Still Haughty

Yesterday I wrote about the bizarre situation where Catholic theologian John Haught had objected to the release of the video of the debate that he had with Jerry Coyne. That refusal caused quite a furor in the blog world and as a result, Haught has relented.

You can read Haught’s explanation for his initial refusal and subsequent reversal, and Coyne’s response follows immediately after. What I want to highlight is Haught’s extraordinarily patronizing claim that he was trying to protect our delicate sensibilities from being offended by having to listen to what Coyne had to say.

But let me come to the main reason why I have been reluctant to give permission to release the video. It is not for anything that I said during our encounter, but for a reason that I have never witnessed in public academic discussion before.

I’m still in shock at how your presentation ended up. I was so offended both personally and as an academic by the vulgarity of it all that I did not want other people to have to share what I witnessed that night in October. I still don’t.
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You should be grateful that I have tried to protect the public from such a preposterous and logic-offending way of bringing your presentation to a close.

It is preposterous to think that the kinds of people who would take the trouble to watch a debate between a theologian and a scientist are like stereotypical Victorian ladies who might swoon and have to reach for their smelling salts. We can judge perfectly well for ourselves who comported themselves well and who didn’t.

All Haught has done is vastly increase the interest in watching the debate. He may want to buy stock in companies that sell smelling salts.

The role of religion at a secular university

There will be a panel discussion followed by a free and open forum on the above topic to discuss the role of religion, involving questions such as: Should we support it, promote it, accommodate it, respect it, or just ignore it?

The panelists are: William Deal (moderator, Professor of Religion), Peter Haas (Chair of Department of Religious Studies), Colleen Barker-Williamson (Director of Student Activities and Leadership), and Mano Singham (Director, UCITE)

Location: Nord 310 on the Case quad of CWRU
Time: Friday, November 4, 2011, 12:30-1:45 pm

Pizza and drinks will be available.

Rising tensions over the Occupy movement

The police and authorities in various cities have started to crack down on the Occupy movement and evict them from their sites. The worst such incident using force occurred in Oakland where police used tear gas and so-called ‘non-lethal projectiles’ (an euphemism for anything other than bullets) with one victim suffering brain injuries when he was hit by a projectile fired by the police and is now awaiting brain surgery. A general strike has been called for in Oakland today.

The Oakland mayor and police chief have received calls for their resignations and are now trying to distance themselves from the brutality that they unleashed. What makes it worse for them is that the victim, rather than someone who could be dismissed as a dirty hippie and therefore underserving of sympathy, is a US marine veteran who had served two tours in Iraq. This has put authorities everywhere on the defensive, though it hasn’t stopped them from trying to remove the protestors.

This week’s violent clashes with police in Oakland appear to have re-energised the Occupy movement in America, creating political liabilities for civic leaders across the United States, who had seemed poised to follow Oakland’s lead and, in some cases, issued orders to clear the streets.
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The Oakland protesters were back in force on Wednesday night, 24 hours after they were supposed to be gone for good, demanding the resignation of the city’s mayor.

The Daily Show had a segment on the Oakland crackdown.

Stephen Colbert also spoke about it.

I think the authorities are underestimating the widespread but quiet sympathy that exists for the Occupy movement. A lot of people in the US feel politically impotent, that they have no say in the decisions that are made. They may not know what exactly the Occupy movement hopes to achieve but they know that that a small and very wealthy cohort of individuals are manipulating the political system for their private benefit and that the Occupy protestors are the only ones doing anything about it, and for this they are grateful. And the movement has already achieved had one major effect: The conversation has now shifted to talk about jobs and income inequality and in terms of the 1% vs. the 99%, and not about the deficit.

Meanwhile in Egypt there was a demonstration and march on the US embassy, starting at the now iconic Tahrir Square, in support of the Occupy movement and in protest of the police actions against the Oakland protestors. Given that Tahrir Square was the inspiration for protest movements around the world, this was a fitting symbol. There are also protests in Greece over the bailout package that will, like the bailouts in the US, is not meant to bail out the people of Greece but to siphon public money to recompense the big banks for the losses they sustained for their risky behavior. It is interesting how the French and German and US governments are horrified that the Greek government is planning to put the bailout plan to a referendum, as if the thought of people having a say in their country’s future is something to be deplored. And big protests and a march on the G20 meeting today in Cannes resulted in the police blocking the marchers from entering the city. The war against the oligarchy is going global, as it should.

Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman, two of the best journalists around, appeared on the Charlie Rose show and provided a thoughtful look at what is going on and what the events symbolize. This took place last Tuesday before the Oakland crackdown so that was not discussed.

Documentary: Hot Coffee

Stephen Colbert interviews Susan Saladoff, the creator of the documentary with the above name, that challenges the myth put out by the corporate industry and its pliant media allies that trivial lawsuits are out of control and that people need to be limited in their ability to take big corporations to court.

Here is the trailer for the documentary.

More evidence that religion has lost the argument

I have said many times before, especially in my series on Why atheism is winning, that religion has lost the argument. Modern science has revealed the poverty of even the most sophisticated arguments for god. As further evidence, Jerry Coyne shares the extraordinary events that followed his debate with theologian John Haught.

On October 12 at the University of Kentucky, I debated Catholic theologian John Haught from Georgetown University on the topic of “Are science and religion compatible?” It was a lively debate, and I believe I got the better of the man (see my post-debate report here). Haught didn’t seem to have prepared for the debate, merely rolling out his tired old trope of a “layered” universe, with the layer of God and Jesus underlying the reality of the cosmos, life, and evolution. I prepared pretty thoroughly, reading half a dozen of Haught’s books (you need read only one: they’re all the same), and watching all his previous debates on YouTube. (Note that he’s sanctioned release of those videos.)

Haught seemed to have admitted his loss, at least judging by the audience reaction, but blamed it on the presence of “Jerry’s groupies,” an explanation I found offensive. I’m not aware of any groupies anywhere, much less in Kentucky!

The debate, including half an hour of audience questions, was videotaped. Both John and I had given our permission in advance for the taping. I looked forward to the release of the tape because, of course, I wanted a wider audience for my views than just the people in the audience in Lexington. I put a lot of work into my 25-minute talk, and was eager for others to see why I found science and religion to be at odds.

Well, you’re not going to see that tape—ever. After agreeing to be taped, Haught decided that he didn’t want the video released.
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I am deeply angry about this stand, and can see only one reason for what Haught has done: cowardice. He lost the debate; his ideas were exposed for the mindless theological fluff that they were; and I used his words against him, showing that even “sophisticated” theology, when examined under the microscope of reason, is just a bunch of made-up stuff, tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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The only good thing to come from this affair is that it exposes not only the follies of “sophisticated” theology, but the cowardice of a famous theologian. (Haught is the most prominent American theologian who writes about evolution and its comity with religion.) If Haught can’t win a debate, then he’ll use all his God-given powers to prevent anyone from seeing his weaknesses. I’ve written to other well-known atheists who have debated theologians, and not one of them is aware of anything like this ever happening.

This is shameful behavior by Haught.

Relativity-10: Science and public relations

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Scientists want their work to influence the field and so they would like it to gain the widest possible audience. Most of the time, their peers (and funding agencies) are their target audience because they are the only ones who really understand what they do. But when the work also has appeal to the general public because of its practical applicability or its revolutionary implications, then there can arise tensions in how the work is publicized and in the case of the OPERA experiment on faster-than-light neutrinos, there has been considerable unease with how this whole episode was handled with respect to the media.

The usual process when scientists have something new to say is that they write up a paper with their results and send it to a journal. The journal then sends the paper to referees who work in the same field (the number of referees depends on the journal and the discretion of the editor) who provide feedback to the editor. The referees do not usually check the results or repeat the calculations and experiments. What they do is see if the paper makes sense, the methodology is correct, if the authors have taken into account all the relevant factors and provided all the necessary information so that readers know exactly what was done (and how) so that they could repeat and check the results if they are so inclined, and that proper credit has been given for prior related work. Based on this feedback, the editor decides whether to accept the paper, reject it, or send it back to the authors for revisions and/or additional work. Good referees and editors can improve a paper enormously by providing the authors with valuable feedback and useful information and suggestions.

In the sciences, authors also usually simultaneously send out copies of the paper (known as preprints) to colleagues in the field. This serves to give their colleagues advance notice of their work (since the time taken to appear in the journal can often take over a year), to get feedback, and to establish priority for any discovery. All this occurs out of the public eye. Once the paper has been accepted and published by a journal, then it enters the public discussion and the media can publicize it. If the paper has significant implications, the journals may alert the media and give reporters a copy of the paper before it appears in print so that they can research and prepare an article about it, but the reporter is under an embargo to not publish until the journal article actually appears. Some of the more influential journals will refuse to publish an article if the authors release the information to the media before the journal prints it.

In the pre-internet days, and for research results that do not have revolutionary implications, this system worked reasonably well. Due to the cost of mailing, not too many preprints went out so the pre-publication discussions remained within a fairly small circle. With the internet, it became much easier to send out preprints to huge numbers of people at no cost and it was not long before it was realized that it made sense to create a system that could serve as a permanent archive that would allow scientists to post their preprints online so that anyone could gain access to them and search for those results that interested them. Currently the most popular venue for such preprints is arXiv and Wikipedia has a good article about its history and how it works.

The articles that are found on arXiv are preprints and thus have not been peer-reviewed but the system is minimally moderated to keep out rubbish. In general, scientists are concerned about their reputations among their peers and so most are careful to only post articles that they think would meet the standards of quality required if they were submitting to a peer-reviewed journal. Almost all of them do simultaneously submit their articles to such journals. As a result, the papers that appear on arXiv tend to be of pretty good quality. All the papers associated with the faster-than-light OPERA experiment are on arXiv.

A few scientists feel that peer-reviewed print journals are an anachronism and do not bother to try to even get their work into journals, feeling that the quality of the work will speak for itself. They think that if their work is correct and important, the community of scientists will accept it and build on it, while if it is wrong the community will criticize and reject it. Possibly the worst fate is that the community will think it is useless and a waste of time and completely ignore it. It may well be the case that in the future, expensive peer-reviewed print journals will disappear and that this kind of open-source publication will become the norm, with quality being determined by the consensus judgment of the scientific community. We are not there yet.

In the case of the OPERA experiment, the system broke down somewhat for several reasons. The OPERA experiment is very difficult and is a huge enterprise involving many collaborators and lasting over three years, with the paper having over 150 authors. Given the culture of the free sharing of information in science, it is very hard to keep preliminary results under wraps and it was pretty much an open secret that these faster-than-light results had been obtained. But this knowledge stayed within the community. What the OPERA team did was the day after they posted their preprint on arXiv on September 22, they issued a press release announcing their results and promoting a big press conference the next day with media and scientists present.

This rubbed some scientists the wrong way. Scientists can be as publicity hungry as celebrities but there are norms and there is a discreet way of making one’s name known. Holding press conferences or issuing press releases so early in the game, before the scientific community has had time to pass its verdict on the research, is considered bad form and the OPERA team has received some criticisms on this score.

While some of the carping may be due to jealousy, it is also the case that trumpeting that a scientific revolution has occurred can harm the image of science if the claim has to be later retracted. The reliable knowledge that science produces tends to be the consensus verdict of the community, achieved after a lot of behind-the-scenes work has smoothed out the rough edges and corrected mistakes. Bypassing that filtering process and going public too soon can lead to embarrassing reversals and give ammunition to the critics of science that its results cannot be trusted.

Next: Recalling an earlier public relations debacle

The Republican comedy road show

I am beginning to wonder if Herman Cain and the entire Republican field are not performance artists and the whole campaign is one big act. Take a look at this long new internet ad from Herman Cain, which is even weirder than the previous blowing smoke ad.

At least the production values have improved a lot. But this ad demonstrates perfectly the fact that the campaign seems to be oblivious to jarring notes. The first part is quite clever and amusing. Then when the actor steps out of the role at the 1:40 mark and becomes presumably himself, he acts like a egotistical and self-important jerk who is rude to the crew. Why would the ad’s producers think that an endorsement from such an unlikable person would be a positive thing? And what’s with that slow creepy smile at the end that seems to be becoming Cain’s trademark?

Stephen Colbert generates more ad ideas for the Cain campaign in the same vein.

In a comment to my earlier post, John suggested that these odd ads may be a smart strategy on Cain’s part since the smoker ad has attracted so much attention. I am not convinced. Being talked about is good to gain name recognition but Cain’s among Republican voters is already high at 80%, so he does not need more buzz. What he needs to do is convince people that he is a credible leader. It is one thing to have people laugh with you at something clever and funny that you put out, it is quite another to have them laugh at you for seeming to be a little strange. Coming out with ads that are ridiculed even by the people in your own party, such as this parody by Jon Huntsman’s three daughters, is not a good sign.

If it was only people like me who are laughing at the antics of the Republican field, trying to outbid each other in pandering to the looniest segments of their party’s base, that would be one thing. But even Republican party stalwarts are sounding the alarm. Neoconservative columnist John Podhoretz is one of those clearly worried about the looniness that seems to have overtaken the Republican party although, as Charles Pierce correctly points out, he and his fellow ‘moderate’ and ‘sensible’ Republicans benefitted for over three decades because of their careful cultivation and grooming of the crazy base that is all grown up now and biting the hand that fed them. Podhoretz scolds Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney as if they were children, saying:

Memo to the Republican field: You’re running for president. Of the United States. Of America. Start acting like it.

Stop proposing nonsense tax plans that won’t work. Stop making ridiculous attention-getting ads that might be minimally acceptable if you were running for county supervisor in Oklahoma. Stop saying you’re going to build a US-Mexico border fence you know perfectly well you’re not going to build.

Give the GOP electorate and the American people some credit. This country is in terrible shape. They know it. You know it. They want solutions. You’re providing comedy.
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Enough with the foolishness. Stop it. Stop it now.

But it is too late. All these conservatives and neoconservative Republican party stalwarts calling for sensible behavior are the ones who sowed the seeds of this behavior. They cannot complain if the plants are now strangling them. Back in November 2008, I pinpointed the precise moment when they lost control and that was John McCain’s nomination of Sarah Palin to be his running mate. That let loose the furies that we now see driving the party’s agenda.

If they want to pin the blame on someone, it should be John McCain.

The crazy anti-science people

The rejection of science by the Republican party and its rabid base is quite extraordinary. To reject evolution is to reveal oneself to be a pre-Enlightenment person living in post-Enlightenment world.

The correlation of pre-Enlightenment thinking with religion is clear. Religious people fear (correctly) that science undermines religious faith and so they can be easily manipulated by big business to reject science and devalue evidence and data because of their belief in the value of ‘faith’, which is merely a synonym for prejudice and gut feelings.

In this clip from The Daily Show, Republican strategist Noelle Nikpour seems to be even dumber than Lord Monckton, in that she never seems to catch on that she is being primed to say crazy things that will make her look like a fool. How can such a stupid person ever acquire the label of ‘strategist’?

What use is half a wing?

Creationists like to challenge the theory of evolution by asking how it can be that things can evolve incrementally since in its early stages the new feature seems to lack its final functionality. They pose questions like “What is the use of half an eye or half a wing?” Of course, scientists have long explained this. They have shown how the eye could have evolved by tiny changes and in fact even right now almost the full spectrum of differential eye development can be seen in existing species.

They have also pointed out that it is a mistake to assume that the final functionality of a feature was the only functionality all along, and that features may have had other functions in the early stages and only later became adapted to its final use.

Carl Zimmer had a nice article earlier this year in National Geographic about the evidence that feathers might have evolved for a different purpose long before flight occurred. More recently, he reports on new research results that add to our knowledge of what purpose those non-flying feathers in primitive wing forms might have served.