Chris Mooney gave a talk in Seattle, and you know who else is up there in my home town: the Discovery Institute. They tried to go on the offensive and sic their version of an attack dog on him…which was, amusingly enough, Casey Luskin. This is the kind of attack dog that goes “yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap,” though, and annoys you by peeing on your shoes. His initial volley was this:

Why do so many people eagerly listen to a journalist with neither scientific nor legal training discuss a complex scientific and legal issue like intelligent design?

It is awkwardly ironic for an unqualified stooge of the Discovery Institute to question anyone’s credentials; if we start down that path, it’s going to lead to pointing out that very, very few of the people at that institute have any credentials in biology at all, and that maybe we should wonder why anyone should listen to a collection of ideologues with degrees in philosophy and law and theology when they pontificate on science (although, to give the other side of the argument, one of their favorite people, Ann Coulter, thinks “biologists are barely scientists,” so maybe they think the dearth of fellows with training in evolution is a plus).

But I’m not going to go down that path. I don’t think the formal credentials are as important as that gang of poseurs and con-men would like to believe.

[Read more…]

Red State Rabble declares that we must stand united against the common enemy, creationism and such anti-scientific forces of unreason that threaten our secular institutions. That’s a nice, fuzzy statement, which I personally suspect is unrealistic and unworkable, but let’s give it a try.

Our first test: the Pope has made an interesting statement.

Pope Benedict XVI on Monday issued his strongest criticism yet of evolutionary theory, calling it “unreasonable”.

Speaking to a 300,000-strong crowd in this German city, the former theological watchdog said that, according to such theories derived from Charles Darwin’s work, the universe is “the random result of evolution and therefore, at bottom, something unreasonable”.

He has also just spoken out against secular societies—it seems that secularism is a greater problem than radical Islam.

But the section on Islam made up just three paragraphs of the speech, and he devoted the rest to a long examination of how Western science and philosophy had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the secularization of European society that is at the heart of Benedict’s worries.

I presume we all going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in agreement that the Pope is wrong, he has completely misrepresented evolutionary theory, and that he should not be concerned about secular society—it is every person’s privilege to refuse to participate in any religion? We should all deplore his fallacious intrusion into a scientific matter, and all of us who are together on the side of science should unambiguously repudiate his opinion.

In the spirit of our shared community, I’ll step aside and refrain from chewing out the Pope, and defer that privilege to my colleague, Ken Miller, who is always willing to draft letters criticizing those who harm the cause of getting the public to recognize the validity of science. Perhaps he can draft a rollicking good letter telling the Pope where he can get off? I think it should definitely mention that Pope Benedict’s clerical status gives him absolutely, positively no credibility or status in assessing biological issues, and perhaps points out that we all stand as one against efforts to undermine science, whether they’re made by a creationist pope or some uppity god-hating atheist.

It should be something we can all agree on.

To unity!

Wilkins is keeping us busy lately: he also has a a whole series on why creationists are creationists. The short answer to the problem he gives is to teach them the process of science, not the rote solutions, and to catch them early—I agree, college is too late. I think he missed one other corrective though. He has a diagram illustrating the forces on a growing mind that drive people towards science, or towards pro-tradition, strongly anti-science attitudes. I can’t help but notice that all the “folk-based heuristics” are driving attitudes towards the anti-science position.

There must be some folk-based heuristics that promote good science. Shouldn’t one of our strategies be to root out the anti-science forces at the earliest ages, replacing them with those science based heuristics or even folk heuristics that promote science? When there’s forces of ignorance dragging our children down, maybe we should also think about opposing the bad as well as promoting the good.

The Pope speaks, John Wilkins replies. Wilkins is sufficient, but I just had to comment on one silly thing the pope said about the consequences of evolution.

Man, “would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless,” said the Pope.

This is terrible news. Forget evolution; I am the chance result of one out of trillions of my father’s sperm meeting one out of hundreds of thousands of my mother’s ova. And, oh no, the allelic content of each of those gametes was the result of chance molecular events in meiosis. And each of those gametes contained a handful of random mutations. I can see in my brothers and sisters that chance could have resulted in rather different outcomes.

Whoa … my exalted manliness was also the result of a roughly 50:50 chance—it’s like one of the primary qualifications for Ratzinger to have become pope was little more than a coin flip.

So chance makes everything meaningless? I guess my life must be nothing, then, and the papacy too is just random noise. I guess in his recent get-together with his students on evolution, his reported willingness to listen was all a sham.

Pam Spaulding reports that Ken Ham’s clown palace of a ‘museum’ will be opening in April. I am so tempted to make a road trip this summer to see it and mock it…but no, I don’t really want to put one penny in his coffers. I did think this was funny, though:

According to Ham, the museum is already receiving worldwide attention. “The international press are getting very, very interested in this,” he says, “and it’s going to be not just a national event here in America. It’s going to be an international event when it opens in April 2007.”

I’m sure it is getting lots of international attention. It’s a colossal joke and an embarrassment to this country.

Surely you can’t be tired of dissecting Ken Miller yet, can you? Perhaps you’re tired of me going over it, though. In that case, Jon Voisey discusses his talk and the Q & A afterwards (don’t worry, he’s less vicious than I am, despite being an angry astronomer), and Mark Perakh points us to Amiel Rossow’s review of Finding Darwin’s God. Personally, I find it a strange book: pages 1-164 are excellent, among the best and plainest and most direct critiques of Intelligent Design creationism you’ll find; pages 165-292, eh, not so much. It’s like mild-mannered, sensible Dr Miller wrote the first half, then he drank the potion that turned him into the wartily odious Mr Theologian, with his temporal lobe unshackled and the mystical caudate nucleus unleashed, and we get page after page of unearthly prolix rationalizations for superstition. Oh, well…165 pages of first rate biology makes the book worth buying, and you can always read the rest as an exercise in facing down religious apologists.

Jack Krebs has his summary of the KU talk by Ken Miller, and I’ve also had a bit of a private conversation with Miller in email. I’m not going to post it, but I will summarize my ideas after getting more of the story.

• Miller is not trying to redirect creationists to fight atheists, and he’s very clear that all of us need to stand together in our opposition to bad science (I also agree the religious and the non-religious should be united on this issue.) Krebs mentions that this was a new section of his talk, so I suspect this is one where he’ll be reworking some of the wording. I hope.

• Miller should speak out vociferously against atheism, just as I should speak out against religion. While we have a united front against creationism, that doesn’t mean our disagreements on other issues should disappear.

• There is a distinction to be made between small “c” creationists who believe in a creator god, and big “C” Creationists who wage a culture war against good science. Miller may be a believer in a creator god, but he’s a staunch opponent of the Creationists—despite disagreement on matters philosophical, I should be clear in saying that he is on our side.

• I think we both agree that the debate with creationists needs to shift in direction—the science is settled and has been resolved for a long, long time. Where that argument should go is unsettled, and I don’t think his talk helped clarify matters much. I think it muddied them, if anything.

I’ve also listened to that section of Miller’s talk where he is proposing a “road to peace” in the creation-evolution wars, and I’ve seen several different interpretations in the comments now. I think the problem is that I still don’t know what the hell he is proposing, how it will work, how it will lead to a resolution of the problem, or how he sees this happy world will turn out, nor do I agree with his premises about the causes of the conflict. Maybe the real source of our disagreement is that he announces that he has the answer, and then serves up such a vague mish-mash that anyone can read anything into it.