Zzzzzzzzzz.

So Obama is running for president. I’m not a fan (too pious and too unaccomplished), but what hurt most about the article is this:

Mr. Obama, 45, was elected to the Senate two years ago. He becomes the fifth Democrat to enter the race, joining Senators Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut as well as former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina and Tom Vilsack, who stepped down this month as governor of Iowa.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is expected to join the Democratic field soon and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said he would make his decision known by the end of the month. Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts also is weighing another run.

BOOOOORRRING. The only ones with a hint of charisma are Obama (who I will not support) and Edwards; the others just put me to sleep. I guess we just wait to see which drone will receive the DNC coronation—and it won’t be the most interesting candidate, or the one who promises to shake anything up—and we pull the lever for not-Giuliani or not-McCain.

Accept the implications

Awww, poor William Dembski is puzzled by the data that shows that acceptance of evolution rises with education level. I’m sorry, guy, but that’s what the evidence shows: better educated people tend to support good science more than poorly educated people, and Intelligent Design creationism derives its popularity from ignorance. Larry Moran puts him in his place.

At the risk of boring anyone with an IQ over 80, let me make the point that Dembski is deliberately missing. In 2002, if you rejected evolution you were an idiot. That’s because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The same correlation holds today, only more so.

One other thing that that graph shows is that conservatism is associated with disbelief in evolution, and several people have complained that they dislike the way I phrased it, as “American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science”. They’ve complained that it’s only a correlation, not evidence of causation, and that it’s not about science, it’s about evolution. However, I stand by my wording.

The voice of conservatism in America is the Republican party, and the Republican party stands against evolution, against stem cell research, against reproductive rights, against education, against the environment, against alternative energy research, against pollution controls, against good science education, against universal health care, on and on and on. I appreciate that individual conservatives in good conscience may deplore the anti-science agenda and divorce themselves from rather large chunks of the Republican platform, and I understand that the party has not always been such a refuge for know-nothings and may someday reshape itself, but face it: conservatism in this country is tightly coupled to scientific ignorance. If you are a conservative, that is your problem (just as the ineffective, dithering dullards of the Democratic party are my problem, as an openly declared liberal). Buck up, accept the responsibility, and do something about it. Fight for reform of America’s conservative political party.

Or maybe you sensible people who believe in conservative values just need to found a new party and get out from the umbrella of what should be called the Insane Christianist party.

American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science

Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views.

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(click for larger image)
The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (conservative, moderate, liberal), education (high school or less, some college, graduate school), and respondent’s religious denomination (fundamentalist or not). Belief in evolution rises along with political liberalism, independently of control variables.

It looks to me like being a fundamentalist means you’re about half as likely to believe in evolution as a non-fundamentalist of the same level of education and place on the political spectrum. The majority of fundamentalists of any kind (except the liberal ones with a grad school education; I wonder how many of those there are) reject evolution. To get a majority of conservatives to accept evolution, you have to drag them through grad school and make sure they aren’t fundamentalists.

It’s not surprising that fundamentalism puts such a strong damper on evolution, but it is surprising that political conservatism would do likewise. That, I suspect, is a consequence of the strong association between the religious right and Republicans in this country, and I have to wonder whether conservatives who reject religion completely are as screwed up as this sample indicates, and if conservatives from other countries would do as poorly.

One problem I have with these data, though, is there is no indication of the sample size in each category. It’s taken from a total of 3673 respondents, but I rather suspect that the liberal-fundamentalist category was significantly smaller than the conservative-fundamentalist group in raw numbers, so that, for instance, there are actually many more fundamentalist grad students who disbelieve evolution than believe it.

The chart also shows that a college education has a negligible effect on fundamentalist’s belief in evolution, but what we don’t have here is any data on what kind of college education we’re talking about. The fundamentalists may have mostly attended a bible college that reinforces their ignorance for all we know, and they may have had a very different experience than the non-fundamentalists, who would have been more likely to attend a secular school.

The association of anti-evolutionism with conservatism is not a particularly reassuring trend to me. Despite being liberal myself, I think the acceptance of good science ought to be independent of political affiliation; the data says it isn’t. The chart is about belief in evolution, and that’s a good word for it—if you are saying you agree that humans evolved from earlier species of animals because your political views say you should, you may not be evaluating the evidence rationally…or perhaps liberals are simply more receptive to education.

Mazur A (2007) Disbelievers in evolution. Science 315(5809):187.

Uh-oh…this is going to backfire

One of the lesser diaries on Daily Kos is calling for a boycott of Scienceblogs and is asking readers to email the gang at Seedmedia and tell them to spank one of our colleagues here. All this because Dr Charles thinks John Edwards is a piss-poor presidential candidate. Now I happen to disagree on Edwards worth as a candidate, but I do agree with some of the criticisms: Edwards sure is awfully rich, and good lawyerly arguments are often very, very bad scientific arguments. But anyone who had actually read much of Charles’ site would know that he’s a liberal humanist who actually wants Barack Obama for president, a candidate I detest about as much as he does Edwards. Will I be censured by dKos for that? I guess I can kiss my chances of being invited to speak at YearlyKos ever again goodbye.

One of the paradoxes of this medium, too, is that now that dKos has linked to Dr Charles, and I and the Mungers are chiming in, he’s probably going to get a little surge of traffic today. It would be a good idea for him to open that article to commenting, because he’d probably get a lot of vociferous arguments that might win more repeat traffic. I have the impression, though, that Dr Charles really isn’t into long, loud wrangles, which is probably why he didn’t open comments on it in the first place.

By the way, pestering the nice people at Seed about us is ineffectual and counterproductive. None of us were selected for our political views, and any liberal bias here is entirely a side-effect of the representation of conservative thought in America by a rather nasty know-nothing party of anti-science ignoramuses, which does tend to alienate people who favor science. If we were a country of Rockefeller Republicans and Shirley MacLaine Democrats, we’d have more blogs railing at the Democratic party (and if in continued political evolution, the two parties transformed themselves in that direction, I’d be among those railers.)

Also, think about it: if the management were malleable by the flow of complaints from people who were offended by some of the things we bloggers write, who do you think would be #1 on the chopping block? Not Dr Charles, that’s for sure; I think it would be a blog with a name that starts with a “ph” and ends with an “ula”, and “phlyctenula” is an icky subject name, and the “phylum Sipuncula” is poorly represented here.

Anencephaly and right-wing moralizers

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i-2364146fee84e4d7056e4f49d30961ca-neurulation_diagram.gif

There’s an important phenomenon in development called neurulation. This is a process that starts with a flat sheet of ectodermal cells, folds them into a tube, and creates our dorsal nervous system. Here’s a simple cross-section of the process in a salamander, but in general outline we humans do pretty much the same thing. Cells move up and inward, and then zipper together along the length of the animal to produce a closed tube.

It’s a seemingly simple event with a great deal of underlying complexity. It requires coordinated changes in the shape of ectodermal cells to drive the changes in tissue shape, and invisible in simple diagrams to the right are all the inductive interactions going on that trigger the differentiation of the tube into a nervous system.

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Pessimism

Wilkins is wondering when the real criminals will be punished—he’s talking about the abuses of power by the current Republican administration, ranging from the evisceration of civil liberties in our own country to criminal and unjustified foreign wars, with the concomitant loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. I think I can answer that one.

Never.

Bush will leave office with the praise of his sycophants ringing in his ears, and that will include the national media. He will go off to a happy retirement, smirking all the way, and will only ever appear at voluntary events hosted by other criminals who will be anxious to continue applauding him. Personally, I think that at every public event at which he shows his face from now on, people ought to spit on him…and he and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the whole rotten gang ought to be shipped off to an international war crimes trial today. It won’t happen.

One reason is the remarkably timid complacency of the citizenry. We have a president who signs away our liberties, and the people just yawn. This is a nation of sheep, bred to follow authority, no matter how odious or insane. It’s frightening how much reverence for authority people will grant to piddling wankers like Bush, or televangelists, or media figures—these people can do anything, and the public will rush to hush anyone who criticizes.

Another reason is historical. Read this account of what the United States has done in the past—along with the sheep, we are a nation of monsters. John Milton Chivington would have been an exemplary soldier in the War on Terror. But, you see, we don’t learn from history: our kids do not learn about the Sand Creek Massacre in school, and they will not learn about Abu Ghraib and habeas corpus in the future.

Our kids don’t even learn about Nixon, except that he was a president; if they are particularly diligent, they might discover some of the press hagiography about him. That’s it.

There’s a fantasy of America the rich and wise and powerful and gracious and self-sacrificing that has a powerful resonance in this country. Unfortunately, we’ve learned that we can close our eyes and wallow in the myth, and we don’t actually have to try and live up to it…and we haven’t. Ever.

How can they screw up this badly?

Why is it that I, nasty ol’ atheist who is completely ignorant of theology and religious history, can see the parallels in the execution of Hussein, but our theocracy-sympathizing leaders bumble along, failing to see the damning errors of their position? Glenn Greenwald’s post on the ineptitude of the lynching is chilling.

One participant described the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.'”

You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what’s the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don’t they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they’ve apparently done the execution at a time when it is “religiously unacceptable”, and we’ve got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.

I know. They must all be hardcore atheists over there.

Science and the National Park Service: a festering problem

The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything intellectually challenging from the experiences in their parks — the ideal seems to be Chevy Chase’s reaction from the movie Vacation (if you don’t know what I mean, here’s a short homage). Pete Dunkelberg has brought a letter in Science from 28 October 2005 to my attention — it accuses the Park Service of dumbing down the interpretive material and turning it into a purely aesthetic experience.

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