Thoughts in a Haystack

Ken Miller's Ankles Are In Danger

2009-11-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

Oh, my goodness!

The Discovery Institute's attack chihuahua, Casey Luskin, is actually taking a page out of Answers in Genesis (and about every other young-Earth creationist organization's) book. It is the ol' "we are using the same evidence but just interpret it from different starting points" ploy.

In responding to what Luskin characterizes as Ken Miller's argument that evidence for common descent refutes Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity" claims, Luskin says:

[A] piece of evidence Dr. [Kenneth] Miller commonly cites as demonstrating human/chimp common ancestry is the fusion of chromosome 2 in humans, which he argues has a structure similar to what one would expect if chimp chromosomes 2a and 2b were fused together, end to end. Without belaboring the details (which are covered elsewhere), the evidence for human chromosomal fusion simply indicates that our ancestors once had 48 chromosomes. But it tells us nothing definitive about whether our lineage leads back to a common ancestor shared with with apes. Human chromosomal fusion merely shows that at some point within our human lineage, two chromosomes became fused. That's it.

If we step outside the Darwinian box, then the following scenario becomes possible: (1) The human lineage arose separately from that of apes with 48 chromosmes, (2) a chromosomal-fusion event occurred, and (3) the trait spread throughout the human population. In such a scenario, the evidence would appear precisely as we find it, without any common ancestry between humans and apes. The two diagrams at right show two models for explaining the evidence for human chromosomal fusion.

At most, the fusion evidence confirms something we already knew: humans and apes share a similar genetic structure. But this might have been predicted by morphological studies without considering evolution. Again, common design can also account for such functional genetic similarities, and the fusion evidence does not demonstrate that humans share a common ancestor with apes.

Dr. Miller may reply that his model predicts the fusion evidence. But if we didn't find evidence for fusion in human chromosome 2, would that really refute Darwinism? No. Evolutionists would just claim that the fused telomeres and extra centromere were deleted. Miller assumes that functional genetic similarities must result from common descent, ignoring the possibility that such biochemical similarities might result from common design upon a functional blueprint.

Luskin even produces a diagram to "illustrate" his point:

First, let's get Miller's argument from his own mouth, rather than as spun by Luskin and the other IDers:

We've known for a long time that we humans share common ancestry with the other great apes—gorillas, orangs, chimps, and bonobos. But there's an interesting problem here. We humans have 46 chromosomes; all the other great apes have 48. In a sense, we're missing a pair of chromosomes, two chromosomes. How did that happen?

Well, is it possible that in the line that led to us, a pair of chromosomes was simply lost, dropping us from 24 pairs to 23? Well, the answer to that is no. The loss of both members of a pair would actually be fatal in any primate. There is only one possibility, and that is that two chromosomes that were separate became fused to form a single chromosome. If that happened, it would drop us from 24 pairs to 23, and it would explain the data.

Here's the interesting point, and this is why evolution is a science. That possibility is testable. If we indeed were formed that way, then somewhere in our genome there has to be a chromosome that was formed by the fusion of two other chromosomes. Now, how would we find that? It's easier than you might think.

Every chromosome has a special DNA sequence at both ends called the telomere sequence. Near the middle it has another special sequence called the centromere. If one of our chromosomes was formed by the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes, what we should be able to see is that we possess a chromosome in which telomere DNA is found in the center where it actually doesn't belong, and that the chromosome has two centromeres. So all we have to do is to look at our own genome, look at our own DNA, and see, do we have a chromosome that fits these features?

We do. It's human chromosome number 2, and the evidence is unmistakable. We have two centromeres, we have telomere DNA near the center, and the genes even line up corresponding to primate chromosome numbers 12 and 13.

Is there any way that intelligent design or special creation could explain why we have a chromosome like this? The only way that I can think of is if you're willing to say that the intelligent designer rigged chromosome number 2 to fool us into thinking that we had evolved. The closer we look at our own DNA, the more detailed a glimpse we get of our own genome, the more powerful the evidence becomes for our common ancestry with other species.

Note what Miller is really saying here: we have lots of evidence that we share common ancestry with the other great apes (heck, even Luskin has to admit that "humans and apes share a similar genetic structure") but, when we encounter something that raises a question how close that relationship is -- our different number of chromosomes -- and we go and look, we find convincing evidence that it is as close as we originally thought. If we hadn't found the fused chromosome, it would not have refuted evolution or common descent but it would have greatly changed our ideas about the relationship between gorillas, orangutans, chimps, bonobos and human beings. In short, it supports the other evidence that led us to think there was not just shared ancestry, but a close relationship.

What is Luskin's response to this evidence? Not wanting to go the "trickster Designer" route, he can only fall back on a presumption that there is a "Designer" and simply say that, if you look at the same evidence with their presumption, you can mangle it to fit their preconceived idea ... i.e. "the possibility that such biochemical similarities might result from common design upon a functional blueprint."

But why would a "Designer" abandon the "common design" of an already "functional blueprint" to fuse the human version of chromosomes 12 and 13, shared by all other primates? Now here is a research project that the Biologic Institute could take on: find the functional reason to fuse these two chromosomes. Otherwise, IDers are just offering a reason to ignore one piece of the massive total evidence, gathered across numerous lines of investigation in many different fields, that forms a consilience favoring common descent of all the great apes, including humans, and evolution in general.

Remember how Stephen Meyer crows about using "the same method of inferential reasoning that Darwin used," namely: "the inference to the best explanation"? When you take all the evidence, instead of selectively ignoring the evidence that your theory does not even attempt to explain, the best inference clearly favors common descent through processes that can be naturalistically explained.

And no amount of ankle biting can change that.
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Boundaries

2009-11-19T00:34:00.002-05:00

Massimo Pigliucci has, I think, an excellent post at his blog, Rationally Speaking, entitled "On the difference between science and philosophy," that nicely captures most of my objections to the attempts by some atheists to smudge the very real lines between science and philosophy and/or to denigrate philosophy.

Science, broadly speaking, deals with the study and understanding of natural phenomena, and is concerned with empirically (i.e., either observationally or experimentally) testable hypotheses advanced to account for those phenomena.

Philosophy, on the other hand, is much harder to define. Broadly speaking, it can be thought of as an activity that uses reason to explore issues that include the nature of reality (metaphysics), the structure of rational thinking (logic), the limits of our understanding (epistemology), the meaning implied by our thoughts (philosophy of language), the nature of the moral good (ethics), the nature of beauty (aesthetics), and the inner workings of other disciplines (philosophy of science, philosophy of history, and a variety of other "philosophies of"). Philosophy does this by methods of analysis and questioning that include dialectics and logical argumentation.

Now, it seems to me obvious, but apparently it needs to be stated that: a) philosophy and science are two distinct activities (at least nowadays, since science did start as a branch of philosophy called natural philosophy); b) they work by different methods (empirically-based hypothesis testing vs. reason-based logical analysis); and c) they inform each other in an inter-dependent fashion (science depends on philosophical assumptions that are outside the scope of empirical validation, but philosophical investigations should be informed by the best science available in a range of situations, from metaphysics to ethics and philosophy of mind).

So when some commentators for instance defend the Dawkins- and Coyne-style (scientistic) take on atheism, i.e., that science can mount an attack on all religious beliefs, they are granting too much to science and too little to philosophy. Yes, science can empirically test specific religious claims (intercessory prayer, age of the earth, etc.), but the best objections against the concept of, say, an omnibenevolent and onmnipowerful god, are philosophical in nature (e.g., the argument from evil). Why, then, not admit that by far the most effective way to reject religious nonsense is by combining science and philosophy, rather than trying to arrogate to either more epistemological power than each separate discipline actually possesses?

It is not an either/or proposition. Philosophy is a messier field than science since it admits a more diffuse standard than science admits, precisely because it is broader, less defined, subject. But you cannot complain about the diffuseness of philosophy while simultaneously trying to expand science to answer questions it cannot produce empiric evidence about that truly bear on the questions posed.
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Peas In a Pod

2009-11-18T22:31:00.001-05:00

Here's something I did not know before.

Anti-vaccination denialists share more in common with creationists than just a disdain for science. Of course, I knew that they shared many of the same tactics: appeals to a nonexistent scientific "controversy;" argumentum ad populum; claims of scientific "elites" choking off "debate;" etc. But I did not know to just what extent they follow the same trail.

As pointed out by Orac, they even have tales of "deathbed conversions" by scientists.

Supposedly, Louis Pasteur recanted the germ theory of disease on his deathbed.

In the clip of Bill Maher Orac points to, Maher seems (or feigns) hurt that he has been described as being a denier of the germ theory of disease but Orac also shows where Maher has propagated the myth of Pasteur's recantation. Apart from the fact that, logically, the fact that one person, even the originator of a scientific idea, might change his or her mind does nothing to refute all the other science done by other scientists, the people who trot out these myths never seem to consider the possibility that people in extremis might not be the most reliable of witnesses.

Maher's reaction is so like the Discovery Institute's faux outrage at being described as evolution deniers, while still sending out their attack puppy, Casey Luskin, to make a fool of himself in arguing against transitional fossils.

Maybe there is something in the architecture of the brains of denialsts that attract them to these kind of "arguments." A "just so story" to explain such an adaptation would be a doozy.
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Putting On a Dogma and Pony Show

2009-11-17T22:09:00.002-05:00

The board of trustees of La Sierra University in Riverside California is asking the impossible. After voting last week unanimously to endorse Seventh-day Adventist beliefs that the world was created in six 24-hour days, it:

... also proposed that all 15 North American Adventist universities develop a curriculum that includes a "scientifically rigorous affirmation" of Adventist creation beliefs.

Good luck with that!

It seems that the university's science department is a victim of popular dissent from evolution within the church:

More than 6,300 people from across the country have signed an online petition expressing concern that evolution is presented as fact at La Sierra and other Seventh-day Adventist universities. ...

Shane Hilde, the Beaumont man spearheading the petition drive, said he will be satisfied only when Adventist creation beliefs are presented as the preferred world view in classes in which evolution is discussed.

"To me, this is a positive statement, but that's what it is, just a statement," Hilde said of the board resolutions. "They didn't do anything about how to hold employees accountable for representing the church's position."

Hilde and others say Adventist beliefs must be integrated into all classes in which evolution is discussed. He said faculty statements that God created everything in the world are insufficient, because they don't specifically endorse Adventist beliefs.

That's the way religions do science ... by political pressure to support dogma, instead of trying to discover how the world actually works.

__________________________________

Update: The excellent Nick Matzke is over at The Panda's Thumb delving into the reasons why the hard-creationist-line Adventists are in such a tizzy (i.e., the "backsliding" by the faculty at Adventist universities).
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Duane Gish Rides Again!

2009-11-15T19:46:00.003-05:00

The Rev. Charles Welch, pastor of the Meadowbrook Church in Howard, Wisconsin, has an article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette, "Scientific fact or philosophy?". It is a classic example of a "Gish Gallop," a series of bogus (if not outright dishonest) arguments that take much longer to debunk than to make. Fortunately, we have resources that greatly help, including Mark Isaak's "Index to Creationist Claims" (also available in book form as The Counter-Creationism Handbook); 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent; and the Quote Mine Project and other resources on creationist abuse of quotes.

Pastor Chuck says:

Let me ask a few honest questions.

... which is his greatest misrepresentation, since, at the very least, he is implying a knowledge of science and its arguments that he does not have. It starts at the very beginning of his article:

Turn a frog into a prince? Even a child recognizes it is not fact, but fiction.

Claim CA100: Argument from Incredulity:

1.Really, the claim is "I can't conceive that (fill in the blank)." Others might be able to find a natural explanation; in many cases, they already have. Nobody knows everything, so it is unreasonable to conclude that something is impossible just because you do not know it. Even a noted antievolutionist acknowledges this point: "The peril of negative arguments is that they may rest on our lack of knowledge, rather than on positive results" (Behe 2003).

2.The argument from incredulity creates a god of the gaps. Gods were responsible for lightning until we determined natural causes for lightning, for infectious diseases until we found bacteria and viruses, for mental illness until we found biochemical causes for them. God is confined only to those parts of the universe we do not know about, and that keeps shrinking.

He next trots out a quote mine of Darwin:

"Why, if species descended from other species by gradual transcending orders of complexity, do we not find embedded in the earth (fossil record) or living (in the present), innumerable transitional forms?"

Claim CC200.1:

1. Some important factors prevent the formation of fossils from being common:

• Fossilization itself is not a particularly common event. It requires conditions that preserve the fossil before it becomes scavenged or decayed. Such conditions are common only in a very few habitats, such as river deltas, peat bogs, and tar pits. Organisms that do not live in or near these habitats will be preserved only rarely.

• Many types of animals are fragile and do not preserve well.

• Many species have small ranges. Their chance of fossilization will be proportionally small.

• The evolution of new species probably is fairly rapid in geological terms, so the transitions between species will be uncommon.

Passenger pigeons, once numbered in the billions, went extinct less than 200 years ago. How many passenger pigeon fossils can you find? If they are hard to find, why should we expect to find fossils that are likely from smaller populations and have been subject to millions of years of potential erosion?

2. Other processes destroy fossils. Erosion (and/or lack of deposition in the first place) often destroys hundreds of millions of years or more of the geological record, so the geological record at any place usually has long gaps. Fossils can also be destroyed by heat or pressure when buried deep underground.

3. As rare as fossils are, fossil discovery is still rarer. For the most part, we find only fossils that have been exposed by erosion, and only if the exposure is recent enough that the fossils themselves do not erode.

As climates change, species will move, so we cannot expect a transition to occur all at one spot. Fossils often must be collected from all over a continent to find the transitions.

Only Europe and North America have been well explored for fossils because that is where most of the paleontologists lived. Furthermore, regional politics interfere with collecting fossils. Some fabulous fossils have been found in China only recently because before then the politics prevented most paleontology there.

4. The shortage is not just in fossils but in paleontologists and taxonomists. Preparing and analyzing the material for just one lineage can take a decade of work. There are likely hundreds of transitional fossils sitting in museum drawers, unknown because nobody knowledgeable has examined them.

5. Description of fossils is often limited to professional literature and does not get popularized. This is especially true of marine microfossils, which have the best record.

6. If fossilization were so prevalent and young-earth creationism were true, we should find indications in the fossil record of animals migrating from the Ark to other continents.

Where are the half-bird, half-reptile creatures today? Where are the half- ape, half-man creatures today?

Claim CB805:

1. The claim might be true if there were no such thing as extinction. But since species do become extinct, intermediates that once existed do not exist today. Since extinction is a one-way street, species can only become less connected over time. This is clear if we look at the fossil record, in which early members of separate groups are much harder to tell apart.

2. Environments (and ecological niches) are not really as continuous as the claim pretends. Dogs bring down their prey through long chases, and cats ambush their prey; dogs are made for long-distance running, and cats are made for short sprints with high acceleration from a standing start. These requirements are quite different, and it is hard to achieve both in a single body. Compromises between the two have disadvantages in competition with specialists for either type, and thus natural selection culls them. Intermediates are competitive only so long as specialists are absent; so when specialists evolve, the intermediates are likely to become extinct.

3. In part, distinctness is an illusion caused by our choice of which groups to give names to. Groups with unclear boundaries tend not to get separate names, or groups in which intermediate forms exist are chopped in half arbitrarily (especially obvious if fossil forms are considered; e.g., the line between dinosaurs and birds is arbitrary, increasingly so as new fossils are discovered).

4. There are indeed several cases of continua in nature. In many groups, such as some grasses and leafhoppers, different species are very hard to tell apart. At least ten percent of bird species are similar enough to another species to produce fertile hybrids (Weiner 1994, 198-199). The most obvious continua are called ring species, because in the classic case (the herring gull complex) they form a ring around the North Pole. If we start in Western Europe and move west, similar populations, capable of interbreeding, succeed each other geographically. When we have traveled all the way around the world and reach Western Europe again, the final population is different enough that we call it a separate species, and it is incapable of interbreeding with herring gulls, even though they are connected by a continuous chain of interbreeding populations. This is a big problem for creationists. We expect kinds to be easily determined if they were created separately, but there are no such obvious divisions:

They are mistaken, who repeat that the greater part of our species are clearly limited, and that the doubtful species are in a feeble minority. This seemed to be true, so long as a genus was imperfectly known, and its species were founded upon a few specimens, that is to say, were provisional. Just as we come to know them better, intermediate forms flow in, and doubts as to specific limits augment. (de Condolle, quoted in Darwin, 1872, chap. 2)

Next, Pastor Chuck asks:

Where are the transitional forms today, evolving from one species to another? The honest study of fossils do not show it. They merely show a vast array of organisms that have become extinct over time.

The answer to that is fairly obvious: they are all around us. They are just transitional between present day life and what will be extant in the future, something that is too contingent for human beings to predict, much like we cannot predict which atom of U-235 will next decay into Thorium-231. If some aliens visited Earth back in the time of the transition between dinosaurs and birds, they would have just noted the cool dinosaurs with fuzzy coverings, some of whom could maybe glide a bit. They wouldn't know that those dinosaurs would be ancestors of something called "birds," anymore than they'd know, five million years ago, that some interesting apes would evolve into the apes we call H. sapiens today. But we can definitely see the results of evolution. As said in 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, Prediction 1.4: Intermediate and transitional forms: the possible morphologies of predicted common ancestors:

[A]ll living organisms can be thought of as intermediate between adjacent taxa in a phylogenetic tree. For instance, modern reptiles are intermediate between amphibians and mammals, and reptiles are also intermediate between amphibians and birds. As far as macroevolutionary predictions of morphology are concerned, this point is trivial, as it is essentially just a restatement of the concept of a nested hierarchy.

Why did the eruption of Mount St. Helens a few years ago give evolutionary appearance as though it took millions of years in its formation, while in reality it occurred within a short number of days?

Claim CH581.1:

1. The sediments on Mount St. Helens were unconsolidated volcanic ash, which is easily eroded. The Grand Canyon was carved into harder materials, including well-consolidated sandstone and limestone, hard metamorphosed sediments (the Vishnu schist), plus a touch of relatively recent basalt.

2. The walls of the Mount St. Helens canyon slope 45 degrees. The walls of the Grand Canyon are vertical in places.

3. The canyon was not entirely formed suddenly. The canyon along Toutle River has a river continuously contributing to its formation. Another canyon also cited as evidence of catastrophic erosion is Engineer's Canyon, which was formed via water pumped out of Spirit Lake over several days by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

4. The streams flowing down Mount St. Helens flow at a steeper grade than the Colorado River does, allowing greater erosion.

5. The Grand Canyon (and canyons further up and down the Colorado River) is more than 100,000 times larger than the canyon on Mount St. Helens. The two are not really comparable.

Why do scientists ignore the observable evidence of a huge flood? Fish fossils, for example, were found in the high mountains of Wyoming and elsewhere.

Claim CC364:

1. Shells on mountains are easily explained by uplift of the land. Although this process is slow, it is observed happening today, and it accounts not only for the seashells on mountains but also for the other geological and paleontological features of those mountains. The sea once did cover the areas where the fossils are found, but they were not mountains at the time; they were shallow seas.

2. A flood cannot explain the presence of marine shells on mountains for the following reasons:

• Floods erode mountains and deposit their sediments in valleys.

• In many cases, the fossils are in the same positions as they grow in life, not scattered as if they were redeposited by a flood. This was noted as early as the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci (Gould 1998).

• Other evidence, such as fossilized tracks and burrows of marine organisms, show that the region was once under the sea. Seashells are not found in sediments that were not formerly covered by sea.

How about the many places where petrified tree trunks stand upright through various layers of sediment, showing a rapid laying down of strata, not following the proposed idea of the geologic time scale?

Claim CC331:

Sudden deposition is not a problem for uniformitarian geology. Single floods can deposit sediments up to several feet thick. Furthermore, trees buried in such sediments do not die and decay immediately; the trunks can remain there for years or even decades.

The same is true of so-called evolutionary family trees, which are based on speculation and not true science.

If it was just speculation, we wouldn't be able to make predictions based on them, as pointed out in 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, Prediction 1.4: Intermediate and transitional forms: the possible morphologies of predicted common ancestors:

[A] phylogenetic tree does make significant predictions about the morphology of intermediates which no longer exist or which have yet to be discovered. Each predicted common ancestor has a set of explicitly specified morphological characteristics, based on each of the most common derived characters of its descendants and based upon the transitions that must have occurred to transform one taxa into another (Cunningham et al. 1998; Futuyma 1998, pp. 107-108). From the knowledge of avian and reptilian morphology, it is possible to predict some of the characteristics that a reptile-bird intermediate should have, if found. Therefore, we expect the possibility of finding reptile-like fossils with feathers, bird-like fossils with teeth, or bird-like fossils with long reptilian tails. However, we do not expect transitional fossils between birds and mammals, like mammalian fossils with feathers or bird-like fossils with mammalian-style middle ear bones. ... (See the article for numerous examples of confirmation in bird-reptiles, reptile-mammals, human-hominids, land mammal-whales and land mammals-seacows.)

Why the unscientific circular aging of the fossils by the rocks and the rocks by the fossils?

Claim CC310:

1. Many strata are not dated from fossils. Relative dates of strata (whether layers are older or younger than others) are determined mainly by which strata are above others. Some strata are dated absolutely via radiometric dating. These methods are sufficient to determine a great deal of stratigraphy.

Some fossils are seen to occur only in certain strata. Such fossils can be used as index fossils. When these fossils exist, they can be used to determine the age of the strata, because the fossils show that the strata correspond to strata that have already been dated by other means.

2.The geological column, including the relative ages of the strata and dominant fossils within various strata, was determined before the theory of evolution.

And:

Claim CD103:

1.The geologic column was outlined by creationist geologists. For example, Adam Sedgwick, who described and named the Cambrian era, referred to the theory of evolution as "no better than a phrensied dream" (Ritland 1982). The geologic column is based on the observation of faunal succession, the fact that organisms vary across strata, and that they do so in a consistent order from place to place. William "Strata" Smith (1769-1839) recognized faunal succession years before Darwin published his ideas on biological evolution.

2.The geologic column is validated in great detail by radiometric dating, which is based on principles of physics, not evolution. Furthermore, different dating techniques are consistent, and they are consistent with the order established by the early pioneers of stratigraphy.

Speaking of origins, where did matter come from to begin with? The philosophy of evolution has no answer.

Yes, and the science of evolution also does not answer why chemistry works reliably or why your car can turn gasoline into mechanical energy. Here, Pastor Chuck is confusing biology with physics and cosmology. The important point is: however matter and the universe first came into existence in the Big Bang, once it did, biological evolution became possible.

Evolution has to assume that nonliving matter gave rise to living matter, contradicting the proven Law of Biogenesis, that only life reproduces life.

What exactly is "nonliving matter"? All of life on Earth is made up of the same carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. that is found in the crust of the Earth and its atmosphere. It is just arranged in molecules that come about through the ordinary "laws" of chemistry, where elements will combine in certain ways given a proper energy source. Life is an ongoing chemical reaction no less understandable than any high school chem lab experiment.

As for the so-called "Law of Biogenesis":

Claim CB000:

The spontaneous generation that Pasteur and others disproved was the idea that life forms such as mice, maggots, and bacteria can appear fully formed. They disproved a form of creationism. There is no law of biogenesis saying that very primitive life cannot form from increasingly complex molecules.

See, also, John Wilkins' excellent article "Spontaneous Generation and the Origin of Life."

There you have it. Pastor Chuck, in an article of a mere 592 words has misrepresented science to such a degree that it has taken 2,830 words to give even a sketchy reply to him. Hundreds of thousands of more words could be expended and still not fully lay out the case on science's side. Truly, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get it's boots on.

Pastor Chuck describes himself as having a degree in chemistry and natural sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison ... no doubt to the great chagrin of UWM. It's a shame he learned so little.
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Eye Problems

2009-11-14T22:51:00.002-05:00

Here's a good one*:

"You can't teach creationism or intelligent design without getting into a little bit of trouble in the public schools, which is a shame," said former Green Bay East High School science teacher Jim Kraft of Allouez. "What's being promoted in the public schools is really atheism. … There's the (presumption) that the Earth is millions, billions of years old, and that is really a very subtle attack on the Bible, and on Christianity."

Kraft used to be an evolutionist, but later became a Christian and an adherent to creationist principles. He thinks public schools should teach creationism, and he isn't alone.

If Mr. Kraft's religion requires that the Earth be less than "millions, billions of years old," then teaching the scientific facts about the age of the Earth is hardly "subtle." If, on the other hand, the evidence for the age of the Earth is just a "presumption," given the breadth of the evidence, from physics, astrophysics, geology, etc., etc., then all of science must be a presumption in Mr. Kraft's topsy-turvy Omphalos-driven world and you have to wonder about the commitment he ever had to teaching science.

There's more:

Kraft doesn't think someone can be a Christian and an evolutionist.

"It really boils down to the authority of Scripture," he said. "Are you going to believe God, or are you going to believe man?"

For myself, the answer is easy. I'm going to believe the men and women with the evidence over the men who wrote down the Bible and, without any evidence, claimed it came from God.

But it's funny that Mr. Kraft apparently thinks the Pope ain't Catholic since, as the article points out, the Catholic Church's position is that evolution and faith are not incompatible.

If those blinders on Mr. Kraft get any tighter, he won't be able to see at all.

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* "Black and white: Nearly 150 years after Darwin, creationists and evolution theorists hold tight to their arguments," Green Bay Wisconsin Press-Gazette, November 15, 2009.
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Mirages In the Mirror

2009-11-13T07:32:00.002-05:00

David Klinghoffer is peddling inanity again but in a hilariously un-self-aware fashion.

Once more, he is promoting David Berlinski's Argumentum ad Poetica, where Keats' line (still mangled by Klinghoffer) about "Beauty is truth, truth beauty ..." is somehow supposed to be a measure of scientific theories. He has a minor point about PZ Myers' also holding that "ideas have consequences" when it comes to religion but, of course, there is a major difference between the ideas of religion and the ideas of science. Science does not say, as religion does, that:

We have a responsibility to hold fast to every doctrine God has seen fit to reveal to us in Scripture; in particular, we are under obligation to receive by faith the doctrine of Creation.

... even when it means we have to accept such batshit crazy ideas as the Earth being only 6,000 years old. All science requires is that you not commit a category error by calling something "science" when it doesn't follow science's method. Despite all their whinging about mean ol' "Darwinists" not letting them have their say, all the IDers have to do in order to get a hearing in the scientific community is to produce empirically testable data in favor of their claims.

But here is Klinghoffer's comedy routine:

Islam doesn't particularly interest me -- any religion can be made to look inherently wicked by a selective quoting of sources ...

Oh? ... like how Klinghoffer and the other IDers selectively quote Darwin and even intuit Hitler's "transparently Darwinian arguments to motivate fellow Jew-haters to actuate the Final Solution" in order to try to make science look wicked?

I've got news for Klinghoffer. It doesn't take selective quotations to make his version of religion, which has no scruples about lying to children about what science is, look bad.
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Striving to Be the Worst

2009-11-12T13:28:00.003-05:00

This may be the stupidest example of brain-damaged ramblings to ever be posted to the internet. I know that is an extremely high ... or low, depending on how you look at it ... bar to meet but Steve Kellmeyer has made a mighty try at exceeding it. It's no surprise that his efforts are sponsored by Alan Keyes' RenewAmerica website, giving him an enormous running start.

His premise is that "leftist liberals" (which later morphs into "atheist liberals" without explanation) love Islam.

His "evidence" for this is hard to discern but apparently has to do with some unspecified "protection" of Major Nidal Hakim Hasan (perhaps by not being as willing as some to take the Major out and summarily lynch him?) and this:

Why allow the name of Allah and the practice of Ramadan into public schools while forbidding the name of Jesus and the practice of Christmas?

Last I looked, "leftists liberals" were for treating Islam and Christianity the same under the First Amendment: children should be taught about both, since they have been and are major social forces in our world; children can speak the name of Jesus and Allah in the appropriate circumstances (i.e. when not disrupting class work); and reasonable accommodation has to be made for their practice of their religion. The one thing that government schools can't do is force the children to practice someone else's religion, say, by organizing a Christmas pageant in a public school, replete with readings from the New Testament.

But then he gets truly weird:

[F]rom an atheist's point of view, Allah has a marvelous attribute: Allah can change his mind. Allah turns good into evil and evil into good by simply commanding it. And for the liberal atheist, this is very comforting. Sure, Allah doesn't like homosexuality or rape today, but He might change His mind tomorrow. My self-destructive behaviour today may turn out to be a wonderful moral good tomorrow. ...

With Judeo-Christianity, no such possibility exists. God will never change His mind because God does not change. But with Islam all bets are off. Allah may decide tomorrow that rape is perfectly fine, that homosexuality is the preferred form of sexual expression. All we liberal atheists need to do is convince the imams that this is so. And how tough can that be?

Huh? I'm reasonably certain that I can find many more Christian and Jewish clergy accepting of gays and gay rights than I can imams. But something tells me that Kellmeyer would just say that they aren't real "Judeo-Christians."

And when crazy rears its ugly head can downright offensiveness be far behind?:

He [Hasan] did to the soldiers at Fort Hood what every good atheist liberal has always wanted to do to those Christian, God-fearing, courageous American soldiers — he shot them through the head. He shot them through the heart. He drove a stake into them, chased them down while they were wounded and pumped more bullets into them. He shot them and shot them and shot them until their blood flowed like water, until their blood clotted on the floor, and then he shot them again. He destroyed them, he vented his rage upon them, he annihilated them for daring to question the annihilation that is coming to us all. He ground them to dust, the dust of the universe.

Ummm ... I suppose Kellmeyer is so divorced from reality that he doesn't even make the connection that the very fact that Major Hassan is a Moslem demonstrates that not all American soldiers are Christians. But to attribute murderous intent generally to "leftist" or "atheist" liberals is bizarre. It no doubt comes from Kellmeyer's involvement in anti-abortion activism, where he maintains his lack of objectivity:

[L]ook at the leftist embrace of abortionists, men and women who wear body armor to their place of work. Even though you are much more likely to end up dead from being pro-life than you are from being pro-abort, the left constantly touts the dangers of being in favor of abortion.

I'm not quite sure if wearing body armor is supposed to be a sign of their perfidy but I can only wonder if he considered the case of Dr. George Tiller, shot down by a Christian inside a Christian church ... one of many examples of why pro-choice providers might consider body armor. How many anti-abortionists have been shot down by pro-choice activists?

I can't reproduce the full batshit insanity of Kellmeyer's piece without reproducing the entire disjointed mess ... further depressing myself. If you need something to cause yourself to despair for your country, you'll have to go and read the original.

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Update: James McGrath, who actually knows something about the Bible, gives some examples, contrary to Kellmeyer's assertions, where the "Judeo-Christian" God changes his mind.
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Analogized

2009-11-12T07:12:00.002-05:00

PZ Megahertz on the dangers of argument by analogy:

We know that human beings build penis-shaped objects; that does not imply that Bill Dembski's penis is made of silicone and has an on-off switch, let alone that someone made it in an injection-molding machine.

It would be crude and unfair to ask how PZ knows the state of Wild Bill's penis and we can, instead, put it down to a charitable assumption that the living fart sound effect machine is not as weird as that implies.
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Lying Liars Lies

2009-11-11T10:00:00.002-05:00

Casey Luskin's lips are moving again.

This time he is claiming that Intelligent Design Creationism is not merely a negative argument and accusing Ken Miller of "misrepresenting" (i.e. lying about) its nature. I'll summarize his "positive" arguments (with the sources he gives: Michael Behe, Scott Minnich and Stephen Meyer:

"[W]e recognize design by the purposeful arrangement of parts" and "parts appear arranged to serve a purpose" (Behe); "irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role ... we regard it as an inference to the best explanation, given what we know about the powers of intelligent (sic) as opposed to strictly natural or material causes" (Minnich and Meyer); and "experience-based knowledge of information-flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source from a mind or personal agent" (Meyer). (Emphasis added)

In addition, Luskin assets: "ID proponents have made it clear that ID appeals to an intelligent cause, and necessarily not to a supernatural one."

Let's take a closer look at these. What is a "purposeful" arrangement of parts? What about the arrangements of the parts of a water molecule? Water is a highly unique "system" in our world with a number of properties that are not found in most substances. It exists in three different states (gaseous, liquid and solid) within a very narrow range of temperatures; it expands when both heated and cooled; it is a near universal solvent; and it is absolutely necessary for all living things. Moreover, it is irreducibly complex. Remove any part of the molecule and it is no longer water and does not serve the "purpose" of sustaining life. But does observational experience demonstrate that intelligent design or engineering invariably plays a role in water formation? Thus, we have a ubiquitous example of an irreducibly complex part of our world that needs no intelligent design or engineering to explain it (unless, of course, everything must be explained by design, in which case design is no "explanation" at all).

Furthermore, all these arguments boil down to an argument from analogy: we see things we know are designed have some traits, therefore everything with similar traits must be designed. As we have already seen, the analogy breaks down because it depends on a subjective determination of "purpose." Furthermore, it is nothing but warmed-over William Paley, who was refuted before he even wrote his more honestly entitled book, Natural Theology, because the analogy of living things to human designs is not nearly close enough to be persuasive. Even as we start to "engineer" life, it will be based on our learning about what life already was, which has never resembled what we have engineered before.

As to the claim that ID is not appealing necessarily to a supernatural agent, not only is Wilkins' epistemological hat in serious danger, but if there is a potentially natural "Designer," why does Casey (and Of Pandas and People before him) then assert that the nature and abilities of the intelligent agent is unanswerable by science must be left to religion and philosophy?

That last part is the final nail in the coffin of ID as science. Even when science does make an inference to the best explanation (which has its own philosophical problems), the last thing science does is then throw up its hands and say that's all we can do. When Darwin made an inference to the best explanation he fully expected the scientific community to go on testing it relentlessly, as he himself kept doing. (Allen MacNeill has a nice example of this in the way we have gone on testing the hypothesis that whales evolved from Artiodactyls, with no end of testing in sight.)

The fact that ID advocates try to protect their "inference" from further testing is more than enough reason to say that it is not science. That's why they have to try to change the definition of science in support of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature." The failure of its "positive" evidence to bear the scientific weight of the claims made for it renders the whole of ID nothing more than an attempt to use empiric facts about the world (such as the complexity of the blood clotting cascade) as a negative argument against evolution.

All the smoke and mirrors in the world cannot hide that fact.
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