The Austringer

Tea Party candidate Allen West made clear his disdain for the “Coexist” bumper sticker. West was quoted as saying,

“[A]s I was driving up here today, I saw that bumper sticker that absolutely incenses me. It’s not the Obama bumper sticker. But it’s the bumper sticker that says, ‘Co-exist.’ And it has all the little religious symbols on it. And the reason why I get upset, and every time I see one of those bumper stickers, I look at the person inside that is driving. Because that person represents something that would give away our country. Would give away who we are, our rights and freedoms and liberties because they are afraid to stand up and confront that which is the antithesis, anathema of who we are. The liberties that we want to enjoy.”

West makes clear that what he objects to is the symbol of Islam on the bumper sticker, saying that people choosing that bumper sticker would give away America because they won’t stand up against radical Islamists. It seems to me that he reaches a conclusion without any chain of logic connecting the premises he starts from to the conclusion he wishes to reach. We can reject the extremism of some without trampling on the rights of other citizens; West doesn’t appear to get that.

The Bill of Rights to the Constitution does provide for freedom of religion, and Islam, last I checked, is a religion. There are practitioners of Islam who don’t agree with radical Islam, just as there are Protestants who aren’t in favor of hanging or burning witches and Catholics who aren’t into pederasty or burning heretics at the stake. We aren’t ‘giving up America’ when we tolerate our Protestant and Catholic neighbors, and we aren’t ‘giving up America’ when we tolerate our Islamic neighbors. It is, though, ‘giving up America’ when we let foreign extremists of any sort encourage us to turn our back on freedom of religion here in the USA. It is curious that Allen West can’t seem to see that his attitude is the problem, not the fellow with the “Coexist” bumper sticker.

Update: I’ve already been told in the comments that West “is not anti-religion”. Here’s another reported quote from West continuing his anti-bumper sticker comments:

– “We already have a 5th column that is already infiltrating into our colleges, into our universities, into our high schools, into our religious aspect, our cultural aspect, our financial, our political systems in this country. And that enemy represents something called Islam and Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology, it is not a religion. It has not been a religion since 622 AD, and we need to have individuals that stand up and say that.”

– “George Bush got snookered into going into some mosque, taking his shoes off, and then saying that Islam was a religion of peace.”

The above demonstrates the very generically anti-Islam sentiment that West advocates. West is not targeting Islamic radicalism or radicalism in general; he is setting himself up as an arbiter of who gets First Amendment freedom of religion rights. That’s about as scary as politics gets in my book.

Viewed 10601 times by 834 viewers

“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)]

Viewed 10565 times by 834 viewers

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.

Viewed 19027 times by 1202 viewers

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.

Viewed 48277 times by 2490 viewers

There’s an article in the Austin American Statesman about the ongoing Gulf oil spill. It talks about the effects of the spill throughout the water column. The massive use of dispersants at depth is noted as being experimental: nobody knows exactly what outcomes you get by doing that. Well, other than that less of the oil washes ashore where it is convenient for photographers to document the pathetic demise of many a bird and marine mammal because of the oil. It is a lot harder to get cameras on the pathetic demise of benthic, nektonic, and pelagic animals, but those deaths count no less because they pass unseen. Nor is most of the problem going to be at the level of charismatic megafauna, as the authors point out. This spill is disrupting the food web from the lowest levels right up to the top predators. Further, they note that the bacteria that are relied upon to consume the oil over time do so in the presence of oxygen. As they metabolize the oil, they deplete the oxygen. High levels of methane gas are not helping, either. It doesn’t take much to make the inference that “dead zones” with low to no oxygen in the water will expand. What’s worse is that given the toxicity of what we’re dumping into the Gulf, they may well persist over time scales we have not experienced before.

It seems to me to be only common sense that off-shore oil drilling at any depth, if done at all, should be conditional on the principals demonstrating that they have the capacity on-hand to deal with even worst-case problems within a short time window. Turning loose the machinery and hoping for the best is no way to safeguard the public welfare.

As usual, this is only personal opinion.

Viewed 47825 times by 2392 viewers

I’m working on setting up a citizen scientist project to document where snapping shrimp (family Alpheidae) are active pre- and post-contamination by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In this post, I just want to introduce the basic concepts and provide an example sound file.

Snapping shrimp comprise a number of species, mostly distributed in tropical to temperate waters. They live in near-shore structured environments, including seagrasses, rocks, and coral reefs. They are predators on small, live prey, and they kill or stun their prey using a snap from a disproportionately large claw. The snap of the claw generates a cavitation event and, by the way, a high-amplitude, broadband transient sound that is also called a snap. The combined noise from the local population of snapping shrimp is a familiar feature not only to bioacoustics researchers, but to anyone who snorkels or SCUBA dives in areas with snapping shrimp.

Because of this noise and the role snapping shrimp play in the marine food web, they are an excellent candidate as an “indicator species”, a species that can be easily monitored and which provides a measure of the health of that part of the marine food web. Better yet, the monitoring and assessment can be done acoustically, by sound recording, to get a measure for a local population.

If I had a chunk of money to throw at this, a sophisticated way to do this would be to make a baseline of calibrated sound recordings and be able to characterize tidal and daily cycle effects on snapping shrimp sound activity, and thus be able to statistically determine a reduction in activity post-contamination. I estimate somewhere around $10K would be needed to set up a portable data collection system from scratch with that kind of capability. Not having that in spare change in my pocket, I’m looking at a somewhat different approach that a lot more people can get into with minimal outlay of funds and just a bit of do-it-yourself drive.

Because snapping shrimp noise is broadband, you can hear it even in plain audio recordings, though the peak frequencies are actually ultrasonic. This means any sort of audio recorder can be used to find out if snapping shrimp are present in a location: cassette tape recorder, digital recorders, and even video cameras. The thing that any of those will need is a microphone input. What to plug in for that recording? A hydrophone would be great, but most people don’t have those lying around. But one can also make a normal microphone water-resistant and use it. It is best to think of such a microphone as disposable, since better sensitivity also corresponds to the water-resistance being more fragile, and saltwater is great at destroying electronics. In another post, I’ll describe making your own hydrophone or water-resistant microphone. If you already have a recorder, the additional cost is under $50 to be able to record underwater sound. I’m not looking for this sort of recording to do as much, simply to say whether a snapping shrimp population is active or not.

Below is an example of a simple recording I made last night that demonstrates the presence of an active population of snapping shrimp at one location and time. I’m still working on what additional information should be noted along with the recording, but I think what I provide here may be sufficient.

File: s_sunshine_skyway_201006241851_WS_30006.wma
Recorder: Olympus WS-320M, ST HQ mode, CONF mic sensitivity
Transducer: Salvaged hydrophone from a sonobuoy
Transducer depth: Approximately 2 feet
Recording made by: Wesley R. Elsberry
Date: 2010-06-24
Time: 18:51 EDT
Latitude: 27.586371°
Longitude: -82.620388°
Location description: South Sunshine Skyway Bridge on road to south fishing pier, at overpass over water, north side, toward east end.

I’ll be posting more on this topic later.

Viewed 47433 times by 2580 viewers

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.

Viewed 49459 times by 2574 viewers

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.

Viewed 57675 times by 3139 viewers

Manatee County offers tax certificates to bidders. When property owners fail to pay their taxes, and that is happening a lot right now, the county gets other people to pay the taxes and gives them a tax certificate, which is a lien against the property. Each year, an auction happens where people can bid to get these. The bid amounts are in percent interest, and range from 18% at the high end down to 0%. The person bidding the lowest percent interest gets the tax certificate, after, of course, they pay the county the outstanding taxes.

Today, there was a practice auction. This is all handled online now. The page included the option to download data on the 9,000+ properties in CSV, XLS, or XML formats.

Diane is interested in the process and specifically in the land just to the south of our property. It currently has unpaid taxes, and if the executors of the former owner’s estate don’t pay up by June 1st, it will be included in the tax certificate auction. But she is also interested in what else is available out there.

That brings up an interesting problem. The downloaded data is minimal, giving just a parcel ID, outstanding tax balance, and some auction-related attributes. On the other hand, Diane would like information that is available online from another county office, that of the Property Appraiser.

I worked on a Python script to handle the job of getting additional information on acreage, zoning, the address, and bits like that. I hadn’t done anything with Python regular expressions to date, and started looking at that and getting less enthused by the minute. The issue is getting data out of an HTML page downloaded from the Property Appraiser. I could have it done in Perl right offhand, but wanted to develop my Python skills a bit.

On the other hand, getting the job done is the top priority, so while looking stuff up, I ran across the BeautifulSoup module for Python. The web site sounded promising, and a number of other people seemed to have found it useful. Very useful.

BeautifulSoup is an HTML/XML parser. It aims to not only handle clean XHTML, but also to do reasonable things with the sort of HTML people were writing when the Web was young, in other words, bad HTML.

I downloaded the module distribution, and got it uncompressed. Setup is simply

python setup.py -install

My usage so far is to pluck values out of adjacent cells in a table. I can load a BeautifulSoup object with the HTML in question, then ask it to find the label I’m looking for in text. Then I just ask it to retrieve the next text in the document, and that is the stuff I’m looking for.

Anytime one gets started with a library to do a job, it can take a while to get going with it. BeautifulSoup let me get my job done without a lot of effort on the initial learning curve. Right now, my script is about halfway through getting the additional data wanted for those 9,000+ properties. We’ll be able to look it over in the morning. The whole script I’m using is less than a hundred lines of code, and that reads in a CSV file, traverses that, gets the associated profile page from the Property Appraiser for each property, parses that with BeautifulSoup, adds the additional fields of info to the original, and writes out a new CSV file with the more complete data set.

Viewed 47906 times by 3323 viewers

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.

Viewed 53126 times by 3742 viewers

Last year, the CoverFlorida Health Care program got started. This is essentially group insurance for the Florida uninsured pool, organized by (but not paid for by) the state of Florida. Governor Charlie Crist says the following on the CoverFlorida website:

During the 2008 legislative session, my administration worked with legislators of both parties to secure unanimous approval of the Cover Florida Health Care Access Program. This legislation makes affordable health coverage available to 3.8 million uninsured Floridians through a comprehensive market-based strategy.

3.8 million uninsured Floridians. That’s a lot.

It has been a little over a year now, so maybe we can start to see a shift in the demographic. How many eligible people actually have signed up for coverage under CoverFlorida’s plans? According to a PDF summarizing enrollment through January, 2010, that would be 5,426 people. That works out to about 0.14% of the eligible pool who have taken the plunge. At that rate, 3.8 million people may have signed up for this health care somewhere around the year 2709. That does appear to be viewing the problem as solving itself in Lord Keynes’ long run.

Viewed 52874 times by 4035 viewers

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.

Viewed 47002 times by 4520 viewers

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.

Viewed 42633 times by 4435 viewers

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.

Viewed 34000 times by 4331 viewers

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.)

Viewed 34651 times by 4308 viewers

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.

Viewed 30379 times by 5036 viewers

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.

Viewed 31068 times by 6519 viewers

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.

Viewed 26651 times by 4495 viewers

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.

Viewed 26238 times by 4324 viewers

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.

Viewed 26228 times by 4309 viewers