Shhhh. Don’t tell the students.

Professor Denis Rancourt of the University of Ottawa has taken a radical step in his teaching practices: he tells all the students in his classes that they automatically get an A+. For this, among other infractions of convention, he has been suspended with pay from his teaching position pending institutional review.

Prof. Rancourt’s suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005, when, after researching new teaching methods, he first experimented with eliminating letter grades. He also altered course curriculum with student input – although not the approval of the university – an approach he calls “academic squatting.”

A well-published and politically outspoken scientist who revels in hashing out theories on napkins at conferences, Prof. Rancourt’s unconventional teaching style has generated both an ardent following among a core group of students, and the rancour of many of his fellow faculty members, one-third of whom signed a petition of complaint against him in the fall of 2007. In the letter, which he provided, the complaints stem largely from a series of critical e-mails he distributed about their “paternalistic” teaching methods – a criticism he still expresses, with little restraint, today.

Well, I have to say that what he proposes actually sounds cool and interesting, and that I’d have to see a lot more information before I could say whether the suspension was warranted or not. Grades are a pain and sometimes an obstacle to real learning, and sometimes they are a crutch — a whip we use to motivate when we can’t get the students excited about a subject. I think that one of the things tenured professors ought to be able to do is experiment and innovate in their teaching.

However, there are two potential problems. One is that sometimes innovation doesn’t work — if you’re going to experiment, sometimes experiments fail. The article doesn’t say whether there was some objective assessment of the outcomes of his classes. Do his students actually come out the other side of the term with him with more knowledge and understanding? If they do, bugger the objections, let him keep at it. If they don’t, and the university is actually complaining that he is ignoring the assessment of his experiments to keep doing stuff that doesn’t work, then goodbye Professor Rancourt.

The other problem is that a university education is not the product of a single instructor, and we must respect the whole of the curriculum and work together with our colleagues. I rely on other faculty to teach our students cell biology and molecular biology, for instance; if students showed up in my upper level elective courses with the expectation that they’d learn some developmental biology, and I discovered that they knew nothing about those foundational subjects because their instructors had decided that they’d teach philosophy and political science instead (something I know they wouldn’t do), I would be screwed, and more than a little upset. I’d like to know how far he deviated from the course curricula…a little flexibility is good, but if he was ignoring the needs of the whole discipline’s program, then that’s also reason to say bye-bye to Rancourt.

Whatever happened with the proteomics paper by Warda & Han?

Not much, I’m afraid. The weirdly awful paper has been retracted, but we still don’t know how it got published in the first place. NCSE Reports has an excellent summary of the affair, but the conclusion is still highly unsatisfactory (the conclusion of the event, that is, not the summary, which is spot on).

THE EDITOR’S RESPONSE
I contacted the editor-in-chief of Proteomics, Michael Dunn, to find out more about what happened. Many scientists have speculated publicly that the peer review process went seriously wrong for this paper. Dunn assured me that the paper was reviewed by two “well-respected and highly competent reviewers” both of whom recommended minor revisions. For some reason, though, “neither picked up the references to creationism, nor did they recognize that sections of the text were plagiarized,” according to Dunn. It is not too surprising that the reviewers missed the plagiarism, but the title and abstract should have raised huge red flags warning the reviewers that this article had questionable science. I have to conclude that the reviewers were very sloppy, incompetent, or both; at the very least they were inattentive in this case, despite the editor’s claims to the contrary. And Dunn himself is not without responsibility in this case: he must have seen the reference to “the soul” in the article’s title, and he should have been more pro-active. His failure to make any public statement about the creationist claims in the article also raises questions about the leadership at the journal.

CONCLUSION
This entire episode points out a weakness in scientific peer review that creationists and other pseudoscience proponents may try to exploit again. We only caught this attempted fraud thanks to the diligence of bloggers: the journal itself had already missed it. What is perhaps more troubling is the fact that the journal relied solely on the plagiarism to force the retraction: if not for that, the article might have been published despite its unsubstantiated creationist claims. I asked Dunn specifically about this issue, but he declined to comment. The Warda and Han paper demonstrates a new strategy that proponents of creationism might attempt again, and perhaps next time they will not be so foolish as to plagiarize their text. We can only hope that the publicity surrounding this incident will alert both reviewers and editors of scientific journals to be on the lookout for “stealth” creationist claims in the future.

The title of the paper was “Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence.” I’m still baffled by the fact that “well-respected and highly competent reviewers” could completely overlook the title and an abstract that makes extravagant claims for a complete and rather revolutionary revision of the most widely accepted explanation for the origins of mitochondria.

Rename it to “Quackery Without Scruples”

I’ve always considered Doctors Without Borders to be a commendable, even noble, organization. So I’m a little bit shocked to see this new group capitalizing on their good name: Homeopaths Without Borders. They’ve got to be joking.

It is our main aim to transfer homeopathy to those countries, where public health care and medical supply of the people is sub-standard, for whatever reasons. Homeopathy also proves very effective in healing physical and mental injury in situations of war or political crisis.

If their health care is substandard, isn’t it rather cruel to charge in and make it worse?

Jerry Coyne has a blog

I know! It’s hard to believe! Why, any of the riff-raff can just charge in and start a blog anymore. You write a book or a few, do some internationally recognized research in evolution, and suddenly you get cocky and think you have the talent to write a blog. Back in the day when I started in this, I had to struggle with none of that. And I liked it!

Despite his awesome handicaps, it is a pretty good blog.

I especially like this image from his book, Why Evolution is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll):

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©Kalliopi Monoyios

So…no transitional forms, huh? Look at that australopithecine between modern Homo and Pan. It’s definitely not a chimp — the pelvis alone would tell you that — yet it’s also definitely far from fully human. Very cool.

Ben Goldacre is getting sued…again

Lawyers must love Ben. All he has to do is speak the truth, and wham, the kooks charge in. He recently posted a clip from a radio program in which lunatic anti-vaccination nut Jeni Barnett said many stupid things, so she rushed to silence her own words. Can’t have the fact that she’s spluttering nonsense made public, of course!

It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. “It’s a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry.” “Science always changes so you can believe what you like.” “It’s a debate and a controversy.” “Measles was never that bad anyway.” “Immune systems are damaged by being understimulated.” “Immune systems are damaged by being overstimulated.” And so on.

The clip has been taken down from Goldacre’s site while the lawyers frolic, but this is the internet: it’s still available elsewhere. I recommend that more of us download a copy and keep it handy. Barnett is only going to succeed in disseminating her own indictment ever further.

Even better: Science Punk and a network of bloggers have partial clips and transcripts of the silly show. Watch the net route around lawyer-induced damage and keep the information flowing!

For shame, Forbes magazine

Forbes has published a collection of pseudoscientific nonsense, giving free rein to the hacks and frauds of the Discovery Institute, along with a few other crackpots. There is no hint given that these are marginal characters with no connection to modern science, who are following an ideological agenda with the admitted goal of replacing science and secular government with a Christian “spiritual” rule. There are no rebuttals. I’m sure the DI was thrilled to use Forbes as an arm of their propaganda machine.

I can’t possibly go through all of it; practically every sentence these guys write is misdirection, error, or outright lie. I’ll just try to give you a taste — a nasty, bitter taste, vile and rancid, but apparently the flavor Forbes wants to attach to their magazine — and you can decide whether you want to dig deeper into the cesspit.

Jonathan Wells, one of the more contemptible charlatans behind the Intelligent Design movement. Here’s one snippet of his sleight of hand.

Before 1859 science meant (and still means, for most people) testing hypotheses by comparing them with the evidence. For Darwin and his followers, however, “science” is the search for natural explanations. Such explanations should be plausible–that is, they cannot blatantly contradict the facts–but instead of being based on evidence they are based on the assumption that everything can be explained materialistically.

See what he did there? He implies that Darwin was doing something that his peers of that time should not have recognized as science, because science is based on “evidence” and not on “materialism”…and if you read further in his load of tripe, you’ll discover that he claims that “Darwinism” has no evidence, and that ID does, and will therefore win.

In addition to redefining the meaning of science, the intelligent design creationists apparently want to redefine evidence, too. Somehow, the fact that science demands material evidence — evidence that can by measured, repeated, analyzed, and integrated into theory — is a rule that means the kind of evidence that the DI wants to present is invalid. Which is true. We aren’t going to accept immaterial, supernatural claims as evidence, no matter how much Jonathan Wells whines that his Moonie fantasies ought to constitute legitimate support for his anti-science crusade.

Of course, Michael Egnor has to ramble vacuously in there. He’s a neurosurgeon, you know. It’s always the first thing he types. But then he makes the same empty claim as Wells.

But the evidence is unassailable. The most reasonable scientific explanation for functional biological complexity–the genetic code and the intricate nanotechnology inside living cells–is that they were designed by intelligent agency. There is no scientific evidence that unintelligent processes can create substantial new biological structures and function. There is no unintelligent process known to science that can generate codes and machines.

What evidence? All they do is wave their hands at the wonderful complexity that real scientists have discovered — which nobody denies — and repeat their mantra that natural processes can’t generate complexity, therefore God. But we know that natural, unguided processes are remarkably good at building elaborate innovations, and that chance can produce surprising novelties … and that natural selection acts to prune back the exuberance of random variation to a functional diversity. Their syllogism is false. One example: look at the nylonase enzyme, produced by a frameshift error. That’s a natural process, not design, and it produced new functionality.

John West repeats his bogus argument that Darwin was to blame for 20th century racism and mass murder.

Darwin waffled about following these ideas to their logical conclusion, but his followers were not so squeamish. The Darwinian rationale for eugenics was embraced by leading biologists at Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, as well as by leading European scientists, giving the movement the clear backing of the scientific community for decades and providing for justification of the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 people in the United States and the killing of more than 200,000 disabled persons in Nazi Germany.

Darwin did not “waffle”. He understood the sense of what people like Galton were proposing, that by protecting against selection by smallpox, for instance, we are allowing people with susceptibility to the disease to propagate, which would result in populations having a greater weakness to disease. That does not mean that he endorsed shutting down modern medicine, or any of the other institutions which support the poor or infirm. He had his own ideas about better ways to promote the common good.

The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs, and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion. It should, however, be borne in mind, that the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through Natural Selection as one of the most important elements on the social instincts.

It is also true that some few in the scientific community did endorse eugenics, and even that some scientists helped the Nazis. But it is a complete lie on the part of West that there was a “clear backing of the scientific community”: there were many vocal dissenters from the eugenics program, and eugenics as a whole was less the product of scientific consensus than a façade for the endemic racism of the population as a whole. Martin Luther was pushing his crude version of eugenics in the 16th century, after all.

Another clown in this show is Michael Flannery, someone I’ve never heard of before, who has apparently written a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace that I don’t think I need to read, if this is the quality of his history.

For one thing, Darwin’s own theory could hardly be called objectively scientific. Early influences on Darwin’s youth established his predisposition to materialism and a dogmatic methodological naturalism long before his voyage on the Beagle. In short, Darwin’s metaphysic compelled his science. Wallace, on the other hand, was a tireless investigator who increasingly discerned design in nature. Unlike Darwin, Wallace’s science compelled his metaphysics.

Say what? Darwin, trained to be a theologian, admirer of Paley, was philosophically predisposed to dogmatic materialism? That is a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?

But I think it’s part of the DI’s general strategy. Relying on real, physical evidence to make a case is to be declared anathema; True Scientists™ build their case on metaphysical imaginary supernatural “evidence”, like the creationist’s rationale for a god.

I think their new motto ought to be “Making Stuff Up for Jesus”. It’s all they’ve got.

Now why Forbes would willingly act as a mouthpiece for these shills is the real mystery — I‘ve written for Forbes before, and they usually seem sensible. But since they are implicitly endorsing the DI’s approach to evidence, I guess I actually don’t need to find out — I can just invent an explanation and it’s as good as any other. Therefore, I think somebody snuck into the editorial staff’s homes late at night and carried out involuntary lobotomies on everyone. And if you try to disagree with me, obviously you are an ideologue with an a priori commitment to the metaphysic of materialism.