I can only read Plantinga for the lulz

In a review of a new book by Alvin Plantinga, Christopher Tollefsen claims that Plantinga, “one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries”, has “systematically dismantled…the claims of the new atheists”. I think we can take that about as seriously as his assessment of Crazy Alvin’s status as a philosopher.

I have zero interest in Plantinga’s “philosophy” — what I’ve read of it convinces me that it’s nothing but deranged Christian apologetics gussied up in academic dress, and the words of Plantinga himself pretty much have persuaded me that I couldn’t address him without frequent invocations of the frolics of shithouse rats. But I am interested in how these gyring rodents see the New Atheists — it’s always such an easy confirmation that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

The claim of the new atheists is that Darwin’s “Dangerous idea,” as Dennett calls it, proves that there is no divine agency responsible for the world. As Dennett explains, “an impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.” But the claims of Darwin show no such thing: even if Darwinism accurately identifies the mechanism by which evolution has occurred, Plantinga notes, “It is perfectly possible that the process of natural selection has been guided and superintended by God, and that it could not have produced our world without that guidance.”

The emphasis is there in the review; the first sentence just sings with ignorance. Here they are, carping at those New Atheists, and the first thing they say about them is blatantly false: no New Atheist claims to have a disproof of any god. We’re extremely forthright about saying it, too: Richard Dawkins explicitly laid out a scale of belief in The God Delusion, and it seems that every ferocious critic of that book never bothered to read it, because they were all stunned when Dawkins repeated the same thing on television: we don’t have absolute certainty about the nonexistence of a deity. We’re very confident that you might as well go on about your life as if gods don’t exist, but that’s about it.

Plantinga’s reservations at the end of that paragraph are also very silly. Evolution is the mechanism by which species have been shaped throughout the history of the world, and that is a fact; we can concede that there are other mechanisms besides natural selection (and in fact, we study them), and that one possibility, offered so far without evidence, is that intelligent entities have manipulated our ancestors. We don’t think it’s likely or necessary, but OK, it’s possible that one could find evidence supporting such a scenario.

As for Plantinga’s assertion that intelligence was required to create the diversity of life we have, well, please Alvin, at least wipe your filthy feet before spasming out on the carpet.

But there are things that I, as a New Atheist, am certain about, even if I remain open to the possibility of evolutionary interventionists of an undefined nature.

I am certain that “god” is a useless term. It’s utterly incoherent; some people babble about the god of the Christian Bible, which is an anthropomorphic being with vast magic powers and the emotional stability of an 8-year-old on meth. Others talk about an all-pervasive force in the universe, or use meaningless phrases like “the ground state of all being”, or chatter about a reified emotion like “love”. The really annoying thing about discussions with these people is that they’ll cheerfully switch definitions on you in mid-stream. Getting battered because the whole concept of an omnipotent being existing in the form of an Iron Age patriarch in the sky is silly? No problem! Just announce that god is everywhere and in you and that god is love. Trying hard to justify your regressive social policies using an amorphous principle like love, and finding the atheists turning the whole principle of benignity back on you? No problem! Just announce that god so loved us that he became a man, and if you’re opponents reject that concept, they’ll be thrown into Hell by God the Judge.

Plantinga is an excellent example of this theological muddle. On the one hand, he wants to argue for a cosmos-spanning Mind; on the other, a bigoted narrow being with a chosen race and a preferred position for sexual intercourse, who wants to be cosseted and praised for all eternity. Pick a clear definition for god, and be consistent about it, please. And then persuade all the other theologians that your definition is the correct one. Then come argue with the atheists when you know what the hell you’re talking about.

I am certain that theists have no credible evidence for their claims. Oh, sure, they can say their holy book says so, which is a kind of weak evidence; they can recite anecdotes; they can point to people who believe. But that’s about it, and it’s not adequate. I want to see independently verifiable empirical evidence that can be assessed independently of one’s sociocultural background; I want to see the stuff that would convince a Christian that Islam is an accurate description of the universe, or vice versa, and that would persuade a scientist that here’s some preliminary support for a phenomenon that is worth pursuing. Theologians don’t have that. They’ve never had that.

Religions have grown most often by the sword, or by fostering fear and emotional dependency, or by hijacking secular institutions and forcing beliefs on others, but they never expand by right of reason. Why isn’t a specific god-belief a universal, like mathematics or physics? Because unlike math or physics, religion doesn’t actually deliver on its promises. The power of religion has always been in psychological manipulation of the human mind, empowering a priesthood at the expense of genuine human advancement and understanding.

I am certain that evolution occurred. The evidence is in; the process occurred and is occurring, there are no known barriers to natural processes producing modern life from proto-life/chemistry over the course of 3.8 billion years, and all the evidence we do have shows modern forms being incrementally modified versions of earlier forms. We don’t know all the details, of course, and just maybe someone somewhere could discover a real hurdle that could not have been overcome without intelligent aid, but I know for a fact that no creationist has ever come up with a defensible objection, and that nearly all the creationists who pontificate so ponderously on the impossibility of biology, Plantinga among them, always turn out to be profoundly ignorant of the science. There’s a good inverse correlation between knowledge of biology and certainty that evolution can’t work.

So Plantinga-style arguments, that evolution cannot occur without intelligent guidance, therefore god, leave me cold. They begin with a false premise, easily refuted by the evidence, and therefore the credibility of their entire line of reasoning collapses. This true of all of the Intelligent Design creationism arguments that rest on showing natural selection (it’s the only mechanism they’ve heard of, sadly) doesn’t work, therefore you have to accept the only other alternative they offer, which is godly intervention. Not only is it bad science, it’s bad logic.

Unfortunately for them, the alternative to taking potshots at an explanation that works is to provide specific positive evidence for design, and they can’t do that. For instance, they could say, “My designer enhanced human brain performance by introducing a specific allele of microcephalin into select populations 37,000 years ago”, but then they’d have to face those awkward, demanding questions from scientists: “How do you know? What’s your evidence? Why couldn’t natural mechanisms of genetic variance have produced that specific allele?” And we know they can’t cope with those questions, because their only reason for believing that is that they wish it were so.

That’s all Plantinga has got: a peculiar historical myth-figure that he can’t define without making his whole enterprise look ridiculous, a total lack of reasonable objective evidence to support his myth, and a reliance on criticizing a science he doesn’t understand in the hope that if he stirs up enough doubt, people will cling to his myth rather than all the other myths swirling about in the confusion of his own creation. It’s pathetic. And this is from “one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries”? How sad that would be for philosophy, if it were true.

Carnival of Evolution #48: The Icelandic Saga!

At last! Here is the much delayed Carnival of Evolution 48!

I must begin by apologizing for my tardiness, especially since John Wilkins managed to post the last one on time. I was traveling in the 2½ weeks preceding the deadline for CoE, and the combination of spotty internet access, extreme jetlag (British Columbia to Germany to Iceland, where the sun hovered around the horizon all night long, just messed me up), and of course, the incredible distractions of exotic foreign lands, meant that I was disgracefully dilatory in putting it all together.

To reward your patience (or punish you all for allowing me to do this carnival), I thought I’d sprinkle the listing with some of my travel photos. Iceland is a lovely place; it’s also a strange place to consider evolution, in a land that’s only about 60 million years old and that is lacking in large animals (other than humans and their livestock), and mainly seems to be a place for rocks, lichens, mosses, fish, and small insects, as well as the busy bacteria…so in a sense it’s a place where we get back to the roots of evolution. Anyway, I’m just splattering the text with my photos; ignore them or get motivated to visit this gorgeous place.

On to the linkfest!

[Read more…]

It never ends — Bemidji is afflicted with the toxin of creationism

So this past weekend, we had the Midwest Science of Origins conference here in Morris, Minnesota. At precisely the same time, about 190 miles north-north-east of us, in Bemidji, Minnesota, a team of lying clowns from the Institute for Creation Research were repeating the same bullshit that provoked our students to organize our conference. I hope the Bemidji State biology faculty were paying attention, and that their students are right now planning some remedial education for the community; I’d be happy to help if they want to contact me.

It was a seminar titled “Rebuilding the Foundation: Demolishing the Pillars of Evolution”, and it was held in Bemidji High School. How embarrassing for Bemidji. How typical of creationists, though.

The seminar, consisting of six hour-long presentations, was presented by the Institute of Creation Research out of Texas and led by John Morris and Nathaniel Jeanson.

This is just weird, but they’re always doing it, and I don’t get it. It was the same thing last year here in Morris; Terry Mortenson of AiG showed up and did these back-to-back lectures, while refusing to answer questions (he claimed to have a sore throat…which didn’t interfere with 7 hour long lectures).

I see we missed an opportunity. We should have just told Neil Shubin to come here and spend all day talking. Unfortunately, when you’re talking science, it’s actually hard work and you have to back up everything with evidence and demonstrate some rigor and care; when you’re a creationist, it’s easier because all you have to do is make stuff up non-stop.

You might be wondering who these two guys are.

Morris has a doctorate of geological engineering and has led 13 expeditions to Mt. Ararat in search of Noah’s ark. Jeanson has a Ph.D. in cell and development biology from Harvard Medical School.

First, when your most notable contribution to “science” is haring off to chase down myths, you ought to be laughed off the stage. Morris is a deluded charlatan.

And Jeanson…he’s an embarrassment to Harvard. I’ve described Jeanson’s competence before — he’s a guy with an undergraduate degree in bioinformatics, who lectures creationists on genomics, who knew nothing about how the chimpanzee genome sequence was acquired or how it compared to the human sequence.

Students generally are taught evolution theory in early high school, Cairns [Steve Cairns is the superintendent of schools!] said.

“But it is expressed as a fact,” Penni Cairns said. She said students raised on Creationism concepts can be confused and frustrated with evolution theory teachings because their beliefs are shot down by teachers following educational guidelines.

Yes, I’m sure that is frustrating to have your superstitions constantly shot down by reality.

“There are so many unexplained aspects of evolution, such as the missing links,” he said.

In Morris’ morning session, “The Fossil Record: A Problem for Evolution,” he showed images of fossils that mirrored the images of the animals that exist today: A 200-million-year-old crocodile is still a crocodile, a 300-million-year-old dragonfly is still a dragonfly, a 65-million-year-old bat is still a bat.

Cairns keeps trumpeting his ignorance in this article. Why is he superintendent of schools again?

Harun Yahya also makes this argument — it’s about the only thing he says over and over again. Let’s show a picture of a fossil and a contemporary organism to someone who wouldn’t know a femur from a cercal bristle, and they’ll happily say that they look exactly the same. Meanwhile, someone who actually knows some systematics and anatomy will look at the 200-million-year-old crocodile and immediately spot the differences that make it a unique species.

And yes, it certainly is true that there were dragonflies 300 million years ago, and there are dragonflies today; it’s a successful form. It doesn’t follow that organisms separated by a third of a billion years of time are indistinguishable from one another, or that we ought to be surprised about it. What matters is that we have change over time: there were no T. rexes in the Triassic, and there are no T. rexes today, but there were T. rexes in the Cretaceous. The existence of successful taxa that span that range of years does not negate the reality of change.

He also showed pictures of actual fossils that show, in his interpretation, how animals died catastrophic, sudden deaths. Fish died in sediment-filled waters; land-dwelling animals drowned. He showed pictures of dinosaurs fossilized with their heads arched backward and up, saying they were struggling to find air, but were drowning.

“Every dinosaur fossil is like that,” he said.

No, they’re not…but it’s true that a lot are. It is silly to claim that opisthotonus (the arched neck in those fossils) is always a consequence of drowning; there are multiple possible mechanisms behind it. But it’s even sillier to claim that all of the dinosaurs not only died of the same cause, but died in the same cataclysmic event over the course of one year. It’s like noting that some human skeletons show evidence of fatal cuts, bludgeoning, or gunshots, therefore they all died in the American Civil War, which was global and explains all violent deaths in all of history.

But of course, Henry Morris is an idiot.

He also argued against evolution by saying that there is no hard evidence that shows one creature evolving into another. If a fish did turn into an amphibian, there would be a “missing link” or transitional fossils proving such steps. Yet none exist.

At the very same time that Morris was making that stupid claim, Neil Shubin was pulling out a cast of Tiktaalik, a transitional form in the process of fish evolving into amphibians, and showing it to a room of 200 people in Morris.

“Yet none exist.” Lying dumbass.

But OK, world. Any students out there shopping for colleges right now? Are you looking at Bemidji State University vs. University of Minnesota Morris? I think the smart choice is crystal clear.

But then, I expect someone at the university will soon come roaring back with a strong response. I’m looking forward to it.

P.S. One other odd thing about that article. It keeps touting “Intelligent Design”, and Cairns is promoting the inclusion of Intelligent Design creationism in public schools. Yet the talks are by the ICR, a specifically young-earth-creationist organization that believes the earth is less than ten thousand years old and that all of geology can be explained by a global flood, patently religious claims that the Discovery Institute tries mightily to sweep under the carpet in their pretense of being a secular, scientific organization. Somebody has apparently looked at the claims of both and can’t tell the difference. Which is not surprising.

(Also on Sb)

It turns out there is a letter from a Bemidji State University professor in that newspaper. It’s not what I expected.

Although I don’t work in the lab, I am the local professor who teaches epidemiology to undergraduate and graduate students throughout the state. In this capacity, I know of no one doubting the mutative action of skin-invading bacteria. But that’s a far cry from going from nothing to everything. Macro-evolution appears unable to explain the Irreducible Complexity of life as we observe it.

This conference, Saturday at the BHS auditorium, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., presents a wonderful opportunity to engage in civil and respectful discourse on a very foundational subject.

An epidemiologist who doesn’t understand evolution and thinks young earth creationism is reasonable — how strange and unfortunate. It’s not surprising at all that Karl Salscheider emphasizes civility and respect in his letter, though; when you’ve got nothin’ of any substance, pound that drum demanding respect for your superstition equal to that given to hard-won science.

Who needs an IQ test when you’ve got coalescence?

I am just blown away by the consistency of this observation. You know, the creationists are not all stupid; there’s a wide range of intelligence in their camp, even if they are all wrong. But this one recent paper on the gorilla genome has become such an excellent tool for discriminating the competent from the incompetent.

This was the paper that unsurprisingly explained that gorilla genes reveal a mosaic; that some gorilla genes are closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other. If you understand the logic of coalescent theory at all, you know this is an expected result. The only way you could fail to see the distribution we observe is if the population went through a bottleneck of exactly two individuals.

But once again, one of the so-called scientists of intelligent design creationism blows it. Doug Axe has announced that the ape family tree is hopelessly broken, and that the gorilla data should call evolutionary theory into question.

Until recently, the answer was that a real family tree should generate a fully consistent pattern of similarities. [Not true at all. Coalescent theory is an extension of Fisher/Wright models of large populations, and the formal mathematics were worked out in the 1980s] For example, we are told that chimps and humans came from the same ancestral stock (call it CH stock) and that gorillas, chimps and humans all came from an earlier ancestral stock (GCH stock) [Correct so far]. If so, then the human and chimp genomes should consistently be more similar to each other than either is to the gorilla genome [WRONG. They should not be consistently more similar. Does he know nothing of probability?], since the human and chimp histories were one and the same thing more recently than the human and gorilla (or chimp and gorilla) histories were.

Well, the recent publication of the gorilla genome sequence shows that the expected pattern just isn’t there [Jebus. Read the paper. The pattern observed is the expected pattern.]. Instead of a nested hierarchy of similarities, we see something more like a mosaic [AS WE’D EXPECT.]. According to a recent report, “In 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other…”

That’s sufficiently difficult to square with Darwin’s tree that it ought to bring the whole theory into question. And in an ideal world where Darwinism is examined the way scientific theories ought to be examined, I think it would. But in the real world things aren’t always so simple [And yet the creationists keep throwing up their simplistic models and being surprised that they’re wrong].

Axe is the one guy the creationists keep touting as a real scientist, a guy with genuine chops in molecular biology, the man who is doing serious scientific work. You know, if you’re going to publicly criticize an observation and claim it calls into question the entirety of evolutionary theory, you ought to first look into it and see whether that observation actually fits a prediction of evolution — actual evolutionary theory, not that cartoonishly naive caricature of evolution the creationists all have in their heads.

Here’s a nice, short history of coalescent theory by Kingman. It’s been around for decades, long before the gorilla genome was sequenced, and it predicted what kinds of distributions we ought to see in our comparisons of different species…predictions that were borne out by the paper Axe thinks contradicts evolutionary theory.

Battle in Scotland!

One of the few places outside the Discovery Institute that promotes Intelligent Design creationism is the Centre for Intelligent Design, led by Alastair Noble, a Scottish creationist. (Sorry to embarrass you, Scot readers and commenters, but you should be a little bashful about the nest of ninnies in your midst). There’s been some recent wrangling between sensible people and Noble and his oh-so-helpful assistant, Casey Luskin…wrangling that has been made public by the Centre for Unintelligent Design.

It’s good stuff. You know your argument is in trouble, though, when you have to bring in an incompetent dweeb like Casey Luskin to squeak out the usual ID boilerplate.

We detect design by finding features in nature which contain the type of information which in our experience comes from intelligence. This is generally called complex and specified information (CSI). In our experience, CSI only comes from a goal-directed process like intelligent design. Thus, when we detect high levels of complex and specified information in nature, we can infer that intelligent design.

“Generally called”…by whom? Not scientists, that’s for sure. CSI is an invented term with no quantitative definition, no means of measurement (it doesn’t even have units!), and no mechanism of detection, but these bozos trot it out time after time in order to make these sciencey assertions.

It’s like ontogenetic depth. They’re happy to invent the term, they’re happy to claim they’re demonstrating the falsehood of evolution with real science, but when you try to pin them down and get the methods that would allow you to replicate their claims, they squirm and wiggle and declare that it’s “A Biological Distance That’s Currently Impossible to Measure”.

That’s all they’ve got. Stuff backed up by claims of quantitative values that, when pressed, they admit that they can’t measure.

The Discovery Institute is winding up their persecution complex again

It has the potential to be fun or a fizzle. The Discovery Institute is leaping to the defense of David Coppedge, a computer technician (don’t be fooled, the DI is desperately straining to enhance his credentials) who was demoted and then fired at the JPL. Coppedge claims to be the victim of discrimination against his views on Intelligent Design creationism; the JPL has argued that he was out of line to be harassing scientists with nonsense, passing out DVDs of ID BS, pushing his silly creationist website, and basically wasting his time and not doing his job. They warned him, he persisted. They demoted him, he persisted. Finally they fired him.

So now Coppedge, with the assistance of a fine team of creationist lawyers, is suing the JPL. There’s lots of information at The Sensuous Curmudgeon, which is shaping up to be the go-to place to follow the trial, which started today.

This is a big case for the neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids). They’re trying to establish some new kind constitutional right — an employee’s freedom to promote creationism in the workplace. One of their top legal talents, Discoveroid Casey Luskin, is advising the lawyer for Coppedge — that’s William J. Becker, Jr., who (until he picked up a few creationist clients) appears to be mostly a personal injury and workers’ comp lawyer.

To promote the issue, the Discoveroids initially waged a public relations campaign which we described here: The Coppedge Case: A Study in Tactics and Strategy. They’ve set up a page devoted to this case, which is here, but which seems to have languished for months.

The official information source for the Coppedge case requires payment of fees to obtain copies of pleadings from the court clerks here: Superior Court of California, Los Angeles. At the box for “Case Number” you need to enter BC435600. Some minimal information is available for free — the names of the parties and their lawyers, a list of what documents have been filed, what proceedings have been held, and what future hearings have been scheduled.

It’s going to be a weird trial. It sounds like the JPL was reasonable and put up with Coppedge for quite some time, clearly telling him to desist in his problematic behavior at work; The Discovery Institute has nothing to lose — Coppedge is a nobody — and their enthusiasm for the case has waxed and waned. We’ll see if they put up a fight or not.

(Also on Sb)

Spin, spin, spin

Now the Discovery Institute is trying to spin the Darwin on the Palouse event.

Hosted ironically by an outfit calling itself the Palouse Coalition of Reason, the event included Daniel Dennett and PZ Myers with the latter doing basically a standup comedy routine mocking Darwin-doubters. “He never interacted with a single argument,” our friend reports. Not once.

Well of course not.

Hmmm. I don’t even know what this bozo means by “interacted with a single argument”. I gave a talk in which I pointed out the absence of evidence for intelligent design creationism’s claims, showed that they pad their résumé and are pseudoscientific, and then talked about how young earth creationism was a greater threat because it was far more popular, despite being even more ridiculous. They don’t have a credible argument!

Dan Dennett and I then had a joint Q&A session; it was a little on the short side because of time issues, but we both interacted with the audience and answered questions. Most of the questions were legitimate and relevant. There was one fellow who was clearly from the local creationist camp who asked one rambling, near-incoherent question about the source of morality, trying to imply that we need some external source to impose it, and somehow drifting into something about aliens, which the world-class philosopher sitting next to me took charge of answering. That questioner was reduced to mumbling something about “What if there were more aliens?” in rebuttal. It was a little weird.

But I even complained later that the creationists did not say much of anything at my talk; they waited until the next day, at Jen and Fred’s, to open their mouths. And now they’re complaining that I didn’t interact with their arguments?

The next night, Jen McCreight and Fred Edwords spoke, and there were at least two creationists in the audience who did ask questions. These were people from New Saint Andrews College, a 17th century throwback and bastion of right-wing extremism, founded by the odious Doug Wilson (money quote: “They voted for Bush; I’d vote for Jefferson Davis”; he’s so right-wing, he openly argues for the blessings of slavery). That’s who our cheerful correspondent to the Discovery Institute is: a follower of the New Confederacy, a liar for Jesus, a narrow-minded bigot who was puffed up with the volume of his own ignorance. And also willing to misrepresent.

A followup event at the University of Idaho the next night starred Darwin defenders Fred Edwords and Jen McCreight. In the Q&A, our friend alluded to some challenges to Darwinian theory and offered the view that “Good scientists are masters of the method; they aren’t identified by which paradigm they pledge allegiance to.”

“I was interrupted by someone and then PZ Myers chimed in (he was there as an audience member). He turned around and said to me, ‘That’s crap science.'” And so there you go: argument over.

Wow. That makes it sound like I was disagreeing with the importance of the scientific method, because he left off what I was objecting to. His “challenges to Darwinian theory” was a stupid argument about an instance of rapid deposition which can’t be used as an argument for Noah’s Flood (it was a collection of whale fossils that had been buried in diatom blooms in a sheltered shallow bay), and which certainly don’t challenge evolutionary theory, and my outburst was to tell him that he was cherry-picking his stories — that was the crap science. He’s no master of the method, he’s an ideologue mangling the evidence to support his paradigm.

Then the Intelligent Design creationists gloat.

You can’t reason with these people — you really can’t. What made it worthwhile for our correspondent was the conversations afterward. Chatting with people from the audience, he got a chance to recommend good books to folks looking for further and better information and got into one conversation that went on over beers till midnight. That kind of human interaction is almost invariably worth the effort.

I’d like to know what those “good” books were; I suspect they were more dishonest nonsense from the DI and young earth creationists. I’m not at all surprised that he found a few deluded souls to evangelize to — when all they’ve got is fairy tales and fluff and distortions of science, it’s pretty easy to spin up bar conversation, I’m sure.

They were also rank cowards. I’m reasonably up-to-date on all of the creationist arguments (hey, I knew of the obscure paper on South American paleontology the guy was citing), and Dan Dennett of course is an arch-Darwinian, so they waited until the graduate student and the Coalition of Reason activist were on the stage to ask the questions that better matched our expertise.

And then they have the gall to complain that I didn’t interact with their arguments. They were afraid to make any!

Zooming in on the Origin of Life Science Foundation

I’d been wondering about the credibility of David L. Abel, an Intelligent Design creationist who claims to work in the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. I tried to track down this foundation with the lofty title, the million dollar prize, and the elaborately specific departments, but the best I’d been able to do was find a google satellite image.

Huh. That looks suspiciously like a suburban house.

So then someone from the Evil Atheist Conspiracy’s vast network of spies and agents decided to drive by and get a picture.

Why, it is someone’s house at that address! It’s a nice but unpretentious little place in a residential suburb. There must be some mistake. This doesn’t look like a fantastic institute of advanced science — it’s got shady trees and a lawn and a basket of flowers by the garage and it looks like a typical two bedroom house.

But wait…what’s that by the hanging basket? It’s a sign of some sort. Look closer…

Yep, that’s the place.

That’s every intelligent design creationism institute of scientific thinking: a cheap sign tacked up on a garage, with some guy with delusions of competence twiddling his thumbs inside.

(Also on Sb)

Making excuses

The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.

Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. Discussions on previously published articles are welcome and I hope that, by fostering discussion and by keeping an open-minded attitude towards new ideas, the journal will spur progress in this little explored, difficult and very exciting area of knowledge.

In particular, the paper “Andrulis, E.D. Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Life 2012, 2, 1-105” was published recently online and is due to appear in Issue 1, Volume 2, 2012 of Life, at the end of March this year [1]. So that our readership has as much information as I can divulge without violating the confidentiality of the review process, what follows is the background of these events. Professor Bassez had previously guest-edited a successful special issue titled “The Origin of Life” in another MDPI journal [2]. Although Professor Bassez [3] had also planned to be the Guest Editor of the special issue “Origin of Life – Feature Papers” for Life [4], she was, for personal reasons, unable to do so. I therefore volunteered to take this responsibility on her behalf and to guest edit this special issue and supervise the editorial procedure for the papers. I made the decision of acceptance based on the peer review reports we received and their recommendation in support of publication.
As stated earlier, finding reviewers able to cross discipline boundaries as is often needed for multidisciplinary “origin of life” topics [5] is particularly difficult. The publishing process that MDPI manuscripts go through by our in-house editorial staff members is that they choose reviewers from sources like Chemical Abstracts, PubMed, Web of Science or more recently, from Google Scholar. Very often we also ask the Editorial Board members to review papers or ask those of them who have relevant knowledge and expertise to supply possible reviewer names. We also use the reviewer names suggested by the authors, but we do this with great care, checking the background of each potential reviewer and their publication record, as well as ensuring they have no collaborations with the authors that may be construed as a conflict of interest. I should stress that although we try to encourage bold, innovative science, we reject many submissions. In the case of the Dr. Andrulis’s long paper, the two reviewers were both faculty members of reputable universities different than the author’s and both went to considerable trouble presenting lengthy review reports. Dr. Andrulis revised his manuscript as requested, and the paper was subsequently published.

Regardless of opinion on specific papers that have been published to date, I sincerely hope that all of our articles, most of which are outstanding, will continue to be read and discussed. Our editorial procedure is under scrutiny by the Editorial Board, who wishes to be more closely involved in the editorial process, and we are striving to further improve our editorial service. We welcome comments on the Dr. Andrulis’s paper or any other papers that have been published in Life.

The “interdisciplinary” excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis’s paper, and Abel’s paper as well, were “off” — to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field — general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance — who would read either of those papers and think maybe there’s something to them? You’d have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.

Also, you don’t need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I’m reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky’s cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics. Evaluating interdisciplinary work does not mean you cherry pick the most favorable interpretations from those most ignorant of a specific subfield, nor does it mean you split the difference and average the opinions of the subfields together. If one part of the mix is bullshit, you throw out the whole thing.

The fact that they’re having trouble finding qualified reviewers for the work they’re publishing is also ominous. Shouldn’t the editorial board consist of people who are competent in this interdisciplinary field who can screen out the wackier submissions? And shouldn’t it be setting off alarm bells when they accept suggestions of reviewers from authors, and those are the only people they can get reviews from? It’s a situation ripe for selection by crackpots of crackpot reviewers; you just know that the Abel paper was reviewed by fellow travelers in the Intelligent Design creationism movement, and got no critical evaluation at all.

Given the spectacularly poor quality of the Andrulis and Abel papers, though, I am most amused by the claim that the editors and reviewers of Life “reject many submissions”. I would love to see the papers that they judged worse than Andrulis’s and Abel’s.

(Also on Sb)

OwlMirror found the quote in Sagan’s Broca’s Brain.

Velikovsky has called attention to a wide range of stories and legends, held by diverse peoples, separated by great distances, which stories show remarkable similarities and concordances. I am not expert in the cultures or languages of any of these peoples, but I find the concatenation of legends Velikovsky has accumulated stunning. It is true that some experts in these cultures are less impressed. I can remember vividly discussing Worlds in Collision with a distinguished professor of Semitics at a leading university. He said something like “The Assyriology, Egyptology, Biblical scholarship and all of that Talmudic and Midrashic pilpul is, of course, nonsense; but I was impressed by the astronomy.” I had rather the opposite view.

More bad science in the literature

That sad article on gyres as an explanation for everything has had more fallout: not only has it been removed from Science Daily’s site, not only has Case Western retracted the press release, but one of the editors at the journal Life has resigned his position over it. The editorial board of the journal was completely surprised by the wretched content of the paper, which is not encouraging; apparently they exercise so little oversight at the journal that they were unaware of the crap their reviewers were passing through. One board member thinks it is a hoax, and laughed it off. Think about that; your shiny new journal has just published total garbage, and instead of being brought up short and questioning the quality control of the review process, you think it is amusing that what you consider an obvious hoax slipped in? There’s something seriously wrong there.

Add this to the list of failures at Life: the paper immediaely after Andrulis’s is this one, “Is Life Unique?”, by David Abel. Guess what? It’s Intelligent Design creationism crap. Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: Is life physicochemically unique? No. Is life unique? Yes. Life manifests innumerable formalisms that cannot be generated or explained by physicodynamics alone. Life pursues thousands of biofunctional goals, not the least of which is staying alive. Neither physicodynamics, nor evolution, pursue goals. Life is largely directed by linear digital programming and by the Prescriptive Information (PI) instantiated particularly into physicodynamically indeterminate nucleotide sequencing. Epigenomic controls only compound the sophistication of these formalisms. Life employs representationalism through the use of symbol systems. Life manifests autonomy, homeostasis far from equilibrium in the harshest of environments, positive and negative feedback mechanisms, prevention and correction of its own errors, and organization of its components into Sustained Functional Systems (SFS). Chance and necessity—heat agitation and the cause-and-effect determinism of nature’s orderliness—cannot spawn formalisms such as mathematics, language, symbol systems, coding, decoding, logic, organization (not to be confused with mere self-ordering), integration of circuits, computational success, and the pursuit of functionality. All of these characteristics of life are formal, not physical.

It’s drivel. The whole thing is one long windy argument from assertion, as in the penultimate sentence above, which is simply the bald claim that higher order functions of human functions like cognition cannot be derived from chemistry and physics. The paper itself contains no data at all — no experiments, measurements, or observations — but it is full of novel acronyms. Apparently, all you need to do to make it as a big time creationist is to make up new words and phrases and string them together. I checked out some of his other papers — he seems to be some kind of computer science guy, and this is all he does, is write impenetrably glib papers full of pretentious acronyms, posing as an expert on biology while saying nothing credible about biology at all.

But he certainly has an impressive address and affiliation!

Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc., 113-120 Hedgewood Drive, Greenbelt, MD 20770

Whoa. Sounds major. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of this foundation, and all I could find out about it is a webpage in which they announce a million dollar prize for “proposing a highly plausible natural-process mechanism for the spontaneous rise of genetic instructions in nature sufficient to give rise to life.” This sounds suspiciously like standard creationist dodging — they’ll never have to award this prize. So I looked at their judging, and at first glance it seems impressive: they have over 200 judges, including Jack Szostak, Peter Atkins, Paul Davies, and Edward O. Wilson. But then, they mention that judging will be in 5 tiers, and only the ones that pass all other reviews will reach the Nobel prize winners and famous scientists…and the first tier is an “in-house review”. I suspect the big names will never be pestered by this prize committee. Actually, I wonder if most of these judges know that their name is on this list. Maybe you should look in case you’ve been drafted.

I started wondering about this “in-house staff” who would be doing the initial judging, and about the Origin of Life Science Foundation itself. It’s awfully hard to track down — its only web presence is the prize page, and its only employee seems to be…David L. Abel. So I looked it up in google maps to see where the foundation’s majestic headquarters might be.

Origins of Life Science Foundation

It’s a house in a residential neighborhood of a Maryland suburb. It made me wonder if maybe the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics was located in the master bathroom, while he Department of ProtoBioSemiotics was in the hall closet, or whether both were consolidated into a sunny corner of the kitchen. At least it seems to be a step above Patriot University, but it’s still some guy’s house that he’s calling a Foundation with multiple implied Departments with fancy titles.

That’s not all! Mr Abel seems to be a linchpin of the Intelligent Design movement, who manages to work his rambling, incoherent publications into all kinds of journals. In fact, the Discovery Institute just bragged about all their peer-reviewed scientific publications, and there, in their list of over 70 works published over the last 25 years or so, which includes papers by such famous scientists as William Lane Craig and John A. Davison, and prestigious journals like Rivisti di Biologia and their own in-house pet journal, BIO-Complexity, and also seems to include books that were not peer-reviewed at all, are twelve papers by Mr Fancy-Titled-Suburban-House. 17% of the Intelligent Design creationism movement’s ‘scientific’ output comes out of that dwelling in Maryland.

I’d love to see the gigantic laboratory he must have in there.

For your edification, I’ve included the official complete list of Intelligent Design creationism’s publications below the fold. It’s an impressively short list of hackery.

And may I suggest that the journal Life has deeper problems than simply accidentally allowing one bad paper to slip into publication? I think it needs a negative impact factor.

(Also on Sb)

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