Nature publishes a crank letter

This week’s issue of Nature contains a bizarre letter from a Polish creationist, forester, and member of the Polish parliament. His credentials notwithstanding, it is a very silly diatribe that makes a series of false claims—claims that are trivial to dismiss, but in that fine tradition of the Gish gallop and Hovind’s rambling free-association eructations, he makes a lot of them. A whole lot of them; all just plain naked assertions with no evidence to back them up, because the evidence, if he’d bothered to discuss it, contradicts him. Even the title reveals his ignorance of how science works.

Rather than trying to dismantle it piece by piece, I’ve just added links to his letter that lead to short, simple refutations of his claims.

Creationism, evolution: nothing has been proved

Maciej Giertych

In your News story “Polish scientists fight creationism” (Nature 443, 890–891; 2006 doi:10.1038/443890c), you incorrectly state that I have called for the “inclusion of creationism in Polish biology curricula”. As well as being a member of the European Parliament, I am a scientist — a population geneticist with a degree from Oxford University and a PhD from the University of Toronto — and I am critical of the theory of evolution as a scientist, with no religious connotation. It is the media that prefer to consider my comments as religiously inspired, rather than to report my stated position accurately.

I believe that, as a result of media bias, there seems to be total ignorance of new scientific evidence against the theory of evolution. Such evidence includes race formation (microevolution), which is not a small step in macroevolution because it is a step towards a reduction of genetic information and not towards its increase. It also includes formation of geological strata sideways rather than vertically, archaeological and palaeontological evidence that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, a major worldwide catastrophe in historical times, and so on.

We know that information exists in biology, and is transferred over generations through the DNA/RNA/protein system. We do not know its origin, but we know it exists, can be spoiled by mutations, but never improves itself spontaneously. No positive mutations have ever been demonstrated — adaptations to antibiotics or herbicides are equivalent to immunological adaptation to diseases, and not a creation of a new function.

We keep on searching for natural explanations of everything in nature. If we have no explanations we should say so, and not claim that an unproven theory is a fact.

I’d love to know how this piece of ignorant dreck managed to get published. Is Nature concerned that they’re always publishing stuff from smart people, so they’ve committed to a policy of affirmative action for idiots, just to give them a chance?

Deepak Chopra and his magic love god

Chopra.

Deepak Chopra is a fraud who probably makes at least ten times my salary, who gets invited onto talk shows and news programs to spout his opinions, whose books are read by millions as if they actually provide any insight…and the guy has the brains of a turnip. It’s just sad. Have you no shame, Ariana Huffington?

His latest attempt to explain himself (an effort which is to reason as cat-strangling is to art) is a poor critique of Dawkins’ The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It promises to be part one. When I was in my twenties, I had a very difficult extraction of my wisdom teeth, and that promise reminded me of what the dentist said, after he he had literally knelt on the armrests of the chair, wielding a hammer and chisel against my tooth…”Well, that’s the first one done.” I’m sure you all know that awful sinking feeling as you complete one ugly chore, only to realize that there’s more to come.

There isn’t much to his argument, fortunately, so I’ll just pluck out one representative piece of it. This is a familiar complaint: I call it the “Well, you can’t see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?” argument.

Is science the only route to knowledge? Obviously not. I know that my mother loved me all her life, as I love my own children. I feel genius in great works of art. None of this knowledge is validated by science. I have seen medical cures that science can’t explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people. I know that I am conscious and have a self, even though Dawkins—along with many arch materialists—doesn’t believe that consciousness is real or that the self is anything but a chemical illusion created in the brain. By Dawkins’ reasoning a mother’s love is no more real than God as neither can be empirically quantified.

Ho hum. You can sort of see the wheels turning in the poor sap’s head: he’s got this idea that Science is men in white lab coats with needles and instruments and computers, and he is surely convinced that they had nothing to do with his momma loving him, and of course they didn’t. But then, his naive view of meddling scientism has nothing to do with what the godless and Dawkins are talking about. We’re just saying that love is a natural property between human beings, no deity required. I would just ask him a few questions.

Is he, Deepak Chopra, a human being? Is he real?

Was his mother a human being? Was she real?

Can human beings feel love for one another here in the real world?

The answers, I would hope, would all be “yes” (although with a wacked-out flake like Chopra, one can never tell; he might answer “Unicorns,” “Vibrations,” and “Quantum” to the questions, but at least then I’ll have cause to ask that he be committed.) Then I would say that all people like Dawkins are saying is that we’re dealing with natural phenomena between natural agents in the natural world, so yes, we can observe it, test it, measure it, and believe it…no problem. Dawkins and I are most definitely not denying the existence of love, nor are we advancing this strange idea that other properties of the mind, like consciousness, do not exist.

It’s a bad argument when you have to mischaracterize your opponents that grossly to make a point.

I would also turn his worries around. Do you think a mother’s love and consciousness and art need to be validated by religion? Religion has nothing to do with those experiences; it offers nothing but unfounded, contradictory assertions that it contributes; it adds nothing to our understanding of mind or love or art. All of his complaints can be reversed right back at the superstitious nonsense of religion with far more accuracy than they can be applied to science.

Not that any of this will make the slightest impression on that turnip. He’ll just go on making stuff up, selling lots of goofy books, and appearing on television. And, of course, he’ll go on to inflict on us another vacuous cavil against a book he doesn’t comprehend.

The Koufaxes are much more respectable

I see that Phil and I are going to be in competition: we’ve both been nominated in the new Best Science Blog category of the Weblog Awards. This is one of those awards I don’t quite get: apparently, the organizers will just choose a subset of the nominated blogs in some way or another, and I seem to recall that voting is weird, too—you get to vote once a day in each category. It’s also run by a very conservative group blog that I’ve only interacted with because there is a loud-mouthed putz of a creationist in the group…I will be very surprised if a certain cranky liberal evolutionist gets his name pulled out of that hat.

The voice of David Paszkiewicz

Remember that fundie history teacher who was caught on tape? One of the recordings is now online. I haven’t listened to the whole thing—the quality is terrible, and it’s a typical high school classroom that is in a noisy uproar—but you do hear him nattering on about Satan and the Bible and sin and so forth; apparently, the “Scriptures aren’t religion, they are the foundation of all of the world’s major religions”, and he claims evolution isn’t science.

I’m not sure what he’s teaching.

Dave, an audio engineer, has provided an amazingly cleaned-up version of the recording. Listen to that one.

John G. West is just so concerned about the discourse

John G. West of the Discovery Institute wants all you conservatives to know that the Debate Over Evolution Not Going Away, and that you need to join up with his side and question “Darwinism”, because of all those intolerant nasty dogmatists who want to suppress the truth. You know, people like me.

Biology professor P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has demanded “the public firing and humiliation of some teachers” who express their doubts about Darwin. He further says, “It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots.”

Deja vu, man, deja vu.

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I keep being told what I believe

A lot of people don’t know what atheists are, but they’re sure certain about defining them, and somehow, we’re always so BAD. Ophelia finds a doozy of a redefinition of atheism, but I can top it: Steve Cornell, a pastor at Millersville Bible Church, makes a long list of the sins of the atheist. In it, he nestles himself securely in the Christian tradition of babbling assertively about subjects in which he is completely and manifestly ignorant, but will sell well to his equally ignorant flock. It’s the usual stuff about how it takes more faith to believe in the absence of god, atheists are amoral, they reject “historical proof” (i.e., the Bible), yadda yadda yadda.

Read it for the entertainment value, but I’m afraid I just can’t get motivated to bother to rip it up.

(via Susan Cogan)

The eye as a contingent, diverse, complex product of evolutionary processes

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Ian Musgrave has just posted an excellent article on the poor design of the vertebrate eye compared to the cephalopod eye; it’s very thorough, and explains how the clumsy organization of the eye clearly indicates that it is the product of an evolutionary process rather than of any kind of intelligent design. A while back, Russ Fernald of Stanford University published a fine review of eye evolution that summarizes another part of the evolution argument: it’s not just that the eye has awkward ‘design’ features that are best explained by contingent and developmental processes, but that the diversity of eyes found in the animal kingdom share deep elements that link them together as the product of common descent. If all we had to go on was suboptimal design, one could argue for an Incompetent Designer who slapped together various eyes in different ways as an exercise in whimsy (strangely enough, though, this is not the kind of designer IDists want to propose)…but the diversity we do see reveals a notable historical pattern of constraint.

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