake from 100 years ago that was uncovered by scientists, not by creationists like Egnor). Egnor just ignores all the evidence collected in the last 100 years or more. I guess on Egnor’s planet, nothing must have been discovered since Piltdown Man in 1908.

Both of these pieces by Egnor are extraordinarily bad – even for him. Usually with Egnor’s posts, you do at least get the impression that there is an intelligent person trying to make an intelligent, even scholarly point. He fails quite often, relying on logical fallacies and ignoring points raised by his opponent (see especially the series of posts by Steven Novella dueling with Egnor on what causes the mind). But you do at least get the sense of an intellect at work, a measured, professional tone, someone who is trying to grasp an argument. But here you get none of that. Instead we have just the juvenile repetition of an infantile misrepresentation of natural selection, as though repetition and assertion were valid arguments if delivered with enough sarcasm. Perhaps that’s understandable when you consider what we now know to be Egnor’s prime source for his knowledge on evolution, namely Ann Coulter:

Well, nobody insults Ann Coulter without a reply from me. I love Ann Coulter (Platonically, of course). Love, love, love. She's basically right about everything, and the only thing I don't like about her books and T.V. appearances is that when she attacks atheists/Darwinists/liberals she's so clever that my sides ache from laughing. I still can't look at a picture of John Edwards without thinking of her name for him: 'Silky Pony'.

I have all of Coulter's books, paper and electronic (so I can always have her insights close). Coulter has more wisdom in one of her neurons than P.Z. Myers and his Pharyngula inmates have collectively in their telencephalons and diencephalons (I know, I know, that implies a materialist reduction of the mind. It's a metaphor).

Read that and consider the caliber of a person who actually believes anything like that. Rational Wiki quotes Scopie’s Law as “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately ...and gets you laughed out of the room.” I’d like to propose a new law – call it Skeptico’s Law, or Argumentum ad Coultarium if you prefer: “In any discussion, citing Ann Coulter as a credible source loses you the argument immediately ...and gets you laughed out of the room.” It would certainly save you a lot of time.

Casey Luskin Wrong on Tiktaalik

Casey Luskin over at the Disco-Tute’s blog is getting all excited about the recent discovery of fossilized tetrapod (four footed vertebrate) footprints in Poland, dated 395 million years ago.  What?  The Disco-Tute is excited about new scientific discoveries?  Well, yes, but only because they think it disproves evolution, or something.  Luskin’s post is entitled Tiktaalik Blown "Out of the Water" by Earlier Tetrapod Fossil Footprints, which should give you an idea.  Briefly, the transitional (between fish and tetrapod) fossil Tiktaalik was found in rocks 375 million years old, but these new tetrapod fossils are 395 million years old, so this newly discovered tetrapod wasn’t a descendant of Tiktaalik.  Luskin claims this means Tiktaalik isn’t a transitional form, even though it clearly has features of both fish and tetrapods (more on that below).

Here’s Luskin:

The fossil tetrapod footprints indicate Tiktaalik came over 10 million years after the existence of the first known true tetrapod. Tiktaalik, of course, is not a tetrapod but a fish, and these footprints make it very difficult to presently argue that Tiktaalik is a transitional link between fish and tetrapods. It’s not a “snapshot of fish evolving into land animals,” because if this transition ever took place it seems to have occurred millions of years before Tiktaalik.  [My bold.]

Of course, Luskin’s reasoning is wrong – if Tiktaalik is an intermediate between fish and tetrapods, then the discovery that this evolution also occurred earlier doesn’t suddenly magically mean that Tiktaalik isn’t an intermediate between fish and tetrapods anymore.  The evidence that Tiktaalik is an intermediate is still evidence that Tiktaalik is an intermediate.  Luskin doesn’t understand what an “intermediate” is – he thinks it has to be something on a direct line from (in this case) fish to existing land animals; it’s actually just a fossil that shows evolutionary change within lineages.  (It has features of both a fish and a tetrapod, so it shows evolution happening.)  Luskin thinks evolutionary theory says this happened only once.  But evolutionary theory doesn’t say that.  Transitional forms don’t have to be direct descendants of living species, they just have to be transitional between species (“cousins” of our ancestors, if you like) – that is, they just need to demonstrate evolution occurring.

PZ has a good post up, Casey Luskin embarrasses himself again, where he explains that Tiktaalik's status as a transitional form does not depend on us slotting it in a specific chronological time period as a link between two stages in the evolution of a lineage.

Why ID Is Useless

An interesting thing about Tiktaalik, is how Neil Shubin (its discover) managed to find it using a prediction of evolutionary theory.  In his post, Luskin quotes Shubin.  I’ll repost what Luskin quoted, but I’ll add a piece that he missed, from Zimmer and Shubin on Tiktaalik:

What evolution enables us to do is to make specific predictions about what we should find in the fossil record. The prediction in this case is clear-cut. That is, if we go to rocks of the right age, and the rocks of the right type, we should find transitions between two great forms of life, between fish and amphibian.

[…]

What we see when we look at the fossil record, at rocks of just the right age, is a creature like Tiktaalik.  Just like a fish, it has scales on its back, and fins. You can see the fin webbing here. Yet when we look at the head, you see something very different. You see a very amphibian-like thing, with a flat head, with eyes on top. It gets even better when we take the fin apart. When we look inside the fin, as in this cast here, what you’ll see is bones that compare to our shoulder, elbow, even parts of the wrist—bone for bone. So you have a fish, at just the right time in the history of life, that has characteristics of amphibians and primitive fish. It’s a mix. 

[My bold to indicate the bit that Luskin didn’t quote.]

Tiktaalik is undoubtedly transitional.  With gills, scales and fins it is a fish, but its fins, instead of having the many tiny bones normally found in fish, had fewer but sturdier bones in its limbs – bones similar in number and position to those of every land creature that came later.  Also, it had a flat head with eyes on the top like a modern amphibian, and it had a neck (which fish don’t have).  It also had spiracles (breathing holes) on the top of its head, which suggests it had primitive lungs, and it had stronger ribs that allowed it to pump air into these lungs.  Normal fish don’t need these because they breathe through their gills.

Luskin misses the point of all this with his “Tiktaalik, of course, is not a tetrapod but a fish” comment.  Typical creationist – scientist finds a transitional form (fish to tetrapod) and creationist insists it’s not transitional because it’s still either a fish or a tetrapod.  (Fish, in this case.)  Nothing would satisfy Luskin – regardless of what new fossils are found, according to Luskin they’ll either be a fish or a tetrapod but never a transitional.

Also, it is beyond question that Shubin used evolutionary theory to predict where he would find Tiktaalik.  He reasoned that if there were lobe finned fish but no terrestrial vertebrates 390 million years ago, and terrestrial vertebrates 360 million years ago, evolutionary theory would predict that you would find fossils of the transitional form in rocks around 375 million old (ie in between the two).  And you would find them in a freshwater area, since both lobe finned fish and early amphibians lived in freshwater.  So that’s where he looked.  And guess what?  That’s exactly where he found it. So evolutionary theory predicted where the fossil would be found.  Again, this all flies right over Luskin’s head:

The New York Times presaged Shubin's argument, first reporting on Tiktaalik that "the scientists concluded that Tiktaalik was an intermediate between the fishes Eusthenopteron and Panderichthys, which lived 385 million years ago, and early tetrapods. The known early tetrapods are Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, about 365 million years ago." But would neo-Darwinism have predicted true tetrapods from 397 million years ago? Definitely not

No, but then neither would Intelligent Design (ID) have predicted this.  The same way that ID didn’t predict Tiktaalik.  These new fossils were discovered by real scientist doing real science, not by creationists using “Intelligent Design.”  What this demonstrates is that science expands our knowledge while ID is completely vacuous and useless.  ID didn’t predict anything (neither Tiktaalik nor these new fossils) since ID is nothing but a bunch of ignorant whining about evolution.

Where do we go from here?  Well, clearly the creationists at the Disco-Tute will continue to miss the point entirely and claim that this discovery by real scientists somehow invalidates discoveries made by other real scientists.  Meanwhile, actual real scientists will use this new information as a springboard to investigate and learn more.  Philippe Janvier from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (reviewer of the paper on the newly found fossil) told CNN:

"The divergence between the tetrapods and their closest fish relatives is much younger than previously thought and it obliges us to find actual evidence -- skeletons or complete fossils -- in much earlier strata that could enlighten us between this divergence."

Real scientists will now do actual research on these new fossils so we can learn more about our past.  The difference between this and creationist poseurs such as Luskin, couldn’t be clearer.

Additional Reading

Jerry Coyne’s excellent book Why Evolution Is True has more on Tiktaalik and on transitional forms in general.

Roseneau Is Projecting Again

He’s at it again.  Josh Rosenau has another post up On accommodationism.  He ends with:

…I've occasionally used the term "enabler" to describe the folks who oppose whatever accommodationism might be.

(Sigh.)

I called Josh on this piece of projection before.

Think about this.  Considering a drug addict, say - which is the enabler:

1. The one who helps the addict get drugs, lends him money to get drugs, who tells him drug addiction is not that bad, tells him you can do drugs and live a normal life, would never tell him to give up, or
2. The one who tells the addict to stop doing drugs, says doing drugs is stupid, hides his drugs, hides his drug money, points to studies saying drugs are bad, gets angry at the addict when he’s high.

Clearly the enabler is #1.

Now, question for the class, which one (# 1 or # 2 above), by analogy, is the accommodationist, and which the new atheist?

As I wrote in a comment on Josh’s blog:

“You (the accomodationists) tell the addict (religious believer) that their religious delusions are OK and totally not inconsistent with science at all.  You (the accomodationists) are the ones who actually do enable the addicts (religious believers) by providing them with their drugs (reasons why religion and science are compatible).  I realize you are acting out of love for the religious people you come into contact with, but in reality, you’re making the problem worse.  That’s up to you, but you really should stop this dishonest labeling of the non-accomodationists with what you are actually doing yourself. It’s called projection.”

Of course, Josh is under no obligation to respond to what I wrote, to justify his use of the word.  But, if he’s not going to respond, then he should at least have the intellectual honesty to stop parroting this nonsense.

Buffy and the Enablers of the NCSE

Scienceblogger Josh Rosenau has a post up where he claims that there are other valid ways of knowing, apart from science.  Regular readers will know that woos make this claim all the time, which is why I think this subject is pretty important.  So much so that I wrote about the fallacy that is The appeal to other ways of knowing - the claim that the tools of critical thinking and science are not sufficient to evaluate the believer’s claim; therefore the believer's claim has validity despite the lack of evidence for it.  It’s generally not worth making a new post about this every time someone mentions it, but Josh, as well as being a blogger with the generally awesome Scienceblogs, is also Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), the organization that works to keep evolution in US public school science education.  So when Josh suggests that religion might provide one valid way of knowing, it’s relevant.   

Josh’s (first) post on this subject is On vampires and ways of knowing.  It was written in response to Jerry Coyne’s post How many “ways of knowing” are there? (which is how I found it).  You have to scroll down a few pages in Josh’s post before you get to where he starts to support his “other ways of knowing” argument.  If you read those two posts (especially Jerry’s), you’ll realize that what’s behind this discussion is the recent argument about so called “accommodationism” – the idea that science and religion need not conflict.  Accommodationists think that the “new atheists” with their harsh criticisms of religion, are making it harder to get people to accept evolution.  (I’m simplifying the discussion.  If you’re been reading PZ, Larry, Jason or Jerry Coyne, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)  The accomodationist stance does appear to be the NCSE’s position, although Josh’s post is not an official NCSE statement.

The reason for that preamble, is that before Josh gets to his “other ways of knowing” arguments, he takes a dig at the people who don’t approve of accommodation, or as Josh refers to them, “enablers”:

This is all part of the long and tedious battle between a clique of atheists who seem intent on enabling creationists in their muddling of the nature of science (enablers) and people who think it's possible for science and religion to exist without meaningful conflict (so-called accommodationists).  [My bold.]

He repeats this “enablers” wording later, and in comments.

First of all, you’ll note that Josh in no way demonstrates that the new atheists are “enabling creationists,” (he even says that they only “seem intent on…”) and yet he immediately follows by assuming his point is proven and henceforth labels the people he disagrees with as “enablers” – which is ad hominem, since he didn’t justify the wording.  As a further sign of his dishonesty, he doesn’t even use the much less pejorative (and more accurate) description of his own side, which would be “accommodationists.”  Instead he uses “so-called accommodationists.”  Weasel wording at best, and hardly a positive sign. 

More to the point, “enablers” seemed like a strange label to apply to the anti-accommodationist people.  It’s a specific term used by psychotherapists and the like, and has a specific meaning.  I looked up “enabler” in several places.  This one is fairly typical, where it defines enablers as people who:

…allow loved ones to behave in ways that are destructive. For example, an enabler wife of an alcoholic might continue to provide the husband with alcohol. A person might be an enabler of a gambler or compulsive spender by lending them money to get out of debt.

In this fashion, though the enabler may be acting out of love and trying to help or protect a person, he or she is actually making a chronic problem like an addiction worse. By continuing to lend money to the gambler, for example, the gambler doesn’t have to face the consequences of his actions. Someone is there to bail him out of trouble and continue to enable his behavior.

Looking at that explanation, it seems to me that if anything, the real enablers are the accommodationists.  Think about it.  They (the accommodationists) tell the addict (religious believer) that their religious delusions are OK and totally not inconsistent with science at all.  They (the accommodationists) are the ones who actually do enable the addicts (religious believers) by providing them with their drugs (rationalizations for belief in both religion and evolution).  They are certainly protecting religious believers from having to face the consequences of their beliefs.  I’ll leave you to decide which side is actually making a chronic problem worse.  Regardless of what you think, it’s pretty clear that Josh has made no attempt to justify calling his opponents enablers.  His argument by label is lazy and not a little sleazy.  And since he’s really describing what his side does, it’s actually also projection.  (Hey, I can do psycho-babble too.)

OK, so what are Josh’s other ways of knowing?  Essentially, it’s what we get from fiction:

…telling stories about vampires is a great way to convey certain truths about the world we all live in. These aren't truths that science can independently verify, but they are still true in a meaningful way.

No one should watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer they (sic) way they would watch a documentary, but they should certainly watch the show. It's brilliant, and it uses this exact sort of literary truth to tackle tricky subjects like drug addiction, spousal abuse, peer pressure, bullying, and the challenges of adolescence in late 20th century America with a sophistication and humor that would be impossible in any other form.

Oh dear.  It’s hard to believe a smart person could make such a bad argument.  He’s saying (and he further clarified this is the comments and in subsequent posts) that works of fiction tell us truths, make us think of things, or in a way, that perhaps we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.  Maybe, but he’s confusing a way of knowing something with a way of having it explained.  Reading fiction may be a way of understanding something – but it’s just an explanation of what is already known by some other means.  It’s not a way to determine what is true in the first place.

For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the characters gets so heavily into magic that it messes up her life.  Nothing else has meaning for her anymore, she lies to her friends, she puts herself and her friends in danger, nearly gets someone killed, damages her own physical and mental health.  This is obviously an allegory about drug addiction.  From this we learn that drug addiction is bad.  But we don’t know that drug addiction is bad from this episode of Buffy.  We know that drug addiction is bad from stories about drug addiction, from people we have known who were addicts, from reports on addiction etc.  We already knew this from some other way of knowing – one based on observation, verification and replication (aka “science”).  The fictional Buffy the Vampire Slayer just explains this – gets us to remember and understand these facts that were already known before by some other means.  But we only get the allegory, and register the fact that addiction is bad, because we already know addition addiction is bad.  If we didn’t already know addition addiction was bad, the allegory wouldn’t make sense.

Buffy also tells us things that are not true.  For example, that vampires exist.  And yet we don’t learn from Buffy that vampires exist - we already know they don’t.

Josh must know this, but he digs himself in deeper in one of his follow up posts, Defining terms:

To return, then, to ways of knowing, I'll define them as systematic methods of evaluating truth claims against new sources of knowledge

For once I agree.  But how do you use Buffy to evaluate the truth or otherwise of the statements:

1. Drug addiction is bad
2. Vampires exist.

You can’t do that from watching Buffy – you have to go outside of the fictional TV program, and check what they’re telling you against the real world.  That is, you must do some form of science (informally defined), to check what Buffy is telling you – to “know” what is true, if you like.  Therefore Buffy is not a way of knowing, by Josh’s own definition.

The peculiar irony here is that the talk Jerry is complaining about was delivered at DragonCon, a science fiction/fantasy convention filled with people celebrating the truth of unreal things. I didn't see Genie's talk because I was manning NCSE's booth, watching a parade of costumed fans wait in line to get autographs from William Shatner (James T. Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), Kate Mulgrew (Star Trek Voyager's Capt. Janeway), and Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard). These fans are devoted to the various incarnations of Star Trek, and were willing to spend $40-75 for just one signature from one of the Star Trek captains. And they don't all want the same signature. Some think Picard is the greatest captain in the Star Trek Universe, some think Kirk is the better captain, and a few prefer Janeway.

These, again, are truth claims…

Again, oh dear.  No, these are not truth claims.  These are opinions. 

In any event, science as a "way of knowing" does not produce truth. People have known that since the failure of logical positivism in the early 20th century; science can lead us away from untruths, and lets us narrow in on the truth, but science can only approach truth asymptotically, and rarely as any sort of smooth function. Furthermore, the truths that other "ways of knowing" aim to provide are of a different sort than scientific claims. As a scientific claim, "vampires fear crosses" is as meaningless as "Picard is a better captain than Kirk" or "The Cubs are the greatest team in baseball's history," and none of those is any more scientifically meaningful than "Jesus is my personal savior."  [My bold.]

Tell that to people who believe, literally, that Jesus is their personal savior.

"Picard is a better captain than Kirk" is an opinion only, not a scientific claim as Josh proposes.  "The Cubs are the greatest team in baseball's history," might be just an opinion, or perhaps it could be verified empirically by tabulating numbers of games won or lost, numbers of home runs scored or whatever.  Then it would be a scientific claim.  If it were, then it would clearly be more meaningful, scientifically, than the Jesus statement.  Either way, Josh is wrong again.

I like novels. I like TV. I like art. I like baseball. I think there is truth to be found in such endeavors, and I think any brush that sweeps away the enterprise of religion as a "way of knowing" must also sweep away art and a host of other human activities. I've tossed out the comparison before, and have yet to get any useful reply to it.

OK, here’s a reply.  Novels and art are not ways of knowing – they can be ways of explaining what is already known, ways to make us think, or pure entertainment only, but they are not ways of knowing.  So when we say religion is not a way of knowing, we clearly do not need to sweep away novels or art as a way of knowing, because they were not ways of knowing in the first place.

Novels and art do not usually make empirical claims.  In the rare cases where they do (for example, many people believe The Da Vinci Code is based on fact), those claims can be tested.  Where they are false, the claim can be dismissed, but that doesn’t require us to “sweep away” the rest of fiction that is just fiction. 

I hope those replies were useful.

Josh continued to defend his idea in comments, and in further posts.  (You should read the comments – most disagree with Josh.)  In one comment, Josh writes

How do we decide that some non-empirical ways of knowing are OK, while others are incompatible with science?

The only basis Coyne offers, and the only one I can recall being offered by other enablers, is that religion and science are incompatible because religions can make false empirical claims.

No, that’s not it.  The problem with religious ways of knowing are:

1. There is no basis for making most religious claims.  They were essentially made up, usually by ignorant ancient peoples with no idea of how the world actually works.  Some of these claims are actually known to be wrong, and
2. There is no mechanism to change religious claims when new information is discovered that shows they were wrong.  On the contrary, religious believers go to great lengths to cherry pick the things that they think supports their position, while ignoring what contradicts it.  And then they lie about the whole thing.

Obviously, science works in the exact opposite way from points 1 and 2 above.  It’s disturbing that someone who works for the NCSE (and blogs at Scienceblogs) doesn’t know this.

Jerry Coyne ends his post with:

As for “ways of knowing,” my response is always, “What do you find out? What do you “know”?  And how would you know if you were wrong? Was Jesus the son of God?  Christians’ “way of knowing” tells them, “Yes, of course!” But Islamic “ways of knowing” say, “No, of course not, and you’ll burn in hell if you believe that.”  Revelation, dogma, and scripture are not in fact ways of knowing; they are ways of believing.  There are no “truths” that religion can produce which are independent of truths derived from secular reason.

Precisely.  Josh’s piece is a totally muddled post relying on little more than equivocation between different things that can appear in fiction, compared to things you can find in religious texts.  He just took a blog post from someone he says is an evangelical Christian, and repeated that blogger’s points uncritically (and at great length).  It was such a poorly thought out piece that Josh wrote four more posts in the three days following the original one, to try to reply to criticisms raised in the comments and rescue the jumble of the original post.  Which wouldn’t matter if Josh were a regular blogger, but he’s Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education!  While he does state that his blog is not official NCSE policy, it gives a worrying insight into the way they may be thinking.

In my view, the only interesting thing to come from Josh’s piece was the insight that the NCSE and other “so-called accommodationists” are enablers – that is, they’re enabling religious people to continue with their destructive delusions.  Apparently it’s a part of being codependent.  (I didn’t “know” that from Josh’s post, by the way.  I had to check external sources.)

Other bloggers on Josh’s post:

Jason Rosenhouse - Ways of Knowing

Ophelia Benson - Ways of whatting?

Cargo Cult Religion

Several bloggers have commented on this article by Tom Stern about Ken Ham’s creation museum published in The Point magazine.  While Stern’s article was generally OK in its presentation of Ham’s museum as pseudoscience unsupported by facts, he spoils the ending with a false conflation of science with religion.  And although he claims he isn’t doing this (“Of course science isn’t a faith: it builds bridges…” etc), he really is and in a most intellectually lazy way.  This is what you find towards the end of the article:

I was taught the earth is four billion years old and, going around the Museum, I realized I don’t actually know how “they” know that.

This isn’t the tired retort, often aimed at Dawkins et al., that science is just another faith. Of course science isn’t a faith: it builds bridges, it puts Americans on the moon and finds extraordinary new ways for us to kill each other. But it has more in common with faith than either the religious or scientific community would like us to admit. For Nietzsche, this was particularly evident in the consideration of scientific methods: there’s something comforting about the repetitive rituals of the scientific and technical life, which mimics the priestly cure of the Hail Mary or morning prayer. And there’s something silencing, too, about the way facts are presented to the public—as fossilized nuggets of information not to be questioned. Where once we used to turn to the priest for advice and guidance, now we turn to the scientific expert; we bend to the stamp of his authority, his status, his style—compare the expert witness in the courtroom to the priest at the hanging.

So science isn’t faith, but Stern doesn’t know how we know the age of the Earth and Nietzsche wrote something about the rituals of science being like religion, and so science really is like faith, except it isn’t.  I find it telling that Stern finds the the time to mention Nietzsche seven (count them) times (why?) but apparently doesn’t have ten seconds to put earth is four billion years old into Google and find out how we know the age of the Earth.  (If he had, he would have soon found this nice explanation of Isochron Dating.) 

So what if there is “something comforting” about the rituals of science?  Many secular activities include comforting things.  The rituals of baseball are comforting to fans, the ritual of cooking a meal for friends can be comforting, the rituals associated with Star Trek fandom can be comforting to trekkies… you get the idea.  But that doesn’t make these things religions.  Or if it does it uses a definition of religion that is so wide as to be virtually meaningless.  If everything is like religion, then nothing is.  In reality, the “rituals” of science (which are not “rituals”, but procedures), since they are performed for a reason, are further from religion than the rituals of baseball etc.  And frankly, I imagine many of the detailed procedures necessary for many science experiments are more tedious than comforting, anyway.  So Stern is wrong here in at least two different ways.

This idea that science has religious-like “rituals”, scientists are “priests”, or “men of the white cloth” (lab coats), science journals are “holy scriptures” etc etc is something I have heard a lot of recently.  It’s old, tired drivel.  Science can be questioned.  And, amazingly, this applies even to subjects that Tom Stern does not fully comprehend.  Science is questioned by both scientists and non scientists.  Only, unlike with religion, there is a basis for questioning and determining what scientific theories we accept and what we don't – the evidence.  What do they use in religion to determine what to accept?  Well, nothing really, other than what some authority just happens to think.  They have no externally verifiable basis for determining what is true and what isn’t.  By comparing scientists to priests, Stern is just lazily looking at the surface – what might appear to be happening – without delving any deeper.  Then it occurred to me this is just cargo cult religion. 

In 1974 Richard Feynman gave a lecture at Caltech where he described what he called cargo cult science - work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing the things necessary for real science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. [My bold.]

It struck me that referring to scientists as “priests”, or science journals as “holy books” is cargo cult religion.  Stern is examining scientific things that look similar to religion and using this to conflate the two.  But this conflation of science and religion is cargo cult religion the same way as pseudoscience is cargo cult science.  It may have the semblance of religion, but is missing the things necessary for real religion.  (Thankfully.)  Although science may have the appearance of some aspects of religion, it is different in all the ways that actually matter.

Of course, in an ideal world we should not just accept everything scientists tell us, but should examine their arguments to see if they are valid.  But not everyone has the time or the inclination to do this with every claim they hear.  Stern himself is proof of this.  And even scientists cannot be experts in fields that are not their own.  But just because each one of us hasn’t personally performed every scientific experiment ever performed in the history of the world, that doesn’t mean our acceptance of scientific knowledge is like religion.  We trust what science tells us because science has a track record of being right more often than any other method of inquiry.  But trust is not faith, and trusting experts in areas where we are not experts, is not religion.

Few if any of the similarities between science and religion are interesting or useful.  On the other hand, the differences between science and religion are profound.  Stern spoiled what could have been a reasonable expose of Ken Ham’s silly museum by dragging out this discredited canard once again.

The Misreporting of Evolution

I occasionally glance at the Disco ‘Tute’s “Evolution News & Views” blog (which it isn’t, since they don’t allow comments), just to marvel at what easily refutable drivel they’re writing today. Usually I don’t bother to delve too deeply, but today for some reason I decided to click their linked article to see if it really said what they said it says. I concluded that their site tagline - “The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site” – still holds true.  Today’s article is by Logan Gage who writes Hello Evolution, Nice to Meet You, and it certainly misreports evolution. Gage is commenting on the recent “Seed” interview with Alison Gopnik, entitled To Be a Baby. His interpretation of what Gopnik said is:

Gopnik notes that the helplessness of young children seems to be an evolutionary disadvantage and thus would never have developed via the Darwinian mechanism

Note, children would never have developed through evolution.  Never!  So how come there are children? Intrigued, I clicked the link to the Seed article, where Gopnik says:

It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have [children] that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults.

You’ll note that “it doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense” is not quite the same as “would never have” evolved. Of course, factual inaccuracies have never stopped a creationist from making his point.  If you read on, you’ll find that Gopnik does actually explain the Darwinian process involved in the development of children:

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use.

Gopnik’s opening “it doesn't make sense” is just a rhetorical device that then allows her to provide the answer and explain how evolution might actually account for the existence of helpless children and babies. The answer is that there is a tradeoff – one that we humans are able to take advantage of because of our evolved child rearing tendencies.  Far from saying children would never have developed through evolution, Gopnik explains exactly how and why they could have evolved.  Gage continues to completely miss this point by concluding with this piece of drivel:

Rather than see the amazing design of the world, the Darwinian is forced to the absurd position of personifying "Evolution." Evolution intended this and that. And yet this rings hollow when you read the genius of child development which she ably describes.

What “personifying" evolution even means (or why the word “evolution” is in scare quotes) is not explained. Nor is there any justification given for saying that evolution “intended” anything – since Gopnik never even used the word “intended”, and evolution does not “intend” anything.  Typical clueless Discovery Institute sophistry, in other words.  To paraphrase Gage’s words back at him, rather than try to understand the amazing process of evolution, the creationist is forced to the absurd position of denying it, even when the article he is critiquing explains exactly how the observed world evolved. 

And of course, it goes without saying that there is no explanation at all from Gage for why the “designer” would have created helpless children who need the enormous investment of time on the part of adults.  How would “helpless children” be a prediction of design?  Surely an intelligent designer would have created children who are not helpless?  Once again, Intelligent Design is shown to be useless vacuous posturing, and the only reason for the Discovery Institute and its lame website is still to misreport evolution.

Melanie Phillips Wrong Again

One of the most consistently stupid “journalists” writing on the subject of science and intelligent design has to be Melanie Phillips. I commented two years ago on another horrendous anti-science piece of hers: Idiot Journalist is the new enemy of reason.  Now she’s back again writing in the Spectator, with a piece entitled Creating An Insult To Intelligence – actually a highly accurate headline considering what she wrote under it.

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was

nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

The court was”simply wrong”? What, because you say so? And why was Miller’s testimony “muddled”? Because you didn’t like it? Or because you didn’t understand it? In any case, the court was not “wrong”, simply or otherwise. The court was shown evidence (actually, virtual proof) of the link between creationism and ID. The transitional version - cdesign proponentsists – was discovered.

Put simply, the ID book Of Pandas and People that was discussed at the Dover trial was originally a unashamed creation book called Creation Biology. (You know it’s a creation book because it has the word “Creation” in the title. You’re welcome.) Just after the Supreme Court ruling against creation science in Edwards v. Aguillard, the Disco Tute decided to remake the book as an ID book, rewriting large parts of it to make it all “sciencey” and not creationism at all.  No, really. But unfortunately for them, they were in such a hurry to do so that in changing the wording in one place from “creationists” to (presumably) “intelligent design proponents”, they morphed the two phrases and the book actually included the words “cdesign proponentsists”. Apparently they believe in a designer but not in a spell checker. Hilarious. Click the NCSE’s Missing Link discovered! for a detailed explanation of what they did. Also, The Panda's Thumb's Missing link: “cdesign proponentsists”.

Whatever the ramifications of the specific school textbooks under scrutiny in the Kitzmiller/Dover case, the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science.

Which is funny, because cdesign proponentsists (excuse me) intelligent design proponents don’t do any science. Instead they write long whiney articles about why ID is too science.

Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

So how did the existence of this “governing intelligence” result in there being matter? According to IDists, the designer designed stuff. Stuff that could not have evolved. So after he had designed it, surely he must have implemented his design? But how did he do this, if the “matter […] could not have developed spontaneously from nothing” as Phillips writes? Didn’t the designer have to “create” the matter? If not, where did it come from? And if the designer did create matter, how is this not “creationism”? Obviously it’s not literal six day creationism, but who said creationism had to be literal six day creationism as in Genesis? Regardless of whether ID has its roots in religious creation or not (it does, but even if it didn’t), it’s still creationism. Clearly it’s more than just “design” (intelligent or otherwise). Somewhere along the line, the designer had to create stuff too.

The confusion arises partly out of ignorance, with people lazily confusing belief in a Creator with Creationism.

A bit like how people lazily confuse the appearance of design with belief in a designer.

But belief in a Creator is common to all people of monotheistic faith – with many scientists amongst them -- the vast majority of whom would regard Creationism as totally ludicrous. In coming to the conclusion that a governing intelligence must have been responsible for the ultimate origin of matter, Intelligent Design proponents are essentially saying there must have been a creator.

There you are - “there must have been a creator”.  Told you.

The difference between them and people of religious faith is that ID proponents do not necessarily believe in a personalised Creator, or God.

Well, yes they do, but even if they didn’t, it’s still creationism. It’s still “magic man did it”.

As a result, both Creationists and many others of religious faith disdain Intelligent Design, just as ID proponents think Creationism is totally off the wall. Yet the two continue to be conflated. And ignorance is only partly responsible for the confusion, since militant evangelical atheists deliberately conflate Intelligent Design with Creationism in order to smear and discredit ID and its adherents.

No, we conflate them because they are the same. If they want it to be science they need to do some science. Then they need to write it up and present it for publication in a science journal. Then have it peer reviewed, and stuff like that. But that’s too hard. Instead they just want to whine about how mean scientists are for calling them creationists. Boo hoo.

Casey Luskin's Junk Logic

Casey Luskin has a post up on the Disco-Tute’s blog, entitled Nature Paper Shows "Junk-RNA" Going the Same Direction as "Junk-DNA".  He’s read a paper in Nature that he thinks shows that junk DNA and junk RNA, may not be junk.  This is an interesting point, since junk DNA is often given as evidence of unguided evolution, rather than purposeful design.  And you know that’s his point because his post ends with:

As an ID proponent, I'm still waiting for Darwinists to let go of their precious "junk" arguments for blind evolution and common descent and learn the lesson that you can't assume that if we don't yet see function for a biomolecule, then it's probably just "junk."

To which I would reply, as an evolution proponent, I'm still waiting for IDists to let go of their precious "irreducible complexity" arguments for design, and learn that if we don't yet see see every step of how an irreducible complex entity evolved, we can't assume that it must have been designed.  Yes, Luskin was in effect calling evolutionists on an argument from ignorance fallacy – if we don’t know what it is then it’s junk.  Pretty funny considering ID is nothing but an argument from ignorance.

Of course Tu quoque is a fallacy too.  Unfortunately for Luskin though, evolutionists rely on more than just, “we don't yet see function therefore it’s junk”.  Luskin is wrong in his interpretation of the Nature paper, as Larry Moran explains.  First, let’s go back to see what Luskin wrote on the subject.  Quoting the Nature paper, he writes:

The article makes an extremely important point: "Strictly speaking, the absence of evolutionary conservation cannot prove the absence of function."

But Luskin has been quote mining.  Larry Moran quotes a larger part of the Nature paper.  Read this – note that the first sentence below is the only bit that Luskin quoted; he omitted the sentences that followed immediately afterwards:

Strictly speaking, the absence of evolutionary conservation cannot prove the absence of function. But, the markedly low rate of conservation seen in the current catalogues of large non-coding transcripts (<5% of cases) is unprecedented and would require that each mammalian clade evolves its own distinct repertoire of non-coding transcripts. Instead, the data suggest that the current catalogues may consist largely of transcriptional noise, with a minority of bona fide functional lincRNAs hidden amid this background.  [My bold.]

Now, whether you agree with that or not, you have to admit that the Nature paper simply does not say what Luskin quoted mined it to make it appear to say.  It actually states the opposite, namely that 95% of the transcribed sequences are not conserved (and therefore are unlikely to have function). 

So we have poor understanding of logical fallacies, and quote mining, from the ID camp.  In other words, nothing new.

Designed To Confuse

Someone called rbullock posted a classic piece or poor reasoning at The ID Report.  It's entitled Darwinists on Design: Jumping to Confusions.  Get a load of this and guess where it’s going (no prizes):

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

Imagine that you really bought the lie. You began to see reality not as circles and squares, but as circles and the illusion of squares. And suppose over time you trained yourself, through constant reminder that what you see as squares are not squares, but circles; you actually saw only circles.

Well, that would be pretty silly.  We have a very clear definition of a square: “a regular polygon with four equal sides and four equal angles (90 degree angles, or right angles)”.  Anyone claiming a square was a circle could easily be shown to be wrong.  More importantly, a group of independent observers could all pick out the squares from a series of squares and circles, with 100% accuracy, using the standard square definition.  But rbullock doesn’t care about this.  You know where he’s going:

The problem for Darwinists lies with the term "design". The term best describes everything we see in nature, but, insist Darwinists, it simply cannot be; The Theory will not allow it. Never mind what your eyes see, never mind what your hands touch, never mind what your ears hear, you must, as atheist co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick insists biologist do, constantly remind yourself that what you see was not designed but evolved.

He is saying living organisms are the (designed) squares that Darwinists are insisting are circles (not designed).  Yes, it’s an argument by analogy.  Except it doesn’t work because IDists have never been able to define how to tell if something is designed (the way a square is defined), other than “it looks designed”.  What they really mean is “it’s complex”.  But we know complex organisms can evolve.

He does have a point though.  Well, almost.  I cringe when people (and I think I’ve heard even Dawkins do this) refer to “design” in nature.  “Design” in my view has to have an element of intent – some conceptualization of the thing before it is built.  Evolution is very clearly how something comes into being without pre-planning.  By an accidental mutation that is then (ie after it exists) selected for.  Apparently someone else agrees with me, although rbullock misses the point:

The latest gift of Darwinian absurdity came in the pages of the gloriously serious-sounding Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research where Columbia University's W.J. Bock surrendered to an Orwellian coward's solution: simply eliminate the troublesome "D" word altogether. Rather than have biologists distracted repeating the mantra, "it is not designed, it is not designed, it is not designed," Bock's solution is to remove even the "concept of design" from all "biological explanations". Design is "inappropriate" in biology, according to Bock, and "should not be used in evolutionary theory."

I agree with Bock’s suggestion because it is correct.  "Orwellian" is misinformation or the denial of truth – in fact, exactly what rbullock is doing.  Eliminating the “D word” actually makes the description more accurate.

Biology can continue to operate (as it does, truth be told) in terms of design, and because there is no English word for "apparently-designed-yet-actually-unintelligently-caused" with respect to observed objects

Yes there is.  The word is “evolved”. 

Adesignists, including Darwinists who believe in God and theistic evolutionists (there is no practical difference) risk embarrassing themselves talking about God for one reason: to keep the confusion alive regarding the Darwin-busting fact of design in nature. Confusion is the ally of a wrong worldview, and those who deny design in biology, particularly for fear of the "connotations" of a designer, must rely on silly thoughts about God and dice as they spin their worldview in a whirlwind of illogic and ever-growing deception.

No, evolutionists talk about god because they know the IDist’s true motivation is to teach their religious myths as though they were science.  And talking about design that is not there helps them in their dishonest endeavor.  We should stop talking about design in nature.  Evolution is how life got built.  There is no evidence that there was any forward planning or conceptualization in advance (design) at all.

Egnor's Dualism Of The Gaps

I see Michael Egnor is writing more of his dualist drivel, in what was presumably supposed to be a rebuttal to Steven Novella.  It is notable that in his latest piece, Egnor again fails to answer any of Novella’s actual points, but instead relies on more of the same fallacies of logic that he relied on before.  I’m sure that Novella will have a detailed rebuttal to this “rebuttal” out soon, but Egnor’s arguments are so bad I couldn’t resist getting in a quick response first.  Egnor’s main point seems to be that his invocation of dualism to explain the mind, purely on the basis that materialism cannot (yet) fully explain the mind, is not a dualism of the gaps argument.  He starts with:

I must say that I’ve never understood the rhetorical force of the ‘God of the Gaps’ argument.

And this is the only point that I agree with - Egnor does not understand this argument.  (Although I would dispute that it is rhetoric - it's actually logic.  Strictly speaking, fallacious logic.)  Egnor goes on to demonstrate his ignorance of what the God of the Gaps really is, with this:

The God of the Gaps sneer is invoked to imply the inexorability of materialism as a complete explanation in natural science.

No. You. Don’t. Understand. The. Argument.  Not even close.  Dualism of the Gaps means that if materialism cannot (yet) explain everything then dualism does not get to be the explanation by default.  It really is that simple.  For us to accept dualism you need to provide some evidence for dualism, and pointing out that not-dualism doesn’t yet explain everything is not evidence for dualism, it’s just evidence of our own lack of knowledge.  And as Novella pointed out, you can’t justify a positive claim with a lack of knowledge.

Having completely misunderstood the argument from ignorance fallacy that he relies on, Egnor’s next argument relies on another logical fallacy – the one that in my experience non-materialists always come back to:

Dr. Novella responded recently to my post in which I clarified my views on the mind-brain problem. He accuses me of using a ‘Dualism of the Gaps’ argument. I’ve merely pointed out that the salient characteristics of the mind, such as intentionality, qualia, free will, incorrigibility, restricted access, continuity of self through time, and unity of consciousness (the ‘binding problem’) seem to be impossible to explain materialistically.  Materialistic explanations for subjective mental states are not impossible merely because we lack experiments or evidence. Materialistic explanations for the mind are impossible within the framework of materialism itself, because mental properties are not physical properties.  [My bold.]

Because mental properties are not physical properties?  Because?  This is where he’s going wrong.  And I’m going to overkill this explanation in the hope that even Egnor might begin to understand.  (And apologies to those who already get this point, but I’m going to spell this one out in detail, so hopefully anyone can understand it.)  Here we go.  This is Egnor’s conclusion: the mind is not caused by the physical brain, or (to put it another way) mental properties cannot be caused by material properties.  That’s his conclusion.  That’s what he wants us to accept – that mental properties are non-physical so dualism is necessary to explain the mental.  OK so far?  But he just said that materialistic explanations for the mind are impossible because mental properties are not physical properties.  The “because” means that what follows is his premise.  And the premise that follows (“mental properties are not physical properties”) is the same as his conclusion. The premise being the same as the conclusion is the definition of circular reasoning. He has just assumed his conclusion, namely that mental properties are not physical.  But he does not know that mental properties are not physical.  He provides no evidence for this.  He just assumes it.  It’s a purely circular argument.  He does not and can not know that mental properties cannot arise from a physical brain. 

The next bit is just pure assertion - he just asserts as if it were fact, what he wants you to accept:

Nothing about matter as understood in our current scientific paradigm invokes subjective mental experience. The essential qualities on the mind are immaterial. Invocation of immaterial causation that incorporates subjectivity seems necessary for a satisfactory explanation of the mind.

Yes, I'm sure that invocation of immaterial causation "seems necessary" to Egnor, but that doesn’t mean it is necessary.

Yet we know nothing — nothing — about how subjective experience could arise from matter alone.

And we also know nothing — nothing — about how subjective experience could arise from non-matter.  The difference is that at least we know that matter exists.  Where is Egnor’s evidence that his “immaterial causation” even exists, let alone is necessary to explain the mind? 

Dr. Novella is wrong to attribute the inference to dualism to an argument from ignorance. The exact opposite is true. The reason that immaterial causation is invoked to explain the mind is because we know so much about the mind and about the brain, and it’s evident to most people (that is, people who aren’t dogmatic materialists) that the mind isn’t material. It isn’t an argument from ignorance. It’s an argument from deep knowledge — deep knowledge of the mind and of the brain. The invocation of immaterial causation for aspects of mental states is the result of our deep knowledge of the difference between mind and matter.

This is the bit that Egnor doesn’t get – Dualism of the Gaps is an argument from ignorance fallacy because we know nothing about the non-materialistic explanation that Egnor wants us to accept by default.  It’s just a made up magic placeholder non-explanation that he thinks fits the gap of our current knowledge.  It’s totally fallacious reasoning.  On the other hand, the “Materialism of the Gaps” argument that Egnor is trying to make into a fallacy is not a fallacy because we know the material world exists. (Unless you’re an idealist or a solipsist.)  It is a fallacy to insist that your explanation must include some unknown entity that you just made up; it is not a fallacy merely to exclude made up entities.  Ironically Egnor then writes about the “deep knowledge of the mind and of the brain” – and yet he provides no knowledge about where minds comes from.  None at all – just the undefined and un-measurable “immaterial” causation that Egnor thinks "seems necessary."  But "seems necessary" is not the same as “deep knowledge.”  His “deep knowledge” is really a lack of knowledge.

The materialist argument is essentially this: ‘materialism is the complete explanation for the mind, and if you ask questions, you’re a neuroscience denialist’.

Now Egnor presents the straw man materialist.  No, the materialist argument is that materialism is currently the best explanation for the mind, and we have no reason to invent magic “immaterial” explanations.

It gets worse.  Egnor goes on to claim that materialism is in trouble in the scientific world, and to support this he (drum roll) invokes quantum mechanics:

Quantum mechanics, in many of its interpretations, invokes an observer in order to collapse a waveform.

LOL – Woo Handbook #9.  Actually really only one interpretation, not “many of its interpretations.”  And even if the Copenhagen Interpretation is true and not just a metaphor to help scientists get their head around what is happening, it is well known that the “observer” could easily be just the equipment, not a human being.  The need for a conscious observer is completely unfalsifiable, which is why it is not part of the scientific theory.

Egnor can’t resist closing references to some authority figures:

It's notable that many of the leading neuroscientists — Sherrington, Penfield, Eccles, Libet — were dualists. Dualism of some sort is the most reasonable scientific framework to apply to the mind-brain problem, because, unlike dogmatic materialism, it just follows the evidence.

Personally I’d be very interested in following the evidence for dualism.  Unfortunately, Egnor didn’t provide any.  Not a shred.  Instead all we got was:

1. Misinterpretation of the Dualism of the Gaps argument
2. Circular reasoning
3. Argument from ignorance (Dualism of the Gaps )
4. Straw man
5. Appeal to quantum mechanics
6. Appeal to authority

Rather pathetic.

Egnor Accepts His Woo

From Orac I just learned that creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has accepted the Golden Woo I awarded him three weeks ago.  This is the first formal acceptance.  In accepting his award, Egnor quoted my snippet of his words that I quoted as a justification for bestowing the honor:

There is no shared property yet identified by science through which brain matter can cause mental acts like altruism. Material substances have mass and energy. Ideas have purpose and judgment. There is no commonality.

And he followed with

So I win this materialist's "Golden Woo Award" because I assert that there are properties of the mind, such as purpose and judgement, that are not properties of matter. Furthermore, I assert that this is a problem for materialism.

Yes.  And the problem is just that – Egnor just asserts these things; he presents no evidence for them.  He also conveniently ignores Steven Novella’s rebuttal, that I also linked, that starts with:

[Egnor’s argument] is utter rubbish on many levels. Egnor’s basic point is that the material brain cannot cause mental activity, which is immaterial. But he does not establish that premise, he merely assumes it and his justification is nothing more than semantics. He then accuses material scientists of assuming that mental functions are brain functions, while essentially dismissing a huge chunk of modern neuroscience as “interesting” but irrelevant by falsely invoking the “correlation is not causation” argument.

First, he is treating mental function as a pure abstraction – but in so doing he is assuming his conclusion and therefore is making a tautological argument.

And in my experience, this is the fundamental flaw with virtually all the philosophical arguments around this supposed “hard” problem, namely that the proponents of dualism (such as Egnor) or idealism, just assume that mental functions cannot be physically caused.  And so ultimately, all their arguments circle back to (you guessed it) mental functions cannot be physically caused.  Seriously – I don’t think I’ve ever had a debate with one of these people without circular reasoning making its customary honored guest appearance at a crucial time. Egnor follows this with a hilarious list of arguments from authority figures from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle through Galileo, Newton and Einstein, all of whom, we are supposed to believe, agreed with Egnor. 

Sadly, there is no monetary stipend to go with the award as Egnor imagined, but then he wouldn’t need it to buy me the copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy that he thinks I need for the simple reason that I already have a copy.  And I have read it.  And, just as with Egnor’s writing, it contains not a shred of evidence that the mind is caused by anything other than the brain.  FAIL.  Still, if he really wants to spend some money on a book that might explain some things that he is obviously confused about, I humbly suggest this one.  It’s nearly a buck more that the philosophy book, but then you get what you pay for.

The Incredible Shrinking God

Prologue

The Date: Pre-historic times – tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Ug and Og are sitting around the campfire. They had recently discovered fire. “Fire good” they said. Well, that’s what they would have said if they had invented language yet, but their language was still little more than a few grunts. (Hence the names.) Or perhaps it had developed to something more complex. (Some think it had by then.) They certainly had big brains, just like modern homo sapiens, even if they didn’t have our knowledge. So they were curious about things. And they wondered why things happened. For example, they wondered why the Sun crossed the sky each day, what caused it to rain, what caused the thunder and lightning, why it was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. They couldn’t explain those things, but possibly someone, sometime, invented the idea of a God or Gods who magically made them happen. And lacking another explanation, they believed that these things were caused by God. “God mad”, grunted Og, as the thunder rolled in again. “Ug” grunted Ug in agreement. It probably seemed like a good explanation at the time.

Roll forward a few years

In ancient times, God used to be really powerful. Or at least, his presence was required to explain virtually everything that happened in the world. For example, the ancient Greeks believed that the God Apollo [edited to add: or possibly Helios] pulled the Sun across the sky every day in a flying horse-drawn chariot, and other cultures believed similar things about their gods. Each morning at dawn, God rose in the east, rode his chariot pulling the Sun through the sky to the west, to return during the night when the Sun showed only its dark side. Or so it was believed.

Similarly, ancient man wanted an explanation for thunder and lightning. Of course, knowing nothing about electricity, he decided that the most likely explanation was that lightning bolts of fire were being thrown by Thor. Something like that, anyway.

In medieval times no one knew what kept the planets moving in their orbits. Many thought that each planet had an angel to push it on its journey. Even Newton thought this might have been the case. Of course, Newton refused to include supernatural explanations in his laws of gravitation, and because of that we can use these laws even now to send probes to land safely on Mars (most of the time). Since “God” was not included in the explanation, man was free to look for other explanations for the formations of stars and planets and their orbits.

In recent years, “cdesign proponentsists” wrote that organisms such as the bacterial flagellum were "irreducibly complex" and could not possibly have arisen through unguided evolutionary processes alone. Despite this claim, we know that irreducibly complex organisms can evolve. “God” is not needed – even to produce irreducibly complex organisms.

The creationists haven’t given up though. Some argue that although micro evolution (small changes within species) happens, macro evolution (evolution to another species) can not. God is clearly needed to add the additional information to the DNA to accomplish the development of each new species. And Michael Behe, in his recent book “The Edge of Evolution”, gets into even more detail – he now writes that protein-protein binding sites couldn’t have developed by natural means, and therefore now this is what God does.

And that’s what it’s come to. God used to be responsible for moving the Sun across the sky each day. If God didn’t get out of bed and make this happen, there would be no Sun. Now, God is reduced to tinkering with bits of DNA. You can picture God in his workshop. All around him, clouds of gas are collapsing in upon themselves due to the force of gravity until hydrogen begins to fuse and stars are formed. Occasionally one of these stars will go supernova, creating the heavier elements. Over millions of years, some of this matter will clump together under gravity to form planets. And so on. Then, after a few billion years, God comes along and thinks, “Hey, I’d better create some protein-protein binding sites stat or this whole process will come to a grinding halt,” and gets to work. Pretty demeaning for him. (Although at least he doesn’t have to get out of bed every day to drive that damn chariot. That was a real chore.)

Seems a little sad for the God believers though. Their God, once so big, has shrunk to something so small. And what if someone comes along later and discovers that God isn’t even needed for protein-protein binding? (Oops – someone already did.)

The Intelligent Design/God of the Gaps approach is a dead end. If early man had taken Behe’s attitude we’d still believe God caused the Sun to rise and set, threw thunderbolts, etc. and we wouldn’t understand anything. Fortunately, not everyone settled for God of the Gaps explanations, and so we do know better. But why should anyone think Goddidit would be a good explanation now, when it’s been consistently wrong and singularly useless every time it has been evoked since the dawn of time?

Sarah Palin Proudly Ignorant

Yesterday, Sarah Palin gave a speech on the McCain/Palin plans for special needs children. And in it she demonstrated her ignorance more clearly that in anything she had said before. Which, considering the other things she has said, is quite an achievement. Get a load of this:

This is a matter of how we prioritize the money that we spend. […] And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good -- things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Research into fruit flies. In France. France I tell you! The horror. (The “I kid you not” was not part of the official transcript, but she said it. I kid you not.)

Palin's proud ignorance shines through loud and clear. The actual research she was mocking was into the olive fruit fly – a major pest that threatens California’s olive farmers. (I guess she doesn't care about Joe the farmer.  How elitist.) But fruit fly research is much more than this. The fruit fly is a standard organism that is used to study numerous genetic traits, precisely because it shares so many genetic similarities with humans. Including possibly genetic causes of some of the very “special needs” traits of children Palin was supposed to be supporting in her speech. Just a ten second Google of fruit fly research would reveal 1,390,000 articles explaining the many benefits of research using fruit flies. Avenues of research and benefits achieved already that are too numerous for me to list, although a molecular biologist writing in the Daily Kos yesterday managed to list quite a few.

Of course, such research only makes sense if you accept that evolution happened - that humans and fruit flies have a common ancestor. Palin doesn’t believe this, because it conflicts with what she read in her bible, and so she sees no value to it. And right there you have, eloquently expressed, the reason that creationist nonsense should not be taught as science, and why creationist idiots (some redundancy there) like Palin should not get anywhere near having any real power.  And I kid you not.

October 27 - Edited to add:

Bora has much more on this, including links to this response from UNC researchers: In defense of fruit flies and basic medical research, as well as videos from some actual fruit fly research scientists, and these additional links:

Mike the Mad Biologist
Evolgen
Napa Valley Register
Island Of Doubt
Pharyngula
Pandagon
The Tree of Life
Washington Post
Myrmecos Blog
KSJ Tracker
Hyllaballoo
Radula
Uncontrolled Experiment
Greta Christina's Blog
Bjoern Brembs
Salon.com
Life v. 3.0
Flags and Lollipops - Network Edition

I'm smarter than Palin

Egnor Attributes Scientific Progress to Religion

OK, so I’m a little late to this one. But I still think I have something to add. Well I would.

PZ wrote a piece extolling the virtues of science over religion in curing diseases such as cancer, and bemoaning the shortage of funds to support research. (And also bemoaning the money wasted on useless woo projects such as homeopathy and creationism.) The Discovery Institute’s pet brain surgeon, Michael Egnor, then penned what he probably imagined was a decent rebuttal - Cancer Research, Prayer, and St. Jude. A snippet:

I take exception to his claim that prayer and religious faith had nothing to do with the improvements in the treatment of cancer.

The remarkable progress in the treatment of cancer in the past several decades had a lot to do with faith and prayer. Myers misunderstands the origins of modern medical science and the history and nature of cancer treatment.

[…]

Advances in science and cancer treatment emerged, not from science in isolation, but from a culture that made science possible and that directed the fruits of scientific work toward good and compassionate goals. The culture from which science has emerged is Judeo-Christian culture, and modern science has arisen only in Judeo-Christian culture.

PZ responded, as did Orac and Steven Novella, so I don’t need to repeat all their points in detail. Obviously scientific discoveries took place in other cultures apart from Judeo-Christian ones, and even more obviously, the main contribution of religion to scientific discovery has been to suppress it and deny reality, rather than to encourage any new discoveries. Opposition to stem cell research on religious grounds is an obvious example. As is Egnor’s support of the Discovery Institute, a body that wants to deny evolution and instead promote the pseudoscientific idea of Intelligent Design. Egnor even denies that knowledge of evolution has any bearing on medical research – a view that if accepted by researchers, would without doubt hinder new discoveries. Egnor’s views are decidedly anti-science.

Steven Novella also noted that Egnor’s argument was a diversionary tactic. PZ had argued that science, not woo or prayer, has resulted in improvements in treatments for cancer; Egnor shifted the argument to claim that only faith and religion motivated those scientific discoveries. Well OK, he can think that if he wants, but hasn’t he just admitted that it is only through science that these discoveries can actually be made? If you examine Egnor’s almost 2,000 words, you won’t find anything that suggests science is not the best (or only) method for making new discoveries in medicine. And yet this is the man who would bypass the scientific method to teach pseudoscience in schools, and have researchers ignore the implications of evolution in their work. His best argument is that, well, er, science was motivated by religion. Really? That’s the best you got?

OK then. So my question to Michael Egnor is this: now that you have apparently conceded that only science will result in progress, will you publicly admit that we should consider only scientific ideas about how we got here, and disavow quasi religious ideas such as ID? No? I don’t think he will either.

I want to comment on one additional point he made:

The application of science to care for the sick presupposes the view that we have an ethical obligation to help the weakest among us. The atheist view of metaphysics — that the universe has no purpose and no designer and no transcendent ethical code — provides no impetus to scientific inquiry or to the compassionate application of scientific knowledge.

An example he uses is the claimed higher rates for survival of epidemics in early Christian communities, compared with those in pagan communities. This, he claims, was due to the care that Christians provided for the sick, and their refusal to flee when an epidemic struck. (In pagan communities, healthy people fled.) Assuming this is true, all this shows is that early Christians were better than early pagans. Or, if you like, Christian irrationality was better than pagan irrationality. Of course, preferable to both is rationality. By now we should have progressed beyond the world view of second century pagans, with or without religion.

Of course, Egnor’s argument is just the old “no morality without Jesus” drivel we have all heard and debunked many times before. Good people do good things and bad people do bad things, religion notwithstanding. But as someone once said, only religion can make good people do bad things. Egnor shows here that his opposition to evolution is not based on rationality, but on his religious beliefs. Which is great for him, I guess. But not something anyone else need take seriously.

Poor Babies

The Expelled nitwits apparently set up a MySpace page to promote their silly mocumentary. On it they had an online poll to ask readers if they thought Intelligent Design should be taught in schools. It seems no one was moderating the page over the weekend because up until this morning, 98% of those voting (over 400,000 people) voted “NO”.

Sometime today one of the Expelled twits finally woke up to this embarrassment and… (you know what’s coming) deleted the poll.

Aaah – the poor babies. Boo hoo. Couldn’t stand any dissent so they took their bat and ball and they’re going home so there. Wankers.

I took a screenshot of it Saturday when the “no” vote was only 273,000. I wish I’d taken another one Sunday now, but as PZ reports, the poll is still available here. And you can still vote.

Typical creationist liars and cowards. They make a film about how dissent is not allowed, and yet they’re the first ones to censor anything that dissents from their little fairy story world view. Expelled is right.

What’s Ben Stein Smoking?

I just watched Expelled presenter Ben Stein’s Thursday night appearance on the Craig Ferguson late night talk show. And I must say, it was strange. I was expecting him to talk about how “Darwinism” led to Hitler, and similar nonsense, but what he actually said was just weird:

[Expelled is] about the fact that people think that Darwinism explains everything and we want to say that Darwinism doesn’t explain the laws of gravity, Darwinism doesn’t explain the laws of thermodynamics..

and

We love [Darwinism], but it just doesn’t explain everything, and we don’t want people to be fired if they say the planets stay in their orbits maybe because of something other than Darwinism. And we don’t think Darwinism explains how the planets stay in their orbits..

and

[Darwin’s] followers claim it explains everything including astronomy…

He didn’t really give any other arguments. As I said – just weird. Which scientist thinks Darwinism explains astronomy? Which scientist would be fired for suggesting Darwinism doesn’t explain the planets’ orbits? Obviously none, but it was such an obvious straw man that I actually wondered if Stein realizes what a stupid film he’s made and is trying to distance himself from it – making out the whole thing was a big joke. It’s hard to believe even he thinks scientists are losing their jobs for suggesting Darwinism doesn’t explain astronomy (whatever “explain astronomy” means). Although admittedly with creationists it’s hard at times to tell their real claims from parody.

At one point he even said:

It is probably best to watch [Expelled] while high…

Maybe. Although I think it more likely they were high while making the film. Come to think of it, that would explain Stein’s performance on Thursday night.

Expelled – No Stork Theory Allowed

Ben Stein’s next project following his success with Expelled. It’s just a short clip. But funny. And it features Richard Dawkins!  Although who knew he was such a sex maniac?

Expelled Exposed

I thought I would add my name to the list of people linking to Expelled Exposed:

…a detailed look at the Ben Stein movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. We'll show you why this movie is not a documentary at all, but anti-science propaganda aimed at creating the appearance of controversy where there is none.

The site contains a list of links to reviews of Expelled from those who have seen it, as well as the truth behind Expelled’s claims, including the real explanations for those academics supposedly discriminated against for supporting creationism.

All in all, a great resource on the reality of Expelled.

Official – Complexity Does Not Prove ID

From Neurologica today I read this quote from creationist Michael Egnor writing in the creationist Discovery Institute’s website:

Complexity can arise without intelligent design, but complexity is not the same thing as design.

Huu-whaaaaa? He clearly didn’t run that by Michael Behe. Because, according to Behe, and virtually all other ID proponents, complexity is the one thing you can use to determine design. That has been their entire argument – life is “too complex” to have arisen without a designer. Now Egnor, writing in the Discovery Institute’s own paper, states clearly that this is not true. And I didn’t take it out of context – read the whole thing. Finally, Egnor says something sensible. Although one wonders how such a blunder was allowed to slip in.

I’m bookmarking that page for the next time some creationist insists life is “too complex” to have arisen without a designer.  “Complexity can arise without intelligent design” – official, The Discovery Institute.

Evolution Not Responsible for Hitler

This won’t be news to any rational people, but it may be news to creationists. And I know the subject has already been dealt with by numerous others, but this creationist post (also here – highlight the text after “spoiler” at the bottom), describing PZ’s recent expulsion from the creationist movie “Expelled”, describes some “specific content” of the film that I think needs a reply. It’s this:

Many scenes are centered around the Berlin Wall, and Ben Stein being Jewish actually visits many death camps and death showers. In fact, Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany.

Really creationists? That’s what you’re going with? Really? Well OK, if that’s the approach the religious creationists want to take, I’m happy to debate that point. There are (at least) three reasons why this isn’t a valid argument against evolution. Each one by itself is enough to sink this ridiculous creationist canard. They are:

1. So what?
2. Hitler wasn’t inspired by evolution
3. Hitler was religiously inspired

So what?

Really – so what? Even if it were true that wouldn’t mean evolution was wrong. The argument is just a fallacious appeal to consequences: the truth of something does not depend on the consequences of it being true; the truth of something depends on whether it is actually true or not. Nuclear weapons are terrible things, but that doesn’t mean that E does not equal M C squared. Even if Hitler was inspired by evolution, that wouldn’t mean evolution was wrong.

Even so, if it Hitler was actually inspired by evolution, that would be a bit of a black mark for evolution. But:

Hitler wasn’t inspired by evolution

Evolution is a process where favorable mutations are selected by nature – that is, mutations that make it more likely the organism will reproduce, will be passed to offspring. Although the phrase “survival of the fittest” has become popular, the idea that this means “only the strongest survive” or that living beings fight each other for survival (and so only the strongest survive), is false. “Fittest” actually means “most able to reproduce”. That sometimes means “the strongest”, but in social groups (such as primates), “fittest” can also mean “well regarded by the group”. For example, a rogue early hominid, who murdered his peers, might well have been excluded by the group and (therefore) would not have been able to reproduce.

Hitler’s solution was the opposite of allowing nature to select. Hitler’s approach was to artificially remove groups of people he didn’t like, from the gene pool, in what was undeniably a sickening version of selective breeding, as practiced by farmers for around 10,000 years before Darwin. If Hitler learned of the opportunities of such selective breeding from anywhere, it was from farmers’ knowledge and experience that predated Darwin. Which means that Hitler’s final solution was, if anything, an example of intelligent design.

So Hitler wasn’t inspired by Darwin. If Hitler was inspired by anything:

Hitler was religiously inspired

If you want to know what Hitler really believed, a good place to look would be what he actually wrote in his plan for the revival of Germany - Mein Kampf. Get a load of this:

The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties-and this against their own nation.

Not convinced? Try this:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: 'by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.

There’s a lot more of the same in Mein Kampf, and in other speeches Hitler gave, if you can stomach reading any more. It doesn’t sound to me as though Charles Darwin was much of an influence. In fact, I haven’t been able to find even one mention of Darwin or the theory of evolution in Mein Kampf. Not one. Now, isn’t that strange? Don’t you think that if Hitler had been influenced by Darwin that he would have mentioned it somewhere in his book? Why wouldn’t he? But not even once.

No. Hitler’s ideas of the superior Aryan race were quasi religious mythology based Christian and/or occult beliefs. This is what inspired the extermination of the Jews – not evolution.

Christians will say that Hitler wasn’t inspired by “true” Christianity (or even by a “True Scotsman”). Well, maybe not. But so what? They try to blame evolution for the Holocaust on much flimsier evidence. Actually no evidence – no link to Hitler at all apart from their own flawed understanding of evolution. But Hitler can be directly quoted using Christianity as a justification for his treatment of the Jews. It was clearly Hitler’s religious or quasi religious beliefs – not an over reliance on critical thinking and science – that inspired him. And these flawed beliefs were combined with an authoritarian streak that demanded respect and unquestioning obedience. Hum… religious or quasi religious, not backed by evidence, demanding respect and obedience it hadn’t earned…

… Remind you of anything?

Christian creationists may live to regret opening up this particular can of worms. In future, every time they trot out this tired piece of propaganda they should have Hitler’s real Christian influence, rationally for the Holocaust and his exact words thrust back down their throats. Evolution wasn’t responsible for the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the result of the exact same kind of unquestioning groupthink that characterizes religion. Or, to paraphrase the creationist twit I quoted at the top: Religion leads to unquestioning belief in what you’re told by authorities, leads to acceptance of an authoritarian state, leads to eugenics, leads to Holocaust, leads to Nazi Germany.

I’m not necessarily saying that Christianity alone was responsible for the Holocaust. Without Christianity, Hitler would probably have found another excuse. But I am saying religious thinking was responsible. And Hitler’s own words lay the blame with Christianity, not evolution. Hey, I didn’t start this.

Other Reading

The Panda’s Thumb From Darwin to Hitler, or not? (spoiler – it’s “not”), and From Darwin to Hitler, or not? Part II

Talk Reason’s Creationists, Hitler and Evolution.

Orac’s Random dispatch from the road: More on Darwin & Hitler

A page of links about Hitler's Christianity

Red state Rabble writes Richard Weikart: Workin’ in a Quote Mine

Pharyngula’s List of Hitler quotes — he was quite the vocal Catholic

Orac’s amusing take on Hitler Zombie massacre over evolution!

Expelled from Expelled

Read PZ’s description about how he was not allowed in to see the new dumb creationist film “Expelled” – the one about how poor old Intelligent Design is being discriminated against in favor of Evolution because it (ID, not evolution), has not passed scientific muster. They wouldn’t let in PZ but did let in Richard Dawkins.  What morons.

Also read this account from a pro-ID person who supposedly witnessed the whole thing. Apparently he thinks that “anyone walking away from this film will be convinced that the merits of Intelligent Design should be on the same level playing field as Evolutionary Theory”. The comments to that post so far are critical (to be polite) of this guy, his account and his view of the film. Worth a read if only to marvel at the IDists' stupidity.

Vox Keeps His Readers In The Dark

Via the Bad Astronomer I read this absurd post from a blogger called Vox who seems to think that dark matter and dark energy are outside the scope of science which means that secular societies are “arguably insane”.  Of course, Vox’s argument is unarguably retarded.  He’s saying that because we don’t know exactly what dark matter and dark energy are, they’re outside the realm of science. But that’s obviously false: it’s only through science that we even know that dark matter and dark energy exist. There is nothing in the bible about the universe being 72.1% dark energy and 23.3% dark matter. Nor does it say on which day God created them.  They don’t exist, according to the nomadic goat herders who wrote the bibble.  Furthermore, if we are ever to understand dark matter and dark energy, that will only happen through the process of science, not by assuming it’s too complex and so Goddidit.  Vox's silly argument is just another lame Science Doesn't Know Everything appeal.

I did post a comment on Saturday, asking the assembled loons who support the blog’s author, what other method they would use to try to understand dark matter and dark energy. Unsurprisingly they had no reply.

Judgment Day – Tonight on PBS TV

Tonight, 8.00pm on PBS (US TV) is Nova’s Judgment Day - a two hour montage of interviews and reconstructions of the Kitzmiller vs Dover case from 2005. (Wow – was that really two years ago? Time flies.) The documentary apparently features all the main players except (inexplicably) Michael Behe. Or perhaps not so inexplicably. Remember, the Dover case was where Behe got to admit that Intelligent Design was a science just like astrology. I would want to forget that too if I were Behe.

Looks like an interesting program, anyway.

ID Creationist Bingo

This post was inspired by the continued poor and already debunked arguments put forward by creationists - notably on the comments to this post by me, and to a post on Neurologica blog - but also elsewhere. The only remarkable thing about the creationists' arguments is it's remarkable how they continue to parrot the same arguments after they have been debunked years ago. Anyway, I've had some fun recently playing ID Creationist Bingo. You check off a square every time the relevant dopey argument is presented. You win when you have a straight line of five - horizontally, vertically or diagonally. The "JOKER" square can either be a free square, or you can reserve it for any new ludicrous argument presented (as long as it is presented with total sincerity), or any argument I've missed.

If you don't know what all these creationist arguments are then you haven't spent much time talking to creationists on the web. If you don't know how to debunk any of them you could go to Talk.Origins Arguments against Creationism and their 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, read what Steven Novella has to say or browse Pharyngula.

The Parsimony of the Multiverse

I wasn’t going to do this again for a while. Comment on something on Dembski’s blog. Their standard is so lame. But I had to contradict this one as it represents a common misinterpretation of Occam’s Razor.

The post in full:

“In science, parsimony is preference for the least complex explanation for an observation. This is generally regarded as good when judging hypotheses. Occam’s razor also states the ‘principle of parsimony.’” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsimony

In the post below (”Multiverse of the Gaps”), I point to a recent paper in which a Darwinist attempts to get around the extremely small probability (less than 1 in 10 raised to the negative 1,018) of life emerging by chance by invoking an infinite “multiverse.”

The question for the class today is which is the most parsimonious hypothesis: One designer or infinite universes?

Answer: the multiverse is the more parsimonious. The mistake he’s making is in thinking that parsimony means the “least complex” or simplest explanation. Of course it doesn’t. If it meant choose the simplest explanation then Occam would always choose “Goddidit”. Because, what is simpler that “Goddidit”? No. Occam’s Razor means, don’t make stuff up. Or if you have to, make up as little as possible.

Suppose I have a cat. One night, I leave out a saucer of milk, and in the morning the milk has gone. No one saw who or what drank the milk. Lets say there are two possibilities:

1. The cat drank it

or

2. The milk fairy drank it

Occam tells us to reject option 2. This is because option 2 requires us to invent an unnecessary entity - the milk fairy. It is an invention because we have no evidence that the milk fairy exists. And it is unnecessary because there is a plausible explanation that does not require a milk fairy - the cat.

Note also that strictly speaking, both solutions are equally simple. The cat hypothesis is only simpler in that you haven't had to invent a new, unnecessary entity.  Occam says that if you insist it could be the milk fairy, you have invented an unnecessary entity. And why would you do that?

So the answer to the original question is – it depends if there is any evidence for God, and if there is any evidence for the multiverse.

I haven’t seen any convincing evidence for God. Of course, the whole “extremely small probability” baloney is itself supposed to be the evidence for God – so we can’t include that or we’d be assuming the conclusion. It’s been debunked anyway. I’ll draw a blank on the evidence for God, then.

While I don’t think there is any hard evidence yet for the multiverse, I believe it is predicted by some of the math in string theory, and that the multiverse makes some predictions that may soon be testable. Astrophysicist Victor Stenger states:

No new hypothesis is needed to consider multiple universes. In fact, it takes an added hypothesis to rule them out-- a super law of nature that says only one universe can exist. But we know of no such law, so we would violate Occam's razor to insist on only one universe.

We know this universe exists. Why should there be no others? On the other hand, we don’t know God exists. While we currently can’t be sure, it seems to me that God is the milk fairy in my analogy. Just because I think that one of several million cats drank the milk, that doesn’t mean that it is more parsimonious to insist the milk fairy drank it.

Galileoists – teach the controversy!

Via Pharyngula I just discovered a new blog essential for my RSS list, dealing with ID, atheism etc – Tiny Frog.  See today the post questioning the outdated Galileoist Theory of Gravity - The Stifling Dominance of Secular Academia. Then check out some of the earlier posts as I did. Excellent reading.

Irreducibly Dumb

Another lame-o, writing on Dembski’s blog, asks what he obviously thinks is a killer question:

In any debate on Intelligent Design, there is a question I have long wished to see posed to ID opponents: “If we DID discover some biological feature that was irreducibly complex, to your satisfication (sic) and to the satisfaction of all reasonable observers, would that justify the design inference?” […]

Answer – NO. Because irreducible complexity does not imply a designer and is not a problem for evolution. In fact, irreducible complexity has been proven to evolve. But this dolt clearly hasn’t heard of this, because he goes on to demonstrate even more stupidity:

If the answer is yes, we just haven’t found any such thing yet, then all the constantly-repeated philosophical arguments that “ID is not science” immediately fall. If the answer is no, then at least the lay observer will be able to understand what is going on here, that Darwinism is not grounded on empirical evidence but a philosophy.

Noooo, that’s not what it shows. It shows that ID is grounded on argument from ignorance. That is, it’s not science.

In any debate on Intelligent Design, there is a question I have frequently seen posed to IDists (but is never answered): “If we DID discover some biological feature that (hypothetically) you could demonstrate was irreducibly complex – what would that tell us about the designer. Because if the answer is “nothing” (which it is), then at least we can be clear that ID is useless vacuous nonsense.

No intelligence used…

…to make this film.

You will have heard of the new Ben Stein film, "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed", that PZ and others have written about? It’s a piece of anti-evolution propaganda, due to be released next year.

Today, You Are Dumb tells Ben Stein exactly why he was dumb to get involved with this film.

Idiot Journalist is the new enemy of reason

A twit of a journalist called Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, thinks that science is the enemy or reason. Why? Well, she seems to be saying that abandonment of religion has led to people believing in new age nonsense, alternative medicine etc. Quite why this is science’s fault is unclear, but I think this “journalist’s” reasoning is that Richard Dawkins is somehow arrogant in deriding Intelligent Design, and that this is as illogical as religion. Or something. It is a little hard to make any sense of what passes for a reasoned argument in this woman’s mind.

See if you can make sense of this:

But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.

No. Irrationality was there already – people just believe in other irrational things too – as irrational as religion in many cases.

We are living in a scientific, largely post-religious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense.

It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that "when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."

Yes. That is why this blog is about critical thinking and skepticism, not just anti-religion. Pity this “journalist” didn’t apply some – maybe explain to her readers how to be a critical thinker. You know – write something useful.

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe - which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

A rational creator? No, a petulant creator who demands obedience, worship and sometimes human sacrifice. Whose only son has to die so that he (God – who made the rules, remember?), can forgive us for our sins. Because he couldn’t just forgive us our sins unless his only son dies. Although he is God. Very rational.

And the most irrational thing about all this – believing in this pile of nonsense in the first place. Oh but wait:

Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don't correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.

So which is it? Is there a rational creator, or is it all a metaphor? Surely it can’t be both?

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is "true for me".

Which is the opposite of what science teaches. How is this science’s fault, again?

That is because our society won't put up with anything which gets in the way of 'what I want'. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

Agreed. But why is science to blame?

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic.

How else do you distinguish between truth and lies?

In modern times, however, science has given rise to 'scientism', the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so.

Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.

Count the straw men. Science doesn’t even pretend to know the answers to “all the questions of human existence”, nor does it suggest it has explained “the origin of the universe”. Although it is the best method we have of knowing those things, if they are knowable.

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin's theory of evolution - which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection - also accounts for the origin of life itself.

Well, I don’t know if Dawkins actually says that. But no scientific theory states that as yet. But at least science tries to answer those questions. What is Phillips’ better way? See what the Bible says?

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question "Who created God?", it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question "What created the bang?"

The argument is that saying “God created the universe” is not an answer – it just raises the question “who created God. So “Goddidit” tells us nothing. The Big Bang, however, tells us a lot. And makes predictions.

Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.

If he claimed it true without evidence, then that might be correct. Of course, what scientists are trying to do is find the evidence for the origins of life. Again, what is the alternative? “Magic man did it”?

Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research - which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life - have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.

Er, no it hasn’t.

These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.

Some of them may be scientists (not many, but some of them may be), but they’re not practicing science. And the findings didn’t “give rise” to the school. The school existed before – it was religion that “gave rise” to it. They then tried to shoe-horn the evidence to fit the religious beliefs they already had.

While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.

No, they go to lengths to prevent it being taught as science, because it is not. And being taught ID as though it were science would jeopardize future scientific progress.

Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail.

Again, nonsense. The Cambrian explosion is not a problem for evolution.

These scientists argue that only 'rational agents' could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.

Yes, but only because they can’t imagine how it could have come about without God.

Whether or not they are right (and I don't know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled - on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.

No, IDists do not have a “scientific argument about the absence of evidence”. They ignore the evidence for evolution, and they have no evidence for their lame idea. So yes, that isn’t science.

As a result of such arrogance, the West - the crucible of reason - is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts.

Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable. So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against 'new age' irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.

Science is unreasonable because it can’t yet explain how life started? And what is your explanation then Ms. Phillips? And what is your solution, if you don’t like science? Because you don’t provide any solutions in this long whine at Richard Dawkins. And if you have no solutions, what is the point? Pots and kettles indeed.

The God Part of the Brain

The publisher of Matthew Alper’s The God Part of the Brain, sent me a copy to review. The premise of the book is that spiritual consciousness (and therefore belief in God), is an evolved trait. Alper argues that our self-conscious awareness, and with it the awareness of our own eventual death, meant that humans would have lived in a state of constant dread unless there was something that could relieve us of the painful effects of that awareness. He suggests that spirituality – and the belief that we continue to live after death – is the palliative mechanism without which our species might not have survived.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that sounds right to me. Not every atheist would necessarily agree. As I recall, Michael Shermer had a slightly different take – I believe he suggested that religion was a way of “enforcing” acceptable rules of conduct necessary for group living. (I could be wrong – it is a while since I was at that talk.) Also I know that PZ Myers really doubts that religion is an adaptive trait. Still, I like the idea. Which is why I was so disappointed that this book doesn’t really make the case.

I was pretty much turned off the book from chapter 3 – “A Very Brief History of Time – which is a description of how we got here, from the big bang, through the formation of stars and planets, the possible way life may have started, and the subsequent evolution to the life we see today. It was a good idea to lay it all out like this, and it would be a useful read for someone not familiar with all the steps. It was let down by the numerous factual errors it contained.

My first “What?” moment occurred only four paragraphs in (page 26), where Alper explains Einstein’s E=mc² equation:

What this essentially means is that if mass (matter) is accelerated to a high speed, it will become energy. Inversely, should energy be slowed down, it will settle into matter.

Which is of course nonsense. I can only assume that Alper thinks that since the equation includes the speed of light (“c”), this means matter has to be accelerated to a high speed (presumably close to light speed), to be converted to energy. But that is not what it means at all – “c” is just the ratio of conversion from matter to energy. You convert matter to energy by (for example) splitting an atom, not by speeding it up. (Also, how do you slow energy down? What does that even mean?) That had me shaking my head for a bit.

More serious, considering the premise of the book is to explain spirituality through evolution, was his rather startling errors in describing aspects of evolutionary theory. The explanations of natural selection were pretty good. But he goes off the rails on page 41 when he writes about punctuated equilibria:

Other times, a beneficial mutation emerges that is so dramatically different from its peers that a species can be transformed within a few generations…

He seems to be suggesting Saltation. But Stephen Jay Gould was very clear that he never linked punctuations to microevolutionary saltationism. The idea that massive evolutionary changes could come about in a few generations is clearly absurd, and is contra to just about everything else the theory of evolution tells us about small beneficial random mutations. All punctuated equilibria states is that there can be long periods with no evolution, followed by periods of relatively rapid change. But note “relatively” (perhaps fewer than 100,000 years for significant change) - not “a few generations”.

Then on the next page Alper describes genetic drift. Strangely he seems to think it occurs when members of a species migrate to a new area and are isolated from the rest of the species. While small populations are more prone to it, I’m pretty sure genetic drift occurs in all populations, and isolation from the herd is not necessary. But the major and I mean MAJOR error he makes here is in the example he gives for genetic drift – Darwin’s finches. But Darwin’s finches are an example of natural selection, not genetic drift. I actually read this section about five or six times to be sure this was what he was saying, it was so wrong. The errors in this section are so serious and basic that they really need to be cleaned up in any future editions. More to the point, it caused me to doubt the statements of facts and interpretations of data elsewhere in the book, when he was describing things I was less familiar with.

Most of the rest of the book is given over to numerous detailed logical arguments for why all traits must be evolved traits (all planarians turn to the light, all bees build hexagonal hives, all cats meow, etc). He makes a reasonable case although I found the writing style ponderous and repetitive. Unfortunately, although he makes a perfectly logical case to explain how God-belief could have evolved, he offers no actual evidence to support it. In fact you get to page 130 before he even promises that:

In the remaining chapters, I will provide … the most recent neurophysiological and genetic research that supports [the book’s] hypothesis.

But the rest of the book is mostly more of the same logical (and repetitive) arguments (planarians again, honey bees again), with virtually no actual experimental evidence. The most interesting part of the book, in my view, was the short section from page 136 where he describes the work of scientists (such as VS Ramachandran), that reveal an individual’s behavior can change in specific ways following the alteration of specific parts of the brain. In my view this section should have been longer, and with more references to the actual research. This brief section did actually seem to support the idea that “God” resides in a specific part of the physical brain and is not a product of any outside agency. (Paging Michael Egnor. Michael Egnor to the house phone.) Unfortunately it was too short and didn’t touch on the specific reasons Alper claims for the evolution of God-belief.

I really wanted to like this book, and I do think its main premise – that God belief evolved as a way of coping – may be true. But this book offers zero experimental evidence to support the case. The book might be useful to explain the widespread belief in God without proposing that God actually exists. But the factual errors in describing evolution need to be corrected before I could recommend it.

Missing The Point

I can’t help it. I really can’t. I just can’t help deconstructing poor or fallacious arguments. And Dembski’s blog is chock full of them. Yesterday, BarryA, in Identify the Indian or Shut Up, re-tools one of the old saws in the creationist tool bag – the argument that archaeologists determine design in items they find, just like IDists do in nature. I covered this before in SETI, archeology and other sciences – actually a rebuttal to an argument made by Casey Luskin. Barry is making the same argument, although this time it’s about finding sharp stones that look like arrowheads.

The other day I got into an argument with one of my friends who insisted that the literally hundreds of pieces of flint in my grandfather’s collection, each showing an almost identical chip pattern, could not possibly be accounted for by blind unguided natural forces like erosion. I have to admit he made a fairly impressive mathematical case and I was beginning to waver. But then my friends at Panda’s Thumb came to my rescue. They argue that a design inference is illegitimate unless the person asserting the inference can also identify the designer.

I don’t know about the PT guys, but that’s not how I would put it. I would say that archaeologists can infer design because they know something about the putative designer. For one – they know they are human. That means we know something about their habits (they eat meat), limitations (they have no claws, etc) and strengths (they compensate by being smart enough to design weapons). Also, if an artifact is found within an obvious human encampment, the object is likely to be of human origin. So although we cannot know the identity of the designer (a rather silly straw man), we do know something about the designer, and can draw inferences from that knowledge. Barry continues:

I pointed to one of the stones in the frame my grandfather gave me (It continues to hang on my wall for sentimental reasons, not because there is anything special about the stones themselves). I said, “OK, Mr. Smarty Pants. If the pattern on that stone is designed, tell me who the designer was.” He was, of course, stumped, so I declared myself the victor in the argument. Yet another triumph for materialist reasoning!

Of course, archaeologists don't have to "identify" the Indian - just knowing it was an Indian is enough.  (Although ironically, Barry's grandfather might not have actually known enough to be able to do that in most cases.  No matter.)  The problem with ID is not that they can’t identify the designer. The problem is that they know nothing about the supposed designer, and so have no way of inferring design in the complex patterns we find in nature.  Still – I think I’ll borrow Barry’s headline and modify it so it represents the true archaeologists’ argument, and play it back at him. IDists – tell us something about the designer (eg how he designs / why he designs / how he manufactures his designs / what strengths and limitations does he have) – something that would allow us to infer design in nature - or Shut Up.

Strange arguments on Dembski’s blog

I really wonder what goes on in their minds sometimes. Creationists. PaV, writing on Dembski’s Uncommon Descent blog, has a rather strange take on this Physorg.com article – an article that describes how some scientists are studying the bacterial flagellum (you know – the one that’s too “irreducibly complex” to have evolved), to see if they can learn something to help them design nanotechnology. PaV seems to think that if you can study nature and learn some lessons from what nature has built, that proves there is an intelligent designer. I know – it makes no sense. Read this:

I find it almost infuriating that there are labs like Petr Kral’s all over the world that are doing this kind of work every day, and, yet, our Darwinist brothers tell us that, unlike any potential contact with ET’s, in this case we cannot possible know anything about any Intelligent Designer.

[Snip]

How is it possible to examine biological life, AND on the BASIS of what one SEES, then construct a molecular machine of heretofore unknown sophistication, and then, simultaneously maintain that no inference about any so-called Intelligent Designer can be made….”since we don’t know anything about Him–He’s beyond science”?

Well it’s not the evolutionists who say we can make no inference about the “designer. Such statements are made by people such as (er) William Dembski (with my bold):

…intelligent design does not presume to identify the purposes of a designer. Intelligent design focuses not on the designer’s purposes (the thing signified) but on the artifacts resulting from a designer’s purposes (the sign). What a designer intends or purposes is, to be sure, an interesting question, and one may be able to infer something about a designer’s purposes from the designed objects that a designer produces. Nevertheless, the purposes of a designer lie outside the scope of intelligent design. As a scientific research program, intelligent design investigates the effects of intelligence and not intelligence as such.

Perhaps PaV should have checked with his boss before posting.

Intelligent Design proponents are the ones who claim there is an intelligent designer, so it’s up to them to tell us something about “him”, rather than whine about how scientists haven’t been able to. Furthermore, PaV has the logic 100% backwards. He seems to think that if we understand a design we must know something about the designer. But he is assuming his conclusion here – he is assuming the flagellum is designed and therefore we should be able to learn something about the designer from the flagellum. But we don’t know that the flagellum was designed. The logic works the other way round - if we knew something about the designer we might be able to tell if the flagellum was designed. We don’t and so we can’t.

It gets even more absurd:

Further, if biological systems contain no intelligence, how, then, can you study them? Why doesn’t some Darwinian-Believer answer that one?

Easy. Something doesn’t have to have an intelligence for you to be able to study it. Geologists study rocks – do rocks have intelligence?

How can someone “learn” how to build a nanoscale molecular pump from such a study of extant biological systems and then have that very possibility denied by saying: “There’s no intelligence in what I’m studying.

I’ll assume that was a question, even though it didn’t end in a question mark. The answer is – just because something was not designed by an intelligence, that doesn’t mean we can learn nothing from it. PaV is again assuming his conclusion – complex things like the flagellum must have been designed. We are studying something complex, therefore we’re studying something that was designed.

Philisophically (sic) speaking, how can you “study” that which is, per your own definition, “incomprehensible”? Would Darwinists like to ‘fess up about all of this?

The flagellum is not “incomprehensible” per any evolutionist’s definition. Just because per an IDists definition it is “irreducibly complex”, that doesn’t mean it is, and it certainly doesn’t mean it is “incomprehensible”. Although I can see how it might be to PaV.

61st Skeptics’ Circle

The 61^st Skeptics' Circle has just been posted at Memoirs of a Skepchick. Click the link for the best skeptical blogging from the last two weeks.

When you’ve read that, Pharyngula has a carnival exposing the absurd Ken Ham Creation Museum – “it's not science... but merely a series of Bible stories dolled up in dioramas”. PZ links to (if my rough count is correct) about 70 blog posts exposing Ham’s lies.

Unfortunately I haven’t had time recently to post anything for either of these carnivals, but I’m going to try really hard to find the time to post something before the next Skeptics’ Circle.  Honest!

Pope Ratzo – back to the good old days

Pope Ratzinger spoke out against evolution yesterday in a new book that harkens back to the good old days – you know, when the Catholic Church denied Galileo’s heliocentric theory.

Benedict XVI, in his first extended reflections on evolution published as pope, says that Darwin's theory cannot be finally proven and that science has unnecessarily narrowed humanity's view of creation.

In a new book, "Creation and Evolution," published Wednesday in German, the pope praised progress gained by science, but cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions science alone cannot answer.

Yes, science perhaps cannot answer some of the philosophical questions, but neither can religion. Religion thinks it answers those questions, but in reality it just makes stuff up and pretends these are the answers. This is just another lame appeal to other ways of knowing.

Think the comparison to Galileo’s day is excessive? Check out how Catholic Answers justifies how they treated Galileo, and compare the wording with Ratzo’s yesterday:

Anti-Catholics often cite the Galileo case as an example of the Church refusing to abandon outdated or incorrect teaching, and clinging to a "tradition." They fail to realize that the judges who presided over Galileo’s case were not the only people who held to a geocentric view of the universe. It was the received view among scientists at the time.

[…]

Many people wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentricity. He could not answer the strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years earlier by Aristotle: If heliocentrism were true, then there would be observable parallax shifts in the stars’ positions as the earth moved in its orbit around the sun. However, given the technology of Galileo’s time, no such shifts in their positions could be observed. […]

Thus Galileo did not prove the theory by the Aristotelian standards of science in his day.

Of course, science doesn’t “prove” theories, but where the evidence is overwhelming, a theory is given pretty strong provisional acceptance. The evidence for the heliocentric theory was good, the Catholic Church just didn’t want to hear it since it conflicted with what was written in their magic book. Make no mistake, if they could suppress evolution the way they were able to censor Galileo – they would. Ratzinger has shown where he would like to take his church if he could – back to the dark ages.

Even a Broken Watch

…is right twice a day.

I was amused when following PZ’s link (from his post today) to the creationist Discovery Institute’s Evolution News & Views page. If you plough through all the whining about how evolutionists haven’t answered Michael Egnor’s questions about how Darwinian mechanisms can produce truly novel biological information (except they have), and if you ignore the fact that Egnor hasn’t answered Orac’s questions to Michael Egnor, right at the bottom of the page they have this:

The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site.

Exactly!  For once, something we can all agree on. Although maybe not in quite the way they intended.

Edited to add:

Another link today to Doctor Michael Egnor. Money quote:

[Egnor's] a kind of creationist Renaissance man, knowing absolutely nothing about everything.

Classic.

Also, Tara Smith on Doctor Michael Egnor.

Creationist Errors

PZ writes today in response to one typical objection to evolution, namely the claim that:

Mutations have NEVER produced additional DNA structures. NEVER! [Snip] I repeat… not a SINGLE scientist in the entire world has EVER recorded a mutation which produced additional DNA structures or material….

Note the absolute certainty expressed by the creationist – the absolute certainty of the totally ignorant religious believer (some redundancy there, it’s true), in the face of scientists who have spent their whole lives actually, you know, studying this stuff. PZ explains clearly that mutations can produce additional information:

I went to the Flybase database, for instance, and did a search for any duplicated alleles. It came back with a long list of them, and here is just the first one, an allele called abd-AUab-G1, which happens to be a Hox gene in the bithorax complex. Here’s the short description.

[Snip]

You want the full citation so you can go look up the details in the peer-reviewed scientific literature? Yeah, we can do that:

Bender and Fitzgerald (2002) Transcription activates repressed domains in the Drosophila bithorax complex. Development 129(21): 4923-4930.

Much more at the link.

Bookmark that link for the next time (and there will be a next time) some creationist fool claims mutations can’t create information and therefore evolution is impossible.

Edited to add:

PZ had a follow up post on this subject today, summarizing even more examples of how evolution produces more information – examples the creationists continue to ignore.

Michael Egnor

Some useful links. See Michael Egnor. Who? for the details.

Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor, Michael Egnor

Happy birthday PZ

Today is the 50^th birthday of PZ Myers, the powerhouse behind Pharyngula, and a tireless proponent of science and rationality in the face of religious and anti-science idiocy. If you want to know why Pharyngula is top of my Sage RSS reader, and why I read his blog first every day, take a look at The unspeakable vileness of religious law, PZ’s response to the claim that without religion we would have no morality. It concludes:

Face it, everyone. Religion is not a source of moral behavior. It's a source of tribalism and obedience to authority, which sometimes coincides with respectable morality, but isn't necessarily associated with it. We have to find our virtue in one true thing, our common humanity, and these ancient superstitions actually interfere with instruction in how to be good by encrusting it with nonsense.

For a more lighthearted satire on creationism, read the first Pharyngula post I ever read, a plumbing parable:

My kitchen sink has a problem. Something has broken inside the Moen faucet, so that the handle is loose and only marginally effective. I'm thinking I should run down to the hardware store and get a new faucet assembly, and get under the sink with a pipe wrench. It shouldn't be too difficult.

Right away, I run into an obstacle. I get down to the basement to fetch my wrench, and there's one of the local ministers sitting on the toolbox. "Have you tried the incredible power of prayer yet, son?" he asked. I said no, of course not. I'm trying to fix a broken faucet. And then he gave me one of those pitying looks and tried to convince me that not only could Jesus fix my faucet, he would give me wine on tap. So I told him to get his fat ass off my toolbox and out of my house, and he stomped off.

The rest at the link.

Happy birthday PZ. Keep ‘em coming.

Worst. Creationist. Post. Ever.

Via Sandwalk I came upon this piece of (words fail me – but I’ll try) creationist garbage.  I tried but couldn’t find one sentence that did not contain errors. The stupidity will make your brain hurt.

I wanted to quote a representative sample, but you really have to read the whole thing to get the full benefit. Good luck.

SETI, archeology and other sciences

On Saturday, Orac wrote The Discovery Institute [DI] drops a bomb of an argument. Apparently the DI’s Casey Luskin thinks the seismologists working to determine if North Korea really did set off a nuclear device are making a design inference just like IDists do:

But difficulties in detecting intelligent causation in seismic energy don't prevent scientists from trying to detect, or reject design. When they do verify a nuclear explosion, they have made a design inference.

It’s the same tired old argument that ID proponents have applied to archeology, SETI and other sciences. For example, archeologists routinely find artifacts that they pronounce as being designed – arrowheads and other tools, for example. Likewise, SETI scientists are scanning the skies for signals that they hope to determine come from extra-terrestrial intelligence. The argument goes that if archeology, SETI etc are science, then ID must also be science, because they’re all doing the same thing – identifying design.

Superficially this may seem compelling, but when you examine what these scientists are doing compared with what IDists do, you realize the DI is wrong – the way scientists go about things is entirely different. Below I identify three basic differences.

Human, or not

The first obvious difference is that the seismologists checking on North Korea know something about the designers - they know they are human. Consequently they also know the designers' motive was to create a nuclear device. Knowing what the designers were trying to do means the seismologists knew what to look for.

The same argument applies to archeologists - they are looking for evidence of human design. When they find remains of an ancient human encampment, knowing something about how humans behave they can determine that a flint is most likely a tool. They use their knowledge of the designers, and the context of where they found the articles, to determine what the objects are.

IDists don't have an equivalent knowledge about their designer or its motives to be able to make a similar determination. The ID process is actually the exact reverse of the scientific one – IDists first claim to determine design, and from this supposed determination they infer something about the designer. As William Dembski writes (all quotes with my bold):

…intelligent design does not presume to identify the purposes of a designer. Intelligent design focuses not on the designer’s purposes (the thing signified) but on the artifacts resulting from a designer’s purposes (the sign). What a designer intends or purposes is, to be sure, an interesting question, and one may be able to infer something about a designer’s purposes from the designed objects that a designer produces. Nevertheless, the purposes of a designer lie outside the scope of intelligent design. As a scientific research program, intelligent design investigates the effects of intelligence and not intelligence as such.

Archeologists and the seismologists referred to above are looking for evidence of human design, based on their knowledge of what those humans would be trying to do. IDists claim to identify unspecified non-human design where they see something they just think is designed. The difference between science and ID couldn’t be clearer.

Complex v Artificial

Of course, that explanation doesn’t apply to SETI – they are not looking for humans. But even so, it’s not so different – SETI are still looking for intelligence that lives in the same universe and obeys the same laws of physics that we do. That means we do know something about the putative ET and can make assumptions and predictions about how they would try to communicate with us. For example, we know that:

… the microwave band contains a naturally-produced emission line, a narrow-band "broadcast", at 1,420 MHz due to interstellar hydrogen.  Every radio astronomer (including extraterrestrial ones) will know about this hydrogen emission. It may serve as a universal "marker" on the radio dial. Consequently, it makes sense to use nearby frequencies for interstellar "hailing" signals.

SETI use these assumptions to predict where to look for ET signals. IDists have no such assumption to guide their search.

Secondly, unlike ID which looks for complexity, SETI is looking for artificiality:

In fact, the signals actually sought by today’s SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. [,,,] A SETI radio signal of the type we could actually find would be a persistent, narrow-band whistle. Such a simple phenomenon appears to lack just about any degree of structure, although if it originates on a planet, we should see periodic Doppler effects as the world bearing the transmitter rotates and orbits.

[…]

… the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal – adead simple tone – is not complex; it’s artificial. Such a tone just doesn’t seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add – for example, DNA’s junk and redundancy.

IDists are looking for complexity, because they think complexity must have been designed. SETI are looking for an artificial signal – a simple tone that does not appear in nature – because they know what an artificial signal looks like.

The beginning or the end?

The ultimate reason why ID is not science, is what they do with the information. With ID, determining design is the whole purpose of the endeavor. Intelligent Design is inferred.  Check. Done. Finished. Determining design is the be-all and end-all of the operation. Of course, if the (nudge nudge wink wink) “designer” is supernatural, then there’s nothing further you could learn anyway, right?

With science, determining design is the beginning of the process. If SETI do make contact, all efforts would immediately be diverted to learning something about the intelligence, finding where it came from, learning something about the source planet, translating the message, ultimately making contact if possible.

When archeologists find tools left by early man, that is the start of the study. The purpose is then to learn more about early humans – where they lived, how they fed themselves, what tools they used, how long they lived etc.

And with the seismologists checking out North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, a test positive for radiation resulted in specific actions – sanctions.  And, no doubt, more monitoring.

With all these real sciences, determining intelligent design is the start of the process – it’s the confirmation there is more to study. The difference between this and ID, where determination of design is the end of the process, couldn’t be starker. The totally empty, vacuous and useless nature of ID, compared with the endeavors of science, is what is most striking about this comparison with science that the IDists want to make

What gets Michael Behe’s goat?

Last year I wrote that Michael Behe, in sworn testimony, agreed that astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same standards as he wished Intelligent Design to be judged.   I also wrote that I was unaware of Behe’s astrological sign. Claus Larsen of Skeptic Report just advised me that Behe is a Capricorn (born January 18^th) – the Goat – and suggested I should look into the characteristics of Capricorns and see how they fit Behe.

Astrology online gives the usual list of vague Forer statements that are really too tedious to consider, but I was interested in the lists of likes and dislikes of Capricorns. First we have:

LIKES

Reliability

Professionalism

Knowing what you discuss

Firm Foundations

Purpose

Some problems there, you might think. But it was the dislikes that struck me. It seems to me that, for a Capricorn, he might be in the wrong job:

DISLIKES

Wild Schemes

Fantasies

Go-nowhere jobs

Ignominy

Ridicule

Oh dear, he dislikes fantasies, go-nowhere jobs, ignominy and ridicule? The last nine months must have been pretty miserable for him then.

Not that I believe in any of this. As regular readers know, astrology is a load of arbitrary made up rules that when tested do not work. Still, Behe apparently believes in it, and I’m sure he has studied astrology as assiduously as he studied that other science, you know, intelligent design. So, in light of the above, perhaps he is considering a change of careers. Sure enough, a little further up the page at astrology online, there is a hint of Behe’s future employment prospects:

The wit and flippancy which is characteristic of certain Capricornians may make some turn to entertainment as a career.

I’m sure we all wish him well in his new career in entertainment. Notwithstanding many of us thought that already was his current job.

Who farted and made the Giant Raccoon?

An unusual headline, admittedly. Bear with me. First though, if anyone needs to know what to cite as a comprehensive debunking of Ann Coulter’s ludicrous anti-evolution shtick, they could go to Talk Reason or (via Respectful Insolence), to this extremely detailed rebuttal of literally dozens of Coulter’s claims, in Media Matters.

I’m just going to write about one of Coulter’s alleged arguments, one I hadn’t heard before, as reported by Orac and Media Matters:

How about this: Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. […]  That's basically how the argument for evolution goes.

At first I thought this was a ridiculous Straw Man of evolution, but it appears Coulter thinks this is a parody – her equivalent of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) parody of Intelligent Design. But she has it ass-backward: it’s actually another parody if ID. Take the FSM letter (paragraph 2), replace a few words, and you get:

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a giant raccoon passing gas. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel.

Agreed, I would prefer to be “touched by his noodly appendage”, but I can’t help it if Coulter has an anal fixation.  Coulter’s Giant Racoon Theory is clearly a perfect analogy for intelligent design: the variety of life we observe on Earth was created by an intelligent designer (giant raccoon) who used an unknown method (farted) at an unknown time (probably at night – raccoons are nocturnal) for an unknown reason (perhaps some dodgy crayfish). Someone should start a web page.

But it gets better (or worse, if you’re Ann Coulter). As Orac pointed out, it suffers from another of the deficiencies of ID, namely: who created the designer (giant raccoon)? Because if life on Earth is so complex it must have been created by a designer (giant farting raccoon), then who designed the designer (who farted and made the giant farting raccoon)? To mix my metaphors, it’d be turtles all the way down.

And apparently Dembski thinks this is a problem for evolution, not ID.

I’ve often wondered if Coulter really is as stupid as she seems or if she’s just cynically milking the ignorance of her fans to make a buck. If she can’t see that this oh-so-clever analogy of hers is really a spoof of ID then I have to conclude: yes, she really is that stupid.  Dembski too.  Hard to believe, but I think we finally have the proof.

Darwin not dead, despite rumors

Via Pooflingers Anonymous I learn the Darwin is Dead - Part Two carnival – that Matt calls the Carnival of the Cretinists – is up at Radar’s blog.

I had to search through the post a couple of times to check I was reading it right – there are only three posts and one of them is a spoof from the satirical reDiscovery Institute. Quite a sorry excuse for a carnival – it seems that rumors of Darwin’s demise may have been exaggerated.

The thing that struck me most though, was Radar’s opening words:

I admit it, this cold/virus thing is kicking my butt! I take anti-biotics, I begin feeling better, they run out, I get sick again

Well, of course I would never expect a creationist to understand biology or any of that pointed headed elitist “sciencey” stuff or anything, but surely everyone knows you don’t treat a virus with an antibiotic? Don’t they? (OK, silly question.)

The myopic pirate sails off into the distance

Just when I was wondering what to write about (actually I was wondering if I could be bothered to write anything at all), something happens. The fake Skeptico I wrote about here, and who “guest blogged” here, has now wised up to the fact that we’re making fun of him and has posted to his blog again – a post entitled “Pseudo-Skeptico Strikes Again!” - ranting at length about how his “Skeptico” name was an accident and how he was now trying to change his web name, etc etc.

I am a little skeptical that he chose the Skeptico name without knowing about this blog. He’s no skeptic (skepticism isn’t about doubting everything, it’s about applying critical thinking to evaluate claims), so why “Skeptico”? Also, his blog title was completely different. But it could be true I suppose – people make mistakes. Either way his last post and in fact the entire http://skeptico.blogspot.com/ blog has disappeared. For now his Blogger Profile is still there, but I suspect he will restart his blogging career with another handle. Just before the blog disappeared I noticed he had changed his handle to “The One Eyed Pirate”, so perhaps that will be his new name (although I hope this guy has no objections - he sounds scary!).

Anyway, I just had to comment on that last post (even though it’s gone). It’s totally inane, and at least three people commented on it on his blog, before it disappeared. At the end of the post was this piece that he obviously thought was a killer problem for evolution:

But I close this post with a simple conundrum for you all, just for fun. (After all, this is supposed to be fun, isn't it?) And you don't have to be a microbiologist to understand the conundrum.

In the animal kingdom, there are all sorts of creatures that fly, from the gnat to the bat, from the humble housefly to the eagle in the sky. But let's focus on some ordinary bird, like a sparrow. Consider his wing. Ever consider the structures and mechanisms of a bird's wing? Well, to work, it has to have the form and strength of a wing, that is, an airfoil, as well as strong and properly controlled muscles to make it beat. But it needs something else to make it work. It needs feathers. Ever take a look at the structure of a feather? Pretty remarkable. Not much like hair or fur or scales.

Question is, which evolved first, the wing or the feathers? (And don't try to tell me we first had birds flying around without feathers, because, besides being preposterous, there is just no scientific evidence for that. And don't bring up any flying reptiles; they weren't birds. And don't tell me they evolved in parallel. The mathematical probabilities against linear evolution occurring are anstronomical (sic) as it is.)

Wow – the stupidity of that statement is quite amazing on so many levels. Considering that he actually mentions two creatures (the gnat and the bat), that have wings but no feathers, but can fly, I would suggest that the answer to his question “which evolved first, the wing or the feathers?” would probably be, “it doesn’t matter”. The important thing for evolution is that feathers are clearly not necessary for flight. And birds evolved from dinosaurs, which makes “don't bring up any flying reptiles” pretty dumb too.

This guy is typical of the know-all evolution denier. He has not studied the subject and by his own admission hadn’t read anything about it until about a month or so, when he read Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box. Now he has seemingly read on some creationist web site this thing about wings and feathers and he thinks it’s a killer for evolution - something that experts in evolutionary science who have dedicated their lives to this subject have missed – and arrogantly crows about it on his blog. And yes I know I shouldn’t appeal to authority – an argument should be considered on its merits not on whether the person presenting it is a scientist or not. But wouldn’t you think someone new to the subject would spend a few minutes researching this evolution-killer question before posting it for everyone to see his ignorance? (OK, rhetorical question.)

In less than five minutes I found the answers on talkorigins.org. For the benefit of Kennesaw Williams (if he is really interested), I present thoughts on how flight, wings and feathers may have evolved (all with my bold):

As to wings: if you read the chapter on wings in the recent excellent book by Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, you will get a better idea how flight could evolve generally, but as to bird's wings and feathers, there is recent evidence that feathers were initially varieties of scales used for insulation (recently feathers were induced in chicks to form from scales on their legs, and a dinosaur in China showed an imprint of feathers along its spine). Once there, feathers must have been co-opted for a range of reasons. One theory is that they were used to catch prey - insects and small rodents - as a kind of net. Once you have them on forelimbs, it is not a long leap, if you'll forgive the pun, to flight, as we see incipient fliers all around us in the form of tree leapers and gliders. Straight selection would account for it.

I also found more information on how feathers probably evolved:

In past times, feathers were probably first used as insulation, much like hair in mammals, and were probably hair-shaped, as some of those other types of feathers mentioned above still are. At some point, some of the proto-birds developed branching projections from the early feathers. These were better at insulating, and so natural selection favored those animals that possessed them.

The next step was probably selection for barbules which curled at the ends, hooking the barbules into the adjacent ones and thus making a better wind-shedding surface, like a windbreaker. (The underfeathers would make better insulators by staying fluffy and unhooked, so the downy type of feather would be retained.) At this point the barbules were probably still pretty much round in cross-section, with no grooves. Since the limited interlocking mechanism was an improvement over non-interlocked feathers, there would be a competitive advantage to having the hooks.

So, now we have hamuli hooked around barbule "petioles". Now go back to one of Darwin's assumptions that I've been pretty much taking for granted so far- variation. Some of these proto-birds had "petioles" slightly oval, or squarish, or crescent-shaped, as opposed to round. Please stress the "slightly" there! Now, one of these shapes was better than the others at holding the interlocking mechanism together (another idea of Darwin's). So, that proto-bird's offspring would survive better than offspring of the others, and so eventually replace them.

Fast forward a couple of hundred million years of the same variation, mutation, and selection, and you end up with modern bird feathers. Simple, no? Just time-consuming. The groove and hook did not evolve separately, as has been contended, but one in response to the other. The hooks were not useless without the grooves, they just work better with the grooves. You find this same pattern all through the living world.

And I found information on the evolution from dinosaurs to modern birds:

Many new bird fossils have been discovered in the last couple of decades, revealing several intermediates between theropod dinosaurs (such as Allosaurus) and modern birds:

* Sinosauropteryx prima. A dinosaur covered with primitive feathers, but structurally similar to unfeathered dinosaurs Ornitholestes and Compsognathus (Chen et al. 1998; Currie and Chen 2001).

(More at the link.)

Not that hard really. I imagine that Kennesaw Williams, if he bothered to read this, in his next post, would perhaps ask how the eye could possibly have evolved, perhaps asking the killer question “what use is half an eye?”. (Answer – a lot more use than no eye.) Or perhaps he would ask how we could agree that a watch (should we happen to find one lying on a beach, for example), was designed, but would suggest that life is not? The possibilities are endless. Such a pity we won’t know where to find such brilliant musings; but at least we will be spared knowing how comprehensively evolution has been debunked. (Sigh.

Get a load of this lame-ass

I just learned that an anti-evolutionist twit has just started a blog with Blogger, with the url of (wait for it) http://skeptico.blogspot.com/ Go on – click the link and see.  He’s even leaving creationist comments on other blogs as Skeptico.

What a lame-ass – can’t even use his own blog name. What does he hope to achieve? To confuse people into thinking I favor intelligent design? To generate extra traffic to his lame site? Clearly, he doesn’t think that rational argument and evidence will be enough to convince people that ID is valid.

If you ever needed evidence the intelligent design argument was in trouble – you have it here. (Not that we really needed any more evidence.)

(Checkout The Real Skeptico.)

Hat tip to Bronze Dog for originally spotting the imitator.

Debate – astrology is science, or not?

Some real science heavyweights are about to debate what is science and what is not:

What is science and what are its boundaries? What is it at the origin of scientific knowledge? What sparks scientific research? What is reason? What is the relationship between reason and faith? What are the agendas that move the two sides in the evolution vs. creation conflict? How much of it is science and how much is politics? What is at stake?

These are some of the questions that Crossroads New York Cultural Center will ask to a panel of distinguished experts…

All well and good, you might think. But get a load of the three “distinguished experts” they have assembled:

Dr. Michael BEHE, professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University and a key witness at the Dover Intelligent Design trial, will debate with Dr. Michael HANBY, Associate director of the Institute of Faith and Learning at Baylor University and with Monsignor Lorenzo ALBACETE, theologian, author and columnist.

(My bold.)

So let’s get this straight. Michael Behe, major Intelligent Design proponent and key witness to have ID taught as science, will debate with a director of an institute of credulity and superstition, er I mean faith, and a theologian, over what is science. I wonder what lively debate and disagreements will ensure between these three geniuses. Hardly seems likely there will be much controversy. Although perhaps they will settle once and for all the burning question of whether astrology is science or not. We know Behe thinks it is. I wonder what the other two will say. Can’t wait.

Hat tip to Red State Rabble.

Intelligent Design Society of Kansas FAQ

Via Pharyngula I learn of The FAQ the Discovery Institute ought to use.

A sample:

How do you recognize when something is Irreducibly Complex?

Something is Irreducibly Complex when proponents of Intelligent Design can't imagine how natural selection could have produced it

Pretty funny – and so true.

Intelligent Evolution

Via Pharyngula and Thoughts From Kansas I learn of the next re-branding iteration of creationism.

Remember how creationism became “Creation Science”, which then became “Intelligent Design”? (Except that Intelligent Design has now been ruled religion in disguise by a judge.) Apparently William Dembski is proposing creationism’s next iteration – Intelligent Evolution. 

It’s also crystal clear from Dembski’s post that all these name changes are just politics and PR:

I therefore offer the following proposal if ID gets outlawed from our public schools: retitle it Intelligent Evolution (IE). The evolution here would be reconceived not as blind evolution but as technological evolution. Nor would it be committed to Darwin’s idea of descent with modification. But, hey, it would still be evolution, and evolution can be taught in schools.

(My bold.)

You’ll note he admits it’s nothing more than a name change to squeak his religiously inspired pseudoscience into school science classes. Remember that when we have the inevitable court cases in a couple of years to teach “IE” in school science classes. Note to Dembski – it takes more than changing one word in a name to make something science. Or as Thoughts From Kansas concludes:

…what IDC … really needs isn't motivational speeches and infomercials … but peer-reviewed research consistently showing promise in IDC.

Well duh! But hilariously, Dembski even has this point covered by this wonderful piece of rationalization:

Don’t be distracted by the “thousands” of articles being published in the research journals that purport to support evolutionary theory — this is an artifact of overfunding an underachieving theory.

Yes, all those “thousands of articles” (note the sneer quotes around “thousands”), are merely evidence of over funding of an “underachieving theory”. Obviously. Presumably the total lack of scientific articles supporting ID is evidence of its strength. Or something

No idea of the odds

I have been reading Hugh Ross’ rather bad statistical guesswork on the probability of life occurring in the universe. Ross lists 154 parameters he says are required for intelligent life to exist in the universe. Then he assigns probabilities to them. Actually he assigns probabilities to 322 parameters (not 154), which is a little confusing. Anyway, he concludes there is less that a 1 in 10²⁸² chance intelligent life would occur without a divine miracle. Poor odds! He doesn’t estimate the probability of a deity spontaneously poofing itself into existence so it is there to create the miracle he claims is necessary. Wouldn’t that probability be zero? If not, surely it must be turtles all the way down?

Ignoring that, where to start with Ross’ figures? The first obvious comment is that he doesn’t (as far as I can tell) say how he arrives at the probabilities of any of his 322 parameters – probabilities that range from 0.00001 to 0.7. In my view his conclusion is meaningless because we don’t have anything like enough information to complete such a task. That fact alone sinks his argument before we even begin.

His article is a variation on the finely tuned universe argument – the idea that since the universe's physical constants are within a small tolerance of what is necessary for life, it must have been designed that way. Usually far fewer variables are quoted, and I have to say I’m skeptical of the number of items Ross thinks are necessary, quite apart from the probabilities he claims he has calculated for each one. But the arguments against both positions are the same.

Fine tuning does not imply design

There are various arguments against the idea that fine tuning means design. First, design rests on the assumption that the only type of life possible is the carbon-based form we are used to here on earth. But there is no reason to suppose this is so: we are restricting ourselves here by our own lack of knowledge and imagination.

Second, and totally fatal to the design argument, is that current theories point to the existence of an infinite number of other universes, each possibly with different sets of physical constants and conditions. Certainly a multi-universe scenario can not be ruled out since no known principle requires that only one universe exists. In fact astrophysicist Victor Stenger states:

No new hypothesis is needed to consider multiple universes. In fact, it takes an added hypothesis to rule them out-- a super law of nature that says only one universe can exist. But we know of no such law, so we would violate Occam's razor to insist on only one universe.

The argument is that an infinite number of universes exist, this universe is the one randomly tuned for life, and so this is the one where we have evolved and where we are here to observe that the universe is fine tuned for life. What else would we expect to observe? This is known as the Weak Anthropic Principle.

A third argument is that a fundamental theory of everything might predict that only a very narrow range of physical constants or even no range at all, would even be possible anyway. In other words, right now we just don’t know what the odds would be.

Talk Reason has a good write-up on why The Anthropic Principle Does Not Support Supernaturalism. In this article they use probability theory to show that the fine tuned argument actually contradicts design. Ross is just wrong.

Little green men?

Scott at the As If blog had another angle on this. He looked at Ross’ site and says Ross’ arguments makes it highly unlikely there are other inhabited planets in the universe. Scott takes Ross’ 154 parameters and assigns 50% probability to each (higher than Ross) and concludes the probability of there being a planet with all of these factors is less than 1 in 2 x 10⁴⁶.  He concludes that not only does the existence of Earth demand an explanation beyond random chance; it is also evidence that we are alone in the universe. See his post What are the odds? for the details. Scott asked for my comments.

Of course, if Ross is right and life demands a divine miracle, then applying probabilities to see if we are alone is meaningless - if God created us against the odds he could have created other life too. That argument didn’t especially appeal to me though. There are enough other reasons to reject Ross’ figures as evidence we are alone.

First, several of Ross’ parameters are for things that he says are necessary for life anywhere in the universe. For example:

6. decay rate of cold dark matter particles

7. hypernovae eruptions

9. white dwarf binaries

10. proximity of solar nebula to a supernova eruption

11. timing of solar nebula formation relative to supernova eruption

86. density of giant galaxies in the early universe

109. decay rate of cold dark matter particles

135. level of supersonic turbulence in the infant universe

136. number density of the first metal-free stars to form in the universe

141. heavy element abundance in the intracluster medium for the early universe

142. heavy element abundance in the intracluster medium for the early universe

144. pressure of the intra-galaxy-cluster medium

I’m not sure but I think there are several more. These, according to Ross, are all necessary for life to form in the universe, and those 12 items according to Scott’s formula would have a combined probability of only 0.00024. But since we know life (ie us) did form in the universe, we know the probability for all of these occurring is actually 1.  These parameters, and probably several others, should be removed from Scott’s calculation.

Rolling up probabilities

Another major problem with Ross’ calculations is that many of his parameters are dependent on other parameters, resulting in incorrect multiplying up of probabilities. For example, take these four:

112. rate of nearby gamma ray bursts

119. gamma-ray burst events

128. frequency of gamma ray bursts in galaxy

152. quantity and proximity of gamma-ray burst events relative to emerging solar nebula

All of which if “too many” or “too few” are said to be a problem for life. Scott essentially multiplied these four 0.5 probabilities together to make a probability of all four occurring to be 0.0625. But surely they are essentially different ways of saying the same thing? He is multiplying four probabilities when there should just be one – 0.5.

How about these three:

20. parent star age

21. parent star mass

23. parent star color

But aren’t the color, mass and age of a star interdependent? For example, massive hot blue stars burn more quickly and therefore have shorter lives.

Look at these:

71. Kuiper Belt of asteroids (beyond Neptune)

94. total mass of Kuiper Belt asteroids

I would be grateful if anyone could explain the difference between those two.

Then there are these three:

105. distance from nearest black hole

15. parent star distance from center of galaxy

132. parent star distance from galaxy’s corotation circle

… any of which if “too close” or “too far” are claimed to mean life could not exist. But aren’t these essentially the same thing, or at least very similar?  But there’s more – the above three are also linked to:

8. supernovae eruptions

16. parent star distance from closest spiral arm

24. galactic tides

110. ratio of inner dark halo mass to stellar mass for galaxy

117. star formation rate in solar neighborhood during past 4 billion years

118. variation in star formation rate in solar neighborhood during past 4 billion years

The reason is that these nine parameters (and maybe others), are all related to what is known as the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ): an area of space with a safe environment and access to the chemical materials necessary for building Earthlike planets. Scott’s 0.5 probability for each of these nine would yield a combined probability of 0.00195 (0.2%). However, a paper published in the journal Science in January 2004 estimated as many as 10% of all stars in the Milky Way galaxy would be within the GHZ – over 50 times what Scott would calculate.

Here’s another problem. The following numbered parameters are all to do with plate tectonics: 14, 54, 92, 153 and 154. Combined, with a 0.5 probability of each, they suggest the probability of plate tectonics arising as 0.03125. But SETI state:

There is nothing miraculous about tectonic activity, and in fact there is some evidence that it has occurred on both Mars and Venus.

Plate tectonics are probably fairly common, possibly even the norm, despite the 3% probability suggested by Scott using Ross’ parameters.

There are so many others like this it would be tedious to list them all, but I think the point is made: Ross did not allow for interdependencies – he incorrectly multiplies interdependent probabilities.

More errors

Then there are some parameters are just wrong. For example:

23. parent star color

* if redder: photosynthetic response would be insufficient

* if bluer: photosynthetic response would be insufficient

But SETI states:

Indeed, even stars somewhat brighter than the Sun, which because of their heightened ultraviolet production might be thought dangerous, could be the loci of life. Jim Kasting has shown that the enhanced ultraviolet radiation from F-type stars would produce so much atmospheric ozone that planetary surfaces could be very well shielded.

Also, Astrobiology Magazine states:

Of course, the development of photosynthesis on Earth did not just rely on the sun's wavelengths. It also was dependent on various factors specific to our planet, such as cloud cover, atmospheric composition, amount of land, and the depth of the ocean. Since so many factors played a role in the evolution of photosynthesis on Earth, perhaps photosynthesis could evolve on other worlds orbiting less-than-ideal stars.

In addition, other planetary factors perhaps could speed up the rate of photosynthesis development. There does not seem to be a particular reason why photosynthesis must develop at the same pace as it did on Earth.

As long as planets have enough liquid water oceans and cloud cover to protect against UV radiation, say Wolstencroft and Raven, planets orbiting most stars should be able to develop photosynthesis. One key to finding such planets is to look in the star's habitable zone.

(My bold.)

Ross’ probabilities ignore the habitable zone phenomenon: Earth like temperatures can be found around most stars, but at different distances.  In addition, many of Ross’ parameters refer to Jupiter or Neptune, or to other factors relating just to our solar system. Again, Ross assumes that the formation of life requires a solar system like ours. He ignores the possibility of differing evolutionary paths that could adapt to colder/ hotter stars and planets, more/fewer massive planets, and countless other differing environments where life could still evolve. Ross also assumes that the time it took for intelligent life to evolve on Earth is the time it will take in all cases. Making these conclusions based on a statistical sample of one planet is absurd, and yet that is precisely what many of his parameters assume.

There are so many dubious parameters in Ross’ list it would be tedious to list them all, but I think the point is made: Ross’ list is bogus. Talk Reason has a very critical evaluation of Ross, covering some of these points, and others.

The Drake equation

The more usually quoted calculation for this kind of thing is the Drake equation devised by Dr. Frank Drake in the 1960s. The Drake equation estimates N: the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which we might expect to be able to communicate. Historical estimates of N range from 0.05 to 5,000, depending on the assumptions. From the link it seems like the current thinking is N = 0.0000008316. If there are 200 billion galaxies, I think that would make the potential number of civilizations with intelligence in this universe to be around 166,000. 

Is that a reasonable estimate? In my opinion it is also based on many assumptions that we cannot be sure of – in other words I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s a better guess than using Ross.

(Note: Pictures are from NASA and the Hubble)