Desperate space filler, Oscars edition

No, my work is not yet done, and my deadlines haven’t yet been met, but I’m confident that I’ll reach my goals by this afternoon. Bear with me with patience, please. Until this afternoon, when I slap these puppies and ship them off to their destinations, I’ll leave you with something to discuss among yourselves: the movies!

Last night was Oscar night, and I had the awards yammering in the background while I was pounding the keys. I have to get out more; I’ve seen virtually none of the nominated movies this year. There’s something called “Slumdog Millionaire” that’s getting a lot of buzz? Shows what I know. I hadn’t even heard of it until last night. My pop culture cred just took a nosedive.

As for the awards show, Hugh Jackman was pretty and congenial, which I guess is the role of the emcee. The format was grating: at each award, they’d have five past winners come out on the stage and slather flattery on each nominee, while the camera locked onto each one, simpering and squirming under the barrage of praise. This was not good; Hollywood already has a reputation of being the domain of the vain, and amplifying the effect with a prolonged demonstration of how happy these people are to be fawningly serviced in public had me cringing.

The high point, I thought, was Sean Penn’s acceptance speech for best actor in which he shamed the people who don’t want to see equal rights for everyone, gay or straight.

On a related note, Bill Maher was one of the presenters for best documentary, and what did he do? Plugged his movie, Religulous, while moaning over the fact that it was not nominated. Bad form, Bill, very bad form. Maybe it just wasn’t good enough.

I did finally see Religulous a few days ago, and I confess to being a bit disappointed. It consisted of a series of short interviews with, for instance, truckers at a truck stop chapel, Catholic priests, an “ex-gay” minister, a Muslim rapper, etc., and it was all capped with excellent and scathing monologue that strongly criticized religion. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, and there were some funny bits, but something nagged at me throughout, and only when I saw the conclusion did I realize what it was.

Maher cheated. He had a clear idea of what his opinion was, but he wasn’t sharing it with the people he was interviewing. They were left to flounder and make poor arguments in part because there are no good arguments for religion, but also because they were left in the dark about what they were arguing against. It may be funny, but it’s no fair; contrast that with the Dawkins’ documentaries on religion, which are less funny, but more honest, because the people on camera know (or should know) exactly what they are wrestling with.

A better Religulous would have recorded the closing monolog first, and sent that to each of the potential interviewees with a note saying, “Here’s my position. Are you willing to argue against it on camera?” That would have made for a much more interesting movie, and Maher would have had to break a sweat to address criticisms…and it would probably be less funny. There’s a reason Maher wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, and I think it’s because his documentary took no risks, and didn’t probe very deeply.

Don’t vote on this poll

Just go and gape in awe at the obliviousness of our national media. This is a poll on US News & World Report, and it asks, “If you had a choice of four daycare centers run separately by Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, which would you choose for your kids?” Incredible.

I believe that next week they’ll have a question about Barack Obama’s, Colin Powell’s, Al Sharpton’s, and Jesse Jackson’s hypothetical fried chicken stands.

Spanking New Scientist

If you open your latest issue of New Scientist (unless, of course, you threw away your subscription), you’ll find a nice little letter from three luminaries — Dennett, Coyne, and Dawkins — and one other guy explaining that Darwin was actually mostly right, contrary to a certain recent cover. Here’s a taste:

What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that “Darwin was wrong” (24 January)?

First, it’s false, and second, it’s inflammatory. And, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure, but about evolution.

Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from “a few forms or… one”, as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.

The flagellation continues.

I wish I were a Republican, so I could just make stuff up

Carl Zimmer is a little bit peeved at the ever flexible standards of the media. If you’re a science writer like he is, your articles get fact-checked until they bleed. If you’re George Will, conservative pedant and pundit, not so much. The Washington Post seems to basically accept whatever he says as gospel truth, even when he gets the scientific facts completely wrong.

Oh, for the day when our media wake up to the fact that they are supposed to be reality-based, not faith-based.

Oh, crap.

You may have heard that there is a new movie about Darwin in the works, Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. We have a synopsis now, and it isn’t good news.

The Darwin we meet in CREATION is a young, vibrant father, husband and friend whose mental and physical health gradually buckles under the weight of guilt and grief for a lost child. Ultimately it is the ghost of Annie, his adored 10 year-old daughter who leads him out of darkness and helps him reconnect with his wife and family. Only then is he able to create the book that changed the world.

They’ve got to be kidding. I’m assuming it is only a metaphorical ghost, not a real one, but given the dreadful melodramatic botch of a story there, I can’t even be sure of that.

Forbes gets slapped around some

I was more than a little disappointed when Forbes magazine published the screeds of those ignorant doofii, Ham, Wells, Flannery, West, and Egnor. Now, though, they’ve also published a broadside from Jerry Coyne that demolishes the five creationists. His primary focus is on Egnor (but just as much could be said against any of them), and he doesn’t hold back.

Why does he so readily dismiss a theory that has been universally accepted by scientists for over a century?

Apparently because a rather old book, Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, first published in 1985, convinced him that evolutionary theory was underlain by very weak evidence. If Egnor had bothered to look just a little into Denton’s book and its current standing, he would have learned that the arguments in it have long since been firmly refuted by scientists. Indeed, they were recanted by Denton himself in a later book more than 10 years ago.

Since Egnor is decades out of date and shows no sign of knowing anything at all about evolutionary biology in the 21st century, one wonders what could have inspired his declaration at this time.

There’s more, much more. Read it all if you enjoy watching an intellectual mauling.

Also, Coyne did not hold back in criticizing the magazine, either — and Forbes published it all without edits. That’s to their credit, but I can’t help but feel that there’s a callous calculation here, that even arguments against the quality of their publication are seen as a way to boost circulation.

The only “controversy” is social and political: Will Americans, in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution, be allowed to impose a false, religiously based view of biology in the public schools? This “teach the controversy” approach, so popular among fundamentalists, ill suits a publication with the gravitas of Forbes.

Can we expect that it will balance stories on medicine with the competing views of shamans, Christian Scientists and spiritual healers? Will articles on the Holocaust be rebutted by the many Holocaust deniers? When the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing rolls around this July, will Forbes give a say to paranoids who think the landing was a fraud, staged on a movie lot?

This, in effect, is what Forbes has done by giving equal time to evolution-deniers. Journalists have an obligation to be fair, but this doesn’t mean that they must give charlatans a prestigious platform from which to broadcast their lies. By doing so, Forbes has debased both journalism and science.

Exactly. Why would anyone go to that gang of charlatans at the Discovery Institute for articles on evolution? Because idiocy sells?

The other side of the coin

The other problem with media coverage is that certifiable idiots get to open their mouths and their noise goes unquestioned in print. Here’s a regrettable example of an ignorant opinion piece, one so egregiously stupid that even Ian Musgrave is reduced to indignant spluttering.

The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won’t take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them.

You would think that, since Darwin himself did not consider any of those actions to be either commendable or a consequence of his theory, maybe someone would realize that perhaps those aren’t logical conclusions of “Darwinism”. You would think that somebody would consider that, while Newton described the acceleration of falling bodies accurately, it does not imply in any way that he he advocated pushing people off of tall buildings. Rational people might be able to see that.

The author of the piece is a professor of theology, though, so we ought to have lower expectations. I’m pretty sure he is probably capable of eating with a fork without putting his eye out.

If only more journalists had this attitude…

I must recommend an excellent editorial in the Guardian. Somebody there gets it; all the “he said she said” journalism that we get is a failure of the media to get to the basic truth of a story.

There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin’s theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other’s beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin’s reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin’s contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.

That’s the lesson to be taught in this week, at the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. There is a hard core of fact to science, and all the waffling about to negate the ideas of common descent and natural selection is driven by ideology, not evidence.

Alert Edward Tufte!

How strange: The Economist is running this graph, of people’s acceptance of evolutionary theory by country.

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Look familiar? It should. It seems to be some of the same data used in this well known figure (not from New Scientist, by the way, but Science):

Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.

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So, The Economist has taken a chart, stripped out half the data, put it into new colors that make my eyes hurt, and put it on a background with chimpanzees having a snack — said chimpanzees occupying almost half the space allotted.

Shock horror! I am offended! The monkey is unhappy! My sensibilities, in particular, recoil. Someone send the illustrators at The Economist some copies of Tufte’s books. I think I’ll stick with Miller et al.’s version.