We’ve had an infestation of insane trolls today who have babbled incoherently about who knows what…I think Keith Knight has captured them perfectly.
The media can’t let today pass by without doing something stupid, so here are a few unfortunate faux pas from our news outlets.
Newsweek has published a dozen reasons to celebrate Darwin. The first? Darwin wasn’t an atheist! Huzzah! He also wasn’t a Jew, let’s celebrate that!
The second isn’t much better. Darwin mentioned “the Creator” once in the second and subsequent editions, therefore you can find God in the story of evolution! Snap your fingers in the face of an atheist for that, believers! You can read the rest, but they’re all rather pathetic.
CNN has also published a long piece of tripe from Stephen Meyer. Yeesh, it’s the same old nonsense: Darwin is controversial (nope, he’s only controversial among ignoramuses), the fossil record and the Cambrian explosion refute evolution (nope, they confirm a pattern of change over geological history), “many biologists now doubt…” (nope, few biologists do, and they all seem to be kooks), DNA is a digital code and a software program (nope, that’s a metaphor, and a pretty bad one, actually), there is evidence of design in cells (nope, if there were, I’d expect some IDiot to show it to me—they never do). It’s an awful, boring, tired old piece trumpeting the same assertions the Discovery Institute has been making for 15 years. When will the media learn that nothing those bozos say is ever news?
Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and a few sites have taken notice.
A new science blog, The Whirlpool of Life, opens today.
CNN has published a brief retrospective from Richard Dawkins. It focuses entirely on “militant atheism”, which is odd since the book itself did not promote unbelief, but also indirectly appropriate, since the concept did end up undermining the argument from design, and contributed significantly to making god irrelevant.
And…that’s about it. No fireworks, no triumphant announcements, no scientists standing outside in candlelight vigils singing hosannas to Chuck. That’s about right, I think — it’s a great book, it made a difference in the intellectual world, but it ain’t religion, thank dog.
So Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort showed up at UCLA to hand out their vandalized editions of the Origin, and Kirk got caught on video (with horrible sound and video quality, unfortunately) getting rhetorically bitch-slapped in an argument with a UCLA student. Be proud, California universities, you’re doing a fine job.
This particular story has a poll attached to it. Here’s the entirety of the poll and its results.
Kirk Cameron — Master Debator?
Yes 100%
Good work.
You may have heard the recent news about a Belgian man who was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after an accident, but who now has been miraculously discovered to have actually been conscious for the last 23 years, trapped in a partially paralyzed body. How horrific, and how frightening that the doctors could have made such a ghastly error.
Until you watch this video. How did they figure out that the poor man was actually alert and mentally competent beneath his deeply damaged exterior? They’re using facilitated communication: somebody holds his hand and moves it around to tap out messages on a computer. Look at the fellow, sitting there slack and grimacing and drooling, and the staffer deftly and quickly using his finger to peck out lucid and grammatical sentences. How does anyone fall for this?
I’d like to see how well Mr Houben communicates when his ‘facilitator’ is blindfolded, or when he is asked questions about objects in his line of sight but hidden from hers.
This excellent article in the Chicago Tribune documents the abuses of science by quacks. Legitimate researchers identify certain properties of autism — markers for inflammation in the brain, for instance, or correlations with testosterone — and write up papers that even go out of their way to explain how their observations are interesting, but do not necessarily lead to therapies, and what do you think the medical frauds do? They use them to justify useless or dangerous treatments like injections of testosterone inhibitors or anti-inflammatory agents or loading up patients with intravenous immunoglobulin…treatments that have not been tested in any way, have not gone through clinical trials, and which are justified by tenuous connections to legitimate research, which sometimes contraindicates what the quacks are doing.
So when Pardo and his colleagues published their paper in the Annals of Neurology in 2005, they added an online primer that clearly explained their findings in layman’s terms and sternly warned doctors not to use them to develop treatments.
“We were concerned that the study would raise a lot of controversy and be misused,” Pardo said. “We were right.”
Over and over, doctors in the autism recovery movement have used the paper to justify experimental treatments aimed at reducing neuroinflammation.
It just goes on and on. Legitimate scientists find a weak connection to something, describe it with solid caveats, and these evil exploiters of the pain of others jump on it to advocate radical and dangerous treatments that ignore all the problems.
Pardo’s study is just one example. In May, the Tribune reported on another questionable use of research. A geneticist and his son who promoted treating children who have autism with a testosterone inhibitor had based their protocol, in part, on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychopathologist at England’s University of Cambridge who has explored the role of the hormone in autism.
Yet Baron-Cohen told the Tribune that the idea of using the drug this way “fills me with horror.”
Pardo said that since his paper came out he has received many questions about unproven autism treatments. He is particularly haunted by inquiries regarding powerful immunosuppressant drugs usually used on organ transplant patients, calling the idea “completely wrong.”
Said the researcher: “People are abusing science for the treatment of autism.”
The article also names names: Dan Rossignol, Jeff Bradstreet, James Neubrander, and Patricia Kane are people who abuse the scientific literature to promote expensive and dangerous snake oil (I was also amused to see that Kane has her degree from Columbia Pacific University, the same sloppy institution that gave Jerry Bergman a Ph.D.—and the article is not kind in its characterization of CPU).
It’s good to see some strong skeptical coverage of medical science in a newspaper. This is exactly what good journalism ought to be doing — digging in and exposing the lies.
Uh-oh. This episode of Mr Deity will fire up some denunciations. Take a deep breath, and remember, he’s satirizing religious attitudes.
Listen through to the end, though — he has an excellent suggestion. This weekend is Thanksgiving, and instead of sitting through another football game, put a Mr Deity episode on, and get the whole extended family talking about irreverence. Come on, it’ll be fun! There might even be a food fight!
Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association has sent me the results of the survey that was given at the debate. He is trying to spin it as supporting the claim that this kind of debate was “useful” — but I’m unimpressed.
About 500 people attended, 290 returned the survey. The survey basically asked two questions about whether they supported teaching creationism in the classroom initially, and the same two questions to be answered after they listened to the debate, with a final question that asked whether the debate was held “on an intellectual level that can serve as an example for other discussions”…and with that, their motives are exposed. It wasn’t to actually work through the problem, but entirely to give credibility to the creationist position. Contrary to Olson’s interpretation, it tells me that this whole farce was a bad idea from the beginning.
When I looked at the numbers, what jumped out at me that there was almost no change in the audience’s position. People who came in firmly opposed to teaching ID in the schools left with the same opinion (no surprise there, Bergman was a kook); people who came in demanding that creationism be given equal time left still feeling the same way. There were a couple of crazy people whose opinions did shift — from being initially opposed to creationism to being for including it in the curriculum. I call shenanigans on that; Bergman did not even try to argue for such a position, so these were ringers who walked in, gave false answers to the first questions, and then pretended to have been converted to a pro-creationist stance by Bergman. That is flatly unbelievable.
The numbers were boringly static. The comments were much more entertaining, and I’ve included them below the fold; to make it a little easier to sort out who was saying what, the comments from evolutionists are in blue, the creationists are in red, and the ones who switched significantly from the two pre-debate questions to the two post-debate questions are in purple.
What I mainly take home from these data is the simple fact that, even though this debate was a complete and embarrassing rout for the creationists, their minds were not changed at all. Debates with creationists are a waste of time, except for the small benefit of entertaining evolutionists with an amusing spectacle, and the larger detriment of giving liars for Jesus an opportunity to piously announce their support for rational discussion…despite the fact that they don’t offer rational discussion.
Enjoy. This is part of a whole series at Symphony of Science.
One of the peculiarities of my recent debate with Jerry Bergman was that he announced his definition of irreducible complexity, which he claimed to be the same as Michael Behe’s…and under which carbon atoms were IC. It was utterly absurd. A reader wrote to Behe to get his opinion.
I recently attended a debate between Dr. P. Z. Myers and Dr. Jerry Bergman on the topic of “Should Intelligent Design be Taught in the Schools?” The topic of irreducible complexity came up, and Dr. Bergman had an interesting definition. His definition of irreducible complexity was “two or more parts are required for something to function” and that if you “remove one part, it will not work properly.” The example he gave was that a carbon atom is irreducibly complex. He said that “you will not have a carbon 12 atom unless you have 6 protons, 6 neutrons and 6 electrons, therefore it is irreducibly complex.” Dr. Bergman went on to say that, the only things that aren’t irreducibly complex were elementary particles, such as a lepton, because they could not be broken down into smaller parts. Much of the audience was confused about this, because as Dr. Myers pointed out, your definition of irreducible complexity dealt with biochemical systems. Dr. Myers also pointed out that carbon is formed naturally in stars, and if Dr. Bergman’s definition of irreducible complexity were correct, it would show that irreducible complexity occurs naturally, therefore negating it as an argument for intelligent design. Dr. Bergman claimed that he was using your definition of irreducible complexity in the example of the carbon atom. That is why I wanted to ask you for a concise definition of irreducible complexity and if you believe Dr. Bergman’s example and definition fits with yours.
Thanks for you time,
David
Behe wrote back.
Hi, David, nice to meet you. Dr. Myers is right; my definition deals with biochemical systems. I take the underlying laws and elements of nature as given. I do not know where Prof. Bergman got the idea that the concept applies to atoms, but he didn’t get it from me. In Darwin’s Black Box, I defined IC as:
“By irreducibly complex I mean a single system which is composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”
Best wishes.
mjb
I got the answer right. I feel so dirty now.
However, I will go on (as I did in the debate) to explain that while it is definitely true that many biochemical systems actually do exhibit the property of irreducible complexity, the fact that an existing pathway can suffer a loss of function when modified says absolutely nothing about whether it evolved or not. Antecedent versions of the current pathway may have 1) had different functions (the exaptation explanation), 2) had less stringent requirements for function because other physiological functions had less specific demands (the coevolution explanation), or 3) had redundant or alternative paths to the final output of the pathway (the scaffolding explanation). IC, even as defined by the author of the concept, is no obstacle to evolution.
