Tangled Bank, etc.

The Tangled Bank

I haven’t been doing much today—I’m afraid I’ve got some bug that had me wrestling with my digestive tract all day yesterday (bad news: it won), sweating and freezing all night, and now today I’m just an exhausted lump. Fortunately, there’s lots of other stuff to read.

Tangled Bank is up at Kete Were. That’ll keep you busy for a while.

Then we’ve got a Teaching Carnival and a Carnival of Education, a Carnival of the Liberals, and a History Carnival. The Skeptics’ Circle is looking for submissions, as is I and the Bird.

I’m going to go huddle in my bed for a while now.

The image of scientists

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Carl Zimmer reviews A Flock of Dodos, and also brings up that worrisome issue, the image of scientists in this country. Cosmic Variance is talking about image, too. Scientists get called “inarticulate”, “high-handed”, “stiff” and “arrogant”. “Arrogant” is terribly unfair as a criticism—a bit of arrogance is a virtue, and is exactly what you need in someone who is going to stick his neck out…and the creationists from Gish to Behe have possessed a superabundance of arrogance themselves.

As for inarticulate, that’s not quite right either. Listen to a talk by a scientist, and while there are many who are wooden, there are also many who are enthusiastic and passionate and funny. I’ve heard Gould and Crick and JZ Young and Ted Bullock and Dawkins and Mike Land talk, and they were terrific; a good science talk is a good story with it’s own rhythms and rules. The problem is that if you put those same speakers in front of a lay audience, the listeners don’t know the language, and the speaker is deprived of a large chunk of their vocabulary. They can charge ahead and speak over the audience and get accused of arrogance, or try to gear down and struggle to explain basic words and concepts that they usually invoke simply by naming, and then they get accused of being inarticulate. Teaching undergraduates is helpful practice, but the majority of our hot, well-known scientists are famous for their research, and typically have light teaching loads. Those of us who do invest a lot of time in explaining things to freshman don’t often have the research clout to warrant the popular speaking invitations.

I sure don’t know where the answer lies. I do know that being a good communicator to people other than your peers or students has just about zero influence on promotion and tenure for scientists. Zimmer mentions the blank stare he got from scientists when ID was brought up, and there’s a good reason for that: it just isn’t an important focus for most of us.

Aggie gossip

I feel like Wonkette: a reader sent along a bit of personal commentary about Deutsch, from someone who knew him at Texas A&M. It’s gossip, nothing more, so take it or leave it.

Well, of course, the Batt [the Aggie school paper, The Battalion] is not the Times, so there was nothing in
today’s issue. However — you will love this! talk about your “Aggie
Network”… — sitting across the hall from me even as I write is a
former editor of said rag.

According to XXXXX this guy “gives Republicans a bad name”. A
friend of hers used to date him. XXXXX called him “a stereotype
Young Republican”, and described him as very over the top; very
“histrionic” in all his reactions. He objected once to a joke told
by a female coworker at the Batt; his reaction was “if you weren’t a
girl, I would smash your face in”.

XXXXX also knows the Nick Anthis mentioned in the article. He is a
Rhodes scholar who also used to work on the Batt. She said she was
not surprised that he would be the one to ferret out this information.

XXXXX can’t believe this. She was invited to, but did not attend,
the Deutsch’s graduation party, which he apparently threw for
himself. She started an email to the current Batt editor as I left
her office.

George Deutsch may have been a jerk, but he was loyal to George W. Bush. That’s got to count for something, right?

(I won’t post just any random scurrilous factoid sent to me, but in this case I know the source and consider it reliable.)

An important question answered

A while back, I asked if Watterson ever did squid. I was informed by Philip Johnson (no, not that Phillip Johnson—this is the one who has not dedicated the declining years of his life to stupidity and evil) that a marvelous thing exists…The Calvin and Hobbes searchable database. You can search an archive of Calvin & Hobbes cartoons by keyword! Sometimes I do love the internets.

He does reference squid a few times (Calvin has a squid eyeball sandwich one day, for instance), but he doesn’t draw them. There are two cartoons with Calvin as an octopus, though.

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Keep your eyes on Ohio today

There could be some new developments. They are reviewing the Intelligent Design creationism nonsense that was inoculated into their curricula a few years ago, and all signs indicate that they are planning to cut the infection out.

A majority of members on the Board of Education of Ohio, the first state to single out evolution for “critical analysis” in science classes more than three years ago, are expected on Tuesday to challenge a model biology lesson plan they consider an excuse to teach the tenets of the disputed theory of intelligent design.

A reversal in Ohio would be the most significant in a series of developments signaling a sea change across the country against intelligent design — which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone — since a federal judge’s ruling in December that teaching the theory in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

The article mentions the usual polls that say the uninformed public favor teaching creationism, but is also notable for including the scathing opinions of scientists and educators.

Besides the Dover decision, the disclosure in December of documents detailing internal discussions of the lesson plan helped revive debate here. Obtained by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a group considering a suit on the plan, the documents show that department scientists and outside experts condemned the lesson as “a lie,” “crackpot,” “religious,” “creationism” and “an insult to science.”

Asked whether the lesson connects skills to the real world, an external reviewer wrote: “Not the real scientific world. The real religious world, yes, the real world based on faith, yes, the real world of fringe thinking, yes!”

Patricia Princehouse, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science who has led the charge against the lesson plan, said, “Basically critical analysis is intelligent design relabeled, just as intelligent design was creationism relabeled.”

Let’s look forward to seeing this new label tossed in the trash bin.

Poor Mikey spent the day under his bed

Michael Behe wasn’t too happy yesterday.

One man who says he isn’t planning to join in the fun on Darwin Day is Michael Behe, the 54-year-old author of “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,” a critique whose 10th anniversary edition will be published in March by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division. Molecular biology is “irreducibly complex,” confounding Darwinism, according to the author.

Of course, the author is wrong. IC is no problem for evolution at all.

“I probably won’t attend” any Darwin Day event anywhere, says Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. “It’s not simply meant to celebrate science or Darwin. It’s an in-your-face exhibition, saying, ‘Look what we have on our side, and you guys who aren’t with us are a bunch of dopes.'”

One more thing he got wrong: it was a celebration of science and Darwin. The one I attended was all about the science.

He was right, though, that the ID crowd is “a bunch of dopes.” I’ve got to give him credit for that.

Mangling science and history to the benefit of religion

Chris Clarke brought this strangely twisted article to my attention. It starts out just fine, pointing out that the Intelligent Design assault on science is based on nothing but incredulity, and has the sweeping goal of destroying naturalism—not just one theory in biology, but the whole scientific shebang. The author is against all that, which is good…thanks, Cynthia, we appreciate your support. Now if only she’d just ended it there at the two-thirds mark.

The last third is peculiar. She seems to be less interested in strong science than in strengthening religion, and the reason she’s arguing against ID is purely on the Augustinian principle that backing foolish statements about the natural world makes the religious look foolish.

A more effective way to bolster religious belief than attacking Darwin is to remember that religion addresses questions that are completely beyond the range of science. The meaning of life, the nature of good conduct, the nature of the human soul: Science is not set up to deal with any of these.

Is religion?

Science isn’t set up to deal with the Great Ju-Ju, the lares and penates, or Atlantean spirit-guides, either—because they don’t exist. The religious are free to invent non-existent phenomena all they want, but saying that science doesn’t deal in imaginary nonsense isn’t exactly a flaw.

As for the nature of good conduct, we don’t need religion to support that idea, and I see no reason why non-supernatural processes require metaphysical rationalizations.

This is why religion remains so potent — and, I think, so positive — a force in modern America. It alone provides answers to the hardest questions we all face. In a health crisis, we want help from a doctor who practices medicine in a completely rational and scientific manner. But our prayers that this medicine helps go to a supernatural being, not to the doctor.

Urk. That casual equation of medicine with prayer is simply creepy. In a health crisis, we need help from a doctor; prayer is superfluous and useless. Religion remains potent because so many refuse to acknowledge its impotence.

The essay is about to hit bottom. The author decides to compare Darwin to that other fellow who shares a birthday with him, and starts praising Lincoln’s spirituality.

Lincoln could never have accomplished the great tasks before him, nor inspired others to stay the course through so many defeats, disappointment and death, without recourse to ideas imbued with the deepest spirituality. Whether he declared that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom” or called on his fellow Northerners to press on to victory “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” he clearly saw the unique wisdom and power embodied in the great truths of religion — wisdom certainly different from scientific wisdom, but equally certainly, just as valuable.

This, most of us would agree, is religion at its best: providing spiritual comfort, psychological strength, moral direction and righteous inspiration.

In this realm, evolution — wonderful job that it does in explaining the natural world — cannot compete with religion. In its own “ballpark,” religion, as Lincoln knew, wins every time. It’s only when it strays into the other guy’s stadium that it sets itself up for inevitable loss and disappointment.

Uh-oh. Somebody needs to look up the actual beliefs of Lincoln, rather than just making them up as she goes along.

Lincoln was a deist and freethinker. He paid token deference to religion because he was well aware that he could not win office as a man who rejected Christianity. That puts that last paragraph in a different light: he knew that religion’s “ballpark” was bigotry and intolerance, and that he had to avoid challenging it.

It’s the 21st century. I think it’s about time we started challenging.