Now they’re taking advantage of YouTube’s easy censorship to shut down a critique of Casey Luskin.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Now they’re taking advantage of YouTube’s easy censorship to shut down a critique of Casey Luskin.
Over the last few days, I’ve been reading the articles in the latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. This is a fairly new journal with the mission stated in the title, and I have to say that it is very, very good — the articles are almost always easily readable, and they address significant issues in the public understanding of evolution. This particular issue focuses on transitions, and not just on transitional fossils, but all kinds of evidence for change over evolutionary time. It’s been commented on by Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, and they’re entirely right that these are extremely useful articles, not just in providing helpful data when addressing arguments about evolution, but they’re also loaded with figures that I’ll be stealing using for my own lectures.
I have to say something a little peculiar, though. It’s not really a criticism, because I’m not going to argue against these articles at all—I repeat, they are informative and useful and great to read! However, I am concerned that they address one audience, but it’s not the audience we have to really worry about. The kinds of people who will read and enjoy those articles are scientists who appreciate a good overview of a field, the kinds of informed citizens who would, for instance, read a science blog, and educators in general who want more substance about evolution to include in their classes. Creationists are not the journal’s clientele. That means that sometimes the articles miss the mark on who we need to persuade.
For example, T. Ryan Gregory’s overview of the principles of natural selection, Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions, makes an important point: selection is surprisingly difficult for many people to grasp. This is entirely true, but we sometimes mislead ourselves because once you get those few basic principles, and I mean really understand them, suddenly selection seems simple and even intuitive…and most of us doing the teaching and public outreach are solidly in that blissful state of easy comprehension.
And this isn’t at all unusual. Gregory provides a taxonomy of common conceptual errors, and points out that many of these errors, such as the idea of inheritance of acquired characters, have been held by some of the greatest minds of Western civilization, from Aristotle to Darwin.
Here’s the catch: we can see how to explain selection to Aristotle and Darwin now, but unfortunately, creationists are not a collection of Aristotles and Darwins. I wouldn’t go far the other way and say they’re all stupid, but they do have lots of ideas that are so egregiously wrong that they don’t fit into Gregory’s schemata.
For instance, here’s a nice diagram of correct and incorrect views of how selection works.
This is very nice. I can see using this in my freshman biology class right away — it’s very handy to be able to contrast correct and incorrect views, and it would provoke some thinking and discussion, since I know many of my students think just like the right panel illustrates (at least, before I’m done with them they do). Of course, my students tend to be motivated to understand, with some background in biology already, or they wouldn’t be biology majors.
Unfortunately, whenever I sit down and talk with full-blooded creationists, their views aren’t even incorrect. They’re so wrong, they’re completely off of Gregory’s charts.
For a public example of this phenomenon, look at Ray Comfort’s ideas about the evolution of sex. He seriously believes that every kind of animal had to independently evolve all of its primary properties in one sudden sweep. When elephants evolved, they had to simultaneously evolve female elephants; the idea that some traits do not have to evolve anew because they are shared with the parent population is incomprehensible to him.
Another fellow with a similar misconception is Jim Pinkoski, who states this idea rather baldly.
If “evolution” is true, then each major life form would have to evolve it’s own eyes (as well as every other major organ of its body)!
He illustrates this with a picture of a T. rex that has evolved a single eye, and then “wants” to evolve another eye. This is a really common belief, that new features arise as a consequence of desire by individuals.
These are the beliefs of the people doing public outreach on behalf of creationism, and the ordinary guy who passively accepts this stuff is even weirder. Every time I’ve had a one-on-one conversation with a casual creationist, there is always a moment when I am weirded out to the max by some genuinely twisted irrationality they trot out in their defense. We make a mistake when we look to the intellectual history of an idea to figure out how they rationalize creationism, because there is virtually no intellectual history there. They are not building on a foundation of ideas at all — they have a religious preconception of how species arise, and their vision of evolution is a hodge-podge of ad hoc contrivances chosen specifically to be absurd and unbelievable. They are not trying to explain, as Aristotle and Darwin were; they are trying to invent reasons to reject.
Like I said, this is not a criticism of Gregory’s paper, which does an excellent job at its purpose of making reasonably knowledgeable people even better informed. I think, though, that there’s a missing piece in the story: how do we turn grossly ignorant people into reasonably knowledgeable people? That’s a really difficult problem.
This is an even bigger problem in the other articles in the issue. For instance, probably my favorite article in the whole issue was Edgecombe’s Palaeontological and Molecular Evidence Linking Arthropods, Onychophorans, and other Ecdysozoa, which weighs the evidence in the great dispute between the cladists who favor a grouping of invertebrates into an Articulata clade, vs. an Ecdysozoan clade. It’s grand, big-picture macroevolution, discussing the relationships of whole phyla in deep time, and it also promotes the importance of multi-disciplinary thinking, basing conclusions on molecules, morphology, and fossils. It isn’t shy at all about bringing up the problematic taxa (where the heck do tardigrades belong, anyway?) either. It’s a wonderfully chewy article that helped clarify my perspectives on the discussion.
Again, not a complaint — this article is going straight into my file of very helpful reviews. But now imagine sitting down over coffee with an enthusiastic Hovind supporter right after church; this article is going to lose him right at the title. He doesn’t know what you mean by arthropod, let alone onychophoran. Throw articulata, cycloneuralia, and ecdysozoa at him from the abstract, and he’s going to tell you how much smarter the Hovinds are than you, because at least what they say is in English and makes sense to him.
This is tough stuff. How I would explain this paper to you, the readers of a blog like Pharyngula, would be close to what Edgecombe wrote, but how I would explain it to a run-of-the-mill church-going creationist would have to be very different. I think the way I would try it would be to start with figure 1 from the paper, which shows diverse representatives of the Ecdysozoa:
Then I would explain that the paper describes the multiple lines of evidence that support macroevolutionary explanations for how all these extremely different kinds of invertebrates had a common ancestor, and then let him raise any questions about how it was done. And I would brace myself for some radically weird questions that I would never have imagined ahead of time. This is a business where flexibility is a requirement.
I am not saying that my hypothetical creationist conversationalist is stupid at all — but that he is grossly uninformed and misinformed, and comes from a background that did not provide him with the rational history of the ideas that would give him any reasonable context with which to even consider the paper. It’s a missing piece of the mission for evolutionary outreach: how do we wake those people up?
Don’t let that dissuade you from reading the journal, though. I think that where it helps most is that it will give non-experts with a reasonable grounding in science more information that they can use in arguments with creationists. When it comes to communicating the information to others though, you’re on your own…and in a lot of ways, that part, getting complex ideas across to people who are actively denying the evidence, is the hardest part of the story.
I don’t drink caffeinated beverages anymore (I gave them up when I converted to Mormonism1) so it’s easy for me to refuse to give Coca Cola any more of my business, but this news may cause more distress to others: Coca Cola is a corporate partner with the Creation “Museum”. Ken Ham can brag about this meaningless exploitation of his suckers “museum” attendees for profit, but I doubt that Coke wants to trumpet this news — it looks like they’re sponsoring stupidity.
I don’t know that there is much point to protesting the association anyway. If Coke pulled out, you know the local Pepsi distributors would jump in to offer a contract, and then Ken Ham would proudly point to their deal as somehow vindicating their existence.
At least now we self-sacrificing, noble, healthier deniers of sugary caffeinated toxins can add a new level of sanctimony to our denunciations of Coca Cola’s consumers by pointing out that they are stooges of creationism, as well.2
(via Bing McGhandi)
1Psych.
2It’s our only pleasure left. When my wife fixes her cup of coffee in the morning, the smell wafts my way and I just want to leap over and swallow her cup, hand, and forearm in one big gulp.
Want to complain to Coca Cola? Go here.
This is an entirely fictional manifesto, but it could be the game plan for a lot of rather devious pro-religion people right now — I could almost imagine it as the mission statement for the Templeton Foundation, for instance.
It is the objective of we, the New Creationists, to undermine not simply evolutionary theory, but science as a whole. It is this form of inquiry which has caused the greatest damage to our version of events. It must be destroyed at all costs.
The primary method for attaining our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground. This means that we are to seek, purely in the eye of the layman public, a position which appears on the surface to be a reasonable compromise. To be sure, we want to tell the world we embrace evolution. We also want to tell the world we embrace a Creator.
We want to hide Our Creator in the nearly impossible to understand gaps of reality. Quantum mechanics will often be our realm, but much more can work. As stated, our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground with the layman public. We need not answer to scientists. Indeed, they are the enemy. What we are to do is wrench the very fruits of these enemies from their empirical hands. We are to show gaps in the understanding of the cell. We are to discuss unknowns in the molecular biology. We are to contort the flaws of physics, cosmology, and astronomy to assist our goals. It is in these places that Our Creator resides. If it’s science, it is imperfect. We shall exploit, even invent, imperfections. All is justified in our goal. Science deserves nothing but lip service; It is the enemy.
Our first step is to put forth an army of Christian scientists. They will not be the supporters of fringe creationism. They shall not espouse views which deny any modern science. However, they shall pure atop all modern science a sense of confusion and remote possibility. That remote possibility shall be where Our Creator resides.
Our goals at this point will rely upon American idiosyncrasies. Tired of divisive politics, Americans seek a Middle Ground. They crave a sense of wishy-washy – it sounds fair. We shall marginalize the New Atheists with paint brushes of extremism. While they full embrace science and all its evils, we shall embrace it only superficially – we shall not fall into the evil of the enemy. We shall appeal to the American sense of fair play. We are the New Creationists.
However, it does have one big problem, and it gets one important issue wrong. These people would never say they hate science or that science is the enemy: rather, they love the idea of science, they just want to redefine it so that their version of science includes Jesus doing miracles.
You’ve probably noticed that as a soap bubble thins, it acquires a rainbow of iridescent colors across its surface. Or perhaps you’ve noticed that a film of oil on a mud puddle shows beautiful colors. These are common physical properties of thin film interference.
The way it works is that light entering a material with a higher refractive index is both reflected and transmitted. Some of the light bounces back with a partial phase shift, and some of it passes through. In a thin film, it passes through but doesn’t travel far before it hits another boundary, for instance between the film and the water underneath it, and again, some of it is reflected and some transmitted. This second reflected beam of light, though, is out of phase with the first, by an amount that depends on the thickness of the film. What that means is that certain wavelengths will be shifted in such a way as to reinforce the first reflected beam, generating constructive interference that will make that wavelength brighter. Other wavelengths will be shifted the same amount, but they will be out of phase with light in the first reflected beam — there will be destructive interference, and that wavelength will be damped out.
The net result: the light reflecting off the film will be colored, and the color will depend on the thickness of the film. It’s a simple physical process. Cephalopods use it to generate their colors — just by shifting thin reflecting membranes by a tiny distance of a fraction of a wavelength of light, they shift which wavelengths constructively and destructively interfere with each other, and thus change their color. Now engineers are exploiting the same principle to build television screens: they use a thin film that can be expanded by fractions of a wavelength of light by applying a voltage to build reflective color screens. This will be very cool. If you’ve got a Kindle or one of the other e-book readers, you know they use a reflective screen with no backlight that depends on ambient lighting to be visible…and that right now you only get shades of gray. With this technology, we’ll be able to have color electronic paper. I’ll be looking forward to it.
Unfortunately, we’ll also enable incomprehending gomers. Case in point: Casey Luskin thinks that thin-film interference patterns implies design. Well, actually, it’s stupider than that — he actually thinks that because TVs are being designed to use thin-film interference, and because cephalopod skin uses thin-film interference to generate color, that implies that cephalopod skin is also designed. I kid you not.
So we may soon have affordable, energy-efficient, cuttlefish inspired flat screen TVs and computer monitors everywhere. But of course, there’s no design overtones to see here folks. None whatsoever.
Right. And because trebuchets were designed to use gravity to generate force, and because rocks on mountains will tumble down due to gravity, avalanches are therefore designed. We make fire by design to produce the release of energy by rapid oxidation of carbon compounds; cells also oxidize carbon-containing compounds to produce energy; therefore, cells must have been set on fire on purpose. This is what the IDiots are reduced to: if something designed and something evolved make use of the same properties of our common physical universe, that means the evolved object must be designed, too. It’s ridiculous, but it’s all they’ve got.
I know, they’re getting a little old. It’s just that we have this glaringly obvious monument to ignorance in our midst, one that is hard to just ignore, so everyone has to take a crack at it. This one does make a few interesting points, at least. For instance…
Of course, the Bible in no place says that it is to be interpreted literally. What is the “literalism” manifesto, then, if not interpretive? Here’s an example of how the literalism plays out, from the Museum literature. Ham’s children’s book, Dinosaurs of Eden, raises the specter of the “day-age theory”–the theory that each biblical “day” in Genesis actually represents an “age.” The advantage of this view for some believers is that it might fit rather well with evolutionary theory–better, at least, than the seven-day alternative. This is not the Museum’s view, although it has a long history within U.S. Christian fundamentalism (including a defense by fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan at the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial). Here’s what Ham’s book says about the theory: “God worked for six days and then rested for one. This is where our seven-day week comes from! If God created everything in six long periods (or millions of years), our week would be millions of years long! That wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever.”
“That wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever.” Isn’t that just the perfect phrase for most of Ken Ham’s turns of twisted logic?
Unfortunately, the article also ends with a tiresome cliche, considering how much like religion science is. At least the author says he thinks science is more than just another faith, but he still waffles over the idea of science as a kind of authoritarian tradition. Sorry, guy…if you don’t see science as a process that empowers questioning and change, you aren’t doing it right.
The Intelligent Design creationists have done it again: thrown together another piece of sloppy scholarship to defend themselves from a non-argument. John Lynch is lazing in the balmy Mediterranean, and casually demolishes them in an afternoon in a Cretan cafe. It sounds like hard work, philosophizing.
Anyway, the gist of the Discovery Institute claim is, oh, no, we didn’t invent intelligent design creationism in response to recent American court cases — it’s an old argument with roots in antiquity. Which, of course, is something no one has ever argued against. We know the argument from design is ancient. We’ve said it repeatedly: a 20th century right wing think tank in Seattle had merely plucked an old rationale that Paley had made in the early years of the 19th century and recycled it, ignoring the logical refutations of design made even earlier by Hume and the empirical argument against it deployed by Darwin. I can’t imagine anyone familiar with the DI ever suggesting that they might have been original or creative.
Lynch goes into considerable more detail on the philosophical foundations of the idea, but again the lesson is the same: the DI is pretty much incompetent at everything they do.
Texans have been doing a lot of things right lately. The newest happy result: bills in the Texas legislature to prop up the Institute for Creation Research and to add creationist language to their science standards failed.
So there’s a bit more hope for Texas: Don McLeroy is out as Chairman of the State Board of Education, the creationist “strengths and weaknesses” language is not in the standards, and the ICR is still not certified to award phony graduate degrees in science education.
I never thought I’d say this, but WND has a reasonable article on Kent Hovind’s legal troubles. It just recites the facts of the case, although I suspect they somehow expect their readership to view it through their Jesus glasses and see it as an indictment of the government. Still, the illogic of the Hovind position shines through.
Hovind’s son, Eric, asserts his parents and the ministry he now heads are not scofflaws.
“My father says very clearly, if you owe a tax, by law, you should pay it,” he told WND. “We are not tax protesters.”
…
In 1996, Kent Hovind tried to file for bankruptcy to avoid paying federal income taxes. He told a judge at a hearing he did not believe the United States, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Attorney’s Office “have jurisdiction in this matter.”
“I sincerely believe that I am not a person required to file a Federal Income Tax Return,” he said. “This belief is a result of extensive research that I have done.”
I see. He thinks people should pay taxes if they owe them. He just thinks he has a special exemption and doesn’t owe them. Right.
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t address the most important question burning in everyone’s minds: will PZ Myers win that iPod Touch?
I know it’s a teaching cliche that there is no such thing as a stupid question…but it’s not true. There really are stupid questions.
So moms are everywhere in nature. Females often go to great lengths to feed, save, and protect their young. Many construct homes and shelters…(all without knowing/understanding she’s even pregnant) and do so with great care and attention to detail.
So I’ve got two questions about this:
1) What is the evolutionary advantage of mothers doing everything they can to feed/protect their young? And remember, mothers often give food to their young that they might otherwise eat. And going out into the world to look for food is often dangerous — she could be killed looking for food. Wouldn’t there be an advantage to her personally just to forget about the kid and go about her own business of eating and finding a mate? Why the unnecessary risk? Why go to the trouble of building a nest to protect the young? Wouldn’t it be easier just to skip all that? I thought evolution was all about being selfish……….so why do so many animals put others’ needs before themselves? What’s the advantage to that?
2) Why wouldn’t it be an evolutionary advantage for mothers to eat their young? I know it sometimes happens in nature…..but not as a general rule. As a general rule, mothers and fathers very rarely eat their young…even when they’re hungry. But wouldn’t an animal be more likely to breed if it didn’t starve? Mothers should be consuming their offspring everywhere in nature — afterall, it would advantageous getting that extra nourishment.
How do the evolutionists here get around this? Where does this “love” or devotion for child come from? Got a gene you can show me? What’s the evolutionary advantage for all this? And remember — evolution cannot plan ahead.
I showed you another eexample of a self-refuting creationist question earlier today, but this one is even better. Wouldn’t an animal be more likely to breed if it ate its own babies?
