The Austringer

This New Scientist article discusses some really cool results coming out of the Devolab at Michigan State University. In for particular attention was my colleague, Laura Grabowski, who defended her dissertation on memory evolving in Avidians shortly before I left MSU. She is now a professor at the University of Texas – Pan American in Edinburg, Texas, continuing her work on artificial life.

Rob Pennock and Jeff Clune also got attention in the article, and a paper of mine (with Laura and Rob) published last year got a link in the article.

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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.

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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.

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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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The Consortium for Ocean Leadership’s National Ocean Science Bowl is holding its national competition this weekend in St. Petersburg, Florida at the USF/St. Pete campus and FWRI. There is round robin competition on Saturday, then the finals will use a double-elimination tournament schedule that finishes up on Sunday.

I’m signed up as a moderator in one of the rooms on Saturday. I really enjoyed volunteering for the regional tournament, and I am looking forward to tomorrow’s competition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The public is welcome to attend the event.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gets worse from there.

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

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

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

A. Right. This is an adaptational response.

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

A. Correct.

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

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

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

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

Casey Luskin again:

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

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

Casey Luskin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.

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

Continue Reading »

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

True Believers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David,

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

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

Paragraph 1 from the first piece goes like this:

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

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

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

Now let’s turn to the second piece.

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

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

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

Now back to your most recent comment.

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

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

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

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

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

Next…

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

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

Is that your final answer?

That’s absurd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next…

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

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

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

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

Next…

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

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

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

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

Next…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Philip Clayton at “Religion Dispatches” has a post up about evolution/creationism issues and the yin/yang of the classes of antievolutionists and new atheists who agree that one must choose between religion and science, but just disagree on which way to jump.

There’s a brief mention of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) (with a disclaimer that it isn’t necessarily adequate) and a further discussion of how the participants need to set aside “hegemonic” claims.

When evolutionary and religious explanations are construed as fighting for the same territory, they will unleash their weapons upon each other—as today’s religion wars show. When we recognize and acknowledge their different strengths, a far more interesting discussion emerges.

This new debate is challenging because it requires both sides to give up certain hegemonic claims: scientists, the claim that science provides the answer to all metaphysical questions; and religionists, the claim that they know better than science how nature works.

I think Clayton does all right in entering certain arguments concerning metaphysics. But I think that he has overlooked the public policy aspect concerning K-12 public school education. Since 1968, religious antievolutionists have been illegitimately claiming scientific status for their conjectures, and attempting to inject those conjectures into the public school curriculum at every opportunity at every level, individual, school, district, state, and federal. “Interesting discussion” is hindered when it is consistently one side that demonstrates such intellectually bankrupt and immoral behavior. Until religious antievolutionists ‘fess up that what they are pushing is religion, not science, there can be no rapprochement on this. Of course, that also means that they have to abandon the long-term project of diluting or contaminating K-12 public school science education. I see no moves in that direction. Until that happens, the flames will continue, and will be contributed to by theistic evolutionists like me, who see religious antievolution as a threat to the integrity of both faith and science. It is way too soon to talk about ashes.

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I've gotten used to using as my usual document preparation tool. However, many of the people I collaborate with are not into and would prefer that we use MicroSoft Word instead for drafts of manuscripts.

I had tried applying the latex2rtf package before to get a version of an existing manuscript into a form that Word would recognize. I failed completely; the translation simply didn't work well.

Given a task of preparing a new manuscript, though, I decided to have another look at latex2rtf. I installed it on the MacBook Pro. That was simple, just a "make; make install" process at the command line. Then I started building my manuscript in TeXShop. I'd typeset the source, then apply latex2rtf to it.

What I can say is that the help available for latex2rtf is sparse. What there is indicates that one should stick to general and common features of . That is good advice.

Some advice for latex2rtf, though, is misleading. It claims to pick up parameters from the statement for the "geometry" package. I tried changing my margins there, and while my document reflected those, the RTF I got did not. Also, I could include graphics, but they appeared without scaling in the RTF. After a while of Googling without result, I finally dug into the latex2rtf source code. That produced results.

To expand the width of text on the page, I ended up using the following:

\oddsidemargin 0.0in
\textwidth 6.5in

That worked for both the and RTF versions of the manuscript.

Instead of using an absolute size for included graphics, I found that if I used "[scale=0.45]" in my "includegraphics" call, that worked well enough for both document systems.

So far, I haven't encountered a difficulty in having the equations carry over to RTF. This looks like it may actually work. I'll have to figure out how to highlight differences in edited Word documents so that I can efficiently carry over edits to the source, but I'm hopeful that won't be too difficult.

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I've changed my bid text to tell an anecdote about penguins and the predatory skua.

I'm not just interested in falcons. I've done research on lekking greater prairie chickens. Diane and I were called upon to help researchers test captive-bred prairie chicken response to raptors. We observed the prairie chickens respond to a hawk flying over their pen. These were naive birds, but the whole population hit the deck and stayed put when the hawk flew over the pens, showing that the captive-bred birds still had the instinct to cower intact.

The Antarctic has its own avian predator. The skuas are gulls that will prey upon penguin chicks and even adult penguins. These are large, aggressive birds, described by some as "seagulls from hell". William Evans told me about an early penguin exhibit, and how people accidentally observed some instinctual behavior in penguins interacting with skuas. A feature that we don't see in current penguin exhibits was the inclusion of two skuas. The skuas initially spent their time bullying the assembled penguins. A wild penguin can flee from a pursuing skua, and corners tend to be uncommon. It didn't take long for one of the penguins to find itself cornered by a skua. The cornered penguin pecked back at the harassing skua. One reason penguins don't often bother with trying to engage a skua attacker is that skuas fly and penguins don't. But these two skuas had their wings clipped. The skua gave a flap that lifted it momentarily off the ground. Every penguin there suddenly swiveled its head to bear on the skua, then attacked. Within seconds, there were no longer any live skuas in the exhibit.

So I'm interested in seeing what these interactions are like in the wild for myself. Please give me your vote and I'll enjoy telling you what I learn.

Please give me a hand by voting for my bid and passing that on to other people you know.

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