The Austringer

I have data on Compact Disks (CDs) from past projects. The technology was getting toward being affordable around 1996. CD writers dropped under $100 for the first time somewhere around there, and media started selling for less than $5 a disk. The amount of storage space on a CD was comparable to the size of hard disks available at the time, and optical storage seemed far better than tape as a medium. So now I have cases, drawers, and spindles of CDs dating right back to 1996.

No storage medium is perfect, so archived data is a commitment and not just a static collection. Last month, Sam asked me what I would like for my birthday. I said I wanted a disk for backing up data. After having a look at off-the-shelf external hard drives, it seemed that all the models I looked at had warranties of 1 year or shorter. However, if you buy an internal hard disk and a separate USB enclosure, the warranty on the drive can be much, much longer. Sam and I visited the Newegg site and picked out a Western Digital 1.5 terabyte drive and a Rosewill USB enclosure. The drive comes with a 5-year warranty. I can pair this with another 1.5 terabyte disk so that I can copy off my data from the CDs, then copy to the second hard disk.

Back when I was about to move from California to Michigan, I had a chat with a fellow who works for the Internet Archive. That is a project whose modest aim is to store the World Wide Web. All of it. You can browse sites as they were in 1995. Well, with a few caveats. My acquaintance said that the Internet Archive’s data storage was based on consumer-grade IDE drives. You can get them cheap and in quantity, and if you store things on multiple disks, the redundancy will help. That’s because disks fail. With an organization like the Internet Archive, they rack up lots of failures. They have to be swapping out bad drives and attempting to restore content from remaining copies on other drives. And they couldn’t, he said, quite keep up with the failures. Some data does get lost because failures occur before the redundancy can be exploited to restore some sites.

I figure for my purposes, the data I have is a copy of what my colleagues have, and for the hard disk copy, I aim to have two of those. I think that should be sufficiently paranoid. The process or workflow takes about six to seven minutes per CD to create a directory, copy the files, and mark the CD as copied. I’m working on the third page out of 32 pages in a CD case now. This will take some effort, but then I invested years of my life getting that data in the first place.

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Throughout the evening, Stephen Meyer kept repeating that we only know of “specified information” occurring because of an intelligent agent acting. Then, because we only know one cause in the present for “specified information”, we should accept that as the cause of “specified information” in the past.

Besides the philosophical problems with rarefied design inferences, there is the rather more simple class of empirical counterexamples. To wit, Meyer has consistently ignored available evidence that is not in accord with his outlook. What designer, for example, must be posited as acting in any of the various cases of duplicated genes that diverge and where the copies now each yield different functional protein products? Meyer has been ignoring this despite notice in 2004 of this class of evidence.

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Michael Medved dismissed accusations that the IDC movement was disguised religion as a “big lie”. Elsewhere in his remarks, he claimed that the vociferousness of the attacks on IDC were because of belief. IDC advocates, Medved claimed, would have no change in their faith if “Darwinian evolution” were proved correct (to the satisfaction of their doubts, certainly), but that atheists would have to admit that they were wrong if IDC proved correct.

OK, so if IDC is correct, how would that change any atheist’s mind about things? It seems to me that’s only the case if one assumes that the “intelligent designer(s)” is/are identical to some conception of God(s). That rather diminishes the force of Medved’s other assertion that IDC isn’t about religion.

Plus, there’s the consideration that Medved overlooks in his dichotomizing. There are rather a large group of us outside the IDC “big tent” who grew up being told that telling the truth was good and telling falsehoods was bad. Maybe the IDC movement gets vociferous opposition because rather a lot of us take umbrage at so many falsehoods being spewed by such a small group? Please, Michael, remember to expand your remarks next time to take us into account.

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I attended the “Signature in the Cell” “intelligent design” creationism (IDC) event last night in Tampa, Florida. This featured Stephen C. Meyer, author of the book of the same name, Michael Medved, David Berlinski, and Tom Woodward, the event organizer and historian to the IDC movement.

I have only a short amount of time for blogging on weekdays, so this will have to be brief. I need to address the use of “IDC”, since Medved in his opening remarks called terming ID as creationism a “big lie”. More on this later, but Medved basically told the crowd that ID was not that fuddy-duddy, hick fan base 6-day creation stuff, and no one on that panel would say so. Then Tom Woodward got up, extolled the ID “big tent”, and explained that YEC people like Paul Nelson and himself were still doing fine inside the ID movement. Beyond the simple fact that Medved doesn’t know the IDC demographic, there is the fact that the sense I use “IDC” in is demonstrable. “Intelligent design” creationism deserves the label because its tactics and arguments are a proper subset of those used in promoting “creation science” or “scientific creationism” (SciCre). There is nothing to “intelligent design” other than a label change and some gilding of the arguments previously used in religious antievolution; the content of IDC demonstrates this point quite well.

OK, that will probably have to do. I’ll note that the venue was about 4/5ths full. I’ve emailed Woodward to ask for the total attendance. Medved said that it seemed to him that the event was like a political rally. No, Michael, that was a political rally. IDC is a socio-political movement, nothing more.

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Apple announced its iPad tablet computer today. The device seems to be mostly a large-screen iPod Touch. The intriguing aspects of the iPad, at least to me, were that Apple says that for the 3G versions ($130 extra over the WiFi-only versions) these devices will be unlocked, and that Apple has arrangements with textbook publishers for EPUB content. It seems that Apple was able to wring some few concessions from AT&T concerning the unlocking and the two tiers of data plans. While the data plan costs are not cheap, they manage not to be exorbitant.

I saw that some other commentators were perplexed about the time taken in the announcement to show Apple’s iWork applications as they are ported to the iPad. I think, though, that a major market for the iPad might just turn out to be among high school and college students. Consider the points made and that market:

- Light enough to carry around in the backpack (If a student can skip carrying even one textbook and carry an iPad instead, they will be lightening their load.)

- 10 hour battery life, good enough for the school day

- Low cost applications that will be good enough for note-taking and in-class analysis

- Capable of holding and displaying full textbook content in color plus supplemental multimedia

- Cost low enough that it is compatible with current budgets for textbooks

- WiFi for on-campus connectivity and research

The fact that it also does a bunch of multimedia service plus gaming will be seen as a plus, at least by the students if not their parents.

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A perfectly reasonable letter to the editor from Walter Kania elicited a response from Andrew Ricks with all the hallmarks of the concern troll.

I was moved to enter a comment there that I’ll share here. There was a 1000 character limit on online comments.

I read the previous letter by Walter Kania. The response from Ricks is overwrought and misguided.

There is open discourse in science, conducted in the scientific literature. The “intelligent design” creationists (IDC) mostly skip that, and have established a track record for premature promotion of their claims as something worthy of inclusion in the public K-12 science curriculum. The IDC advocates have not done the hard work of convincing the scientific community that they have something that works as science.

Efforts to undermine the effectiveness and rigor of science instruction anywhere are fully worthy of disparagement, denigration, and contumely. The religious antievolution movement, IDC included, has been engaged in precisely that for decades. It is precisely because we seek to curtail inappropriate indoctrination that IDC is opposed. If they want respectful discourse, they need to stop being charlatans pushing a sham.

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.

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From about 1992 to around 2002, I was a frequent commenter on the Usenet talk.origins newsgroup, contributing several thousand posts there. I’m going to do some recycling of content from time to time, and pull posts from the archives to bring into this blog. Here are a couple of posts from 1998 related to “puncuated equilibria”.

Continue Reading »

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Does Beliefnet publish just anything? Exhibit A for the affirmative would be the post by David Klinghoffer titled The Cowardice of Richard Dawkins. Klinghoffer, a prominent cheerleader for the “intelligent design” creationism (IDC) movement, is incensed that Dawkins would spend time in one of his books responding to Wendy Wright of Concerned Women of America, and snub the Discovery Institute’s stable of Fellows.

First, Richard Dawkins has elsewhere had interactions with some of the people Klinghoffer offers as serious advocates. Dawkins has not always avoided those people, so the “cowardice” charge that Klinghoffer makes actually is evidence for an “ignorance” charge to be laid at Klinghoffer’s feet. (I’m intrigued by the fact that Klinghoffer’s list of serious people includes Wells and Berlinski but excludes Michael Behe, whose publication record is far better than both of those two combined. Is Behe on the outs with the IDC community?) As for earning it, need I do more than point to William Dembski’s “Judge Jones School of Law” flash animation incident? David, you should remember that in 2005 Dembski posted a flash animation of Judge Jones featuring a squeaky pitched-shifted voiceover laden with fart noises? It turned out that the vocal talent in it was none other than Bill Dembski himself. And, to top it off, Richard Dawkins showed no cowardice, but made a direct response:

Anybody who resorts to tactics of desperation like this has to be a real loser. Dembski is a loser, and it now looks as though he KNOWS it. My guess is that he will try to take it down when he realizes how foolish it makes him look. Josh, can we can keep a copy, after he tries to remove it from his own website?

Why doesn’t Klinghoffer know about this? Or does Klinghoffer know about it and is spreading falsehoods about Dawkins’ record of interaction with IDC advocates?

Second, one can see that Wendy Wright is a stand-in for the people that Klinghoffer extols. Wright, like other IDC cheerleaders, has bought into the “magic bullets”[*] that the IDC advocates peddle. The video interview shows Wright repeating point after point that have been made by Jonathan Wells, one of the specific people Klinghoffer recommends as a serious opponent. Wright may not pretend to be coming from a scientific stance, but she offers exactly the same arguments as those who do pretend so. Klinghoffer has no grounds to complain there; her cheerleading has the same sources as his own. And, in fact, the people Klinghoffer offers as serious opponents do no more than gild already-existing antievolution arguments that they got from previous forms of antievolution. You know, the forms that used to be more honest about narrow sectarian religious belief being the motivation for their antievolution stance.

Third, the IDC advocates and their cheerleaders want no more than to be able to say that they are being taken seriously, and that this “legitimates” their position. Denying them unearned recognition is not cowardice; it is a tactical response to their ploy. Back in 1997, I participated in the “Naturalism, Theism, and the Scientific Enterprise” conference. It was not billed in the “call for papers” as an IDC conference, but those of us who were critics of the arguments made by Bill Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and Jonathan Wells were informed by no less than Phillip Johnson that our very attendance helped “legitimate the question”.

Fourth, why is Klinghoffer berating Dawkins instead of spending his time trying to deal with actual scholarly criticism of the arguments made by IDC advocates? The books “Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism” and “Why Intelligent Design Fails” do take the IDC advocates’ arguments seriously, and show that they are flawed. Is Klinghoffer himself a coward for failing to address those instead?

David Klinghoffer: ignorant and wrong because of it. But that’s the essence of IDC cheerleading.

[*]

I tend to think of SciCre argumentation, and even some of the ID argumentation, as a search for a “magic bullet”. By this, I don’t mean it in the sense that Ehrlich did when searching for a cure for syphilis. I mean it in the sense of werewolf movies. There, the magic bullet is simply a silver slug that will destroy the lycanthrope on contact. Those wielding the magic bullet need invest no other effort in dealing with the lycanthrope, are not required to be pure in spirit, and certainly have no need to *understand* lycanthropy in any deep sense. Similarly, the SciCre “professionals” are engaged in the peddling of “magic bullets”, which retain their magic only so long as they aren’t used on real lycanthropes. The magic bullet users, as Scott relates, remain secure in their faith that the evil lycanthropes can be held at bay or vanquished, right up until the time the magic bullet is fired — and is found to have lost its virtue.

Instead of magic bullets like “too little moon dust” or “materialistic philosophy”, more good would come of trying to understand what exactly evolutionary biology is. As it is, creationist belief has tended more and more to resemble evolutionary biology. In little more than a century and a half, we have seen a change from general adherence to the doctrine of special creation to a range of beliefs, at the most different from evolutionary biology, creation of each separate “kind” (which when defined at all, tends to be defined such that the evolutionist term “clade” comes close to fitting the concept), and at the least different, a belief in physical common descent but separate imbuement of spirit.

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Paul Krugman casts a jaundiced eye back over the last decade in his NYT column.

So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

Personally, I learned a lot this past decade, though not much that had to do with the economy. Economically speaking, my family has had a rough decade, and certainly grad school, non-profit service, a hiatus in hospital, and post-docs all contributed to the threadbare look to the wallet beyond the recent general economic implosion. So I don’t think my particular experience speaks to much of the rest of the population, but I do get the sense that many others have had their own problems.

But Krugman’s general point, it seems to me, remains solid: when it comes to how we deal with economic policy, it seems that we have entirely too much forgetfulness of the lessons of the past. While popular economic lore holds that a free market will automatically optimize everything, most overlook that the assumptions underlying that theoretical ideal include the one that all agents are acting rationally, and we know that real economic agents often act for all sorts of non-rational motivations, greed ranking high among them. There is a role for regulation, and it consists in ensuring that the non-rational impulses of particular economic agents are curbed and the rational ones encouraged. We accept today that regulations for fire safety, for example, are reasonable, yet these obviously restrict the free market, where nightclubs could squeeze in a few dozen more people if only the pesky fire marshal weren’t so concerned about the ability of the sardine-like mass of partiers to exit safely in case of fire. We accept that our food manufacturers should include more actual grain and less actual rat poo, and trust regulation to make it so. We even pay some amount of lip service to the notion that monopolies are somehow bad and competition is good, though a century passing since the monopoly-busting days of Teddy Roosevelt seems to have relaxed our concern somewhat. We should be taking the point from the two worst economic downturns of the past century that banking and stock trading still requires genuine oversight to reach stability in our economy.

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A philosophical look at evolution and creation by a newly-minted history Ph.D., Leslie Tomory, is titled The Shock and Awe of Creation. Tomory is in the theistic evolution camp, and argues on philosophical grounds that antievolution is a bad thing, while affirming that faith and science can co-exist.

That’s fine by me. But here is one of the issues that diminished my enjoyment of the piece.

Young earth creationists are the first and crudest variant of this reaction, but they are by no means the only one. The Intelligent Design (ID) movement accepts common descent to varying degrees, but rejects the established mechanisms of evolutionary change. The arguments of ID proponents are structured in the way I have outlined. Reacting to evolutionism, they have chosen to go on the attack against natural selection and genetic drift. They recognize that common descent is evident and they accept it.

Uh, no. There is one major “intelligent design” advocate, Michael Behe, who is on record saying that he has no particular reason to disagree with common descent, which is a rather different proposition from saying that he accepts common descent, much less that he feels that it is evident. Within the “intelligent design” movement, acceptance of common descent ranges from a (quite common) nil of the young-earth creationists in the movement to the grudging acquiescence of Mike Behe. Wherever one finds “intelligent design” material that addresses common descent, it uniformly seeks to make common descent seem less “evident” to the reader. Common descent is still quite plainly a target of “intelligent design” advocates, but it is also clear that they recognize they have a fine line to walk if they want to appear to be at all reasonable to the rest of the world. Have a look at “Of Pandas and People” and “Explore Evolution” sometime. When they talk to a “safe” audience, though, the stops often come off.

Another issue in the essay:

The final concept contained within the notion of evolution is the pace of evolutionary change. Although gradualism was dominant in Darwin’s thinking, the second half of the 19th century witnessed the rise of other opinions regarding the pace of evolutionary change, the most important of which was mutation theory’s large jumps. The rediscovery of genetics, with its emphasis on clearly distinct expression of genes, gave further impetus to mutation theory’s jumps. This changed, however, with the forging by Theodosius Dobzhansky among many others, of the modern or neo-Darwinian synthesis in the 1930s. This united Darwinian mechanisms with Medelian genetics and the study of population dynamics. Gradualism was once again the dominant opinion, although it was somewhat modified in the 1970s.

It was at this point when Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould put forward their theory of punctuated equilibrium, which argued that evolution proceeds by bursts, followed by long periods of stasis. Their arguments were based on observations of the fossil record which seems to indicate that on the whole, evolution proceeds in this uneven way. The bursts should not, however, be understood as occurring in a few generations. Rather, these bursts are only rapid when considered on geological time scales spanning millions of years, and speciation events occur over thousands of generations, making punctuated equilibrium a form of gradualism.

While Tomory eventually finishes by saying that punctuated equilibrium turns out to be a form of gradualism, he fails to elucidate the terminological problem at basis here. Gradualism of the sort that Darwin espoused wasn’t about constancy of rate, but rather the rather banal fact that it is populations that evolve, and its antithesis is saltationism, where new species are instantiated and founded by single organisms. Gould and Eldredge did rail against “gradualism”, but if you read the original papers carefully every such instance is best understood as shorthand for their slightly longer novel phrase of “phyletic gradualism”, a very specific and delimited concept of anagenetic speciation with constant rates of change in traits associated with the speciation event. I’m not sure that it is at all accurate to say that “gradualism” was modified in the 1970s. Gould and Eldredge elicited a lot of reactions that assumed that they were advocating saltationism, and they had, it seems, quite a bit of fun in tweaking people’s noses over the fact that they were doing no such thing. All in all, most of the brouhaha over punctuated equilibria appears, in retrospect, to have the form of an extended academic practical joke, as the rhetoric and phrasing of the original proposal appears to be gauged to elicit exactly the sort of mistakes in response as did follow. This does nothing to lessen the positive aspects of punctuated equilibria in making clear the importance of allopatric speciation on the patterns seen in the fossil record, but it does illustrate that there is more happening in the scientific literature than just straightforward explication of research findings.

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I’m guessing from the blithe and condescending tone of James Taranto’s piece in the Wall Street Journal that he is supposed to be in the class of “pundit”. Usually, it helps if a pundit can actually read for comprehension before launching into a screed. Here’s the section of interest:

True Believers?

Our lead item yesterday on science and journalism prompted several responses along the lines of this one, from reader John Steele Gordon:

Isn’t “believe in evolution” just shorthand for “accept evolution by natural selection as the explanation for the diversity of life through time”? Biologists are more than happy to explain the argument and the evidence to those who seek an explanation and evidence.

There is plenty of scientific skepticism regarding climate change, but there is none whatever regarding evolution by natural selection. The skeptics either believe in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis or in an “intelligent designer” that helped things along but, somehow, isn’t to be considered God. Neither is, even remotely, a scientific alternative theory (they are untestable and fail to explain many things that evolution explains easily). And the adherents of both are unwilling to consider rational argument and evidence. They are the ones with a belief system. Their whole “argument” consists of trying–unsuccessfully and usually tendentiously–to poke holes in Darwinian theory with the ludicrous idea that if it can’t explain everything then it explains nothing and is therefore false.

We certainly agree that neither Biblical creation nor “intelligent design” is worth taking seriously as an empirical proposition. Nonetheless, we stand behind our criticism of those who scoff at others for failing to “believe in evolution.” Just as it is an error to put forward a religious doctrine as if it were a scientific theory, it is an error to speak of a scientific theory as if it were a religious doctrine–i.e., something to “believe in.”

Gordon’s point in the quote, though, if only Taranto had paused a moment to reflect, was that it was the religious anti-evolutionists who falsely attempt to categorize acceptance of modern science’s findings on living systems as merely another belief system. It’s nice that Taranto took a moment to state agreement with Gordon’s position, but it would have been even better if Taranto had recognized that he was actually agreeing rather than disagreeing.

Update: I see John Pieret got there first. Taranto’s original claim that he said that he stood by when responding to Gordon was this:

But the reason “science” no longer “wins” is that what often poses as science today is different from the real thing. To take an easy example, supposedly science-minded people often scoff at those who do not “believe in evolution.” The problem with this is not that they are wrong to defend evolution, but that they mistake evolution, a scientific theory, for a belief system. When you demand adherence to a set of beliefs, you are no longer doing science but something that has the form, if not the substance, of religion.

This is even more egregious than Taranto’s miscomprehension of Gordon’s comment. Can Taranto substantiate his claim that (1) what he claims happens, happens “often” and (2) that those “often” doing this really and truly have mistakenly put their backing behind a belief system rather than simply being imprecise in their arguments? That still doesn’t help his prior claim of the first sentence, that this represents an instance of something that “poses” as science rather than being science.

As Pieret notes, scientists sometimes do use the words “believe in evolution”. Though I’d say that the odds are that they are not formally stating their own views (i.e., taking evolution to be a belief system), and are responding to the formulation that the religious antievolutionists use, which assumes evolutionary science is a belief system. To take just the most prominent example of the words being used, let’s visit Richard Dawkins’ famous bromide in his review of Blueprints:

So to the book’s provocation, the statement that nearly half the people in the United States don’t believe in evolution. Not just any people but powerful people, people who should know better, people with too much influence over educational policy. We are not talking about Darwin’s particular theory of natural selection. It is still (just) possible for a biologist to doubt its importance, and a few claim to. No, we are here talking about the fact of evolution itself, a fact that is proved utterly beyond reasonable doubt. To claim equal time for creation science in biology classes is about as sensible as to claim equal time for the flat-earth theory in astronomy classes. Or, as someone has pointed out, you might as well claim equal time in sex education classes for the stork theory. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

But neither Dawkins nor the authors of Blueprints ask for people to believe in the sense required to support Taranto’s argument. Just a bit further on from the above, Dawkins also wrote the following:

If you feel even vaguely in the mood to stand up and be counted, evolution is a pretty good issue on which to take your stand. It is an excellent standard-bearer for reason and the gentle virtues of civilization. This is because the more you read, quietly and soberly, the evidence for evolution, the more powerful will you discover that evidence to be. You are as safe taking your stand on the fact of evolution as you would be on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But the latter is not — any longer — at stake in the war against fundamentalism. Evolution is on the front line because it is an important issue disputed by fundamentalists, and you can be completely confident that you can easily prove them wrong.

Emphasis added. Dawkins doesn’t expect people to switch allegiance between belief systems like fans switch between rooting for sports teams. Dawkins is not treating evolutionary science as something that is “posing” for science — he quite well understands that what makes evolutionary science worthwhile is the evidence that underlies it. I could wish that Dawkins also explicitly noted in his review the simple fact that religious antievolutionists want this cast as belief systems all around, and that the sciences aren’t like that, but nobody’s perfect.

So I’m still waiting, just as Pieret is, for Taranto to give us a specific example of what he claims happens “often”. I somehow doubt Taranto will be providing that.

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Please go read The Duck. Pass it on to your friends, especially if they are journalists.

ONCE TWO SCIENTISTS—it hardly matters what sort—were walking before dinner beside a pleasant pond with their friend, a reporter for the Dispatch, when they happened to notice a bird standing beside the water.

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This is a reply to a comment by David Opderbeck in this thread. Since David has consistently accused me of misunderstanding, I’m going to pull in a number of sources to demonstrate that such is not the case. So I’ll tag quotes as follows: [DO S&S 1] for David’s first “Science and the Sacred” post on the topic, [DO S&S 2] for his second post, [DO Aus 1] for David’s first comment here, [DO Aus 2] for his second comment here, [DO Aus 3] for his third, and [DO Aus 4] for his most recent comment here.

[DO Aus 4]Wesley, you are again contradicting yourself, and again missing the point of my first two pieces on Science & Sacred.

David,

You seem to be getting desperate to find some way to be dismissive of my commentary. Not only was I consistent before, and explained why, but I have given you no reason to claim logical error on my part this time, either. In fact, I have pointed out logical flaw after logical flaw on your part, and you seem to take no notice of that.

Let’s review those first two pieces that you erroneously claim I’m misunderstanding.

Paragraph 1 from the first piece goes like this:

[DO S&S 1]On December, 2005, Judge John E. Jones, III (left) issued his opinion in the now-infamous Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District intelligent design case. Like many thoughtful evangelical Christians at the time, I was impressed with intelligent design theory. I had read many of the ID movement’s foundational texts, and felt confident that ID offered an intellectually and theological satisfying alternative to the extremes of young earth creationism and atheistic Darwinism. Shortly after the Kitzmiller decision was issued, I blogged and wrote publicly about Judge Jones’ opinion, which I thought was largely mistaken.

I still think Judge Jones’ opinion in Kitzmiller missed the mark in some important ways, even though I think (and have always thought) the end result was correct. Moreover, I remain impressed with the energy and intelligence of the ID movement’s thought leaders. Scholars such as Bill Dembski and Mike Behe have made some interesting arguments about epistemology, divine action, and causation. However, when I dove into the broader ID discussion after the Kitzmiller case, I came to believe that many aspects of the ID movement are not as helpful as I had first thought – and, indeed, that ID rhetoric is often used to hinder positive interaction between the truths of the Christian faith and truths learned through the natural sciences.

This says that your opinion of Jones’ decision was negative. Paragraph 2 explains how your opinion changed somewhat as you examined the “broader” discussion, but that your opinion was that the Kitzmiller decision still was flawed. You reviewed some of the legal history of the antievolution movement, and gave your opinion that “intelligent design” has been misused by “the Church”. Piece 1, though, never got around to an argument about any of these things. And it still says that the Scopes trial occurred in 1926, when I provided the actual year of 1925 for you back on the 1st of December. There’s some pretty questionable stuff in there besides that (Behe and Dembski???), but given that it was all cast as opinion, it doesn’t seem worth a digression.

Now let’s turn to the second piece.

[DO S&S 2]Supporters of Judge Jones’ approach in the Kitzmiller case suggest that a similar gatekeeping function is important with respect to public education. Without some demarcation of what can be taught as “science” in the public schools, aren’t we opening the floodgates to the teaching of all sorts of pseudo-science, such as astrology and young earth creationism? I think this is a valid concern. For this and other reasons, I personally don’t agree with the “teach the controversy” approach promoted by many ID advocates. If I were to serve on my local school board, I would not vote in favor of introducing ID materials into the science curriculum, primarily because I don’t believe the ID program has generated sufficient results to reach the public schools. Like the courts, the public schools lack the time and resources to address views that fall far outside the scientific mainstream.

I’ve said before that Jones’ approach is not about gatekeeping the science curriculum. You just keep re-asserting that it is without effective support. This is an error on your part, and is a part of your mistaken claims made against my arguments. It is an error that drives the remainder of your piece as well.

I understand your S&S pieces just fine. I continue to think that they do you no credit; quite the contrary.

Now back to your most recent comment.

[DO Aus 4]You can’t have it both ways. If you think the demarcation of “science” was “key” in the “sense” of being necessary to evaluate the “secular purpose” of the School Board’s policy, then it was “key.” Key is key. It seems pointless for us to continue arguing about whether the demarcation question was “key” or “central” to the opinion. Obviously, it was, at least for the “sense” that you advance here.

There is a point, though. It has to do with you producing some support for your claim:

[DO S&S 2]In my view, however, there is a significant qualitative and quantitative difference between giving an issue some consideration and making it the central issue in the case.

My sense of “key” is any argument that could have caused a higher court to overturn the decision, which means that a great many “key” arguments may exist in a decision. This is quite readily distinguishable from your sense of “the central”, of which there can be only one such issue in the decision. I think I’ve done a good job of arguing that what you asserted was the single most important argument in the decision is, instead, but one of many comparably important considerations. And, of course, that you have mistaken the nature of that argument.

And, as I described at great length last time and have consistently said, I do not agree that creating a “demarcation” criterion was the intent of decision. Please stop ascribing that view to me. Judge Jones applied a definition of science from a source stipulated as authoritative by both the defense and the plaintiffs, which is far, far different from seeking to establish a general demarcation criterion. I note that you do not even attempt to support your claim, even though I told you what to look for if Jones had actually been doing something toward finding a demarcation criterion.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]In this regard, the “appeal proofing” argument really doesn’t work, for three reasons.

First, as you admit above, the “science” demarcation part of the opinion does some “key” work under the Judge’s construction of the establishment clause issue. This is clearly more than appeal proofing.

Is that your final answer?

That’s absurd.

Remember my connotation of “key” being an argument that if mishandled or unaddressed by the judge could result in overturning the case on appeal? Do you really want to argue that refusing to drop out explication of an argument because its absence could cause a higher court to overturn a decision is not part of appeal-proofing?

[DO Aus 4]Second, federal judges in particular have significant control over what issues get tried. The Judge could have excised much of the material relating to the “science” demarcation issue at various stages of the pretrial proceedings, but didn’t … because he apparently believed it was key to the proceedings. You seem to think that a Judge must passively hear and decide everything the parties throw at him or her, but that simply is not the case.

First, you shouldn’t have used “second” to introduce this paragraph, since you are no longer discussing appeal-proofing.

Second, you have strayed into inconsistency with this objection. It goes counter with what you told us previously:

[DO S&S 2]The looming presence of this question is one of the key reasons I don’t believe Judge Jones played the role of “activist judge” in Kitzmiller, even though I am critical of the opinion. The question whether ID, like “creation science,” is inherently religiously motivated, is a live concern, and was extensively briefed and argued to the court by both sides. In order to address the question of religious motivation, the court could not have avoided some consideration of the essential nature of ID theory.

You can’t have it both ways, David. Either the court could have avoided “some consideration” of the issue, or not, but you don’t get to pick which one happens to be convenient to your argument moment-by-moment.

Third, I’m quite aware of what latitude a trial judge has in determining what becomes admissible. I was involved in the plaintiffs’ pre-trial strategy formation concerning exactly that point in the case in question. That consideration, though, is conspicuous by its absence in your two S&S pieces, where you couch your opinion in terms of asserted but unsubstantiated faults in the decision, and not in procedural concerns previous to the decision. Did you overlook that before, or are you just flailing? My opinion leans to the latter.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]Third, even when a trial court allows evidence at trial on an issue, the court is not compelled to deal with it at length in a written opinion. It is not reversible error in itself to do this. Many, many, many times I’ve seen courts slap down with the back of a hand arguments made at length by the parties, without any negative repercussions on appeal. The briefer statement I offered in my Science & Sacred post, in fact, would have served this purpose (and the appeal proofing purpose) well.

Again, you have mislabeled your introductory word, since you once again are dismissing and not addressing the appeal-proofing argument. Argument by anecdote is widely considered to be weak. I can’t speak to the numbers of terse dismissive or spotty decisions that get a pass from higher courts relative to the ones that get overturned or remanded by those higher courts (e.g., Selman v. Cobb County), and I don’t think that you are in a position to make a statistical argument, either. Given the raw page number fiasco earlier in our discussion, I’d say I’m well justified in that. Nor does a personal opinion of how well your offered alternative might have held up to hypothetical review do much for anyone looking for an objective reason to prefer your opinion. You have to argue that the mere existence of airy dismissal in some decision means that airy dismissal should be what judges use generally or exclusively to even come close to having a point. I just have to point out that completeness of argumentation is not a fault to completely invalidate your stance that an error lurks in the Kitzmiller decision because of length of consideration, and I have. The thing that you should be looking for is a reason within the practice of law for a trial judge to high-handedly dismiss an argument that comprised a significant proportion of the testimony and evidence heard in a case. Given that the arguments were admitted, what reason in law would a judge have to prefer an uninformative dismissal of the argument to a full explication of why the judge decided on those arguments the way he did? I’m still waiting to hear one.

What I and I think others would want to see is that you show clearly that airy dismissal would have been better legal practice for a judge to engage in than completely addressing the arguments before the court. I haven’t seen anything from you that comes close to that.

Of course, I’ve said about the same thing before without an indication that you are taking my point.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]Now, as to the central point of my Science & Sacred piece: my primary concern is about which institutions in our society should make demarcation decisions, and for which purposes. Courts have to make demarcation decisions about “science” for evidentiary purposes (the Daubert standard), but that it is a narrow purpose tailored specifically to the unique role courts play. Broader demarcation decisions should be left to other institutions and to broader public debate.

Assuming that the second S&S piece is referenced, let’s have another look at that:

[DO S&S 2]This leads to my primary criticism of the Kitzmiller decision. I don’t believe Judge Jones should have ventured a broad definition of “science” in the Kitzmiller case, as though such an exercise necessarily ends the discussion of constitutionality. Under the applicable standards for establishment clause cases, the proper inquiry is into purposes and effects: was the government’s purpose “secular” and was the primary effect of the government’s decision to advance or inhibit religion or to produce an excessive entanglement of government and religion? Whether an idea is labeled “religion” or “science,” in itself, is irrelevant to the constitutional question. “Religion” is a constitutionally proper subject of study in the public schools, provided that the purpose and effect of that study is not sectarian.

You specifically note that figuring out whether a secular purpose exists is a proper avenue of inquiry for the courts. You and I disagree, and have done so throughout, over your unconvincing assertion that the Kitzmiller decision is an example of an improper and extensive exploration of “demarcation” generally rather than secular purpose claims in particular. You continue to appear to be confused over what “demarcation” means for this discussion despite my having gone on at considerable length to fill that in for you. I am consistent in part because I have always said that assertion of yours was wrong. Acting as if I had stipulated it at any point is poor form.

Next…

[DO Aus 4]On this last point, I’d suggest you check out some of the resources on science and the law that I list in my Science & Sacred post, none of which have anything specifically to do with ID. The literature on this is legion, there are numerous areas of public policy that it intersects, and it is by no means confined to reactionary claims of “judicial activism.” It seems to me that a narrow focus on the ID question is crabbing your understanding of the broader policy issues at play.

I’ll note that Cranor’s book seems to indicate that the Daubert criterion is mostly a bar to plaintiffs being allowed to make their case, something that obviously is not applicable to your chosen example.

It seems to me that you have a poor track record of trying to say what I do or don’t understand, as poor as being skunked over and over on that score can get. We agree that Judge Jone is not guilty of “judicial activism” and we have not argued that point. The “broader policy issue” in your S&S 2 piece is merely that courts should limit their inquiry into figuring out intent and purpose, and not offer to get involved in curriculum content decisions generally. But you chose to base your opinion on a particular example, and it was obvious to me that your chosen example failed to support your statement of general concern. Maybe there is a judicial example of somebody overstepping the line and seeking to establish a “demarcation” criterion in general; I’m pointing out, once again, that the Kitzmiller v. DASD decision written by Judge John E. Jones III is not it. Try again.

As I pointed out before, you are urging jurists to take extra-legal considerations into account and to alter their decisions on that basis. (Or, if we credit your turnabout, urging them to change what they consider admissible to a trial on that extra-legal basis.) You fault in particular the 2005 decision in Kitzmiller v. DASD by Judge Jones. If your assertion had merit, it should be robust enough to charitably consider the procedures that may legitimately be used by competent judges, including that of rendering a decision that pretty completely lays out the grounds for that decision. However, it is plainly obvious that charity is fatal to your claims; if we grant that a judge may reasonably respond at goodly length to arguments that occupied a significant proportion of a trial, there is nothing left to support your assertion because of the length of the section that causes you offense. When we examine the content of it, as I’ve gone over in previous responses, there is but one sentence you’ve noted as possibly problematic, and if we note that it directly addresses a possible way that secular purpose could be claimed, it, too, fails to support your assertions because there was a good legal reason that you yourself have stipulated that it should be addressed. Given that neither length nor content provide you a basis for continuing in citing the Kitzmiller decision as supporting your fears, I would hope that you would issue an apology to Judge Jones and look for something that actually provides the example you are questing for.

Now, there is another issue that you could take up, which would be whether the “is ID science” section was mistaken given the evidence and testimony taken in the case. So far, your argument has stopped short of trying to do such a thing, and merely asserted without effective substantiation that it was somehow wrong for Judge Jones to do anything but in the most cursory way possible assert that he found the defense had no secular purpose for their actions. I don’t blame you for not trying that; the defense experts turned out to make the plaintiffs’ case quite convincingly. “Intelligent design” is not science, nor is it going to turn into science someday. It is just yet another label slapped on a subset of the same moldy old religious antievolution argumentation that got recognized as such in previous court cases. ID’s purpose is simply to evade those legal precedents, nothing more.

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I’m going to respond to a comment left by David Opderbeck to my previous post.

[David Opderbeck:] Wesley, I have one more post coming, more on theological issues. On the Kitzmiller opinion itself, if you don’t think the “demarcation” question was central to the opinion, you’re just misreading it.

David,

We seem to be at an impasse, then, as it seems to me that we each believe the other is the one having difficulty with reading for comprehension on this point. But I will go you one better and explain why I think so.

I’ve made a living for more than twenty years reading judicial opinions.

That might be relevant if we were at loggerheads over points of law. We aren’t. We are discussing philosophy of science and public policy as it intersects with the practice of law. You are advocating that the judiciary take cognizance of extra-legal considerations in how they formulate decisions. I’m advocating that the judiciary do the complete job that is in front of them and not be bullied for responsibly doing that job. I think that you are mistaken concerning the relevant philosophy of science and that this has led you to advocate erroneous things.

That certainly doesn’t mean I always get it right, but counting the “parts” of the opinion as you’re trying to do here surely isn’t helpful.

Helpful? Please, strive for a bit of objectivity here. You introduced a raw page count as evidence for your argument without even an indication of the total length of the decision to guide the reader as to the proportion of the decision that comprised. The general concept of raw number reporting gets a fair amount of attention in Darrell Huff’s fine book, How to Lie with Statistics.

You have completely failed to address the reasons that one might legitimately expect a lengthy and detailed consideration of those arguments that were put before the court by the defense and the plaintiffs. You have completely failed to address why we should consider an unsupported denial of the defense’s claims to having a secular purpose in “intelligent design” being scientific as responsible behavior in a judge putting together a decision that would perhaps be reviewed at the appellate level. You are making an argument founded on the belief that Jones could have completely excised from the decision his response to the defense’s extensive argumentation that they had a “secular purpose” because they asserted that “intelligent design” was science and the extensive rebuttal of those arguments mounted by the plaintiffs. You have justified none of that belief other than with a false appeal to consequences.

I think that looking at the logical structure of the decision is a better approach to understanding what may reasonably be called “central” to it. Let me explain what I am taking as connotations for “key” and “central” just so we can make sure that we are on the same page in the discussion. A “key” element of the decision would be one that if not addressed appropriately could result in overturning the decision at an appellate level. There are lots of components of the Kitzmiller decision that can be called “key” in that context. A “central” element, though, would be the one that was the primary finding in the decision. The primary finding, though, was that concerning the “endorsement test”, and it rested on four separate considerations of which the “is ID science?” consideration was just one. I think that is far more helpful to the reader looking for orientation than a raw page count.

Moreover, if you’re correct, and the “demarcation” portion of the opinion wasn’t central to the opinion, then it seems to me that you should agree with my ultimate conclusion. After all, central my point is that a relatively lengthy and involved effort to define “science” wasn’t necessary to the establishment clause analysis. When you argue that the “demarcation” portion wasn’t central, and then argue at length about how good and important that part of the opinion was, you contradict yourself.

You are basing your argument upon false premises, that the section of the decision on “Is ID science?” was about demarcation criteria and “effort to define science”. I’ll try once again to explain why this is so. This involves philosophy of science, which is not the primary field of expertise for either of us, but I do have some relevant experience. A demarcation criterion provides a way to tell both if a concept is not science, and also if it is science. That is, a proper demarcation criterion provides both the necessary (ways to tell if something is not science) and the sufficient (ways to tell if something is science) properties that make the difference between science and non-science. The primary problem with all proposed demarcation criteria thus far is that there is no general agreement concerning what might constitute the sufficient properties of scientific concepts. However, one will find that there is general agreement about at least some of the necessary properties of scientific concepts. That puts us in the position of being able to say with good certainty that various and sundry concepts don’t have those necessary properties and thus aren’t candidates to be considered scientific, but not being able to definitively say that any particular concept which may have all the necessary attributes also has the sufficient attributes that would positively make the case for considering it scientific. Because necessary attributes are conjunctive, we don’t have to collect the whole set before we can make use of any of them: failure to meet any of them rules out the concept in question. However, striving to establish a demarcation criterion would require that the Kitzmiller decision took up the problem of what the sufficient attributes might be, and this is conspicuous by its absence from the decision. If such were the case, you could prove me wrong easily enough by quoting a section from the decision that shows such a search for the sufficient attributes. (I’m not going to hold my breath.)

Nor was Judge Jones seeking to create a definition of science, as “effort to define science” seems to imply. Instead, we see him carefully seeking to find and use an existing definition of science that could be argued to already be agreed to by both parties. He noted that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was stipulated by both parties as the foremost scientific body in the country and relied upon the definition that the NAS provided. Further, accusing Jones of drafting a new definition of science is ironic given what Jones showed in the decision about the IDC predilection to do that themselves:

[From the decision:] It is notable that defense experts’ own mission, which mirrors that of the IDM itself, is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept. Edwards, 482 U.S. at 591-92; McLean, 529 F. Supp. at 1267. First, defense expert Professor Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology. (28:26 (Fuller); 21:37-42 (Behe)). Moreover, defense expert Professor Minnich acknowledged that for ID to be considered science, the ground rules of science have to be broadened to allow consideration of supernatural forces. (38:97 (Minnich)).

Nor is it even true that Jones engaged in ‘a relatively lengthy and involved effort to define “science”’, even if we ignore the implication that he was creating such a thing. The 25 pages of “Whether ID is Science” is further subdivided. Jones takes up three issues there, in only the first of which does a definition of science play a major role. Jones begins that three lines from the end of page 64 and has found and related the definition he applies by the middle of page 66. Jones finishes with application of the NAS definition to his first issue by five lines into page 71. Until one gets to the conclusions starting on the last line of page 88, the rest of the section discusses the other two issues about contrived dualism and repudiated negative argumentation against evolution, with the exception of a seven line paragraph on page 82 that references definitions of science. One does have to give some leeway for perceptions, but mine seems diametrically opposite to yours, that Jones’ approach to the first issue, the one involving a definition of science, was concise, efficient, and economical.

I am being completely consistent: Judge Jones had to address the arguments made about “secular purpose” by both parties, and in order to accomplish that, he had to make a determination on the issue placed before the court and argued as a point of law, which was whether “intelligent design” qualified as a scientific concept and therefore provided a secular purpose for the defendants. This analysis was “key” in the sense I gave, that without doing so Jones would have committed an error that could cause an appellate court to overturn the decision. In order to argue that the defense failed in its claim to having a secular purpose, Jones had to rely upon existing agreement upon what necessary attributes of science “intelligent design” did not encompass. This neither is an effort to define science himself nor to resolve the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science. You are simply mistaken in your fixation on this, and I have spent considerable effort to explain why that is the case.

I’m sorry, I see no reason that I should sign on to a conclusion founded on false premises and substantiated only by a logical fallacy.

[David Opderbeck:] In any event, I suspect that when you read my third post in the series (I think it will come up later this week), you’ll agree substantially with it. Our areas of agreement on this, I think, are larger than our areas of disagreement. I think you’re mistaking me for an ID advocate, which I’m not (though I was at one point). Nevertheless, I have some overriding concerns about which governmental institutions should be involved in demarcation questions, as well as concerns about freedom of speech and religious liberty, that give me significant pause about the Kitzimiller opinion and about the nature of the public debate on this issue.

I can certainly get on board with us agreeing on many things… democracy, mom, apple pie, etc. But that doesn’t mean that I should give a pass to plain error being promulgated and disseminated, which is what I still think — and argue — your “primary criticism” of the Kitzmiller decision amounts to.

We may disagree on how those questions factor into the equation, but I hope that provides a basis for conversation, rather than for attack (particularly the sort of ad hominem with which you opened this conversation…).

Argumentum ad hominem does have an actual definition as a logical fallacy. It is where one notes some personal failing on the part of one’s interlocutor and concludes that his argument must fail because of that. Just to be clear, that is not what I finished up my previous post with. Instead, I went from the basis that a number of the arguments made were unfounded, therefore that made for a negative impression of the author. That is no logical fallacy, nor is it even what is casually construed as an ad hominem. You can call me snarky, rude, or impolite, and I’ll shrug and say, “Mea culpa.” But I won’t accept a false accusation of ad hominem argumentation aimed my way.

I admit to being a bit of a prickly fellow myself, and having been perhaps unduly swayed by Ernst Mayr’s approach to argumentation, which tended to the blunt and direct sort of thing. Mayr himself noted this and explained himself as looking to move quickly through thesis, antithesis, and then hopefully to find synthesis somewhere in the outcome. We seem to be stuck at thesis and antithesis at the moment.

David Opderbeck weighs in with an opinion on the decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case:

This leads to my primary criticism of the Kitzmiller decision. I don’t believe Judge Jones should have ventured a broad definition of “science” in the Kitzmiller case, as though such an exercise necessarily ends the discussion of constitutionality. Under the applicable standards for establishment clause cases, the proper inquiry is into purposes and effects: was the government’s purpose “secular” and was the primary effect of the government’s decision to advance or inhibit religion or to produce an excessive entanglement of government and religion? Whether an idea is labeled “religion” or “science,” in itself, is irrelevant to the constitutional question. “Religion” is a constitutionally proper subject of study in the public schools, provided that the purpose and effect of that study is not sectarian.

Rather than wading into the deep waters of defining “science” over against “religion,” then, Judge Jones should have focused primarily on the purposes of the Dover school board, which clearly were to proselytize for a particular kind of creationism, rather than to explore interdisciplinary approaches to science and religion generally.

I am baffled that anyone who has claimed to have read the decision could possibly apply a clause like “as though such an exercise necessarily ends the discussion of constitutionality” to it. It is manifestly inapplicable to Judge Jones’ decision.

Opderbeck’s primary criticism is much vitiated by what he later endorses as an alternative statement that he would have found acceptable for the decision:

In my view, however, there is a significant qualitative and quantitative difference between giving an issue some consideration and making it the central issue in the case. The court could easily have said something like this, and nothing more than this, on the demarcation issue:

The question of ID theory’s scientific merits, and indeed whether ID theory is properly considered ’science,’ is hotly disputed by the parties. The court finds, after hearing extensive testimony, that the mainstream scientific community generally does not consider ID theory to be valid science. Combined with the clear overriding religious purposes of the school board members, this finding establishes that there was no valid secular purpose for the school board’s actions and that the proposed curriculum would result in excessive government entanglement with religion.

In this context, the Judge Jones’ effort to define “science” in a broad sense was unnecessary, but not “activist.” In any event, the term “activist judge” generally sheds far more heat than light on the complex nature of the judicial function.

In order to evaluate the defense’s argument that introducing “intelligent design” to students because it was science, Judge Jones had to take up the issue of whether the claim that it was science stood up to scrutiny. So, qualitatively, Opderbeck has no argument: he stipulates above that addressing the “secular purpose” argument was necessary, though he seemingly misses the connection to determining the scientific status of “intelligent design” by saying the discussion of science in the broad sense was unnecessary. One can’t accomplish the one without doing the other, though. Nor was the decision seeking to resolve the “demarcation” question, something that has eluded philosophers of science thus far.

How about the quantitative aspect that remains? One can argue about Opderbeck’s assertion that the “ID is not science” section became the “central” issue; certainly most careful readers of the decision will not find it to be the case. It was the fourth section under consideration of the “endorsement test” and section “r.” under the “purpose inquiry” part of considering the “Lemon test”. It was, though, extensively discussed. Judge Jones had at least two motivations for doing so.

One would be a proximal concern that if the case went before an appeals court, that that court have both the full trial record and the judicial reasoning that set aside the defense’s argument of having a secular purpose in “intelligent design” being science. This is commonly called “appeal-proofing” a decision, and it is a valid endeavor for a judge to engage in it. That the subject happens to offend Opderbeck is not a consideration. Could Judge Jones have responsibly only said what Opderbeck offers above? One would beg to differ; Opderbeck’s formulation of how to deny the defense’s “secular purpose” argument seems to be erroneous. On appeal, Opderbeck’s statement could be attacked as simply being a statement of hearsay and not reflective of the actual trial record, a fault that Judge Jones’ decision does not share.

The second motivation would be to provide a record for other courts that might become involved in similar litigation. This kind of record is best done expansively, laying out the issues with full consideration and clarity. Opderbeck’s preferred text would be next to useless for such a purpose.

But all this pales in comparison to the misdirection that Opderbeck engages in by way of his discussion. Opderbeck introduces his “primary criticism” as being motivated by the general principle that courts should refrain from seeking to determine the content of science courses, that they should limit their “gatekeeping” function to the aspect of determining what evidence is relevant and what testimony can be considered expert and entered into the trial record, and in determining the purpose and effects of governmental agents. But Judge Jones clearly is making inquiry into the nature of “intelligent design” precisely in service of the limited goals Opderbeck himself endorses, and not the one that Opderbeck claims is the basis for his “primary criticism”.

In summary, Opderbeck’s “primary criticism” of the Kitzmiller decision seems to be confused as to why the issue was important, arguably wrong concerning the claim that his concern was the “central issue” of the decision, and unappreciative of the purposes for the length of the decision. Are we really sure that the text attributed to Opderbeck was really written by the David Opderbeck who is a professor of law, and not somebody seeking to make him look bad?

Update: There is a next thread where I respond to the latest comment entered in this thread by David Opderbeck.

Check out the discussion of a teacher suspended indefinitely in Brookeland, Texas, apparently for being “too liberal” and “an atheist”.

Today marks the sequicentennial, or 150th anniversary, of the date of publication of Charles R. Darwin’s most-sold book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The original printing of 1,250 copies sold out immediately. I just checked Amazon.com, where it is right now sitting at the #10 bestselling science book position.

You don’t have to buy a printed copy to read it, though. I first got an etext through an archive at Oxford, and Project Gutenberg has long had one of the editions. But for the most of Charles Darwin’s works to be had online, head over to John van Wyhe’s fantastic site, curiously enough called Darwin Online.

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One of the great examples of practical application of both special and general relativity is in the Global Positioning System (GPS). There’s a nice description of how relativity simply has to be accounted for if GPS is going to work well or for long; read it here. The short version is that relativistic considerations cause a difference in the rate at which the atomic clocks aboard the GPS satellites tick, such that measurements based on them would be off by about ten kilometers in a day, and the errors would accumulate. The whole system is engineered with the consideration of relativity built in, as evidenced by textbooks and even the GPS specification.

Some people, though, don’t like the very notion of a theory of relativity. While looking up other material on GPS systems, I ran across a rant that appeared in the Usenet sci.physics newsgroup early this year. A fellow by the name of Tom Potter posted his “The GPS – General Relativity Myth” message there on February 1st. After a general round of name-calling, Potter gets to his argument:

I, for one,
would like to see any General Relativity Cultists
start with the basic General Relativity equation,
and work their way, step by step,
to the artifact they claim is proof that
General relativity is essential to the GPS System,

and then show why this cannot be handled in a system
by simply setting constants and multipliers to values
that provide the desired results.

For example, note that constants are used to
set calendars to agree with Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, etc.
and multipliers/dividers are used to adjust the clocks
on the Earth to agree with days or years, etc.

The Mayans, Chinese, Babylonians, etc.
managed to sync their days and moons
up to the rotation of the Earth about the Sun,
and to my knowledge they never used General Relativity.

I found this an intriguing way to argue. After all, this concedes that the “General Relativity Cultists” actually do derive the adjustments needed to make the GPS system work based on the theory. All Potter is trying to assert, then, is that the theory was not necessary to the implementation of a working GPS system: all the needed adjustments could be derived ad hoc as we go along. I have two responses. Perhaps a working GPS could come about without knowledge of relativity, but it seems unlikely to happen in one go. Without a theory of relativity, the satellites would quite likely not have any capacity built in to adjust the basic clock rate. Why would they? In classical physics, an atomic clock under any conditions of acceleration or position relative to a large mass would keep the same time. It would only be after the first set of satellites went up that the engineers would discover that the calculations were off, and getting further off with time. So maybe the second set of satellites goes up, and these have an adjustment facility built in. (Oh, and somebody has to turn off or destroy the first set of satellites, the ones that were wildly erroneous.) Now comes a period of adjustment as the engineers try to solve a problem in a large number of variables. It probably could be done. It almost certainly would be no fun, and it would leave the issue of how to validate the system. Remember, GPS was originally a military project, where part of its work was to assure the proper placement of ordnance. Once you’ve dropped your bomb, it is a bit late to be worrying over whether the engineers managed to empirically adjust the actual situation your GPS is dealing with at the moment.

That leads to the second point. Machine learning is a fascinating field. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career with it in one form or another. But one generally doesn’t use machine learning techniques to address a problem with a closed-form solution. Why would you? And the theory of relativity provides some excellent analytical solutions to problems like those posed in implementing a GPS system. It at once provides you with an understanding of the mechanics of what is happening and the means to engineer general solutions, with all the confidence that goes with the decades of testing the theory has undergone. It doesn’t leave one wondering if one has suitably managed to train a learning system to generalize appropriately from a sample of training cases. It is easy to explain how your system works under any particular set of parameters. So, Tom Potter, let’s use machine learning for things where we have no efficient solutions worked out in closed form, and let’s apply our best knowledge when it is appropriate to do so. That latter clause includes applying relativity to GPS systems.

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Baraminologist Todd Wood has come to view religious antievolution as idolatry. Wood has apparently come to the conclusion I did back around 1986, that promoting religious antievolution apologetics is harmful to faith.

Hat tip to Josh Rosenau.

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At US News and World Report, Ray Comfort has responded to Dr. Eugenie Scott’s critique of the bowdlerized version of the Origin of Species that he is planning to distribute starting this year. And among other pieces of inherited religious antievolution anti-information, Comfort fires what he mistakenly seems to believe is a broadside:

Scott quoted a famous geneticist, who said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I would like to drop one word, so that the quote is true. It should read, “Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.” For example, evolution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

Uh, Ray, you’ve already embarrassed yourself on this point. But I guess Ray can’t be bothered to actually learn about what he tries to critique. The fact is that while evolutionary science doesn’t have one single theory that everyone agrees explains why sex evolved, it does have lots of hypotheses bearing on that topic, and plenty of research is ongoing concerning that. So, Ray, how does having many proposed explanations equate to having no explanations? Or is math also something you repudiate?

The how question also has various hypotheses in play, though you won’t learn about them from Comfort, since he is also apparently ignorant of the fact that we can see even in extant populations just about every gradation between asexual and sexual modes of reproduction that are conceptually possible. Once organisms start swapping genetic information, there is a clear path to the condition of “male” and “female” where there are two complementary strategies to how to package that information. Males use a strategy of making more, but smaller gametes, and females make fewer, but larger gametes. As to the right reproductive machinery, Comfort is also apparently ignorant of the various invertebrate species that feature a sperm delivery system called the cirrus, but no corresponding vagina-like receptacle: transfer is accomplished simply by stabbing the intended mate with the cirrus and transferring the gametes that way. And Comfort simply doesn’t get the important fact about common descent that each daughter species inherits most, if not all, the properties and attributes of the parent species, including mode of reproduction. Sexual reproduction does not have to independently arise in a great many different lineages; that’s the special creation conjecture that Comfort is actually critiquing. Once sexual reproduction (in the form of exchange of a complete haploid copy of genetic information) does arise, the descendants are free to use that and to modify the mechanisms by which it occurs.

Comfort concludes:

There are so many gaps and holes in the theory of evolution that you could drive a fleet of a thousand fully laden 18-wheelers through them. The irony is that I can see them, and I’m not an expert on the subject of evolution. So, what does that say about the theory’s experts, whoever they are? It says (as a wise man once said) that man will believe anything . . . as long as it’s not in the Bible.

Ray, not only are you not an expert, you are pretty much a documented complete ignoramus when it comes to biology. The “gaps and holes” you see are your ignorance, not something of scientific note and interest. Your brand of ignorant religious antievolution damages both faith and science.

Update: Ray Comfort has apologized for the argument about sexual reproduction. Ray should be commended for his willingness to admit error, which is a trait all too rare among religious antievolution advocates. Ray further notes that the evolution issue is not his primary concern, but evangelizing people to come to Christ. Ray, you will hopefully have more opportunities if you drop the requirement that those who believe that science is finding out how God created must set that aside for the poor apologetics of religious antievolution.

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