Richard Dawkins: banned in Oklahoma?

He’s on his way to Oklahoma (no, that’s not what rouses my envy), and an Oklahoma legislator has proposed a resolution to condemn him.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 1ST SESSION OF THE 52ND OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representative strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.

THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives encourages the University of Oklahoma to engage in an open, dignified, and fair discussion of the Darwinian theory of evolution and all other scientific theories which is the approach that a public institution should be engaged in and which represents the desire and interest of the citizens of Oklahoma.

Wow. This from the same crowd that gets all fluttery and happy at “academic freedom” bills — they want to kick Richard Dawkins out of the whole state. I thought I was the scary one when I was the guy getting kicked out of a mere movie theater.

Michele Bachmann: Minnesota’s gift to politics

Uh-oh. She opened her mouth again.

BACHMANN: If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism. … But we all know that we could turn this around and we can turn this around fairly quickly. We’re still a free country.

And as the Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels — that’s what they’re very good at — they’re trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren’t able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated.

She calls what punctuated equilibrium? I don’t think she knows what it means, and I don’t believe she knows anything about either biology or economic history. It’s interesting to see the Republican version of bipartisanship so nakedly exposed, at least.

(By the way, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Honk if you understand punctuated equilibrium!” No one ever honks.)

It’s a conspiracy!

Ray Comfort is sure that his new book is selling poorly because of a conspiracy among atheists to give it bad reviews on Amazon.

But he said he’s sure his book sales have been affected because of the negative reviews, “because people purchase upon other people’s opinions.”

Has he considered that the book might just be awful? No, apparently not.

Still, he said, the book can’t be too bad.

…

Comfort said the strong opposition easily is explained.

“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.

I know Ray is rather stupid, but who knew he could be that stupid. This has been explained to him multiple times: evolution does explain this stuff trivially. Populations evolve, not individuals, and male and female elephants evolved from populations of pre-elephants that contained males and females. Species do not arise from single new mutant males that then have to find a corresponding mutant female — they arise by the diffusion of variation through a whole population, male and female.

Rather than a conspiracy of atheists falsely downrating his book, there is a simpler explanation for his lousy sales: it’s a piece of crap written by an incompetent and idiot, and his complaint just confirms that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Greg Laden has a big advantage over me

He was probably able to get home before midnight last night. You can now read his description of the social events around Dawkins’ visit, and a much more thorough account of the talk itself.

One other point that I should emphasize. This talk presented an overview of how we should look at the appearance of design in the universe, for a general public. While I heard some complaints that there was nothing new in it, that’s the way this had to be: it was a synthesis of a position.

Dawkins is often given a rap as one of those ultradarwinians who see every detail of life as the explicit product of carefully honed selection. For me, what was interesting in this talk was how clearly he repudiated that position. In several places, he contrasted what he called a “naive Darwinist” perspective with reality, and showed that the strawman didn’t hold up. A major point was also that features that may very well have evolved with a core that was selected for can have side-effects, and been subverted to non-adaptive purposes, and that these features may represent a significant element of the species’ character. He talked quite a bit about the flexibility of the human brain, a property that was the product of selection, yet that same flexibility means it can be reprogrammed into deleterious byways, such as religion or fanaticism or unthinking patriotism.

It was all stuff that I agreed with, and didn’t surprise me at all. Similarly, The God Delusion didn’t contain anything radical or new. The virtue of these kinds of talks and books is that they pull many commonly held ideas together into a coherent fusion that can be more readily absorbed by a larger number of people who haven’t yet taken in all of the underlying evidence.

Wild night on the town for a godless nerd

I may be getting too old for this.

Yesterday, I finished up teaching at 1 in the afternoon, then had to leap into the Pharyngulamobile and drive, drive, drive to Minneapolis. I got together with Lynn Fellman and Greg Laden for a hasty dinner before I had to go move my car and park prior to Richard Dawkins’ talk. This was almost a disaster; it turns out that last night, at the same time as the talk, there was a basketball game scheduled. The streets were packed, parking was a nightmare, and I only got to Northrop Auditorium with a whisker of time to spare. Many of the attendees seem to have run into the same problem, as I noticed that people were dribbling in well into the middle of the talk. (No, not dribbling large orange balls…dribbling as in trickling, and looking a little stressed from the struggle to get into the parking garages.)

I introduced Dawkins almost on time, though. I got applauded, even though I only spent less than a minute talking — or maybe because I spent less than a minute talking.

Dawkins’ talk was good. He’s trying to make a strong distinction with a word that’s already greatly overloaded in the English language: “purpose”. His point was clear, that we really can mean a lot of very different things when we describe the purpose of something, and that especially when we’re talking about biology, “purpose” does not imply “designed with intent”. One excellent example of the way “purpose” is abused was shown: Ray Comfort’s infamous banana rationalization. It made the bit even more hilarious to see after Dawkins had warned us of the habit of too many people to use “purpose” too freely to imply intent — Comfort was the perfect bad example. I’m a bit dubious that Dawkins’ word coinages — “archi-purpose” for describing the function of an evolved structure, like a bird’s wings, and “neo-purpose” for novelties produced as a consequence of prior innovations, and which are often subverted to undermine a Darwinian function — but that’s always the problem with attempts to introduce new terms. Language is a slippery beast that will twist beneath your efforts to tame it.

Dawkins did do a book-signing afterwards, at which a huge crowd appeared. I was very impressed at the man’s well-practiced signing technique — he got through everyone quickly, and he didn’t seem to suffer the slightest crippling of the wrist for his trouble.

We then had a pub night, at the Campus Club in Coffman Memorial Union. As you know, we’d kept it a bit mum so we wouldn’t be overwhelmed by a swarm descending on the place, but just by word of mouth we had well over a hundred people in attendance. Richard got his beer, I had non-alcoholic stuff (no fun, but I had a long drive ahead of me), and there was a buffet of good food that vanished amazingly fast. All thanks to Rick Schauer who set up and hosted the event! We had more mobs of people swarming Richard and getting photos taken with him; look for them to bloom all over Facebook today. It was a good opportunity to make a more informal acquaintance with the famous Dr Dawkins than the usual lecture followed by departure, so if you didn’t get the super-semi-secret directions to the party, you missed out on a splendid evening.

We wrapped up and left about 11pm. I know, the night was still young! Alas, I had a three hour drive home ahead of me. I survived it, got home, passed out…briefly. Now I’m up getting ready for my 8am class. Fortunately, it’s student presentations today, so I just have to be awake enough to listen attentively. Have pity on one of my students in that class (Hi, Levi!) who was also in attendance last night, and has to describe frequency shifting in bat calls this morning. It’s good practice for the madcap life of the scientist!

Of course, I’m older than my students. I may just have to drag myself into a dark corner after class and fall into a coma for a few hours in order to recover. I hope you aren’t expecting voluminous posting today…my exhausted brain needs to reboot, I think.

I don’t know how Dawkins does it. He’s just come off of a trip to Michigan, and will be in Oklahoma tomorrow. He is clearly made of tougher stuff than I am.

Michael Egnor pounds his shoe

“WE WILL BURY YOU!” seems to be his message in his latest complaint. He is very upset that The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology is boycotting Louisiana, and he informs us all in a long argumentum ad populum that the ignorant outnumber us, addressed to the president and members of SICB.

Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don’t accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life. And they think that they ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in their own public schools. They don’t share your passion for ideological purity in science classes. They have a quaint notion that science depends on the freedom to ask questions, and their insistence on academic freedom is catching on. They don’t want religion taught in the science classroom, but they know that students are not learning about all of the science surrounding evolution. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support academic freedom in the teaching of evolution in schools, and that number is rising fast — it’s up 9% in the past 3 years. People clearly resent your demand for censorship. After all, it’s their children in their schools, and they aren’t happy with a bunch of supercilious Darwinists telling them that they can’t even question Darwinism in their own classrooms. So if you’re going to boycott all the creationists who despise you, you’ll eventually have to hold all of your conventions in Madison or Ann Arbor. Keep up the arrogance and eventually you won’t have to boycott people at all. People will boycott you.

Whoa. I’m impressed.

Note the open admission that the Discovery Institute’s audience are the god-fearin’ creationists, and that the people they regard as “on their side” are plain-and-simple, unmodified creationists, not just the usual Intelligent Design creationists. That’s useful to see.

There’s also the usual distortions. People ought to be able to ask questions about evolution in the public schools — that’s what science is all about, and I would encourage kids to raise their hands and speak out in class. However, none of this argument is about squelching inquiry: it’s about whether weak and discredited ideas, like ID, ought to be given special privilege and elevated to the standard curriculum. They shouldn’t.

We’re also seeing the usual deprecation of expertise. SICB is an organization of thousands of scientists who have invested years of their life in the study of biology. They are experts. Against that, we have millions of people in Louisiana who, while competent in their own areas of work, have very little knowledge of biology. According to Michael Egnor, the people we should listen to on this relatively rarefied subject are the majority who know nothing about it. Would he be quite so sanguine if we dismissed his specialization, neurosurgery, and suggested that he needed to follow the suggestions of a roofer from Baton Rouge? Is it “censorship” that he doesn’t allow his patients’ families into the operating room to give him a hand?

Madison and Ann Arbor are both lovely places to have conventions, and I certainly wouldn’t complain if SICB held their meetings there — it’s much closer to home, for one thing. But Egnor left out a few cities. How about Berkeley and Eugene, Seattle and Tucson, New York and Philadelphia, Austin and Cleveland, Champaign-Urbana and Chapel Hill…and I could go on. These cities and university towns are all part of America, too, and they are places where we find majorities who do not accept the ideology of creationism…because their populations are better educated and less shackled to religious dogma. These are good things.

I’m also confident that the people of Louisiana are a mix of the uninformed and the scientifically competent, and that many are good people who deserve better than the falsehoods institutions like the Discovery Institute will ladle out. It would be great to have more scientific conventions in New Orleans (if nothing else, because the cuisine is fabulous). However, when the government of the state promotes policies that are damaging to science, scientists have no choice but to reject them in any way they can.

If you’re not careful, “creationists” (80% of Americans) might notice this irony: you boycott their states, but you forgot to boycott their money. If one percent of the people you’ve censored and boycotted wrote letters to their congressmen demanding a defunding of evolutionary research — a boycott of you — the grant money currently allocated to advancing Darwinist ideology (it’s ideologues, not scientists, who censor) would be re-allocated to genuine non-ideological science.

There’s a word for this: demagoguery. What Egnor proposes here is nothing less than a naked threat to use the ignorance of the mob to attack science. And you haven’t heard anything yet. Look at this attitude:

Your arrogance and disrespect for academic freedom demeans the scientific profession, and your boycott of people who don’t capitulate to your censorship is risible. You’re actually debasing Darwinism, which, after eugenics and a century and a half of third-rate science, is no mean accomplishment. Most people don’t see your refusal to visit their state as a “threat.” Honestly, they’d rather you made your boycott all-inclusive, so you’d miss all of their legislative sessions and federal court hearings as well. So back off the “boycott” stuff. Just say you misspoke, or pretend you never said it at all. You Darwinists are good at covering your tracks (remember “junk DNA”?). Keep in mind that you’re living off the people you’re censoring and boycotting. Your livelihood is dependent on their largesse, and, in “comparative biology” vernacular, it’s unwise for parasites to boycott their hosts.

My advice: just keep suckling at the public teat and pretend the boycott never happened.

Now we see exposed the Discovery Institute’s opinion of scientists: they are parasites, suckling at the public teat, and that a scientific organization’s boycott of a state is just fine…and that we should be divorced from civic responsibilities altogether.

We also see his ignorance of biology on display. Evolutionary biology is a third rate science. Why is “comparative biology” in quotes? When did parasitism become the provenance of comparative biology? It’s a concept in common use, you know. And of course we remember junk DNA — we know that most of the human genome is junk. There is no covering of any tracks there, so I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s probably yet another delusion of the creationist mind, like a schizophrenic babbling about his satellite-based mind control rays.

What we really have to remember henceforth is exactly what the Discovery Institute’s agenda actually is, and there it is in Egnor’s freely expressed opinion: the incitement of an intentionally misinformed public to silence scientific inquiry, all in the guise of ending an imaginary censorship.

But let’s leave laughing. There’s a convention in much of the kook email I receive that they howl at length at me, and then sign off with a conventional and inappropriately friendly signature that is entirely at odds with everything they wrote. Egnor fits right in.

Cordially,

Mike Egnor, M.D.

A day of Dawkins

He just got here, and already Richard Dawkins is stirring things up in Minnesota. He was interviewed on MPR this morning — unfortunately, I had to miss it as I was scrambling to get ready for class — and it sounds like the interviewer was offended. The station live-blogged the interview, and it looks like some of the listeners were offended, too, while others are invigorated.

Get online quick and you might be able to hear the tag-end of the interview.

But family get-togethers must be uncomfortable affairs…

Phillip Skell has a long and sleazy history of lying to support creationism. His usual tactic (actually, his only tactic) is to claim that evolution is irrelevant to science, denying the importance of the theory to understanding discoveries about the natural world, and refusing to believe that it has any application at all to anything. In a clear and straightforward op-ed, Stuart Faulk points out how easy it is to pick up any popular science magazine and find counterexamples to Skell’s claims. And then he picks up a knife, sticks it in, and twists:

Given how easily Skell’s arguments can be dismissed, it is reasonable to ask why he would make them in the first place. He is just as capable of reading Scientific American as I am, and probably more qualified.

The short answer is that this is not a debate about factual truth and science, but about public opinion and religion. What Skell neglects to mention (but any Web search will show) is that he has long supported creationist causes. His guest viewpoint is but one of many letters supporting “intelligent design” and opposing the teaching of evolution in public schools, which he equates to “indoctrination of students to a worldview of materialism and atheism.”

That’s an important approach we have to take more often. The vocal charlatans of creationism are actually relatively few in number, and their histories need to be directly addressed and made public. Skell is most definitely not an impartial scientist looking at the evidence objectively: he has his made up, ignores the evidence (where he is even aware of it—professionally, he is a chemist), and then uses his faux authority to claim that the biological sciences lack substantial evidence that we actually have, all in the service of his religious dogma.

One interesting fact emerges at the end of the piece. Stuart Faulk is Skell’s son-in-law. I’d like to know how the family copes with Skell’s uninformed obnoxiousness…