The Austringer

Rick Santorum is a man with his eye on making a run for the presidency. He’s also known for his Catholocism and for his promotion of “intelligent design” creationism. Michael Zimmerman, the organizer behind the Clergy Letter Project, has a post up at the Huffington Post noting the hypocrisy of Santorum criticizing someone for ignoring their church’s teaching on the abortion issue, while Santorum has ignored his church’s clear policy on evolution for many, many years. Check it out.

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The Los Angeles Times reports on how the US Interior Department made a decision about sage grouse:

The Interior Department declared Friday that an iconic Western bird deserves federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, but declined to offer that protection immediately — a split decision that will allow oil and gas drilling to continue across large swaths of the mountainous West.

The department issued a so-called “warranted but precluded” designation for the greater sage grouse, meaning that the bird merits protection but won’t receive it for now because other species are a higher priority.

Yes, that’s right, sage grouse are an endangered species, but not so endangered as to have us do anything about it.

The “other species” bit is a particularly bogus piece of argumentation. The fact is that listing sage grouse as an endangered species would put most of the burden on developers, who would have far more stringent requirements to meet to show that their projects would not unduly impact sage grouse. Plus, I’d like to hear the list of endangered species that are getting better attention within the Department of the Interior because they don’t have to pay attention to sage grouse. That ought to be darkly amusing for a while as we contemplate what the Department of the Interior has done for them.

Now let’s have a look at what Department of the Interior head honcho Ken Salazar had to say:

“The sage grouse’s decline reflects the extent to which open land in the West has been developed in the last century,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in an issued statement.

“This development has provided important benefits, but we must find common-sense ways of protecting, restoring and reconnecting the Western lands that are most important to the species’ survival while responsibly developing much-needed energy resources,” Salazar said. “Voluntary conservation agreements, federal financial and technical assistance and other partnership incentives can play a key role in this effort.”

Let’s see, Salazar correctly notes that the problem for sage grouse is one of habitat loss. Then, Salazar goes on to emit some bafflegab that doesn’t actually imply that anything will be done that has any effect on habitat loss. There’s already a history of “voluntary conservation” when it comes to sage grouse: I don’t think that the rate of habitat exploitation has even slowed due to this; I’d appreciate comments from people who have the numbers. The feds are broke, so there isn’t much that we can expect in the way of financial assistance there. The feds have given the technical assistance that would be of help (”If you build it, they will go away.”), and it has been ignored. I’m not sure what a “partnership incentive” is, but my suspicion is that it is merely pretty pettifoggery to try to obscure the fact that the Interior Department has decided that corporate interests are more important than the survival of the sage grouse as a species.

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Republican legislators are looking for another memorial for former President Ronald Reagan: put his face on US currency. They’ve encountered resistance for two denominations that have been suggested so far: the dime (displacing Franklin D. Roosevelt) and the $50 bill (displacing Ulysses S. Grant).

I can see Reagan’s visage on a piece of US currency, but I think forcing a currently-honored citizen off of something sends the wrong message. The treasury should issue a new denomination of currency for this purpose. I’d recommend the Ronald Reagan $20,000 bill as the appropriate way to go. $200 or $2,000 would be too common for the task. But a $20,000 bill would make sure that the people encountering the Reagan bill were truly among those who Reagan’s policies were intended to benefit most.

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Don McLeroy, former chairman of the Texas State Board of Education and pusher of “intelligent design” creationism, has lost the Republican primary election for the District 9 seat on the SBOE to Thomas Ratliff.

Hat tip to “carlsonjok” at AtBC. (But a point off for spelling McLeroy’s name wrong, and one off for me not catching it earlier. I wish I could claim to have misspelled it purposely to annoy him, though.)

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The regional National Ocean Sciences Bowl, the Spoonbill Bowl, happens this next Saturday, March 6th, 2010. The location is at the USF Marine Sciences and Fish and Wildlife Institute (100 SE 8th Ave., St. Petersburg, Florida 33701). It gets going pretty early in the morning. This is a quiz competition with each game pitting two teams of four players against each other. There are two rounds of toss-up questions requiring fast responses, with bonus questions for correctly answered toss-ups. In between, there are two “team challenge” questions that give each team a set time to collaborate on answering more involved questions. The questions are drawn from topics contributing to marine science, including

1. Biology
2. Chemistry
3. Geography
4. Geology
5. Math
6. Physics
7. Marine Policy
8. Social sciences (including economics, history and human interactions)
9. Technology (including instrumentation, remote sensing, & navigation)
10. Current Events

The public is welcome to attend the event.

I’ve volunteered to help with the event, where I will be one of the moderators. I think that we are planning on running eight rooms for the round-robin initial phase of the event. The final phase will be run as a double-elimination tournament. I’m really looking forward to this. In April, the NOSB nationals will be held here in St. Petersburg, where teams winning at the regional competitions around the country will compete.

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Yesterday, we got busy with the fixing-up of the fixer-upper in Palmetto. While Sam worked on the electrical panel, I made a photographic record of the state of the house. We plan to ask Manatee County for a re-appraisal as the house is currently not ready for occupancy. So I have about 3.5 GB of photos showing everything from the exterior views below to the various fixtures without cover plates.

There was soaking rain when we left Clearwater. By the time we got to Palmetto, that had slowed to the drizzle. About an hour after we arrived, the clouds cleared and we had some sunshine. We took advantage of that to have a bit of a picnic lunch in and just outside the garage. I had called Manatee County during the week about a couple of abandoned vehicles parked on our seven acres, and the towing service sent out two tow trucks to handle those while we were there on Saturday.

The house itself was built in 1955. We’ve been told that it was neglected for some time before its purchase in 1998 by the previous owners. They replaced much of the roof structure and were working on renovating the interior room by room. The floors are all done in tile, with the exception of the hall bathroom and a couple of closets in the hall that are unfinished. The hall bathroom is completely stripped out, with exposed drywall and the previous set of tile taken off. There are no fixtures in there, so part of our work will be to get the hall bathroom finished again. The interior paint job was not complete, so we have that to look forward to as well. There is a bedroom suite at the east end of the house, with two adjoining rooms and a master bathroom. We are contemplating redoing the doorways there to make the rooms separate, rather than simply having a shared door to the hallway.

Because the place was foreclosed, there is essentially nothing more complex than ceiling fans still there, except for the central air conditioning and heating system. We will need to get ourselves an oven/range combo unit, refrigerator, and, eventually, a dishwasher. There’s nothing in the utility room, so we can add getting a washer and dryer as well. It looks like the water heater in the garage is actually relatively recent (the tag references efficiency figures from 2004).

So on with the pictures. The exterior shots don’t hint at the work to be done on the inside.

Wider view from southeast.

Closer view of south side (front).

View from driveway.

View of west side with garage.

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We looked at a property last September that stood out as a candidate for a home purchase. It had a house on 7 acres of land, and we could afford the asking price… barely. Now that might be ringing all sorts of bells, and to be sure there is a laundry list of issues to go with the house and the property. But there was nothing else close to it in terms of something that we could afford within commuting distance of downtown St. Petersburg that actually had a livable, or not-too-much-repair-needed-to-make-it-livable, house plus some land so that we had a place to train the dogs in agility or flyball.

The property is in Palmetto, Florida, and runs alongside a railroad line easement. It used to be a strawberry farm, but more recently the former owners had used it as a place to dump lumber from a tree surgeon’s patients and to fix up stock cars. It was foreclosed on last year, so we bought it from the bank. That turned out to be a saga, and took about as long as the usual short sale, despite the fact that we were dealing only with the bank’s selling agent.

You see, we got under contract for the place early in November. But it turned out that the bank’s title was incorrect, something that our lawyer pointed out to us. They had failed to get the easement for ingress and egress recorded when they foreclosed. So their task was to go back to the court and get the title corrected. We thought that our closing could be done late in November, but we got word that the seller’s agent wanted to extend to December 18th. Our real estate agent discouraged us from having any contact with the seller or people working for the seller, so time simply passed by until mid-December, when the seller’s agent again proposed an extension, this time to December 28th.

That got us worried about the process. I went online and found that Manatee County had an excellent online site for their courts. I found out that there was no scheduled motion putting the issue before the court. We gave up on the notion of being passive buyers at that point. Diane got the lead for which law practice was involved in the case and contacted them. It turned out that the first request for a change to the title was incorrectly formed, and the clerk had kicked it back with instructions for correction. In the meantime, the lawyer at the firm handling the case had moved on to other employment, and had not passed on the file to anybody else there. So as far as anybody at the firm could tell, the file needed no action. It took Diane’s pushing to locate someone there who agreed to pick it up and finish the job. But at that point, the holidays were in full swing, and it became apparent that nothing further would be done before the end of the year. With that also ended our anticipation that we could at least camp out in the house as ours in order to claim homestead exemption for 2010. The next extension took us into January, and more interaction with the lawyer handling the title correction effort. But it became apparent that things would not move fast enough to close in January. The next extension put the closing date at February 15th.

The court did act before the end of January, but getting the change recorded took us into early February. At that point, the seller’s agent finally woke up to the fact that the property could be sold, and started pushing for a close as fast as possible. We, though, needed to have the corrected title before ordering a survey, and getting the survey scheduled was an adventure itself. With assistance from the title company, we settled on a closing date of February 24th and worked toward that. The survey team actually got out to the property on the 19th, and the title company got the completed survey yesterday. Today, we got our funding sent to the title company in two wire transfers and went to their office in Tampa to get our papers signed and notarized. About an hour after that, the title company told us that the sellers had signed off on the settlement statement.

We still have oodles of work to accomplish before we can actually move in. But we’ve managed to clear a huge hurdle. The place is ours to restore and make our own.

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Rob Crowther’s latest post over at the DI’s propaganda page is quite short.

Darwin was wrong.
Missing links still missing.

There is no such thing as junk DNA.
Birds did not descend from Dinosaurs.
Irreducible complexity is still irreducibly complex.
Tiktaalik has been invalidated by an earlier ancestor.

Haeckel’s embryo drawings are still fake (and still in textbooks).

Yet, evolution is a fact?

Yes, Rob, the fact that evolution has occurred is still quite secure.

The link Crowther gives to show “Darwin was wrong” leads to the table of contents for an issue of “New Scientist”, and the editorial in there discusses the probable misuse ignorant charlatans would make of their content:

As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that “New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong”. Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not.

Nor will the new work do anything to diminish the standing of Darwin himself. When it came to gravitation and the laws of motion, Isaac Newton didn’t see the whole picture either, but he remains one of science’s giants. In the same way, Darwin’s ideas will prove influential for decades to come.

So here’s to the impending revolution in biology. Come Darwin’s 300th anniversary there will be even more to celebrate.

So Darwin was wrong kind of like Newton was wrong. Way to shoot yourself in the foot, Rob!

But, really, we in science don’t count Darwin as a prophet, someone who must have provided the whole truth that would stand unaltered until the end of time. Charles Darwin was a scientist, someone who contributed quite a lot to the process of coming to understand things the way they can be tested to be. The article referenced by the editorial and presumably by Crowther as well does not deliver anything like a result that evolution is not a fact. It simply argues that more evolution occurred by horizontal gene transfer than has been generally recognized, and this puts one organizing metaphor Darwin introduced, that of a “tree of life”, at risk. More ways to pass genetic material than from parent to offspring of the same population doesn’t make evolution any less a fact; it just makes it tougher to analyze.

There’s this bit from the New Scientist article that should have given Crowther pause:

Nobody is arguing – yet – that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants. While vertical descent is no longer the only game in town, it is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another – a tree of 51 per cent, maybe. In that respect, Darwin’s vision has triumphed: he knew nothing of micro-organisms and built his theory on the plants and animals he could see around him.

While I think the last sentence is hyperbolic, it certainly is the case that Darwin’s thinking and lines of evidence were about multicellular plants and animals. Was Darwin wrong in a way that would say anything about human descent from primates? Not according to the New Scientist article linked to by Crowther.

Next… Crowther doesn’t like found links, and points to people urging greater circumspection in describing one particular fossil, “Ida”, as showing that “missing links are still missing”. I agree with the authors of the linked articles that hype is bad and that inaccuracy is bad. But Crowther is somehow thinking that these criticisms support his contention that evolution is not a fact, and it does nothing of the sort. One doesn’t determine the factuality of evolutionary change by negatives; conceptually, if evolutionary change happens even once, evolution is a fact. So Crowther can’t point to something as not qualifying as a particular transitional fossil to get to his desired conclusion; he would have to demonstrate that every single instance of a transitional fossil is somehow wrong. I have no doubt that this is well outside of Crowther’s capabilities. If Crowther insists that there aren’t any transitional fossils at all, I’d be happy to have him take the Transitional Fossil Existence Challenge.

Next… Crowther does claim that there is no “junk” DNA. This is a standard antievolutionary claim, one that is recorded in Mark Isaak’s compendium of creationist claims as CB130.

It has long been known that some noncoding DNA has important functions. (This was known even before the phrase “junk DNA” was coined.) However, there is good evidence that much DNA has no function:

* Sections of DNA can be cut out or replaced with randomized sequences with no apparent effect on the organism (Nóbrega et al. 2004).
* Some sections of DNA are corrupted copies of functional coding DNA, but mutations in them, such as stop codons early in the sequence, show that they cannot have retained the same function as the coding copy.
* The fugu fish has a genome that is about one third as large as its close relatives.
* Mutations in functional regions of DNA show evidence of selection — nonsilent changes occur less often that one would expect by chance. In other sections of DNA, there is no evidence that any changes are selected against.

The article that Crowther links his claim to doesn’t make the case that there isn’t any “junk” DNA, just that researchers have found evidence that particular parts of non-coding DNA do actually have a function in one species. They speculate that much of what is considered non-functional may have function after all, but nowhere does the exclusive claim Crowther makes get support in the linked article. Coupled with the various facts assembled by Isaak above, it looks like Crowther has once again grasped the wrong end of the stick.

Next… Crowther apparently doesn’t like the notion that birds descended from dinosaurs. The linked article does dispute the birds had dinosaurs for ancestors, but says not one word that would dispute the fact that birds descended from reptiles (pardon the non-cladistic usage). How does one get to evolution not being a fact from disputes over a relatively difficult area of phylogenetic inference?

Next… irreducible complexity and Crowther doing some cheerleading for Michael Behe. Crowther’s source for Michael Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity being still a good thing is … Michael Behe. How does citing a tendentious antievolutionist go anywhere near showing that evolution is not true?

Next… Crowther doesn’t like the Tiktaalik fossils. So how does finding tetrapod trace fossils demonstrate that evolution is not a fact, or even that a fossil can be “invalidated”? Crowther failed to learn from the lesson delivered by PZ Myers to Rob’s fellow DI denizen, Casey Luskin. Instead, Rob chose to take on some of that embarrassment himself.

Next… Haeckel’s embryo drawings are a perennial DI talking point, and, predictably, Crowther talks about them. His link goes to a DI-produced YouTube video featuring Jonathan Wells. Wells apparently can’t take on the assessment of even Haeckel’s modern scholarly critic, M.K. Richardson:

On a fundamental level, Haeckel was correct: All vertebrates develop a similar body plan (consisting of notochord, body segments, pharyngeal pouches, and so forth). This shared developmental program reflects shared evolutionary history… Haeckel’s inaccuracies damage his credibility, but they do not invalidate the mass of published evidence for Darwinian evolution. (Richardson et al. 1998, p. 983-984)

What about the claim about textbooks? The National Center for Science Education sheds some light on that:

Explore Evolution repeats another false claim from Wells.

This error even crept into the Encyclopedia Britannica, and remains in many modern high school and college biology textbooks.
Explore Evolution, p. 69

This is incorrect. A recent survey of 36 biology textbooks, dating from 1980 to the present and covering high school biology, college introductory biology, advanced college biology, and developmental biology books, found that only 8 of these textbooks mentioned Haeckel or the biogenetic law. Two of these 8 were creationist/ID books (Of Pandas and People, and Biology for Christian Schools from Bob Jones University Press). Of the 6 mainstream textbooks that mentioned Haeckel or the biogenetic law, two are advanced college-level books. In all cases where Haeckel is mentioned (except for the creationist/ID books), the text discussion does not reproduce Haeckel’s mistakes.

Crowther was wrong yet again… what a surprise.

I don’t know, I didn’t see anything in what Crowther provided that would address whether evolution is a fact, much less that would put the fact of evolution in doubt. Crowther’s post does lend support to the notion that what he writes is not a fact, though.

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Casey Luskin has decided to treat us to an agony in eight fits, wherein he will whine mightily concerning “information”. I don’t know how many of those I’ll be taking note of, but I might as well have a look at the first one.

It does not augur well for the series. Luskin leads with a lot of bluster, claiming that citations to the scientific literature on the topic of genetic information were “bluffs”. It seems dubious to me that Luskin will be able to do more than try to spin armchair philosophy stuff from William Dembski and Stephen Meyer as somehow putting actual research in doubt.

Here’s an example of Luskin innuendo, complete with scare quotes:

Virtually all of those “publications” mentioned by Judge Jones came from one single paper Miller discussed at trial, a review article, co-authored by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago.4 The article does not even contain the word “information,” much less the phrase “new genetic information.” 5

Well, a publication is still a publication, and a peer-reviewed one to boot, even if it is cited in a review article, so it is unclear what, exactly, Luskin is trying to do with the scare quotes. Usually the Discovery Institute (DI) is all for counting any odd scrap of paper with print on it as a publication, even inventing meaningless phrases like “peer-edited” to try to put some cachet on obvious partisan near-vanity press dreck. Perhaps the DI respect for articles and books only goes so far as to cover those that toe the “intelligent design” creationism (IDC) party line.

One can see that Luskin managed to shoot himself in the foot in that sentence-as-paragraph. Notice the footnote. That goes down to this text:

[5.] The word “information” appears once in the entire article—in the title of note 103. Id. at 875 n. 103. See Manyuan Long, Esther Betrán, Kevin Thornton, and Wen Wang, “The Origin of New Genes: Glimpses from the Young and Old,” Nature Reviews Genetics, Vol. 4:865-875 (November, 2003).

So, Casey, how is it that you can get all huffy about someone not including a specific phrase of “new genetic information” when the title promises that the article is about “new genes”? Do you suppose that “new genes” are never associated with new genetic information? If you were that nit-picky about things being different you wouldn’t have been making those claims about the degree of “near-verbatim” passages in the Kitzmiller decision. It appears that the one trait that runs through both of the aspects of Luskin’s text discussed above is hypocrisy.

It gets worse from there.

But are Judge Jones’s, Ken Miller’s, and the NCSE’s bold proclamations supported? Does Long et al. actually reveal the origin of new biological information? Is Explore Evolution wrong? A closer look shows that the NCSE is equivocating over the meanings of the words “information” and “new,” and that the NCSE’s citations are largely bluffs, revealing little about how new genetic functional information could originate via unguided evolutionary mechanisms. This bluff was accepted at face value by Judge Jones, who incorporated it in his highly misguided legal ruling.

No, Casey, the equivocation about “information” comes from antievolutionists like your colleague William Dembski. As for “new”, this point can be found in the transcript of the Kitzmiller trial, where Scott Minnich was cross-examined by Pepper Hamilton’s Stephen Harvey. When asked about the evolution of a DNT breakdown system that evolved in bacteria, Minnich agreed that the multi-part system developed naturally, but dismissed it as an “adaptive response” rather than being evolution per se. But the IDC mindset comes through clearly there, as Minnich testified:

Q. And if you look on — at figure 1, which is on page 113. And Matt, perhaps if you can bring that up for us. These researchers, based on their own original data, have published the organization and evolution of the bacteria that breaks down DNT?

A. Right. This is an adaptational response.

Q. And that’s a DNT — this process by which these bacteria breakdown DNT, that’s a biochemical pathway?

A. Correct.

Q. So we do have published information in this scientific literature about the evolution of biochemical pathways?

A. Steve, you’re extrapolating from the data here. I mean, not all these enzymes evolved specifically to break down this compound. I mean, you’re mixing and matching enzymes, I’m sure, from pathways that had some other property.

It’s pretty simple, really. A gene is new if it was not there in the population before but is now. A system is new if it does something that was not done before. Evolution, if Luskin had paid attention in class (and I don’t know what excuse Minnich could claim), works by modification of what exists. And sometimes those modifications result in novel functionality.

As for the stuff we don’t see happening in living systems, as alluded to in Minnich’s testimony, the de novo injection of systems that had no precursors, that’s what is known as “special creation”. It’s pretty ironic that when trying to figure out what they want from evolutionary science, quite commonly the antievolutionists are really asking that biologists demonstrate that creationism is observed.

Casey Luskin again:

In fact the origin of new functional biological information is perhaps the most important question in biology. As origin of life theorist Bernd-Olaf Kuppers stated in his book Information and the Origin of Life, “The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”8

Now, I think someone introduced the word “equivocation” into the discussion. Right, that would be Casey. And here we see why Luskin introduced “equivocation” into the discussion: he’s projecting. There’s something a bit different between the processes that we see happening in the evolution of living things (the subject of discussion) and pre-biotic chemistry when talking about new genetic information. That would be that there is a system of inheritance established and operating in living things, something that is not available as an assumed starting position in origin-of-life research. So dropping origin-of-life into the discussion is simply a non sequitur, though one that has strong misleading properties.

Casey Luskin:

Judge Jones was not merely in error. Worse than any simple mistake, the misinformation he propounded in his ruling entered media and academic culture, becoming enshrined as a Darwinian myth, alongside many others. This myth holds that perhaps the most important question in biology has been solved, when really (as this series of 8 total posts will show), that is far from being the case.

This is what the lawyers call “an appeal to facts not in evidence”. In fact, parts of this have already been proven false just in the discussion above, and Luskin hasn’t even gotten around to much more than a quote-mine, some projection, and a double dollop of hypocrisy. Nor do I have any expectation that the parts yet to be published will do any better than Luskin’s initial poor showing.

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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”.

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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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