Thoughts from Kansas

There can only be one

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:28:30 -0800

Francisco Ayala is dead, long live Francisco Ayala.

Todd Wood talks (some) sense

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:50:18 -0800

Todd Wood is a creationist. He is a professor at Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Scopes in 1925. He is, in particular, a professor of baraminology, the creationist notion that his particular Christian God created the "kinds" in the first week, and that by careful measurement, he can identify those "kinds." He thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old. He thinks evolution is wrong, but he also freely acknowledges that it is the very best scientific knowledge available, and has been on a minor crusade to move other creationists away from the absurdities of their anti-evolution claims. It's truly remarkable to watch him sort through these issues, and I'm grateful to him for blogging his thoughts.

His latest post goes beyond creation/evolution to a discussion that we may as well consider a sequel to Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Noll: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."). Looking back at his time in the c/e fight he turns to his colleagues and considers "the nature of idolatry" (N.B.: Thanks to Tony Ortega, I've been using that phrase to describe ID advocates since 2005). Wood writes (I tried trimming this down and excerpting it, but the whole thing is best appreciated in its entirety):

I've come to the uncomfortable conclusion that we creationists have made an idol of our own arguments. I don't say this lightly or flippantly either. …

Somehow, in our modern world, I think we've come to believe that the mysteries are all solved, that our position is literally the only one that makes sense. But how can this be? How can any of our theology "make sense?" Let's just look at the most basic point of all: When Adam and Eve sinned, why didn't God just wipe them out and start over again? Why curse the creation then become a part of it and suffer a humiliating death in order to fix it? How does that make any sense? It doesn't. It is the foolishness of God, and it is wiser than any human wisdom. How do I know? I know by faith.

That's not the attitude you'll hear today among many Christian thinkers. They'll tell you that we're the only ones with any sensible position. What happened to God's foolishness? What happened to the great mysteries of the faith? When did we figure them all out?

I greatly fear that our faith in Christ has been replaced with an idolatry of apologetics. I fear we've stopped believing in Christ and started believing in arguments about Christ (or the Bible or creation or what have you). I fear we've bowed to the world's demand that we believe only that which is rational. We're certainly no longer content with merely saying "I don't know." We have to have answers, and endless (and often pointless) argument has become our substitute for simply telling unbelievers what Christ has done for us.

Don't believe me? Try telling a creationist that there is evidence for evolution. Watch how tenaciously they'll argue against you. They might even try to insult you, maybe call you bipolar or just plain ignorant. They'll certainly question your creationist "credentials." Only an evolutionist would say there's evidence for evolution! I've even been told that I'm going to lead people away from faith in Christ by my position on evolution. Imagine that. What kind of world is this where telling the truth about something would lead someone away from faith? The only way that could possibly be true is if our faith is actually wrong, which it isn't.

OK, maybe evolution is a big, touchy subject. Let's look at something a little smaller: the geologic column. Any creationist worth his salt knows that the geologic column is a debated topic in creationism. It all started with George McCready Price at the very beginning of the twentieth century. He claimed that the geologic column (worked out largely before evolution became popular) was bogus. It was supposedly built on circular logic (which it isn't), and there was no reproducible order to it at all (which there is).

The first creationist to question Price's geology was Harold Clark, who actually spent a summer doing field work with oil geologists. He tried to formulate a model to explain the regular order of the fossil record. For his trouble, Price accused Clark of spreading "theories of satanic origin" and tried to bring charges of heresy against him to SDA church officials.

I wish I could say things are better today. In modern creationism, the majority of Ph.D. geologists accept the geologic column as a legitimate summary of the order of the fossil record. There remain critics, however, who sometimes bitterly argue against the geologic column. I've read a lot of these criticisms, and the one thing that always sticks out in my mind is the veiled accusations of "compromise." By accepting the geologic column, so the argument goes, we are compromising with an unbiblical and ungodly uniformitarian view of nature. It's not merely a disagreement over the interpretation of data (which it should be). It's a moral and faith issue.

I ask you, why should that be? Why do creationists get so breathtakingly passionate about this or that argument? Why fight so tenaciously over the order of the fossil record or even sillier things like the Zuiyo maru carcass [a basking shark carcass which, given its state of decomposition, is treated by creationists as evidence that plesiosaurs still live]? Why do we think our faith depends on these arguments being true? Why can't we just let these things go and rest in our own experiences of the risen Lord?

By now some of my readers probably think I've gone way off the deep end. Fair enough. Let me leave you with another chilling possibility. What if we teach the next generation that there is no evidence for evolution? And what if we're wrong? What do you think will happen when those kids find out? I think what will happen is the same thing that always happens. They'll be disillusioned and fall away from the faith. I've heard of this happening, and I've seen it happen. People find out that all the antievolution arguments in the world won't survive a semester of basic biology at a secular university. While we thought we were teaching them to believe in Christ, we instead taught them to idolize our arguments about Christ. And when those arguments are shown to be incomplete, inadequate, or just wrong, that idolatry (which we thought was real faith) slips away.

I think he's right. Look back at the history of religion, and you'll see that religious knowledge (or claims, if you prefer) is typically stated in terms of mystery, whether it's a Zen koan, Taoist stanza, or Talmudic parsing. Paradox, self-contradiction, and a host of irrational claims are offered as analogies for knowledge of the divine. The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, so all we can talk about are shadows of what we mean. Only by essentially denying meaning in its conventional sense did traditional religious thinkers hope to approach a conception of the divine's super-reality. When I try to distinguish religious truth claims from scientific truth claims, I am aiming at this sort of distinction, which strikes me as not unlike (though not identical to) the distinction between scientific truth claims and those of literary works.

The Enlightenment made it less necessary to refer quite so much of the world to that super-reality, and brought so much more into the possibility of our rational ken. The burgeoning Evangelical movement of the 17th century seized on the Scottish philosophies of the day, and especially Bacon's conception of science (discussed briefly here). They used this perversion of science to construct a new way of talking about the deity, a new approach to the Bible, and eventually, a new approach to empirical reality.

There is a common misconception that fundamentalists (who first grew out of Evangelicalism during the late 19th century, essentially doubling down on the scientistic affectations of their forefathers) reject modernity and its works. But fundamentalists are not the Amish. They may reject evolution, but only because they have constructed a view in which their religious beliefs must be squared off against scientific knowledge. They welcome cars, television, and every other scientific and technological discovery. But they also fear the implications of these works, and they want to steer society towards their preferred outcomes. Not by rejecting progress, but by shaping it to their own ends. Osama bin Laden doesn't want to destroy the West, he wants to take all the good things that the West has done and rework them into his Islamic ideal. Similarly, James Dobson doesn't want to rebuild America into a "Christian nation" without sacrificing its secular power, its economic influence, its scientific and technological wonders. Is this idolatry? Surely it is. If we want to see the golden calf which caused Moses to smash his tablets, we need only look at a modern megachurch.

What Wood is suggesting is both deeply radical and utterly traditional. He is asking his fellow evangelicals to follow the urgings of Jesus and not seek to entwine their faith with their dealings in the empirical world. Let faith be faith, and stop seeking to fondle Jesus' wounds. Among those irrational koans that abound in religion, one especially is pertinent: "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."

Is Wood's form of faith contradictory with science? I don't think this is an easy question. The vision of faith laid out above strikes me as almost definitionally compatible with science, as it explicitly accepts science as a legitimate source of knowledge and does not try to challenge its validity as a method, nor the results derived from that message.

Critics from the "New Atheist" camp will take heart in the fact that, despite all that, Wood rejects major elements of evolution and the geological evidence for a 4.55 billion year old Earth and seeks to pose his anti-evolution arguments in explicitly scientific terms. Thus, my New Atheist critics and I will agree that some inconsistency is at work in Wood's mind, but we think its nature is different. They, as I understand it, feel that he is inconsistent because he believes that science gives real and meaningful results, but also believes that religion gives real and meaningful results (regardless of whether those results might conflict on empirical matters). I think the conflict lies in his rejection of anti-evolution apologetics on one hand, and his simultaneous efforts to create the basis of such works on the other.

For what it's worth, I think my form of conflict is more amenable to resolution. Wood may, wrongly, believe that baraminology (the creationist form of systematics Wood practices) is legitimate science which will, in time, reveal legitimate challenges to some forms of evolution, and that these results are not and should not be used as apologetics. The conflict then is whether baraminology is truly a legitimate form of science, or merely a post hoc rationalization of the creationist apologetics advanced by George McCready Price and Henry Morris (among others). It's obvious to me that it is the latter. Wood presumably disagrees.

And that's a discussion I can handle. Science, however hard to define precisely, is a thing we can all examine, as is baraminology. We can devise ways to evaluate whether one meets the criteria of the other or not, and come to agreement about those results. We cannot, as far as I can tell, do the same for theological claims about god(s) in any generic sense. We can't seem to devise a consistent and workable definition of religion that's even tolerable for day-to-day agreement, nor can we find such a definition for any of its major subtopics (god, faith, religious truth, etc.). How can we decide whether religion (in its broadest, most generic sense) is philosophically compatible with science (even assuming we had a good definition of "philosophical compatibility")?

In any event, think about what Wood's saying, and what it says about science and religion, and scientific outreach to religious audiences (such as the general US public). Then read Emiliano Carneiro Monteiro's account of his struggles against the same sort of idolatry as a Brazilian evolutionary biologist recently converted to an evangelical branch of Christianity. Let's all give thanks that this anti-anti-evolutionary sentiment is growing across national boundaries.

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Claude Levi-Strauss, R.I.P.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:55:48 -0800

Afarensis and John Hawks bid farewell to a giant.

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On counting

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:05:52 -0800

Martin Cothran – fellow traveler with the Disco. 'Tute, shill for James Dobson's crew, and generally unpleasant person – thinks the dissent of 162 members of American Physical Society disproves a scientific consensus. Alas for Cothran, the APS has 47,189 members, so the dissent of 162 hardly undermines a claim of consensus.

Bonus shorter Martin Cothran – A sad story:

Guilt by association is wrong. It might lead you to criticize someone for endorsing the racist, eugenic arguments of racist eugenicists, or to criticize an event promoting sexual health and safety for being sponsored by a group which sells novelty handcuffs.

Deep Thought: If owning soft pink bondage restraints is considered abuse, is getting handcuffed a form of police brutality?

A clarification: The UKY Safe Sex Week was not named after KY Jelly.

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Christopher Hitchens doesn't like Mother Theresa

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:15:56 -0800

For some reason, people are only now realizing Christopher Hitchens' distaste for Mother Teresa. It's like they started paying attention to the world a week ago.

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Global warming, science denial, and how to teach more evolution

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:04:48 -0800

There's been much ink spilled lately about the latest work from the authors of Freakonomics. I should say before getting into this that I haven't read their last book, and don't plan to read the sequel. I also haven't read any of Malcolm Gladwell's books, for largely the same reasons (note that the Freakonomists apparently acknowledge that they cut one section of their latest book because Gladwell scooped them). Basically, I see these sorts of books as attempts by minimally-informed dilettantes to insert themselves into complex topics by applying a canned methodology and pretending that the naive solutions resulting from this are somehow novel and important (I also don't read Thomas Friedman any more for this reason).

In their latest book, Freakonomists Levitt and Dubner include a chapter on global warming in which they argue that carbon dioxide isn't the real problem, rising temperatures are, so let's ignore carbon emissions and monkey with the atmosphere to artificially cool it. Joe Romm has dissected the chapter's many errors, and the negative reaction of the chapter's scientific sources to it's content, and RealClimate demolished the chapter as well. The response from economists has been equally negative.

I lost all possibility of respect for the Freakonomists when I heard an NPR interview where they prefaced a discussion of geoengineering (pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet) with a reading from the book's "explanatory note":

In truth, the book [Freakonomics] did have a unifying theme, even if it wasn't obvious at the time, even to us. If pressed, you could boil it down to four words: People respond to incentives. If you wanted to get more expansive, you would say this: People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences. This applies to schoolteachers and Realtors and crack dealers as well as expectant mothers, sumo wrestlers, bagel salesmen, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Emphasis original, from p. xiv of the "Explanatory Note" to Superfreakonomics.

If you take the law of unintended consequences seriously, you do not endorse geoengineering. You just don't. We have one planet, we've studied the upper atmosphere for a matter of decades, and we don't fully understand how pumping tons of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere will change geochemistry, climate, and other important things. The potential downsides are enormous, the cost significant, the payoff obscure, and it fails to address the full range of problems attendant upon global climate change and massive carbon emissions. For instance, the upward trend in carbon dioxide concentrations will have unpredictable effects on plant growth and ecological communities, it will increase ocean acidity, and it will require that any responses to these phenomena accelerate as unchecked greenhouse gas emissions continue to exert their influence on the global climate and the biosphere.

Responding to the fear of ocean acidification as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels, Jonah Goldberg parrots the Freakonomists by suggesting "Give it some antacid," as if we could tweak ocean chemistry so simply and with no unpredictable and catastrophic side effects. Kevin Drum ponders Goldberg and the Freakonomists, and suggests that Dubner and Levitt have failed their readers by giving a general impression that is 180 degrees from reality, then insulating themselves from criticism by inserting occasional unconvincing disclaimers (forcing the AP, for instance, to do an elaborate fact-check). He concludes with this thought:

As for Goldberg, he wonders somberly why public belief in global warming has declined lately and decides (natch) that it's the Democrats' fault for actually trying to do something about it. The fact that his side of the aisle has waged a blistering, no-holds-barred denialism war for the past few years apparently has nothing to do with it.

It should go without saying that I see parallels to creationism throughout this. The current creationist strategy is not to outright promote creationism (courts having been too cruel to such strategies), and instead advocating for the teaching evolution's "weaknesses," itself a strategy mapped out by creationists in the 1980s after losing their last case before the Supreme Court ("school boards and teachers should be strongly encouraged at least to stress the scientific evidences and arguments against evolution in their classes (not just arguments against some proposed evolutionary mechanism, but against evolution per se), even if they don't wish to recognize these as evidences and arguments for creation (not necessarily as arguments for a particular date of creation, but for creation per se).") Creationists hope that, even if such arguments do not overtly advocate creationism, students will draw the inference.

Similarly, I see something similar between the mendacious approach Goldberg takes to explaining public opinion about global warming and some criticisms of evolution's defense by NCSE and others.

To choose an example of this at random, here's Jerry Coyne criticizing NCSE, the AAAS, and NAS, for being too friendly to religious people:

In 25 years of effort, these organizations don’t seem to have had much effect on influencing public opinion about evolution. I think that this may mean that our nation will have to become a lot less religious before acceptance of evolution increases appreciably.

This sort of argument is quite common from Coyne, PZ, and a range of others in that camp ("New Atheists," if you will). It argues that public opinion on evolution has been fairly constant for the last 30 years, therefore current approaches to evolution-defense/advocacy have failed, therefore we should do something different, therefore we should stop treating pro-evolution religious people and groups as allies.

While the last part of this argument doesn't follow in any obvious way from the first parts, one can cobble something or other together. But Kevin Drum's response to Goldberg points up the fallacy of the first logical leap.

If all else were equal, and if the goal of NCSE, AAAS, NAS, and other groups were primarily to conduct public education about evolution, then the measure of success would clearly be poll results on public acceptance of evolution. But both of these assumptions are false. For the last 50 years, creationists have undertaken a high-profile media campaign against evolution, building on the previous hundred years of anti-evolution agitation (of varying intensity).

By the lights of Coyne, et al., the creationists too have failed, as they aren't moving the needle against evolution. Indeed, we appear to be in a public opinion stalemate. Static public opinion thus suggests that either creationists are totally ineffective and that pro-evolution forces have been as well, or that creationists are effective on some level and that pro-evolution groups have also been effective, but not much more effective than creationists. The first is wildly implausible, given the wide dispersal of creationist talking points in the general discourse, so we have to conclude that pro-evolution groups have been effective to at least some degree, and the premise of the New Atheist critique of such efforts is left on quicksand.

This isn't to say that the critique can't be saved, but it does suggest a naivete or disingenuity among people making such arguments. They either don't realize the political context of the creation/evolution conflict, or are intentionally obscuring that context to make their point. Neither of those would be entirely satisfactory.

In the interests of moving past vituperation and toward a productive discourse about how to improve this situation, here are some observations about how I think we could be more effective at increasing public understanding of evolution in particular and science in general. First, note that where creationists have been explicitly targeting public opinion, science groups have been approaching the issue from a different angle. NCSE's resources are largely aimed at activists and teachers, reflecting the fact that most of immediate conflicts over evolution have teachers in the crosshairs, and NCSE's goal is to be a clearinghouse for information for activists and others on the front line, and the materials are more focused on dispelling creationist myths about evolution than on educating the general public about evolution. The fact that our Constitution offers a legal bulwark against creationism means that strategy is formulated with an eye toward an eventual legal conflict, and to maintaining evolution's 45 year winning streak. (As always, this blog is not an NCSE project, and while I work at NCSE and have certain vested interests, I'm not saying anything that isn't clear from NCSE's website or other public sources, nor am I speaking for NCSE in any sense. I don't think anything I'm saying now would differ from my opinion on the topic before I worked at NCSE, which may explain why I went to work there.)

NAS and AAAS are in a different situation, but they tend to preach to the choir. Their publications are generally quite technical and aimed at either scientists or at teachers. Even outlets like NOVA, Science News, Science Times, Scientific American, and Seed will tend to have audiences pre-disposed to favor evolution, and the content of such popular science outlets is still too technical for the general public. Audiences who don't care about evolution or who are undecided about it are less likely to read such material. There has been little effort to break science advocacy out of such a channelized approach, and the suggestion of broader outreach is often met with rather vehement opposition (as evidenced by the reaction to Unscientific America, and the framing fight before that).

In that context, largely defensive in focus and narrowly aimed at a sympathetic audience, the stability of public opinion is hardly surprising. Any strategy focused on primary and secondary education would be hard-pressed to show significant improvements in public understanding, as the cycle of change there is incredibly slow. Today's teachers may have last been in a year-long biology class in their own high school biology class 50 years ago, when evolution was much less central to the presentation of biology. The average teacher is 42, and may not have taken a biology class since she was 14. Changes we make to secondary education today will have a comparable 30 year lag before they trickle back into most science classes.

And change in science classes is blocked in part by the resistance of parents, who probably also haven't had a biology class in 25-30 years (age of first pregnancy: 24; age of most ninth graders: 14; average age of ninth-grade parents: over 38). So most teachers didn't learn biology with evolution at its core. Research shows that teachers who had a college class in evolution spend more time on it, and most spend less than 10 hours of class time on it, a laughably inadequate amount (a third spend less than a week on it, 62% spend 10 hours or less, roughly two weeks of instructional time). Teachers with a college evolution class spend 50% more time on evolution than those without, but how many pre-service programs for biology teachers require a course in evolution?

Part of the problem comes from parents, as well. An informal survey of science educators (mostly high school, but some from colleges and from middle or elementary schools) found that 31% of teachers get pressure (mostly from parents or students) to teach creationism of some form, while 30% report pressure (again, mostly from parents or students) not to teach evolution at all. The survey didn't ask how many teachers report pressure to teach evolution or not to teach creationism, but my own informal surveys of teachers have turned up no such comparable pressure.

What we need, then, is a broader constituency for science, an effort to reach out to the general public and boost understanding of evolution (or failing that, at least toleration of having it taught to students). Making the schools safe for evolution is a critical first step, but it isn't enough.

As I pointed out on my Science Denial panel this summer, congresscritters often have advisory panels of constituents on a range of topics. In discussing his own panels, Congressman Joe Sestak (running for one of Pennsylvania's US Senate seats), listed a range of constituency groups, including military, veterans, manufacturing, unions, and even on dedicated to autism. No mention, though, of science more broadly, either in its narrow academic context nor in the context of the millions of people who read Science Times, Science News, Scientific American, science blogs broadly, or who cheer with House and his colleagues as they apply the scientific method to solving medical mysteries, or Gil Grissom and his successors as they use science to solve crimes.

In recent years, NCSE has been working towards being less reactive, hiring a staffer to reach out to faith communities and another to reach out prospectively to teachers. The first is necessary to counter creationists' ability to sow doubts about evolution in churches, and to turn that around by encouraging pro-evolution clergy to express their views in pulpits and in public hearings, and to bring scientists in to advance that cause as well. The education project works to help teachers improve and increase their evolution coverage, a critical component of improving the situation. Both positions are less than 5 years old, making it too early to measure the effects of those two hard-working staffers on public opinion polls at large. But it's a big job, and two people alone can't do the job, and all of NCSE's staff is often consumed with the challenge of blocking creationist advances. Naturally, there are lots of things NCSE could do if it had a ton more money and staff, and anyone interested in helping on that front knows what to do.

The question of how pro-evolution forces should proceed is an important and interesting one. Blog debate about it's shape and content is a crucial part of its future, and I hope this post helps that discussion proceed. I also hope it moves us away from misleading or inaccurate framings of the question.

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Steve Fuller desecrates Norman Levitt's memory

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:02:34 -0800

Norman Levitt was a great man, a leonine defender of science against the trendy pablum advanced under the guise of post-modern critique. This defense was most famously advanced in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, co-authored with the indomitable Paul Gross. He also assisted in an amicus brief in Kitzmiller v. Dover and reviewed a book about Dover by sociologist Steve Fuller, who testified in defense of ID (arguing, for instance, that ID deserved "affirmative action"). Levitt passed away over the weekend, and his widow has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to NCSE.

Fuller has, apparently, decided to wait until Levitt could not answer for himself before replying to Levitt's criticisms. In writing his own eulogy for Levitt, Fuller quickly shifts into attack mode.

By Fuller's lights, Levitt was "a minor science fascist" whose efforts to "defend the scientific establishment from those who questioned its legitimacy" were undertaken "to render his own sense of failure intelligible." Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers for 40 years and author of monographs on topology, is portrayed by Fuller as "someone of great unfulfilled promise" because "mathematicians typically fulfil [sic] their promise much earlier than other academics."

Fuller concludes this obituary by writing: "I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science, which is backed up (at least at the moment) by nothing more than a steady stream of invective."

Yes, folks, it is Levitt, not Fuller and his bizarre cohort of post-modern creationists, who is supposed to have created a "parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science," and allegedly defended it through "a steady stream of invective."

Gah.

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On false equivalences

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:09:13 -0800

Jason Rosenhouse, criticizing Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's reply to Jerry Coyne's review of their book in Science, ends with this thought:

You can not consistently argue that one side hurts the cause every time they open their mouths, but then object that you are not telling them to keep quiet. Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this, as has been explained to M and K many times. No one thinks they want the government to come in and do anything. To be honest, I'm baffled that M and K persist in getting so irate on this point. Of course they want people like Dawkins to keep quiet, or at least to completely change the way he goes about presenting his views, which amounts to the same thing.

That last sentence strikes me as utterly fallacious. This would only be true if "people like Dawkins" were only capable of saying one thing, and only capable of saying it one way. Which is absurd, and insulting to Dawkins and those like him.

Back in 2007, Mooney and co-author Matt Nisbet stirred up the previous iteration of this crapstorm with an essay in Science arguing that scientists should think more carefully about how they communicate to the public. In passing, they noted that:

The evolution issue also highlights another point: Messages must be positive and respect diversity. As the film Flock of Dodos painfully demonstrates, many scientists not only fail to think strategically about how to communicate on evolution, but belittle and insult others' religious beliefs.

This is hardly a cry for scientists not to talk about evolution, nor for them to evade the subject of religion. They do suggest engaging the public in ways that will encourage productive dialogue, not offense.

The effects of that style of discourse are fairly straightforward. Consider the case of Richard Dawkins, touring in support of his latest book, a vigorous defense of evolution as a science. In nearly every interview with him I've seen or heard, he's been asked about the relationship of evolution to religion, much to his own apparent frustration and to the frustration of his supporters. Reacting to one such interview, Jerry Coyne writes: "Of course the reviewer can’t stay away from Dawkins’s atheism."

Why "of course"? I do lots of media interviews about evolution, and rarely are my religious views a topic of discussion. "Of course" because Dawkins made certain choices in previous books and previous interviews, and perhaps regrets those (a bit) for their impact on his ability to present his current message. From the interview Coyne quotes:

It is true that religious people do react to any kind of criticism as almost a personal insult, it’s almost as if you’re saying their face is ugly or something [Hmmm, could calling people deluded and comparing them to child abusers have that effect? -Josh] … You’ve heard words like strident and shrill, as well. I’d like to suggest that actually it’s quite a funny book.

Do you regret having that kind of reputation? Do you feel like it’s handicapping you in the future — that you’ll always be seen as having a certain kind of agenda in mind?

Yes, I think it’s unfortunate. I think it comes from people who haven’t actually read the book, or who haven’t actually met me personally, and so I’m described as a very aggressive, strident person, which I’m not.

Coyne adds "And he isn't." Which is true. He's a nice guy, as are Coyne, and PZ, and many of the other "New Atheists." But the written word is a harsh mistress, an easier place to be misunderstood than the spoken word. I did read The God Delusion, and didn't find it funny. De gustibus non est disputandum, but humor is really hard, especially for those of us who aren't professional humorists. And when your jokes touch on a topic as deeply personal as religion, it's easy to be misunderstood. As a result of those misunderstandings, Dawkins is having a harder time talking about what he wants: evolution.

Pointing out, as Chris and Matt and Sheril did on various occasions, that the way Dawkins was talking about atheism would make him less effective as a spokesman for science is hardly a call for him not to talk. Chris and Matt wrote an op-ed about their Science paper, which used this example precisely, noting in 2007:

Dawkins, who rose to fame with his lucid expositions of evolution in such books as "The Selfish Gene," has never gone easy on religion. But recently he has ramped up his atheist message, further mixing his defense of evolution with his attack on belief.

Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins's arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality. Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears -- baseless though they may be -- but lends them an exclamation point.

We agree with Dawkins on evolution and admire his books, so we don't enjoy singling him out. But he stands as a particularly stark example of scientists' failure to explain hot-button issues, such as global warming and evolution, to a wary public.

This is hardly a cry for Dawkins not to talk, not to talk about religion, or not to criticize religion. It is, however, a call for him to do so strategically, to continue the work that they admire in a way that isn't self-limiting.

To Jason's point, then, I don't see how it's fair to say that Chris and Sheril or Chris and Matt have tried to silence certain people (bearing in mind that I've hardly read every word any of them have written, and I'm basically just talking about the arguments in Unscientific America and Mooney and Nisbet's two essays here). They do want people to discuss certain topics in different ways, because they think that doing so would make those people more effective at what they are doing. Drawing an equivalence between "don't say X that way" and "don't talk about X" (or even "don't talk") assumes that there's no other way that the target can express his or her thoughts about X – that he or she is incapable of any change at all.

This idea that people's behaviors and thought processes are set in stone has also been applied to the general public in these debates. In trying to catch up on the context of this debate, I found Chris Mooney reacting to a Pew poll by arguing:

if we could only dislodge the idea that evolution is contradictory to people’s belief in “Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%),” then they would have no problem with evolution.

Ophelia Benson responded curtly (and I don't mean to single out Ophelia, I could readily find others in the debate arguing the same way):

Yes, and if we could perform other miracles we could do other great things, but alas...

From there, the discussion branched off into broader discussion of whether epistemic compatibility of science and religion is possible (it isn't clear that all involved here agree on what epistemic compatibility would mean, let alone that that's the best criterion to use for compatibility, but set those questions aside for now).

But Ophelia's dismissal of Chris's observation wasn't about epistemic anything. It's about whether people will continue to believe that evolution and their religious beliefs are in conflict, or whether they might be able to find their own way to be comfortable with both. And a majority of Americans do hold science and religion to be compatible, so it wouldn't be a miracle to simply find a person who believes as Chris describes.

I take it, then (and Ophelia will correct me if I'm wrong), that this response is premised on the idea that it takes a miracle to change people's minds, at least about these sorts of issues. It seems clear that Chris does not. He clearly thinks minds can change, as he and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote a book dedicated to changing people's minds, and to helping them change yet more people's minds. Mooney and Nisbet's articles defended the same proposition: that people's minds can change on scientific topics.

That this is possible cannot be denied. The figure here is from my talk at the AAAS meetings last February, and is drawn from data gathered by the National Science Board. Over the last few decades, acceptance of evolution has been far lower than the younger theory of plate tectonics, neither of which has changed statistically in that time period (taking the 2001 sample on evolution as an outlier).

Acceptance of the dangers of taking antibiotics to kill viruses has risen steadily in that same time frame, showing the value of a consistent public education effort that engages schools, doctors, pharmacists, and a range of other trusted public figures and institutions to convey a consistent message. Today, the US population is less likely to think they can cure a cold with an antibiotic than the European public is.

Can the same happen on science/religion issues? Again, it has. Young earth creationism, which many people think of as the archetype for creationism, is a fairly modern phenomenon. Even within the fundamentalist movement, YEC belief is a later addition. Of the essays in The Fundamentals (1909-1915) addressing evolution, old earth views predominate. William Jennings Bryan, promoting creationist laws and prosecuting John Scopes for violating such a law, accepted scientific estimates of the age of the earth. George McCready Price laid the groundwork for YEC belief in those inter-war years, but it wasn't until Whitcomb and Morris published The Genesis Flood (1961), that young earth beliefs received widespread attention, and swept through the evangelical community.

Can that sweep be reversed? I would say that it can. In my experience, perceived conflicts between science and religion are a critical block to people's willingness to even listen to the sort of evidence for evolution that Dawkins and Coyne have presented in their books. I want those books to succeed, and I know that the dynamic that gets created when evolution and religion are so thoroughly entwined in people's minds can only limit their books' appeal. There's a reason that neither of these books mixes arguments for evolution with anti-religion claims: both authors know that doing so would limit their effectiveness.

Saying "more of the same, please" is hardly equivalent to "shut up."

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Happy Birthday!

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:15:14 -0800

I'll be back in Kansas to take part in the celebration of KCFS's tenth anniversary, and I hope to see you all there

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Cothran's continuing cavalcade of racists

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:13:30 -0800

You may recall Martin Cothran from our fight over whether Pat Buchanan is a racist and a Holocaust denier, and from his guest-blogging gigs at the Discovery Institute, and through his other attempts to abuse logic for partisan purposes. Not content to push creationism with the Disco. 'Tute and other forms of evangelical Christianity through Kentucky's affiliate of Focus on the Family, he now is promoting Charles Murray's eugenic pap.

Murray, for those who don't recall, was a co-author of The Bell Curve, a book widely criticized as racist and eugenic in its implications. Murray and co-author Herrnstein argued that IQ stratifies in society, implicitly argue that these differences are hereditary and imply that they are genetic, and rely on research funded by a racist, eugenicist, hate group to argue that black people are inherently dumber than whites. Stephen Jay Gould responded at length in a re-issue of The Mismeasure of Man, which demonstrated the futility of IQ testing, and the inherent flaws in attempting to claim that IQ can be treated as a trait principally driven by genetic inheritance.

Murray continues his argument that intelligence (as measured by the single metric of IQ) is inherent and unavoidable. He recently applied it to Jews, claiming that centuries of oppression, restriction to financial and mercantile careers, and a tradition of education all resulted in selection for higher-IQ genes (repeating and seeking to justify miscellaneous anti-Semitic stereotypes along the way).

Cothran's post praises a column by Murray in which he re-hashes the discredited argument from his year-old book Real Education, in which he claims that some people are just too dumb to bother teaching, let alone sending to college.

It should be noted that this argument runs counter to the argument offered in his piece on Jews, where he claims that mandatory education exerted an influence which, over the long run, increased the community's IQ.

What Murray's work always ignores is the fact that culture matters. Being raised in a community that values the role of scholarship to society is an important factor, and while it probably doesn't do much to the genetics, it makes a big difference for achievement.

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Gravity, evolution, and a peek at Bill Maher

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:27:52 -0800

Slacktivist is talking sense. He notes a common problem in dealing with creationists:

I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for the rest of us. They use familiar-sounding words, but you quickly realize that they're using these familiar words in unfamiliar ways, using them to communicate vastly, irreconcilably different things.

In particular, they use the word "theory" in ways that don't reflect the term's actual meaning in science. The "just a theory"/"only a theory" formulation he picks up on has a long history in creationism, going back easily to the rhetoric of William Jennings Bryan in the 1920s, and probably earlier.

In part, it rests on a twisted Baconian vision of science that creationists adhere to. In this scheme, science is a process of gathering facts about the world, and letting those observations reveal underlying causes. Facts, in this system, are primary, and theory is secondary – mere interpretation. Creationists, in this vein, often say that they and real scientists use the same observations, but simply interpret them differently because of differing "worldviews," and there's supposedly no scientific way to say who is right.

In science as we practice it 400 years later, it works the other way around. Bacon's reliance on induction proved impractical and error-laden. This isn't to say Baconian approaches are never useful, but their applicability is limited. A more general approach requires you to start from a theory. That theory (with miscellaneous auxiliary hypotheses thrown in) lets you generate certain predictions about what will happen under specific circumstances. You then either create those circumstances in the lab, or find a natural setting where those conditions apply, and you see whether your prediction bears out. If so, the theory stands. If not, you examine both the auxiliary hypotheses and the theory itself, testing various aspects of those propositions until you find out what was wrong.

In this system, theory is central, and observations are inherently suspect. A given observation may be wrong for any number of reasons, from measurement error to biased sampling methods to faulty premises about what to measure. A theory explains results, and gives you a sense of what to look for and how to understand what you see. At the end of the day, that's a better reflection of how even Bacon operated.

As Mark Noll points out in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (slacktivist: "the one book you should read if you want to understand American evangelical Christians"), this naive Baconianism seeps out from science and evangelical approaches to the Bible and to society at large. The odd approach to the Bible in which little snippets are strung together out of order to produce a narrative involving the Rapture, etc., is a reflection of this method. Noll quotes Leonard Woods, Jr. in 1822, to the effect that: "the best method of Bible study was 'that which is pursued in the science of physics,' regulated 'by the maxims of Bacon and Newton.' Newtonian method, Woods said, 'is as applicable in theology as in physics, although in theology we have an extra-aid, the revelation of the Bible. Bun in each science reasoning is the same – we inquire for facts and from them arrive at general truths.'"

Before you can talk to a creationist about evolutionary theory, then, it helps to get them up to speed on scientific practice, perhaps by using a less fraught example. Slacktivist rightly suggests gravity as a good example, and wonders if it would be fair to tell creationists:

Well, OK then, but gravity is justatheory too, the way you're using that word. And gravity, as justatheory, has much bigger unresolved problems than the justatheory of evolution does. If we took your standards for evaluating the justatheory of evolution and applied those standards to gravity, then we'd have to conclude that the justatheory of gravity is even more wrong.

This strikes me as utterly fair. Absent a theory of quantum gravity, there are big issues with gravity, problems that will require tossing aside our current understanding and replacing it with something better.

But that something better will bear a strong resemblance to our current understanding. It will have to explain everything we currently know about gravity, but do it better and without failing under extreme conditions. Odds are, the new system of equations will simplify to the existing equations when you make certain assumptions. The existing gravitational theories won't be wrong, just incomplete.

I use this example myself, and it's a good one to break down barriers to understanding science in general and evolution in particular.

To fulfill the title's promise of Bill Maher, here's slacktivist's take on the anti-vaxx woo being promulgated by Maher, and a distinction we may have to return to in the squabbles over how anti-creationists should approach religion:

Here I would remind us, again, of Wendell Berry's distinction between religion and superstition. Religion, Berry said, is belief in something which cannot be disproved. Superstition, on the other hand, is belief in something that has been disproved. The former can be reasonable, the latter cannot. For all of Bill Maher's railing against religion as "mere superstition," it seems he doesn't understand either of those ideas. His latest anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, anti-science crusade is superstitious nonsense. It's religulous.

Maher, for those who don't know, thinks vaccines don't work, and is endangering children by urging parents not to give their kids the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine. Orac has the low-down. Slacktivist is dead right about Maher. That a non-theist of Maher's caliber can be subject to the same sort of looney-tunes science denial we see from creationists should tell us something about whether eliminating religion would really eliminate threats to science. Read the comments on this post...

George H. W. Bush on civility in politics

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:25:37 -0800

In a radio interview today, George Herbert Walker Bush complains about the "lack of civility in politics":

The Republican elder statesman said, "It's not just the right." He complained, "there are plenty of people on the left."

While he said he does not believe in personal name-calling, he singled out MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow calling them "sick puppies."

"The way they treat my son and anyone who's opposed to their point of view is just horrible," Mr. Bush said.

"When our son was president they just hammered him mercilessly and I think obscenely a lot of the time and now it's moved to a new president," he added.

With a chuckle, Mr. Bush said his son's critics "weren't singled out as much as they should have been."

For what it's worth, President Obama was and is one of his son's critics, and according to the Boston Globe:

The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service…
Obama, who was given Secret Service protection 18 months before the election - the earliest ever for a presidential candidate - has been the target of more threats since his inauguration than his predecessors.

I think it's fair to say that W's critics have been singled out. Indeed, David Neiwert has done a great job cataloging the eliminationist rhetoric emanating from conservatives.

It's true, of course, that people said mean things about President W. They said he didn't care about black people (just because he let a city full of black people drown), they say that he was a war-monger (just because he sold a needless and foolish war). They called him a torturer, just for authorizing torture. They called him a fascist, just for locking his critics in fenced off enclosures (free speech zones!), illegally tapping their phones, exploiting a state of military emergency to unite government and industry, establishing secret prisons, etc. I guess that balances out the overt death threats directed at President Obama, candidate Obama, liberals and Democrats in general and liberalism's most visible representatives in particular. Yep, the equivalence is perfect.

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Teach the strengths and weaknesses … of the NAS?

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:56:39 -0800

Don McLeroy, erstwhile head of the Texas Board of Education, doesn't like the National Academy of Sciences. At least not on even-numbered days. During the science standards fight, he praised the NAS definition of science. Then again, he endorsed a crazy, self-published pamphlet declaring that the NAS is "sowing atheism." And of course, he dismissed the good advice of the NAS and other science groups when they asked him not to undermine evolution education, telling the Board "Someone has to stand up to these experts."

And now McLeroy has decided to attack the NAS in social studies standards. In a memo to the committees drafting new standards for Texas social studies classes (and the textbooks used in those classes), McLeroy requested that students be taught "pros and cons" of the "National Academy of Science in scientific research."

What those cons might be, no one is quite sure.

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Capitalism beats creationism

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:46:02 -0800

At least in the movies. Michael Moore's Capitalism has passed Expelled as the fifth-top-grossing political documentary EVAR! It's showing on fewer screens and has earned over 2 million dollars more, to date, than Ben Stein's crapfest.

This makes total sense. Michael Moore's movie is quite good, is based on real and well-documented events, and has genuinely thought-provoking arguments to make. What's the relationship between capitalism and democracy? When capitalism fails a society, can democracy save both the society and the economic system?

These are hardly new questions. When Franklin Roosevelt took the White House, several modest-sized revolts had already broken out in the heartland, as angry farmers seized town halls, threatened to lynch any bank agent executing a foreclosure order, and organizing a march on Washington that could easily have turned violent. It didn't help that those farmers were joined by out-of-work veterans seeking their pensions. On taking office, Roosevelt had little choice but to move quickly.

His response was not to nationalize industry, but to use the power of government, especially of government borrowing, to prop up workers and to re-energize limping industries. Social Security and related programs carried whiffs of socialism, but there was no cross-cutting socialist agenda on the table, despite there being actual socialist and communist parties in existence at the time.

One might argue, even, that the existence of those extremes allowed Roosevelt to find a middle ground in which risk was socialized and rewards for success were left to a well-regulated market.

In Moore's movie, Barack Obama is cast as the figure who will craft a similar solution to the current Great Recession. Alas, without genuine socialists in the wings to tug him toward a genuine political and economic center, Obama's policies are driven by many of the same forces Moore attacks (including Tim Geithner, who the movie describes in truly Bush-like terms: someone who has failed at everything he attempted). Will the President find a solid fulcrum on which to rebalance our economic and political rights? Can FDR's dream of a Second Bill of Rights be revived?

One hopes. One of the less-discussed works of the Obama administration's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is a book praising Roosevelt's second bill of rights. I had suggested that as one of three books the incoming President should read, and it's encouraging that he put the author in charge of vetting every new piece of legislation passing through the government, and we can hope he is being groomed for a seat on the Supreme Court. Ensuring universal healthcare would be a huge step toward Roosevelt's dream, and toward a dream of a society with equal opportunities for all citizens, a society that matches the dreams of our forefathers.

History will judge whether Moore was right to present Obama as the president who fulfilled the broad dream of a second – economic – bill of rights, a president who will protect democracy when it is threatened by capitalism. Until then, it falls on the rest of us, to make it as easy as possible for that change to come. Congress still needs to hear from you about the importance of health care reform. Your banks and sheriffs need to be reminded that they have a choice in how they handle foreclosures, and they don't have to wait on a good economy and new regulations before they do the right thing.

We don't need a violent revolt. Last year we showed, as our grandparents did in 1932, that democracy can handle these challenges. But it only works when the people make their voices heard.

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Deep thought

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:46:46 -0800

Saying "creationism suck" insults black holes.

Discuss.

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