Larry Moran has been highlighting the work of some great science writers — you really should start off your day with selections from two of my favorites, Richard Lewontin and Niles Eldredge. It’s almost as good as coffee for perking up your brain.
Tune in at 9am Central time for Atheists Talk radio — today, it’s a special Independence Day program, with Edward Tabash discussing the historical and legal status of the separation of church and state.
Next week at this time I’ll be in lovely downtown Atlanta, staying at the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel. If we’re going to have a Pharyngufest, probably the best time would be Saturday, 12 July, and somewhere not too far away from the hotel. Anyone interested? Any locals want to make suggestions for good meeting places? We need something that isn’t too noisy, that serves good refreshments, and offers exemplary Southern hospitality, ’cause that’s what I expect when I go to Georgia. If nothing else, the hotel has two bars, and I suppose we could hit one of those.
If anyone wants to suggest better days, I could probably make it either Sunday the 13th or Tuesday the 15th.
Remember Suzan Mazur, the credulous reporter hyping a revolution in evolution? She’s at it again, publishing an e-book chapter by chapter on the “Altenberg 16”, this meeting that she thinks is all about radically revising evolutionary biology.
I can tell that Massimo Pigliucci — one of the 16 — is feeling a little exasperation at this nonsense, especially since some of the IDists have seized on it as vindication of their delusions about the “weakness” of evolutionary theory. He’s got an excellent post summarizing some of the motivation behind this meeting, which is actually part of a fairly routine process of occasional get-togethers by scientists with similar ideas to hash out the concepts. Here’s the actual subject of discussion at the Altenberg meeting.
The basic idea is that there have been some interesting empirical discoveries, as well as the articulation of some new concepts, subsequently to the Modern Synthesis, that one needs to explicitly integrate with the standard ideas about natural selection, common descent, population genetics and statistical genetics (nowadays known as evolutionary quantitative genetics). Some of these empirical discoveries include (but are not limited to) the existence of molecular buffering systems (like the so-called “heat shock response”) that may act as “capacitors” (i.e., facilitators) of bursts of phenotypic evolution, and the increasing evidence of the role of epigenetic (i.e., non-genetic) inheritance systems (this has nothing to do with Lamarckism, by the way). Some of the new concepts that have arisen since the MS include (but again are not limited to) the idea of “evolvability” (that different lineages have different propensities to evolve novel structures or functions), complexity theory (which opens the possibility of natural sources of organic complexity other than natural selection), and “accommodation” (a developmental process that may facilitate the coordinated appearance of complex traits in short evolutionary periods).
Now, did you see anything in the above that suggests that evolution is “a theory in crisis”? Did I say anything about intelligent designers, or the rejection of Darwinism, or any of the other nonsense that has filled the various uninformed and sometimes downright ridiculous commentaries that have appeared on the web about the Altenberg meeting? Didn’t think so. If next week’s workshop succeeds, what we will achieve is taking one more step in an ongoing discussion among scientists about how our theories account for biological phenomena, and how the discovery of new phenomena is to be matched by the elaboration of new theoretical constructs. This is how science works, folks, not a sign of “crisis.”
You cannot imagine how pleased I was to see this — not because I was at all concerned about this meeting, but because I’ve been scribbling down notes for the last few weeks on the subjects I want to discuss in my keynote at GECCO 2008, and that’s practically an outline of my plans. I was going to go over some of these concepts and define them and give examples; I didn’t have molecular buffers on my list (maybe I’ll have to add it), and I was going to say a bit about conservation/canalization vs. plasticity, but at least I’m reassured that I’m on the right track.
One of the splendid people I met in Denver told me about her attendance at a bizarre lecture a few months ago — and she sent me a link to her summary. If you want to experience a second hand glimmering of Native American woo, with UFOs, magic origins, transparent white people, anti-evolution, and quantum physics, there you go.
Nick Matzke has a fine summary of progress in research into abiogenesis. He chastises those people who try to argue that abiogenesis is independent of evolution, or that you can get out of trying to answer the question of where life came from by simply saying that that isn’t evolution. It is! I’ve said it myself, and I really wish people would stop trying weasel out of that question by punting it off to some other discipline.
The Family Research Council asks, “Do you believe that America, as a nation, was founded upon Christian principles?
97% of the clueless ideologues at the Patriarchy Research Council think so.
Yesterday, I blitzed through a tiny slice of the Mensa meeting in Denver. My time was really tight, so after arriving on Thursday for a fabulous Pharyngufest, I only got to sit through two talks in the morning session before mine, and then whoosh, I was off to the airport and hurtling through the sky at 475mph to get back home.
I had time to look through the program at least, and I hate to say it, but Mensa meetings are better organized than the big meetings of most atheist groups I’ve been to (this is a peeve of mine — atheists give bad meetings, although I’m sure Margaret Downey will prove me wrong this fall). There were parallel sessions and a great deal of diversity in the subjects — which is especially good since there is a lot of credulous woo at Mensa, mixed in with the critical thinking — and plenty of time scheduled for socializing, which is the whole point of such events. The content was very mixed, however, and I sat through two talks that were not, I hope representative. I later realized I could have gone to the atheist meet-and-greet that was scheduled concurrently with the ID talk I saw, which probably would have been a much better use of my time.
The first talk I saw was “Is evolution incompatible with Intelligent Design?” by Edwin Chong. This was an attempt at a philosophical justification for regarding a weak form of ID as fully compatible with acceptance of a strong form of evolution. It was OK, not as horrible as it could have been, but the speakers motivation was transparent: it was a typical post hoc justification of a belief in god. I had a couple of major objections. One was his claim that ID is a legitimate scientific pursuit, made on the basis of the fact that they actually make epistemological claims, that is, that they express an intent to pursue a scientific line of investigation. Personally, I do not accept the fact that they have an honest intent; there’s too much bad scholarship and far too much willingness to distort the truth at the Discovery Institute. I also don’t think an intent to do research is sufficient to call it science. You also have to have some kind of evidential foundation, building on past observations — you have to be able to answer the questions “how do you know that?” or “why do you expect that result?” with something more than “because I wish it were so.”
A good chunk of the end of his talk was a long discussion of the nature of a god who would be compatible with both ID and evolution, in which you could have an omnipotent, omniscient designer who interferes in an indetectable way by selecting probabilistic outcomes, but in which you also do not have a deterministic universe. It was overwrought, I thought, a lot of intellectual masturbation to justify the existence of something Chong wishes were there, but for which he has no evidence at all.
The second talk was pure crazy. James Carrion of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, got up to tell us whose intelligence was controlling the craft. We got a short history of the UFO movement, from scattered reports of ‘foo fighters’ in WWII to the incident that started it all, the 1947 report of flying saucers in formation over Mt Rainier, to modern day accounts. He showed some of the McMinnville UFO photos, and seemed to think these were good examples of UFO evidence — they look like poorly photographed pie plates, if you ask me. Carrion thinks that UFOs are actually high tech craft built by our government that are being tested or used in secret missions. It was telling that when he said his reason for believing this was that it seemed much more likely than that aliens flew here that our government is lying to us, that there was much nodding of heads in the audience. Many of the questions revealed a weird conspiracy theorist mindset in the crowd. The best question was when one woman asked him to give the single most persuasive piece of evidence that UFOs exist…and Carrion couldn’t do it. The best he could do is cite trace evidence. He thought that soil changes (which he did not or could not describe) at purported UFO landing sites were evidence that something unusual had happened there; people in the audience actually chimed in with crop circle stories. Who knew ropes and boards were our government’s secret high technology?
What I find most damning about the whole UFO movement is that, as Carrion explained, they’ve got 60 years of history and absolutely nothing to show for it other than accumulated and often contradictory anecdotes. I say, cut through the crap: it’s a testimony to the imperfection of human perception and the suggestibility of the human mind, nothing more.
Then I gave my talk, which went in the other direction. It was OK, but I’m still working on getting this message across, which is really difficult to do: that the important evidence for evolution is all molecular, and that we’ve got this incredible wealth of detail available. I think I went over the audience’s heads in a few places. Oh, well — I’d rather credit my listener’s with more knowledge than less, and challenge them a little bit to learn more, than to dumb it down. I still have to work at making the abstractions of the molecular evidence more entertaining, though.
And that was it. It would have been good to get a more representative sample of the talks that were going on, but time was short. At least the people I met were smart and fun, even if those talks were a little odd!
My drive home last night was a bit weird — there were fireworks going off everywhere, and being a bit disconnected from the calendar with all my recent travel I was puzzled by it all. Was Minnesota celebrating my return?
I shouldn’t be so self-centered. Of course they weren’t. When I got home I saw the news: Jesse Helms is dead. That makes more sense as a reason to get out and celebrate patriotically — one less twisted, ignorant, bigoted pustule dots the face of America now.
