Ken Ham is feeling defensive

Poor Ken Ham is getting mocked everywhere for his Creation “Museum” and proposed Disneyland for Dummies, so he has put up a post defending Kentucky. It’s a remarkably weak argument (no surprise there, that’s all he can do), which mainly lists famous people who have been born there and occasional connections and horse racing. Whoop-te-doo. He also left off a few important merits to the state.

  • PZ Myers had ancestors who lived in Kentucky!

  • PZ Myers has a son who lives in Kentucky right now!

  • Ken Ham is not from Kentucky!

Ham did find one relevant piece of information: he dug up one study that developed a metric of important educational parameters like average class size, drop-out rate, teacher salaries, etc. that gives Kentucky a #1 ranking in public education. Good work, I knew there were smart people in Kentucky who had their priorities straight, and being from that state or living there is nothing to be ashamed of. We don’t have a detestation of Kentuckians.

The thing is that Ken Ham brings down the state average in intelligence, and his exhibits of stupid ideas bring the region and the country into disrepute. We don’t blame Kentucky.

It’s all Australia’s fault.

Martin Gaskell was not expelled

Gaskell is an astronomer who applied for a job at the University of Kentucky, and didn’t get it. This is not news. The great majority of the people who apply for jobs in the sciences don’t get them, even if they are well qualified — the rejected candidates know just to pick up and move on to the next application, because it is so routine.

Not Martin Gaskell, though. Gaskell is suing the university for not hiring him, which is amazing: when I was on the job market, I sent out at least one hundred applications, and ultimately got hired for one, so I guess that means I missed 99 potentially lucrative lawsuit opportunities. Dang. Is there a statute of limitations on civil suits?

Of course, Gaskell has a predisposition: he’s a devout Christian, so that persecution complex is rooted deeply. He claims he was denied the job because he’s an evangelical Christian. I say he’s just inventing rationalizations…something else his religion has made him very good at. And the newspapers are helping him out.

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Wrong. I’ll deny it. The leading candidate is the one you make an offer to — and the identity of that person varies throughout the review process. You can talk about a “leading candidate” when you look at just the cover letters and CVs; you’ll probably have a different “leading candidate” when you’ve had a chance to read through all the letters of recommendation; it’ll change again when you do the phone interviews; it’ll change again when you’ve had the on-campus interviews; and it’ll change again as the committee hashes over the discussions before making the final offer. This always happens. It’s ridiculous to complain that it was somehow unfair that facts emerged during a fact-finding process.

I’m in the middle (nearer the end, I’m pretty sure) of a job search to hire a new faculty member here at UMM, so I know whereof I speak. It doesn’t matter that Gaskell was well qualified for the job, since most of the applicants were probably well qualified; making a hiring commitment is a big deal that involves consideration of a great many factors, including subjective personal ones, so you simply can’t complain about individuals not getting the job. It’s fair to look for systematic bias, though, but Gaskell can’t make a case there. He claims he wasn’t hired because he’s a Christian.

I don’t believe it. There is no pattern of discrimination against the dominant religious group in the country, and Gaskell knows it. If you look at one of the documents he has written about his beliefs, scroll down to the very end, where you’ll find that Gaskell has a long list of religious organizations, like the ASA, the Affiliation of Christian Biologists, the Christian Engineering Society, etc., etc., etc. It seems that being a Christian is not considered a de facto strike against the possibility of being a scientist or engineer.

The fact that some Christians are in the sciences doesn’t argue against the fact that they could be under-represented, and face an unfair uphill struggle to get jobs. However, being a Christian is not like being a woman: it’s not something that is necessarily obvious in a job interview. We don’t ask candidates where they go to church, and if we find out, we don’t care (not even me, the arch-atheist, will bat an eye if you let slip that you attend). Gaskell will have to show that the search committee was opposed in even a vague sense to hiring a Christian, and he can’t do that. Why? Because there’s a great big fat loomin’ obvious Problem with a capital “P” splatted putridly in the pages of his CV, and all of the concern in hiring him was with that, not where he went to church.

Gaskell is an evolution-denier. He’s an old-earth creationist, a theistic evolutionist who looks favorably on Intelligent Design creationism.

It’s evident in his public defense of the Book of Genesis, in which he goes on and on with unlikely rationalizations for a metaphorical interpretation. This is a fellow who says, “It is true that there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than is usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses“, and then goes on to endorse Josh McDowell, Phillip Johnson, Harun Yahya, Hugh Ross, and the day-age interpretation of Genesis, as if they are somehow not afflicted with these “problems”.

There is a difference between accepting a theory that is incomplete, like evolution, and a set of wacky ideas that are contradicted by the available evidence, like these various flavors of creationism that Gaskell is favoring. That calls his ability to think scientifically into question, and that is legitimate grounds to abstain from hiring him.

The record shows that what people were discussing was not his religion alone, but the way his religion has affected his job as a scientist and communicator of science, and the effect of hiring someone with such dubious views in a state already trying to overcome the embarrassment of being home to the Creation “Museum”. These are valid concerns. It’s also a fact that when hiring, we want to have people whose skills we can respect as colleagues, and Gaskell was not in a good position that way. One of the faculty members who reviewed the case said it very well:

Another geology professor, Shelly Steiner, wrote that UK [University of Kentucky] should no more hire an astronomer skeptical of evolution than “a biologist who believed that the sun revolved around the Earth.”

That’s the bottom line. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that Gaskell was exceptionally competent in the very narrow domain of his astronomical work, but faculty don’t get hired to do only one thing, and Gaskell himself is quite clear that he isn’t going to confine himself to talking only about his field…and unfortunately, it’s also clear that he was a confused and ignorant boob about all the other subjects he was happy to lecture about.

Good grief, but I despise the Discovery Institute

There’s nothing I detest more than intellectual dishonesty, and the Discovery Institute is a world leader in that. They have a ghastly little article up on their website, “Is origin of life in hot water?”, which cites a recent paper in PNAS to argue that life couldn’t have evolved without the enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions. Here’s what they say about it:

So it seems according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors address the conundrum of origin of life chemists between the rate of (un-catalyzed) organic reactions and the lack of time available for these reactions to occur. From the article (note: an enzyme is a biological catalyst):

Whereas enzyme reactions ordinarily occur in a matter of milliseconds, the same reactions proceed with half-lives of hundreds, thousands, or millions of years in the absence of a catalyst. Yet life is believed to have taken hold within the first 25% of Earth’s history. How could cellular chemistry and the enzymes that make life possible, have arisen so quickly?” [Internal citations omitted]

Indeed this is one of the problems with origin of life scenarios, particularly those scenarios that presume a metabolism-first world (as opposed to an RNA-first world). The half-life of certain reactions without a catalyst can be millions of years, but studies show that the emergence of early bacteria could be dated as far back as 3.5 billion years (see ENV post on a cold origin of life and Schopf, J. William, “The First Billion Years: When Did Life Emerge?” Elements vol 2:229 (2006) for more on this). This means there was a limited amount of time for fundamental biological reactions to occur. Reaction kinetics can be prohibitive. However, the authors of this paper have a theory to solve the reaction kinetics problem.

No, the authors provide data to support a dramatic (and unsurprising) effect of temperature on the rate of chemical reactions, and the Discovery Institute uses a paper demonstrating the feasibility of life’s early chemistry to argue the exact opposite.

It’s stunningly arrogant — I guess they’re used to their readers simply accepting whatever they say. They quote the first three sentences of the paper, and leave off the rest of the paragraph. Would you like to know what it says?

Do you think the DI might have accurately represented the sense of the paper?

Place your bets now. Here’s the remainder of the paragraph:

Here, we show that because of an extraordinarily sensitive rela- tionship between temperature and the rates of very slow reactions, the time required for early evolution on a warm earth was very much shorter than it might appear. That sensitivity also suggests some likely properties of an evolvable catalyst, and a testable mechanism by which its ability to enhance rates might have been expected to increase as the environment cooled.

It reminds me of the infamous quote mine of the that section of Darwin’s Origin on the evolution of the eye, in which he rhetorically sets up the problem and then goes on to explain exactly how it occurred…and the creationists only ever quote the part where the problem is laid out, and pretend the answer was missing. That’s exactly what the creationists have done to this paper by Stockbridge et al. — they’ve pulled out just the few sentences at the beginning where the authors explain why this is an important problem, and then gloss over the whole point of the paper, which is to solve the problem.

Just in case you’re curious, here’s the abstract — there’s absolutely nothing in here to provide any consolation to a creationist.

All reactions are accelerated by an increase in temperature, but the magnitude of that effect on very slow reactions does not seem to have been fully appreciated. The hydrolysis of polysaccharides, for example, is accelerated 190,000-fold when the temperature is raised from 25 to 100 °C, while the rate of hydrolysis of phosphate monoester dianions increases 10,300,000-fold. Moreover, the slow- est reactions tend to be the most heat-sensitive. These tendencies collapse, by as many as five orders of magnitude, the time that would have been required for early chemical evolution in a warm environment. We propose, further, that if the catalytic effect of a “proto-enzyme”—like that of modern enzymes—were mainly enthalpic, then the resulting rate enhancement would have increased automatically as the environment became cooler. Several powerful nonenzymatic catalysts of very slow biological reactions, notably pyridoxal phosphate and the ceric ion, are shown to meet that criterion. Taken together, these findings greatly reduce the time that would have been required for early chemical evolution, countering the view that not enough time has passed for life to have evolved to its present level of complexity.

Stockbridge RB, Lewis CA, Yuan Y, Wolfenden R (2010) Impact of temperature on the time required for
the establishment of primordial biochemistry,
and for the evolution of enzymes. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1013647107.

A victory in Louisiana

This is fabulous news: the Louisiana school system has been wrestling with a proposal from the Louisiana Family Forum (you know the rule: the word “family” in their title means they’re anything but) which would have had the schools using science textbooks with absurd warning labels and watered down content. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has seen the light, however, and voted 6 to 1 in favor of using quality textbooks for the kids of Louisiana. It’s an all-around win for everyone.

The Louisiana Patriarchy Forum is not happy. They are venting their frustration a bit with a ridiculous poll — go make them cry some more.

Do you support BESE’s decision today to approve a list of Biology textbooks with known false and inaccurate information?

YES
29%
NO
71%

Just remember, to a creationist “false and inaccurate” refers to any piece of evidence that shows how bogus their superstitions are, and vote accordingly.

While we’re busy playing in the Creationist Theme Park…

…take a look at the depressing state of American education. This is the gloomiest article I’ve seen on the American future.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

That hasn’t even gotten to the predictions yet. That’s a description of our current status.

You know, in ten years the Chinese tourists will be flocking to the bargains and sights of an economy in the toilet, and they will be booking tours to the Ark Encounter. And they will point and laugh and laugh and laugh. While proud Kentuckians will be scrabbling to sell them cheap plastic souvenirs in their new, low-paying jobs in the service industries.

I’m sure Ken Ham is grateful

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting.

We were notified late this morning that AiG’s latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV’s evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the ABC affiliate station in your area and the time of broadcast. (See the ABC-TV news site.) Also, here is a link to the article about the Ark project that appears in the New York Times today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06ark.html.

The website for the Ark Encounter is ArkEncounter.com.

We are grateful to God for all this media coverage.

And well he should be. I looked at the NY Times coverage, and was appalled.

I have to explain something to the Times. Some guy building a little theme park in Kentucky is not news. It’s something for the state and local news, sure, but not something that warrants a good-sized spread and a big image of the proposed park in the N freaking Y frackin’ Times.

So why is it given that much space and a purely vanilla description of the events and people involved, as if it is simultaneously a big deal deserving national attention and a weirdly blasé occurrence that requires no investigation — how can it be both controversial enough to warrant attention and so uncontroversial that the reporter can’t even be bothered to mention how ridiculous and anti-scientific this endeavor is?

It is an astonishingly insipid article. The only good (?) thing about it is that finally the NY Times breaks its bad habit of “he said, she said” journalism and didn’t even bother to contact a scientist to get the “other” side. You know, the rational, accurate, honest, scientific side.

I don’t have much hope for the Diane Sawyer story going on the air tonight, either. Anyone want to bet on whether Ham gets pitched some softballs and the park that encourages children to be stupid is treated as purely an economic development issue?

Such blithe liars

I’m not getting a good opinion of people in New Jersey. They’ve got the awful George Berkin, a cretin who rants on NJ Online, and has a reputation as one of the dumbest jerks in the state. And he has commenters. I want to talk about one of them, Terry Hurlbut, who is a marvelous example of creationist pseudoscience and dishonesty. He’s commenting on a Berkin article that is characteristically crazy (it’s a defense of Christianity against atheism that cites CS Lewis’s trilemma), but Hurlbut goes beyond mere inanity to lie about science.

Take a look at this. Creationists only rarely get this arrogant in writing; usually they reserve this kind of total pseudoscientific BS for when they’ve got you one-on-one.

“Did people really live for hundreds of years?” Yes. Pre-Flood, carbon-14 was not present in the vast quantities that pervade our atmosphere today, and cosmogenic C-14 was very rare. During the Flood, the earth’s crust, wracked with magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes and rich in quartz (which generates electricity when deformed), acted as a gigantic fast-breeding nuclear reactor and produced all of the radionuclides (up to uranium and arguably plutonium) known to man today. That included C-14, produced in tremendous quantities through cluster decay. And when C-14 gets into your system, and then decays, it can wreck whatever molecule (including DNA) of which it became a part. So the reason we *don’t* live hundreds of years today is that we are all suffering from radiation poisoning (or isotopic substitutional poisoning) and have forgotten what it was like not to be subject to such poisoning.

Wow. Breathtaking. So breaking quartz generates electricity (true so far), which with a little prestidigitation is equivalent to turning into a nuclear reactor, which produced all the radioactive elements present on earth in less than a year, and also distributed and mixed them throughout the earth’s crust and mantle. And somehow eight people in a wooden boat survived this remarkable upheaval. (I know, that part was a miracle. The rest was science. Right.)

And the reason we get old is that C-14 decomposes and breaks our DNA. This is a contributing factor, I’m sure, but this fantasy world where all carbon is C-12 never existed: most of the C-14 we’re breathing in is produced in the atmosphere, not some magical giant nuclear reactor beneath our feet, and the only way it wouldn’t happen is if the sun didn’t exist.

Then someone points out that tree ring data contradicts his claims, and Hurlbut ups the ante.

Tree rings are not necessarily annual. And the point is that the Flood, and the associated nuclear reactions in the earth’s crust, released virtually all of the C-14 present in the atmosphere today. Do you know of any experiment in an atmosphere totally free of C-14? I thought not. Isn’t it amazing, how we get used to something as “the new normal” and never consider that it’s the result of a serious health hazard introduced 4400 years ago?

See? His story must be true, because look — the atmosphere contains C14 today! Let’s all ignore the fact that we know how C14 is produced, and that it’s being constantly replenished.

And then he rants some more about the ferocity of his god’s wrath.

And hel-lo-ooooo! The Flood knocked down all the trees that were growing at the time! All the trees that grow today, sprouted after the Flood, not before. You have no concept of how violent an event the Flood was. Magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes; a water jet powerful enough to throw 1 percent of the earth’s mass, as water, mud, and rock, into outer space; killer hailstorms that froze the mammoths (many of them standing up); and the formation of a protuberance (the Himalaya Range and the Tibetan Plateau) heavy enough to pull the earth off-balance and move the poles. (Which is what the mammoths were doing in the Arctic region in the first place; that used to be a lush tropical jungle.) Not to mention the big rocks that slammed into the Moon, mostly on one side of it, forming the “seas” and causing the Moon to turn one face toward earth and lock in place.

And all that is right there, in the Bible! I repeat: Eight people. Wooden boat. There’s kind of a low limit on how catastrophic the flood event could have been.

I do rather like the argument about the heavy Himalayas making the earth topple over and shift the poles. So why aren’t the Himalayas at the South Pole then, smart guy? Huh? (I know, that argument makes no sense, either.) I’m also struggling to imagine what his pre-flood geography was like…so where was Palestine before this big shift? And what was the orientation of the Earth’s axis of rotation prior to the big wobble?

I’m not seriously asking those questions, because I know how Hurlbut would respond: with more pseudoscience shouted very loudly and with complete and absolutely incompetent confidence. That’s the knack these creationists have; they don’t know anything, but they’re really, really good at making nonsense up, and expressing it with sublime certainty. That must be the training the Bible gives them.

The battle over NCSE

It’s still going on. Jerry Coyne repeated our common criticism that the NCSE spends too much effort promoting Christianity; then Richard Hoppe fires back, complaining that his comment was held in moderation (Coyne has been sick for a while, you know…I wish people would have more patience), and then repeating the common and misguided defense that NCSE is not an atheist organization. We know. We’ve both agreed on multiple occasions that the NCSE should not be an atheist organization. But still we get this same tiresome objection.

NCSE’s main remit is defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools. That defense is both legal (think Kitzmiller) and political (think the Dover PA school board election after that trial but before the verdict was in). One cannot win political battles without accepting alliances with groups with whom one does not agree on all aspects of all issues. To imagine otherwise is to live in dreamland.

Yes? Please look in a mirror, Richard!

As I’ve said before, said just above, am saying again, and will no doubt have to say a hundred times more, no one is asking the NCSE to become an atheist organization, and no one is saying that the NCSE shouldn’t make strategic alliances with religious organizations. I’d put it in 72 point type if I thought it would help, but I doubt that anything will.

The problem is that the NCSE is not neutral on atheism vs. religion, but has clearly taken a side in preferring one particularly fuzzy, liberal, soft version of Christianity as its ‘acceptable’ religious belief. I have a preference for it myself — it’s what I was brought up in, and I think the country would be in far better shape if there was more widespread support for a faith that quietly defers to science on material matters and supported progressive ethical values — but that does not justify exclusively endorsing it, especially since I think promoting atheism would have even better consequences for the nation. If the NCSE is to be respected as an honest broker, supporting only better science education, it can’t do so by this weird sectarian favoritism.

What raises hackles is that once again NCSE is caught promoting a cult event, a group of theologians and preachers gathering to babble incompetently about evolution. As usual, they’re being selective: Spong and Giberson and their ilk will always get a thumbs-up from the NCSE, but they don’t seem to appreciate that they are almost as great a minority as atheists, and that supporting this one slippery version of Christianity is not going to suddenly win over the majority to their side. The fact that most of the participants at this conference are generally nice people is not a reason to argue that they’re right.

Here’s what would make me content, and satisfy me that the NCSE was not turning into a religious organization. It’s only two things, and it does not involve sticking a knife in the back of any Christian groups, and none of it involves adding an atheist bias to the center.

  1. Demonstrate some rigor in who they’re going to promote. Right now, it looks like any religious group that announces that they’re OK with evolution, for any reason, gets the happy-clappy treatment from the NCSE. It doesn’t matter if what they’re doing is pushing teleology and a history of godly intervention — if they say their faith is compatible with evolution, no matter how much they distort the science, they get the thumbs-up. Have some standards; don’t allow your logo to be slapped on a gathering of theologians of the acceptable faith, unless there is going to be some critical thinking encouraged, and honest evaluation of the evidence.

  2. Be more equitable in distributing information. The most glaring discrepancy in NCSE’s current policy of so-called alliance-building is that atheists are left out; I presume their support is taken for granted. But I will note that some ditzy conference by Biologos-types gets front page attention from the NCSE, while Richard Dawkins can tour the country giving talks on evolution (if anyone had been paying attention, they’d know that most of his talks are about science, not atheism) and be completely ignored. It’s as if the biggest, most popular promoters of science in the world do not exist, simply because they aren’t liberal Christians.

    Why? Apparently because the alliances they are trying to build are with delicate bigots who will balk if the NCSE even occasionally acknowledges that atheists are sharing goals with them. It doesn’t help to pander to such fragile souls, especially if you’re going to turn around and use their sensitivity to accuse atheists of refusing to work alongside Christians on the issues of science education. We aren’t the ones threatening to abandon science education because Christians are involved in it, please notice; we aren’t the ones refusing to cooperate with religious people who want to better teaching in this country. Instead, we’re the boogey men the NCSE would like to hide in the closet.

Note that I agree that the principle in point #1 should also apply to #2. There are plenty of atheist conferences that address evolution, and many of them are using it to lead the cheer for atheism in the same way that Biologos uses it to promote Christianity. The NCSE is under no obligation to promote every atheist meeting. But I think if they’re going to push anything as aiding the cause of science education, it ought to be events that feature science and education. Right now, it’s science and education and friendly theology. That latter addition represents mission creep, and a growing bias towards promoting a version of religion.

Jerry is precisely right. NCSE is becoming Biologos, and Biologos is an openly and honestly sectarian organization that evangelizes for a specific version of Christianity. That makes NCSE the secretive and dishonest version of the same, and as a long-term supporter of the NCSE (and someone who never will support Biologos), I object. Get back on track with an honest neutrality on the conflict between science and religion, please.

And do I need to say it again? That doesn’t mean promoting atheism. I know what that looks like, and I do it myself all the time, and it’s not what anyone is asking the NCSE to do.

Christ and Corruption

Ken Ham commissioned a company named “America’s Research Group” to produce a feasibility study for the construction of his theme park for biblical literalists — I’m sure its conclusion that the park would bring in 1.5 million visitors and $200 million in revenue was a factor in convincing the Governor of Kentucky to embrace the idea.

Only there’s a catch. America’s Research Group is run by Britt Beemer. Who is Britt Beemer? Oh, look: the feasibility study was written by Ken Ham’s personal friend, coauthor, and fellow fundagelical kook.

This wasn’t an independent study at all. It was by a personal ally with multiple ties to Ken Ham.

I don’t know about you, but I smell something rotten.