If you’ve been trying to complain to UVM about their decision to bring in Ben Stein as a commencement speaker, some of your arguments may have fallen on deaf ears. Richard Dawkins reports:

Someone with a real axe to grind had to have been on the committee
that picked this old fraud”. Layla Nasreddin, posting on
RichardDawkins.net, has found the probable answer to the identity of
that ‘someone’. Ben Stein is an old pal of the President of the
University of Vermont, Daniel Fogel. One is bound to wonder, therefore,
whether the letters that many of us have been writing to Fogel will cut
any ice. If you have written to Fogel, therefore, it would be a good
idea to Forward your letter now to the entire Board of Trustees of the
University of Vermont, and the two administrators in charge of the
Trustees. Here’s a handy list of three addresses:

trustees@uvm.edu, Corinne.Thompson@uvm.edu, estjohn@uvm.edu

I think it is highly unlikely that you’ll get UVM to rescind an invitation, but you can make them squirm a little bit so that they’ll think twice before inviting old cronies who happen to be ignorant jerks to this kind of thing.

Guess who UVM is bringing in to deliver their commencement address?

Ben Stein.

I am very sorry, seniors at that otherwise fine university. You’re going to have a hack wingnut with a history of incompetence at economics, politics, and science standing up and giving you advice. I don’t know what the administrators at your school were thinking; this is a man with no qualifications other than a droning monotone and a stint on a game show. It’s an expression of profound disrespect to the students.

And I’m really sorry for the biology department at UVM — it’s a real slap in the face for the university to drag in this disgrace who has been a figurehead for a movement that is trying to replace science with superstition; a demagogue who accuses modern biology of being a destructive force responsible for the Holocaust.

I am really baffled by this decision. It’s not just that they must have been desperate for a speaker, but that someone with a real axe to grind had to have been on the committee that picked this old fraud.

The Humanist Community of Central Ohio sent out a suggestion to various towns to declare 12 February Darwin Day, in honor of the man and his science. Nice gesture, I think; it’s a small token of appreciation that doesn’t cost anyone anything. The city of Whitehall went for it, but then something odd happened — people complained.

So they watered it down to declaring February a month of science, and added Galileo’s name to the list of honorees. OK, that’s a bit craven, and their intent is transparent, but it’s a reasonable compromise. Go for it!

Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for the creationists. Now they want to remove Darwin’s name! What a silly thing to do.

And now “expert” opinion has weighed in: Ray Comfort, professional dipsydoodling dingleberry.

“They’re trying to deitize Darwin,” he said. “This is the atheist Christmas.

“It’s a God-given right to be an atheist, but they need to lighten up and let us talk about creationism, too.”

Ray must have a one talent, the ability to open his mouth and say things so stupid that one can scarcely believe he said them.

Why would atheists want to ‘deitize’ anyone? It’s just not something atheists think about.

This is to be a celebration of an important individual in science: I know Ray believes science to be unchristian, though.

Atheism is a god-given talent? Now my head is spinning.

I have not noticed any impairment of the creationists’ ability to talk, and honoring Charles Darwin’s birthday does not somehow silence them. They have complete liberty to preach their nonsense even on secular holidays. Now, will they lighten up and allow us to talk about science in their churches? I don’t think so.

Pity Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, which published an issue in which the cover was the large, bold declaration that “DARWIN WAS WRONG“. He has been target by a number of big name scientists who have been hammering him in a small typhoon of outraged private correspondence (I’ve been part of it) that his cover was a misdirected and entirely inappropriate piece of sensationalism. We’re already seeing that cover abused by creationists who see it as a tool — a reputable popular science journal has declared Darwin to be wrong, therefore, once again, science must be in retreat! — and I expect we’re going to have to face the headache of many school board meetings where that cover is flaunted as evidence that students ought to be taught about how weak Darwinism is.

I think it was a mistake on New Scientist‘s part. They could have published a cover that announced “DARWIN IS DEAD!”, which would be just as true and just as misleading, and would also bring nothing but joy to the ignorant. I don’t think it would really help sell magazines, even; I suspect that most creationists are going to only use that cover to flog their cause, and never read any deeper than the widely available cover image.

And you should read the inside. It sends a different message. Roger Highfield encouraged me to distribute the editorial that accompanied the article.

“THERE is nothing new to be discovered in physics.” So said Lord Kelvin in 1900, shortly before the intellectual firestorm ignited by relativity and quantum mechanics proved him comprehensively wrong.

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job. We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.

A particularly pertinent example is provided in this week’s cover story – the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since (see “Axing Darwin’s tree”). Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature – it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable. Other important bits of biology – notably development, ageing and sex – are similarly turning out to be much more involved than we ever imagined. As evolutionary biologist Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, told us: “The complexity of biology is comparable to quantum mechanics.”

Biology has been here before. Although Darwin himself, with the help of Alfred Russel Wallace, triggered a revolution in the mid-1800s, there was a second revolution in the 1930s and 1940s when Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright and others incorporated Mendelian genetics and placed evolution on a firm mathematical foundation.

As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that “New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong”. Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not.

Nor will the new work do anything to diminish the standing of Darwin himself. When it came to gravitation and the laws of motion, Isaac Newton didn’t see the whole picture either, but he remains one of science’s giants. In the same way, Darwin’s ideas will prove influential for decades to come.

So here’s to the impending revolution in biology. Come Darwin’s 300th anniversary there will be even more to celebrate.

The cover is going to cause us some headaches, but just be prepared with that bit of text — I think even just the paragraph I’ve highlighted will be sufficient — and when a creationists sticks those 3 words in your face, just ask them to stretch their reading abilities a little bit further and read those 72 words.

It’s going to be hard, though. Most creationists can’t read that many big words strung together all at once without twisting them, either.

If you’ve been following the creationist strategy lately, you know that one of their efforts is to push a new and awful textbook, Explore Evolution, in conjunction with the various political bills to endorse a “strengths & weaknesses” theme in the public school science curriculum. Explore Evolution is the type specimen for that teaching technique; it contains nothing but imaginary problems in biology presented in a dueling opinions format, with creationists writing sloppy distortions of biological ideas coupled with creationists writing laudatory explanations based on Intelligent Design creationism. The book has been reviewed (that is, panned) before, but now we have another review published in Evolution & Development. The reviewer is not impressed.

Even as the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer was trying to convince the Texas state board of education of his scientific bona fides, the antievolution textbook he coauthored was receiving a scathing review in a top scientific journal. Reviewing Explore Evolution for Evolution & Development (2009; 11 [1]: 124-125), Brian D. Metscher of the University of Vienna described it as “159 glossy pages of color-illustrated creationist nostalgia,” adding, “All the old favorites are here — fossils saying no, all the Icons, flightless Ubx flies, irreducible flagella, even that irritating homology-is-circular thing. There are no new arguments, no improved understanding of evolution, just a remastered scrapbook of the old ideas patched together in a high-gloss package pre-adapted to survive the post-Dover legal environment. The whole effort would be merely pathetic if it did not actually represent a serious and insidious threat to education.”

Of course, most schoolboards will completely disregard the informed assessment of experts in the field to rely instead on the petrified dogma of their local preacher.

We have another M.D. spouting off against evolution using bogus creationist arguments. Jeffrey Dach may also be embarrassing lefty-liberal types, since his page is hosted on Salon. It’s very confused and poorly argued.

He first says that he believes in evolution, but that Darwin’s ideas are outdated, and the new evidence suggests new theories of evolution, because Darwin’s theory can’t answer some big questions. OK, I thought, there are many unanswered questions…but then I read his four questions and realized he didn’t have a clue about the subject.

1) How does random change (mutation) in the genome add information to a genome to create progressively more complicated organisms? It Doesn’t.

It Does. Errors in DNA replication and recombination can produce DNA strands that are longer and contain more information than the parent strand. This is trivial.

2) How is evolution able to bring about drastic changes so quickly? An example is the Cambrian Explosion. It Can’t.

His example of “quickly” is a span of about 15 million years. This may be news to some creationists, but that is a long, long time. If you’re a young earth creationist, it’s a period of time approximately 2,000 times longer than you believe the whole earth existed.

Dr Dach needs to review some population genetics. We have nice algorithms that can be used to estimate how long it takes genetic changes to sweep through populations.

3) How could the first living cell arise spontaneously to get evolution started? It couldn’t.

It didn’t. The first living cell would have been the product of millions (quick!) of years of chemical evolution. It did not arise spontaneously.

4) The Human Genome Project showed that only 1-2% of Human DNA codes for proteins, or about 25,000 genes. These are not enough to account for the complexity of the organism. What is the other 98% of the genome’s function? We don’t know.

This is fast becoming one of the most popular assertions by creationists. Exactly how many genes would be sufficient to account for the complexity of a human being? Show your work. How many genes do we need to have to make you happy, and why should your sense of self-worth be a reason for us to have more?

Less than 25,000 genes is simply the number. It’s what has been counted in analyzing the genome. I don’t quite get the point of complaining that it’s not enough, becaust obviously, it is enough, or we wouldn’t be here.

They always seem so dismayed that humans have that number — it’s never shock that mice or birds have that many, or that flies have about half as many. It’s apparently a very personal issue to them, sort of like how many millimeters long their penis is. Come on, creationists! Be proud of your 25,000 micrometers!

They also seem to take it as a personal insult that so much of their genome is junk. We do know what a lot of the non-coding DNA does: a small percentage of it is regulatory, and most of it does nothing at all. It really doesn’t detract from the importance of the tens of thousands of genes to see that there’s also a lot of filler surrounding them. Perhaps they think there is a secret stash of super-special hidden genes to fluff up the mere 25,000 they find so inadequate?

He throws in another problem for evolution: the lack of transitional fossils. You know you’re dealing with a rube when they make a paleontological argument against evolution and simultaneously reveal that they’ve never looked at the paleontological data.

All right, so what are his “new theories of evolution”? Now it’s my turn to embarrassed: tossed into his superficial list of alternatives is evo-devo. No. Evo-devo is cool, but it isn’t driven by any of his unanswered questions. We don’t have any argument with the idea that mutations can add information, or that they can spread through populations “quickly”, we don’t dabble much in the issues of abiogenesis, and no, evo-devo does not create new jobs for long stretches of junk DNA, nor does it postulate any additional secret genes.

But then, all he is really doing is tossing about a few ideas he’s heard about, but knows nothing about, simply to give the impression that he’s fairly assessing the possibilities. We can all guess where he is really going with all of this:

This brings us to the “Intelligent Design” argument and the question of “is there a creator of the universe?” This is an obvious question raised from biology, which reveals DNA, the genetic code, and complex life forms in the world. All life forms share the same underlying genetic code which translates base pairs into proteins. The existance of a code, or “alphabet” is a language which implies an underlying intelligence for its creation. Coded messages do not happen by random happening. This DNA code was either designed by an intelligence, or not. I will leave it up to you to decide for yourself.

My Own Opinion

My own opinion is that Life did not happen by itself. It is self evident that everything in the Universe is the product of an intelligence, which can be considered as “the creator”. This may not be self evident to everyone, however.

Ho hum. The genetic code is not simply the product of ‘random happening’, nor do we need to invoke a designer to create it. It certainly is not self-evident that the universe is the product of intelligence — that is a conclusion derived from the abundant ignorance Jeffrey Dach demonstrates in his argument.

David Attenborough and I have something in common: he gets hate mail from creationists, too!

Kirk Durston is a cunning wretch. How did he open his part in the debate here in Edmonton? By claiming that atheism was an amoral philosophy that led to the corruption of society, and to prove it, he cited a political scientist named Rummel, who he claimed, had shown that cultures built around a core of atheism had killed the most people in all of history.

If you actually go to Rummel’s site, Freedom, Democide, War, you’ll discover that he said no such thing. His thesis is that democracy is the critical factor in reducing war and the slaughter of civilians. This, of course, I could not do during the debate.

You will quickly discover that Rummel does not talk about this strange “atheist core” to murderous societies like Stalinist Russia or the Pol Pot regime. It’s nonsense; atheism is not the core of Marxism, for instance, and these were autocratic societies with a tyrannical cult of personality. It requires a distortion of history to make this argument, and imposing a personal bias on the data to make up this correlation. Pol Pot was a monster who killed millions, including religious people, in a reign of terror; Mao exterminated any institution, including the religious, to secure a monopoly on power; when I pointed out that Hitler was Catholic and Germans were Catholic and Lutheran, Durston replied that he might have been formerly a Lutheran (?), but he was an atheist. Why? Because anyone who was not doing as Jesus taught was not a true Christian. It’s an interesting piece of circular reasoning. It’s also an interpretation of his own.

He just ignored the fact that the only time in history when you could even describe any society as atheist was in the 20th century, coinciding with the emergence of industrialized tools of mass destruction. There are smart takedowns of the amoral atheist claim, but I was not prepared at all to deal with Durston’s simultaneous poisoning of the well and argument from consequences.

Durston is not stupid. He studiously avoided discussing any biology in his major points. Most of his argument for a personal god consisted of 1) atheists are bad people, 2) cosmology requires a beginning, and that beginning had to have been a god, and 3) the truth of the biblical accounts of Jesus. Would you believe he actually claimed the Flavian testimony of Josephus was valid historical evidence for the divinity of Jesus?

He’s a good debater, because he relies on a powerful tactic: he’ll willingly make stuff up and mangle his sources to make his arguments. I’m at a disadvantage because I won’t do that.

The lesson for me is to pin these guys down much more tightly on the precise subject of the debate. This one was all over the place, especially since Durston consciously avoided any topic on which I might have some expertise.

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There is some confusion about what my argument in the debate was. Here’s my first slide, which outlines the two points I tried to make in 20 minutes.

Do gods exist?

• There is no evidence of intervention by any supernatural force in the history of life on earth, and god-based explanations are inconsistent and incoherent.

• Every biological phenomenon that we have examined in sufficient detail has been found to be explainable by purely natural causes.

Therefore, probably not.

I picked this approach because it does address the question in the debate (about the existence of an interventionist god), it was actually relevant to the major arguments for intelligent design creationism that Durston has a reputation for making, and I thought it would be a way to introduce some real evolutionary biology into the discussion. Contrary to the assertions of others, I did not open with any insults to Durston at all — it was to be a discussion with some actual evidence.

It was Durston’s first words that were insulting and illogical — a shot at calling atheists evil. I suppose if I’d opened by announcing that Christians were all stupid, we would have had equivalency…but I did not.

And yes, we talked past each other the whole time. The debate topic was far too broad, I thought we were going to argue about the evidence for design, but Durston wiggled away and talked about anything but.

As I was told last night, it’s one of the rare times “reason” got some representation in that section. You can read it here — I’ve been on Calgary radio and newspapers this week, so I’m hoping it will draw out some opposition to my talk this afternoon — it would be great to get some argument going in the Q&A.