It’s an appropriate way to start a Monday morning, I think, with a small collection of really badly written articles. It can only go upwards from here!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It’s an appropriate way to start a Monday morning, I think, with a small collection of really badly written articles. It can only go upwards from here!
Intelligent Design
Neil deGrasse Tyson led a debate on whether the universe is a simulation. He took the affirmative side. He agrees that there’s no way to prove it one way or the other, but he claims that the probability that we may be part of a simulation “may be very high”. Aargh. Facepalm.
Uh-oh. I’ve disappointed David Klinghoffer. I should probably put that on my CV.
You see, the other day he praised a fellow named Tom Gilson for a post in which he provided a succinct summary of Intelligent Design creationism, and I took that summary apart, point by point. You might think, perhaps Klinghoffer finds fault with my analysis? He doesn’t provide any rebuttals. Did I get something wrong in using Gilson’s definition of ID? Nope, he doesn’t say…that would be hard to do anyway, since Klinghoffer praised it as exactly accurate!
, exclamation point and all. Even in his title he declares that Tom Gilson Nails It
.
So what’s his complaint? That I corrected the wrong person.
That paper that cited the Creator for designing the hand has been retracted. The authors say it was a translation error — that they assumed that “Creator” was synonymous with “nature” in English, and apparently, they weren’t aware of the potential for willful misinterpretation of the word “design” in the creationist community. I can sort of accept that, except, of course, that they managed to write an entire complex technical paper on the physiology and anatomy of the hand in fluent English. I wouldn’t have expected a retraction, though, but only a revision of an unfortunate mistake.
Except now it has become a different story: Science Journal Publishes Creationist Paper, Science Community Flips Out. Wait, who’s flipping out? It wasn’t a creationist paper, but an ordinary technical paper that leapt to an inappropriate conclusion. I think it was entirely reasonable for scientists to be irritated by some sloppy editing that would be abused by creationist propagandists. But no — this is now the tale of deranged atheist scientists getting unwarrantedly upset about a casual mention of a god in a science paper.
Even more amusingly, I am now the villain.
Uncommon Descent linked to my criticisms of the Biology of the Baroque
, Intelligent Design creationism’s latest misconception, that biologists believe every detail of every organism is the product of natural selection…but they didn’t bother to quote any of my criticisms. It’s weird. They could have quoted the gist of my complaint:
So evolution should produce only the biological equivalent of sterile gray Soviet architecture, and if you find something that is the equivalent of a Baroque church, then evolution is refuted. This entire argument is built around what Michael Denton calls the fundamental assumption of Darwinism…that all novelties are adaptive. To which biologists around the world can only say, “Fu…wha?” in total confusion. That is not one of our assumptions at all. Novelties are going to arise as a product of chance mutation; if they are not maladaptive (and sometimes even if they are), they can spread through a population by chance-driven processes like drift. And some elaborate fripperies can acquire a selective advantage, like that example of Soviet architecture, the peacock’s tail, which this video actually uses as an example of non-adaptive order.
Larry Moran has heard the words of Michael Denton, and has come away with a creationist interpretation of structuralism. I have to explain to Larry that Denton, as you might expect of a creationist, is distorting the whole idea. Here’s the Denton/Intelligent Design creationism version of structuralist theory.
As Denton says, the basic idea is that the form (structure) of modern organisms is a property of the laws of physics and chemistry and not something that evolution discovered. He would argue that if you replay the tape of life you will always get species that look pretty much like the species we see today because the basic forms (Baupläne) are the inevitable consequences of the underlying physics.
Say what? Look, I’m a developmental biologist; I was baptized in the Stygian stream of structuralism by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, I reacted and diffused with Alan Turing, I danced disco by the light of the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, and no, that is not the structuralism I have studied. There is a grain of truth to it, in that structuralism does imply that there are physical/chemical constraints on form, but only the extremists would suggest that that means life on Mars would evolve to look like life on earth. That overlooks the fact that structuralists are thoroughly familiar with the diversity of life on this one planet, and since those physical laws can generate both mushrooms and monkeys, it’s clear that there is some room for exploration of form.
Aww, what sad news. Casey Luskin is leaving the Discovery Institute. Hilariously, he declares victory as he fades away, and cites two instances that he claims have finally validated intelligent design creationism.
The first is that the ENCODE proved that the genome is nearly entirely functional, exactly as ID predicted and against the expectations of those Darwinists. Unfortunately for him, that is not the case, and the ENCODE propagandists relied entirely on a peculiar and narrow definition of function that did not match any kind of function the creationists might have imagined.
The second is — hang on to your hats — epigenetics. Didn’t I just post something about epigenetics? Why, yes I did. I also posted something somewhat lengthy about it. It seems to be a common misconception among creationists.
Interestingly, these were also two of the obsessions of another creationist, Perry Marshall. He didn’t understand those concepts, either.
I think it’s quite appropriate that Luskin should vanish in a puff of misconceptions and ignorance. It’s been his stock in trade all along, after all.
The Discovery Institute is working hard to prove that the Intelligent Design creationism movement isn’t dead. So, they have a post listing all their great accomplishments since the Dover decision. There have been lawsuits and movies!
The cause of academic freedom has also seen significant victories. In one case, as we reported here, “[T]he University of Kentucky paid $125,000 to settle a lawsuit by astronomer Martin Gaskell who was wrongfully denied employment because he was perceived to be skeptical towards Darwinian evolution.” Two other Darwin skeptics received settlements for discrimination. Applied Mathematics Letters retracted mathematician Granville Sewell’s article critical of neo-Darwinism; a lawsuit followed, leading to a public apology and $10,000 payment to Sewell. After the California Science Center (CSC) cancelled the showing of an intelligent design film, Darwin’s Dilemma, the American Freedom Alliance sued. The CSC paid $110,000 to avoid going to trial over the evidence that they discriminated. And the film Expelled drew over 1.1 million viewers to movie theaters to learn about discrimination against scientific dissenters from Darwinism.
They have lawyers! And people pay money to settle their nuisance suits! What a triumph for Intelligent Design science creationism.
They also have people writing books, and can scrape up a few people to give them positive reviews.
Public outreach on intelligent design is also doing very well post-Dover. In 2009, Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell, which received praise from famed atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who named it “Book of the Year” in the respected Times Literary Supplement of London.
In 2013, Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt which made the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. That book was endorsed by scientists including Harvard geneticist George Church and Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin. UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall gave Darwin’s Doubt a serious review in the top journal Science and participated in a radio debate with Meyer.
I’ve read both of Meyer’s books; they are delusional exercises by a long-winded narcissist. It’s lovely for them that Thomas Nagel liked it, but then Nagel’s gone full loopy creationist. McMenamin is a crank. They keep touting the fact that it was reviewed in Science, but they never tell you what the review said. Hint: it’s not a positive review.
Finally and most importantly, science supporting ID continues to move forward. Several areas of research have seen groundbreaking progress, including work by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (using computer models to test Darwinian evolution) and Biologic Institute (exploring evidence for ID in biology). To date, there are more than eighty peer-reviewed articles supportive of intelligent design, with over fifty of them published post-Dover.
Virtually none of this “work” is getting published in serious science journals; it’s all going into cheesy dumpsters of bad science like the Journal of Cosmology, or their own house organ, Bio-Complexity. Eighty articles is nothing, especially when you are claiming to be founding a whole new discipline and approach to analysis. Eighty articles, when you’ve got a whole propaganda mill dedicated to pushing your ideas, is an abysmal failure.
Also, when you look closely at their list of ID creationism science articles, they are exposed as puff pieces, empty musings, and noise published by hacks.
But the Discovery Institute always looks on the bright side.
Given how quickly ID scholarship is moving forward in so many areas — science, public policy, and culture — we can only anticipate how much stronger ID will be twenty years after Dover.
Have you ever read The Wedge Document? In the late 1990s, the Discovery Institute proposed to get 100 academic articles published in the scientific literature. Now, a decade and a half later, they are bragging about 80…and most of them are transparently garbage.
Nope, sorry guys, “Intelligent Design” is a spent force. The only reason it’s still coasting along is because the evangelical/fundamentalist creationists still like to use it as a pseudo-secular cover when proposing their laws, to get around that pesky separation of church and state thing. But even there, the real blow that the Dover trial dealt to them was in exposing that ID creationism was terrible at providing that excuse. Barbara Forrest smacked ’em hard.
Creationism is still around and still causing trouble, but the success story there is old school young earth creationism, and that’s not a good thing for anyone. Still, it must hurt the fellows at the Discovery Institute when they look at Answers in Genesis and see that all their sneaky dissembling was for nothing.
I got a begging email from our good friends at the Center for Science & Culture. They’re going to have to work a lot harder to persuade me.
Dear PZ:
Wait. Dear PZ? I’m having a tough time imagining any of those bozos addressing me as dear. But let us continue.
Intelligent design is a common sense idea. Research has shown that children intuitively recognize design in the world around them. You and I make design inferences every day. It has taken a long time for the scientific community to catch up with the kids. But that day is coming.
Intuitive and “common sense” assumptions are often wrong. You might enjoy these misconceptions children have about physics, for instance. I look forward to their new slogan: Intelligent Design: so simple, only a child would believe it
. Except that it’s insulting to children.
The rest of the letter is all about the crap science they’ve been dumping on the public this year, and threatening to publish more.
For over 19 years, the Research & Scholarship Initiative of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture (CSC) has worked to build the scientific case for design and to winsomely communicate their research and scholarship to a broad audience.
Heh. This is the first time I’ve every seen the adverb “winsomely” applied to what the creationists do. I had to go to the Evolution News website to see an example of their winsome articles. Here’s one: Rubik’s Cube Is a Hand-Sized Illustration of Intelligent Design.
For those interested in explaining ID to people without a lot of memory work, the Rubik’s Cube can be a useful instructional aid. You don’t have to master the art of solving it. Save your sanity; just buy two cubes, and don’t touch the solved one. Lock it into a plastic case if you have to, so that you won’t have to try all 43 quintillion combinations in front of your audience. Or, rent a kid who can fix it in a few seconds.
Explain that the cube is a search problem. Take the scrambled one, and show how you want to get from that one to the solved one. You need a search algorithm. Which approach is more likely to find the solution — intelligent causes or unguided causes? The answer is obvious, but go ahead; rub it in. A robot randomly moving the colors around could conceivably hit on the solution by chance in short order with sheer dumb luck (1 chance in 43 x 1018), but even if it did, it would most likely keep rotating the colors right back out of order again, not caring a dime. It would take an intelligent agent to recognize the solution and stop the robot when it gets the solution by chance.
More likely, it would take a long, long time. Trying all 43 x 1018 combinations at 1 per second would take 1.3 trillion years. The robot would have a 50-50 chance of getting the solution in half that time, but it would already vastly exceed the time available (about forty times the age of the universe). If a secular materialist counters that there could be trillions of robots with trillions of cubes working simultaneously throughout the cosmos, ask what the chance is of getting any two winners on the same planet at the same place and time. The one concession blocks the other. And what in the materialist’s unguided universe is going to stop any robot when it succeeds? The vast majority will never succeed during the age of the universe.
Now rub it in. It would vastly exceed the age of the known universe for a robot to solve the cube by sheer dumb luck. How fast can an intelligent cause solve it? 4.904 seconds. That’s the power of intelligent causes over unguided causes.
Now really, really rub it in. The Rubik’s cube is simple compared to a protein. Imagine solving a cube with 20 colors and 100 sides. Then imagine solving hundreds of different such cubes, each with its own solution, simultaneously in the same place at the same time. If the audience doesn’t run outside screaming, you didn’t speak slowly enough.
Oh, man. So much wrong.
One problem with ID’s argument is that they are committed to the fallacy of a specified target for an evolutionary search. So the “goal” of evolution is to produce a human being, and given the 3+ billion years of chance and variation, and the multitude of different forms produced, I’ll agree: the likelihood of our specific form arising from a sea of single-celled organisms is extremely unlikely. But evolution doesn’t care; it doesn’t have a goal; it spawns endless different forms, so we get elephants and algae at the same time that we get, in one brief and fleeting moment of geological time, anthropoids.
One problem with their Rubik’s Cube example is that it does have a known goal: you’re supposed to get each side to a different solid color. Their single enshrined cube set to a single specific solution is a good example of the poverty of Intelligent Design creationism.
If I were to use Rubik’s Cube as a demonstration of how evolution works, I’d have to do something very different. We have about 20,000 genes, so I’d have to by 20,000 Rubik’s Cubes (not on a professor’s salary), and I’d set each one to a different arrangement. Much of it would be chance, but for some, I’d make a desultory effort. Can I get this one to display mostly green squares on one side? On this one I want three adjacent squares to be red. Another one has alternating yellow squares on one face. You get the idea — I want diversity, and I don’t have to work as hard or as narrowly to get it. I’d also just stroll through the house, tripping over these stupid Rubik’s Cubes everywhere, and occasionally twisting one.
That’s closer to evolution than the DI’s vision.
They’re always making this mistake of assuming the only correct solution is one pre-specified result. I really want to play poker with them: I’d tell them first that the goal of the game is get a Royal Flush, and they’d fold at every hand and I’d clean up with every feeble deal.
One other problem with their analogy is that they’re comparing the cube to the wrong thing. The more natural comparison is not to evolution, but to protein folding. Here’s this chain of amino acids, and you have to twist it into a specific conformation that will function…why, the numbers say this is nearly impossible! And math doesn’t lie!
Here’s a 1993 paper by Fraenkel, Complexity of Protein Folding, that says this.
It is believed that the native folded three-dimensional conformation of a protein is its lowest free energy state, or one of its lowest. It is shown here that both a two- and three-dimensional mathematical model describing the folding process as a free energy minimization problem is NP-hard. This means that the problem belongs to a large set of computational problems, assumed to be very hard (“conditionally intractable”). Some of the possible ramifications of this result are speculated upon.
All the mathematicians and computer scientists out there will recognize that word, NP-hard. This represents a computationally very difficult problem that isn’t easily solved (a Rubik’s Cube is not NP-hard, I don’t think–there are relatively simple algorithms that can solve it, although getting an optimal, minimum-number-of-moves solution might be harder — I haven’t been following the math.) Fraenkel explains the problem in words that will bring joy to the heart of every IDiot, as long as they don’t read the rest.
Each amino acid in a protein can adopt, on average, eight different conformations (Privalov, 1979). A relatively small protein, consisting of 100 amino acids, can thus potentially assume 8100 conformations.
Whoa — 8100 conformations is a much bigger number than 43 x 1018 combinations of the Rubik’s Cube that so impressed the Discovery Institute. I guess we’re done here. It’s impossible for any of my proteins to fold into a functional shape before the heat death of the universe, therefore there must be trillions of invisible tiny angels flitting about winsomely in my body, lovingly crafting DNA Polymerase II for me, cunningly assembling actin monomers into fibers, shuttling electrons about in my mitochondria with focused attention to every detail. I eagerly await the moment when the Discovery Institute lifts those 2 sentences from Fraenkel in their promotional literature.
I assume they’ll conveniently ignore the existence of the next two sentences.
Yet nature attains the native conformation in about 1 sec. (Note that the claim that nature assumes the global minimum free energy conformation in 1 sec is not equivalent to saying that it explores all the 8100 potential conformations in 1 sec!)
So protein folding is a much more difficult problem than solving a Rubik’s cube. The DI is dazzled by a human solving the cube in under 5 seconds, and thinks this demonstrates the superiority of intelligence over other natural causes. Yet the much more difficult problem is solved by the cell in under a second.
Point to physics, chemistry, and biology. Magic intelligence loses again.
Hey, do you think the writers at the Center for Science & Culture have a joke dictionary that defines “winsomely” as “stupidly”? That would make sense.
We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses.
I’m at Skepticon, and while waiting for registration to open this morning, I thought I’d peek in at the Discovery Institute, and their Evolution News & Views site. So much entertainingly idiotic stupidity is on display.
