The Austringer

“The Underground Site” passes on some arguments from Answers in Genesis responding to comments made by an ethnologist, Bernadette Barton, who took a few trips to the “Creation Museum” facility. From the looks of the responses, AiG probably should have just kept mum; they seem to be of the “Bridgewater Treatise” sort of reply that leaves one thinking that the original critique is still looking pretty good.

But what comes through is either pure laziness or lack of journalistic drive on the part of the anonymous “staff” writing the piece. Given a “he-said, she-said” situation (literally!), the “staff” goes for “reporting” he-said only. Not only did only AiG’s arguments get space in the article, the author couldn’t even be bothered to link to the original critique that AiG was responding to. That seems curiously uninformative for a site with pretensions of delivering news. Oh, and there is the inability to run a spell-checker. Even AiG managed that. Hey, anonymous staff writer at “The Underground Site”, if you are wondering why Christians often get a bad rap in intellectual circles, you aren’t helping.

I felt moved to leave a comment. I’ll quote it here.

“Enthologist”? When Answers in Genesis can correctly spell “ethnology” and you can’t, I think you lose 50 points in the t.o. home game.

[Quote]

-50 if a C’ist corrects a factual error of yours (This may seem
like a big penalty, but lets face it — if a C’ist has a better
grasp of bio than you do, maybe you shouldn’t be posting.)

[End quote - Chris Colby, http://www.antievolution.org/features/evohumor/tohome.html ]

But going beyond the title’s spelling glitch, I don’t see much that looks like journalism here. AiG responds to just about anything that might resemble a comment about their facility in Kentucky. Did anybody even consider checking to see whether AiG’s response here made sense in its various supposed points?

Take response (1), for example. AiG doesn’t like the “fundamentalist” adjective. They note that their objection is solidly based on … market perception. Then they equivocate on “mainstream” versus “extremist”, using the demographic connotation of the former to try to deny the philosophical import of the latter. Sorry, inerrantist literalism is still a plank of the fundamentals, and it is still extreme, no matter what percentage of the population happens to be on board with it. All they manage there is to show that extremism is popular. I feel safe saying that Islamic fervor for sharia law in Iran is popular there, but that does nothing to make it any less extreme.

If you want to do some commentary from a Christian perspective on AiG’s curious commitment to plain error, then you can cite St. Augustine’s advice on these topics:

[Quote]

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

[End Quote - St. Augustine, “De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)]

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David Klinghoffer recently challenged Lauri Lebo to explain how the Discovery Institute’s promotion of “intelligent design” related to creationism.

And Lauri wrote a nice article explaining how. It is a good read. And if Klinghoffer can manage to read it for comprehension, he might even achieve enlightenment.

As Lauri notes, we are fast coming up to the fifth anniversary of the start of the Kitzmiller trial.

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Creation Ministries International has launched a “Question Evolution” campaign. Mostly, they seem to be looking to get parents to use their kids as shills in a publicity campaign featuring “Question Evolution” t-shirts.

I wouldn’t push for parents on the pro-science side to simply suit up their kids with a response, but if the students would like to show their pro-science colors, I’ve put up a Evolution Questions: Answered! T-Shirt design on CafePress. It features the “Evolution Questions: Answered!” logo with handy links to the TalkOrigins Archive and Panda’s Thumb weblog for all to see… and many to avoid or deny.

You can see all the TalkOrigins Archive designs here.

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I got an email request from a college student. He asked if I knew of a high-school level textbook that covered the concept of natural selection without using the word, “evolution”. He has relatives who are Mennonite and who home-school, and would reject any textbook that explicitly said “evolution”, but whose kids deserve to have an understanding of some of the basic concepts in evolutionary science.

This is the text of my reply to my correspondent:

I personally do not know of such a textbook, and I’ve tried to get feedback from people who should know the textbook market better than I do without success.

I think that it would be outside expectations that such a textbook would be written, though. Writing a textbook is a major undertaking, and those who are inclined to cover evolutionary science have little incentive to try to target a market segment that will, if they figure out what is going on, not buy their book.

I have myself considered writing a book (not a textbook) with a working title of, “What Every Creationist Should Know About Evolution”. It would cover the basic information and try to be non-confrontational about most aspects of religious antievolutionism. (I haven’t gotten sanguine about the outright lying part of antievolution yet.) The prospects for a market for it are similarly dismal, I expect.

Personally, I think that you might be better off to point out that overturning something like evolutionary science is only going to happen when people motivated to do so can approach the topic with an excellent understanding of the current state of that science. It is that sort of person who would be cognizant of the flaws and have the drive to do the research that would demonstrate it to be so to the scientific community. If they believe that evolution is false and have the courage of their convictions, they should utilize a standard textbook to show their children what the scientists *actually* say about it, rather than accept second-hand slurs about it from people who never bothered to learn the topic. This does, of course, run the risk of convincing the children that the scientists have a point, but the children will eventually have the opportunity to learn these concepts without their parents’ guidance anyway. They might find it better to meet that problem head-on while their children are still in their care than to have them discover evolutionary science concepts and evidence on their own.

I think this latter course of action is better than the stealth textbook on the openness front.

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In an article discussing Google and the news, the Discovery Institute complains that they are victims of a uniform journalistic culture:

We know from our uniform and repeated experience that once something like intelligent design is misdefined as, and equated t,o[sic] creationism, the label sticks. It sticks for exactly the reason that this story subtly highlights in explaining how hidebound traditional reporting is when compared to the internet age. A newspaper reporter defines the idea, and all future reporters at that publication (and many others when you consider somewhere as influential as the AP) simply copy the definition as the defecto[sic] standard – no matter that it may be wrong or completely out of touch with reality. So, eventually you get thousands of reporters with one consensus reading, not five.”

There’s a problem with the bleat, of course: “intelligent design” is a label for a subset of the arguments of creationism, so the people who report “intelligent design” as such are simply “following where the evidence leads”. There is nothing that is argued by “intelligent design” advocates that wasn’t argued previously by “creation scientists” and “scientific creationists” before, either as attempted argument related to agency or in the strategy of general criticism of evolutionary science. This was amusingly well-documented during the 2005 Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District trial, where such things as “cdesign proponentsists” were a topic of discussion, and where the Discovery Institute’s own experts testifying under oath show that we had seen those arguments in religious antievolution before:

[Eric Rothschild] Q. We’ll return to that. In any event, in Pandas, there are arguments for intelligent design of higher level biological life?

[Michael Behe] A. Yes, there are.

Q. And we’re clear, that’s not based on your work?

A. It’s not based on any concept of irreducible complexity. It is based on a concept that I discuss in Darwin’s Black Box, the purposeful arrangements of parts.

Q. That purposeful arrangement of parts, that’s not — you didn’t originate that?

A. No, I didn’t.

Q. At least, it goes back to Reverend Paley?

A. Yes, it does. Further back than that.

And DI Fellow Scott Minnich a bit later:

[Stephen Harvey] Q. Dr. Minnich, I’d like to know whether you know that a man named Dr. Dick Bliss, who was affiliated with the Institute for Creation Research, was using the bacterial flagellum as part of his argument for creationism years before the intelligent design movement picked up on it?

THE COURT: All right. The objection is overruled for the record. You can answer the question.

[Scott Minnich] THE WITNESS: No, I wasn’t aware of it, but I’m not surprised. Again, like I asserted yesterday that, the bacterial flagellum is one of the organelles that we know the most about of any. And so it’s natural to look at this structure as a model for either evolution or irreducible complexity. So I’m not surprised. I didn’t know it, but I’m not surprised.

It’s possible for tropes to become established convention and passed on. Certainly, the religious antievolution movement practices this assiduously. But there’s another reason why things may get repeated once stated, and that is because they happen to be true and well-supported by the available evidence. “Intelligent design” is just a label for a subset of religious antievolution argumentation, and represents nothing but a sham to evade legal rulings against religious antievolution being injected into the public schools. Of course the DI has to say it isn’t so, since admitting forthrightly what the evidence has shown over and over again would be “game over” for any future outings in court. The new news should be just as resistant to accepting propaganda from the self-interested as the old-school journalism was supposed to be.

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I left a comment to the opinion letter of a Greg Swank, M.D.. Dr. Swank gave a Gish Gallop and finished up with argument from authority.

My background is in the medical field and I find it interesting that from a science background I am defending Intelligent Design as a scientific probability, while Rev. Ward defends evolution.

So here’s my bit, just fitting into the character limit on comments there:

Dr. Greg Swank has overlooked some information. The objections that he notes in his letter, plus the hundreds more he didn’t have space for, are listed — and rebutted — in Mark Isaak’s “Index to Creationist Claims”. This resource is available online at http://talkorigins.org/indexcc .

Evolutionary science is rather more productive than Swank admits, being an indispensable part of even medical research. It shapes our best knowledge on why indiscriminate use of antibiotics is bad, leading to today’s “superbugs” like MRSA, and why developing a vaccine for HIV is hard work, since HIV evolves so quickly. It also contributes to agriculture. The Soviet Union rejected evolutionary science and adopted Lysenkoism, leading to decades of crop failures and famine. When China adopted Lysenkoist antievolution in 1958, they went from grain surpluses to a famine that killed tens of millions of people.

Evolutionary science is worth learning about and teaching.

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.
Palmetto, FL

Update: I added another comment attached to Swank’s letter:

Dr. Swank advances “intelligent design” (ID) as a “scientific probability”. But the transcript of the 2005 “Kitzmiller v. DASD” trial in Pennsylvania plainly showed even the ID advocates admitting in sworn testimony that for ID to be considered as science, one must use a definition of science broad enough that astrology would fit the bill, too.

The transcripts are at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/kitzmiller_v_dover.html

When it comes to ID-speak about probability, I can go Dr. Swank one better: I have published articles in the technical literature on exactly this topic. Versions of those are available online at http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/theftovertoil/theftovertoil.html and http://www.antievolution.org/people/wre/papers/eandsdembski.pdf

ID is simply a form of religious antievolution, not science. Its content is entirely a subset of the arguments advanced before under the “creation science” label. ID is a sham to evade contrary legal decisions.

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.

Update: Other commenters say that Swank is not an M.D. I posted one apologizing for having given Swank more credit than someone merely “in the medical field” deserves.

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I was looking for a particular post of mine, and ran across this one from back in 1999. “The Patterson Challenge” refers to a lecture given by Colin Patterson in which he asked his audience a question. This incident has become a favorite quote of antievolutionists.

I’ve been putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, “I do know one thing — it ought not to be taught in high school”.

So when it popped up again in a forum I was participating in, I took the opportunity to answer the original question.

True things about evolutionary theory
Wesley R. Elsberry (welsberr@inia.cls.org)
Tue, 9 Nov 1999 11:26:29 -0600 (CST)

Art Chadwick writes:

AC>Those are fancy (and oft repeated) words. Let me issue you
AC>the Patterson challenge: tell us one thing you know for
AC>sure about the theory of evolution…other than that “it
AC>shouldn’t be taught to high school students”

Patterson’s challenge was broader, asking whether anyone knew any one thing about “evolution” to be true.

Let’s see… true things about evolution. That would make an overlong list. I’ll just give some of my favorites.

- Inheritance is particulate, not blending.

- Inheritance is not perfect. Changes can and do happen in heritable information.

- More organisms are produced than can be sustained under prevailing ecological conditions.

- Those heritable variations which correlate with differential survival of organisms tend to have higher proportional representation in the population.

- The distribution of traits in a population can be influenced by chance effects, such as population bottlenecks and sampling from a limited pool of variant.

- Fossils are the traces of organisms that were once alive.

- Fossil forms show that extinction of species happens. Certain fossils represent organisms common enough, large enough, and distributed in areas where if they were present through the present day could not have been overlooked.

- Fossils are distributed in a stratigraphic pattern indicating change in fossil assemblages over time.

- Fossil assemblages show that mass extinctions have happened at widely different times in the earth’s history.

- The canonical genetic code is consistent with the theory of common descent.

- Patterns of differences in sequences of proteins and heritable information support the idea that these differences have accrued since the time of a last common ancestor.

- Evolutionary interrelationships have been used to advantage in medical research.

- The principles of natural selection have been used to advantage in computational optimization and search.

- Species have been observed to form, both in the laboratory and in the wild.

- A novel symbiotic association has been observed in the laboratory.

Well, that should get us started, anyway.

Wesley

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Richard Thompson’s latest lawsuit by the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) is a foray to obtain a permanent injunction against the health care law recently passed.

Readers here probably recall TMLC for suborning the Dover Area School District (DASD) into passing an “intelligent design” policy late in 2004, claiming that they could blow off advice of their legal counsel; TMLC would be there to defend them in court. The TMLC and DASD ended up losing spectacularly in 2005, with DASD getting a negotiated fine of $1,000,011. (The eleven dollars were $1 each for the plaintiffs in the case; as far as I know, none of those checks were ever cashed, and most if not all are framed and on display.)

Thompson is also known for a long series of unsuccessful cases attempting to prosecute Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who advocated assisted suicide for terminal patients. Kevorkian eventually went on national television with a video showing Kevorkian actually administering a lethal injection to a patient who was incapable of doing that himself, and given that suspect-supplied evidence, the state of Michigan was finally able to successfully prosecute Kevorkian.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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