realitybasedcommunity » Science

Links 6-9

rbc3 — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:04:16 +0000

Bag of Fresh Breath on eBay, bidding presently up to $150 AU. Inspired idiocy.

Google’s Les Paul playable recordable doodle (today only!). Article here.

Lousiana’s efforts to privatize its own state employees’ health care turns hideously embarrassing when Scott Kipper, the CEO of the Office of Group Benefits (the OGP manages the state workers’ health plan; Kipper is conducting an RFP process to turn the plan over to a private bidder) admits to not having read something called the “Chaffe Report” which is a recently completed evaluation of the OGP. But this isn’t incompetence, it’s far worse–Kipper testified that he doesn’t want to read it because it he does not want his judgment to be “jaded” during the RFP process. But why really?

“The report might tell you there’s no need to privatize it,” Murray said.

“That might be the case,” Kipper admitted.

Disturbing video and deeper explanation at Talking Points Memo.

Newt Gingrich’s top aides quit his doomed campaign “en masse” on Thursday, according to NPR.

Sun explosion, via Bad Astronomy:

The Cock Crows for John Freshwater

rbc3 — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:58:29 +0000

A fairly disturbing church/state issue has been fermenting in a Columbus Ohio grade school, where a popular eighth-grade science teacher John Freshwater has been systematically injecting his religious views and discarding the science curriculum he was hired by the state to teach. Story here. This much isn’t especially odd, as it probably goes on everywhere to some extent–we only find out when a high-schooler speaks up, and given the powerful disincentives to self-select as a teen minority amongst your peers, unreported violations of this sort are practically a given.

What makes Freshwater interesting is his annual tesla coil demonstration, where he would burn crosses into the arms of his students. From the just issued independent report investigating the complaints against Freshwater:

While there did not appear to be any intent by Mr. Freshwater to cause injury to any student, he was not using the device for its intended purpose. Contrary to Mr. Freshwater’s statement he simply made an “X” not a “cross,” all of the students described the marking as a “cross” and the pictures provided depict a “cross”.

There are multiple outrages here, which I’ll tackle one at a time. First, just like in the Dover Intelligent Design trial,* why do Christians so often, when confronted by rather blatant evidence that they’ve violated the establishment clause, lie about it. Besides the fact that Freshwater’s lie is insulting (see above photos), it’s amusing that the lie ironically mimics Peter’s denial of Jesus. It’s not a cross? Is that your final answer or do you want to wait for the cock to crow thrice?

More disturbing, however, is the perpetual silence of the school board, a silence that no doubt would have continued had the branding story not found national press, and thus transcend the garden variety religious intrusion into the public sphere. From the same report::

Dr. Weston [Director of Teaching and Learning for the Mount Vernon City Schools] stated that she has had to deal with internal and external complaints about his failure to follow the curriculum for much of her 11 years at Mount Vernon. It has come to her attention many times. She has reported these events to administrators and there have been some attempts to make changes and other instances where they seem to have been disregarded, particularly by one former assistant principal. She said that Mr. Freshwater cannot separate creationism/intelligent design from teaching to the science standards.

The school’s silence is all the more confounding in light of the fact that, whenever someone finally does blow the whistle, either the ACLU, or American United, or whomever, inevitably wins or forces a favorable settlement in these types of cases. While establishment clause jurisprudence may not be as clear as it could be, it’s pretty easy to spot the violations while they’re happening–Freshwater could’ve (and should’ve) been fired for any one of a few dozen violations committed during his tenure. This all inevitably leads to the conclusion that the school administrators and school boards are either entirely ignorant, or are getting bad advice, perhaps from lawyers who share the violator’s agenda, such as the Thomas More Center, in the case of Dover.

Of special interest too is this blog, which defends (through bombastic rhetoric and equivocation) Freshwater’s conduct, and which includes pictures and other news items.

* From Judge Jones’ opinion: “Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions. The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. … Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. … Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony.”

Intelligent Thought

rbc3 — Sun, 28 May 2006 14:51:29 +0000

A new book containing essays from 16 leading scientists, each in turn demolishing the Intelligent Design construct, has just now arrived on the bookshelves. Despite the scientific community’s wise reluctance to be goaded into debate (see the Kansas kangaroo hearings), this book seems well conceived. While actual ‘scientific’ debate should be saved for the courtroom, the Discovery Institute’s successes at shoving some sort of debate into to the public consciousness should be acknowledged in some way.

There is a shallow intuitive appeal to ID that even bright people succumb to, and this is partly due to the silence of science in the public arena. Science is paid short shrift by a cultural echo chamber whose deepest social concern at a given moment is the American Idol winner, so if science is skeptical of its chances of scoring in the public arena, it’s for good cause. Science is boring and complicated–and highly resistant to the syllogistic treatment that makes for good TV. In that forum, science is doomed to lose most every debate, since ID is precisely the sort of appealing syllogism that works within the time constraints of TV. Even if science “wins” these debates in the eyes of the public, they lose for having to even withstand a comparison to an upstart that short circuited the peer review process and took its case straight to the public. The moderators to these debates are willfully obtuse and easily led to the false dichotomy… why not heed “the other side” indeed?

But a book of essays on ID might just be the perfect vehicle for the science side of the “debate.” Anyone who is being primarily coached on the issue through a television is beyond hope, but book readers can be reached. The essay format probably helps its marketability. I hope it finds its niche and I look forward to reading.

Some samples from the essayists:

It should not, after all, be surprising if people who believe that all truth comes from an ancient text disagree with Darwin, whose ideas are in no ancient text. Rather than bemoaning the fact that fundamentalists disagree with Darwin, let’s ask a much more interesting and disturbing question: Why do so many non-fundamentalist theologians and religious leaders have no trouble incorporating Darwin into their worldview? —Lee Smolin

“Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all.” —Daniel C. Dennett, Philosopher

“Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity.” —Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist

“An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one.” —Steven Pinker, Psychologist

Not only is ID markedly inferior to Darwinism at explaining and understanding nature but in many ways it does not even fulfill the requirements of a scientific theory. —Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologist

The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously declared, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” One might add that nothing in biology makes sense in the light of intelligent design. —Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologist

Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all. —Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist

A denial of evolution–however motivated–is a denial of evidence, a retreat from reason to ignorance. —Tim D. White, paleontologist

Natural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity. —Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist

The supernatural explanation fails to explain because it ducks the responsibility to explain itself.—Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist

Nothing indicates that people who believe that life arose by chance also believe that morality is haphazard. —Scott Atran, anthropologist and psychologist

An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one. —Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist

To state that a given organ is so improbable that it requires design is just ill founded. The argument uses standard probability, which does not apply to the evolution of the biosphere. —Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist

We don’t have an intelligent designer (ID), we have a bungling consistent evolver (BCE). Or maybe an adaptive changer (AC). In fact, what we have in the most economical interpretation is, of course, evolution. —Lisa Randall, physicist

What counts as a controversy must be delineated with care, as we want students to distinguish between scientific challenges and sociopolitical ones. —Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologist

Incredulity doesn’t count as an alternative position or critique. —Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologist

Rather than removing meaning from life, an evolutionary perspective can and should fill us with a sense of wonder at the rich sequence of natural systems that gave us birth and continues to sustain us. —Scott D. Sampson, paleontologist

Reasonable Heroes

rbc3 — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 18:17:31 +0000

Panda Thumber Timothy Sandefur profiles Jacob Bronowski, of whom I’ve never heard. Bronkowski was a WWII era renaissance scientist, with an acute ethical sensitivity, as demonstrated by the below snippet:

Bronowski explained why evolution was such a profound idea. Does not evolution simply reduce human nature to an accident, the interviewer asked?

[Bronowski answered] “On the contrary, it is those who appeal to God and special creation who reduce everything to accident. They assign to man a unique status on the ground that there was some act of special creation which made the world the way it is. But that explains nothing, because it would explain everything; it is an explanation for any conceivable world. If we had the color vision of the bee combined with the neck of the giraffe and the feet of the elephant, that would equally be explained by the “theory” of special creation.”

and later

And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into–into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny.

Bronkowski’s observations bring to mind a young author who I recently stumbled over on CSPAN–Sam Harris (website, with book excerpt). Harris argues that our continued intellectual evolution will have to shed religious superstition and choose reason so that humans might survive as a species, just as chemistry ‘evolved’ from alchemy.

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith ( e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures–forces like greed, hatred, and fear–for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.

Religion isn’t going away any time soon. But I often wonder if the United States’ present-day religious resurgence isn’t really a desperate last stand before an inevitable capitulation to reason.

Many people can harmonize the friction between Science and religion with relative ease, but not me personally. Science has made significant gains in recent years (for an entertaining summary of just how far evolution has come, listen to Dover trial expert Witness Ken Miller) and this may help explain the Intelligent Design movement’s popular emergence–the necessity to refute has become that much greater with each scientific advance, so the resistance has formed accordingly.

Religious moderates can dismiss the biblical literalism that adherence to ID requires, but who is to say that the literalist interpretation is less valid than a moderate one? Neither make sense to me. Most religions are inherently and textually resistant to being defanged of their more insidious aspects. As long as religion remains a potent social force, moderates and fanatics will engage in a tug-of-war due to scriptural ambiguity. But under this model, moderates help impede reason by legitimizing superstition in a mainstream context, and enable fanatics by playing semantic footsie instead of embracing reason wholeheartedly.

But as the facts change, Reason will continue to accumulate and grow while religion struggles to reconcile the new facts. ID is an example of a significant, concerted, well-funded religious effort at both denying the facts exist, and changing the underlying structure which the facts are measured against. But how long can that last as new facts emerge? Or rather, at what point are those that ignore the new facts put at a biological disadvantage by their ignorance? (Some American Christians have perhaps instinctually recognized this danger, and have countered by committing themselves to natalism). (There is probably little biological disadvantage to disavowing science so long as that refusal is hypocritically selective, unlike, say, the Amish, who at least have the courage of their convictions, even if this practice hasn’t spread their numbers across the globe, like say, the Mormons.) But as the facts change, the situation bears watching.

WHERE IS YOUR INTELLIGENT DESIGNER NOW?! HA HA HA HA HA

rbc3 — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 18:31:09 +0000

Huge victory for the forces of reason today in Dover. I’m supposed to be writing my paper, but had to stop and smell the roses and share some of the scathingness. The blistering, brilliant 139 page opinion is almost unbelievably enlightened, but the deathknell for ID arrives on page 64:

Whether ID is Science

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980′s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research.
Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16 centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena. This revolution entailed the rejection of the appeal to authority, and by extension, revelation, in favor of empirical evidence. Since that time period, science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any cclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth. In deliberately omitting theological or “ultimate” explanations for the existence or characteristics of the natural world, science does not consider issues of “meaning” and “purpose” in the world. While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as “methodological naturalism” and is sometimes known as the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is a “ground rule” of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify.

And this was equally priceless:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

The Discovery Institute, who were not a party, but stood the most to lose, are pretending that everything is just fine and that federal district court rulings don’t really matter anyway.

In the larger debate over intelligent design, this decision will be of minor significance,” added Discovery Institute attorney Casey Luskin.

Yeah, you keep thinking that.

Big champagne cork popping shoutouts to Panda’s Thumb (where Timothy Sandefur digs deep into the opinion), PZ Myers, Ed Brayton, and Chris Mooney for ably representing the forces of reason against this frighteningly sophisticated attack. Congrats and thanks.

Dover Blog + Points of Note

rbc3 — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 01:15:31 +0000

The ACLU of Pennsylvania is tracking the Dover courtroom action pretty closely on its blog.

Day One seemed to go great from where I sit – Keith Miller, author of one of the most widely distributed high school biology textbooks, got in some really important points…

Intelligent design is not science, has no support from any major American scientific organization and does not belong in a public school science classroom[.] – NY Times

And from the York Daily Record,, Miller gets right to the religious purpose, even though he’s a expert witness on the topic of :

Rather, “it’s the first movement to try to drive a wedge between students and the scientific process,” he said.

Miller called intelligent design “an argument of ignorance,” in that it’s based on the premise that if we don’t understand everything, we will never understand it, so we must seek supernatural causes.

He called it “special creationism.”

Also from the YDR, here’s Miller on cross, neatly and cleanly dismantling the two biggest and lamest rhetorical con jobs promulgated incessently by the ID crowd:

During cross-examination, Robert Muise, an attorney representing the district with the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan, asked Miller numerous questions about the validity of Darwin’s theory.

“Is it not true evolution is a theory not fact?”

Miller agreed that was true because no scientific theories are facts. Rather, a scientific theory is well-supported, testable explanation that connects facts.

“Would you agree that Darwin’s theory is not the absolute truth?” Muise asked.

“We don’t regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth,” Miller said.

In Day Two, AP tells us that the plaintiffs called witnesses to testify that the school board first targetted evolution for elimination. This is interesting and shows that the ACLU and AU are taking pages from the Cobb County playbook, where the district court found a religious purpose merely by the focused attack on evolution to the exclusion of other scientific subjects.

Dover on Deck

rbc3 — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 03:48:24 +0000

Since the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case starts up today, I ambled around the interthing and found a host of original articles, hinting that this case, expected to last about 6 weeks, is going to be heavily covered.

York Daily Record, NY Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, LA Times, Independent UK, MSNBC, New Scientist, People’s Daily Online (China). Deeper background can be found at Panda’s Thumb.

Good luck to the Dover Eleven

Surprise! Bush Endorses ID

rbc3 — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 19:32:01 +0000

Our intelligence-challenged president has finally weighed in on Intelligent Design, and has chosen the ‘teach the controversy‘ talking point.

“You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes,” the president said.

Does that mean that we also teach the tooth fairy theory of dental hygiene? It’s certainly a different idea, and is backed by about the same amount of evidence.

Bush’s quote in the AP story is indicative of a neat little rhetorical parlor trick he picked up somewhere along the way, where he rephrases precisely what was not asked into a straw man question that he then answers in the affirmative. It’s entirely safe to say that none of the five reporters (all from Texas, btw) asked Bush whether “people ought to be exposed to different ideas”.

Of course, the issue is hardly about exposure to different ideas, but rather about scientific standards. And since this administration has all but declared war on science, it’s no surprise that they’d toss this salvo.

Whenever a president drops any calculated bomb/hint on a cultural issue, debate rises over the topic, and we collectively derail from some more important issue. Not that what we teach kids isn’t important — but there is simply no controversy over the factual basis of evolution except from people with noted religious agendas.

Anyway, it’s comforting to read the always rightously pissed PZ Myers in depressing times like this, so I suggest you do that.

Dissent in Dover

rbc3 — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 05:01:43 +0000

Via Panda’s Thumb (stories here and here), and as reported by the York Daily Record, the Dover School District’s attack on evolution, as funded by the Thomas More Law Center, has exposed an interesting rift between Intelligent Design ‘secularists’ and the dominionist Thomas More Law Center, when ID heavyweights Dembski, Campbell, and Meyer being withdrawn as expert witnesses on the defendant School District’s behalf.

This is interesting for a few reasons – first, the rift already existed – the Discovery Institute has stated in the past that the time isn’t ripe to bring suits forward to establish ID in the public schools, ostensibly because ID has not entirely gelled as a theory, but mostly because the Supreme Court some gelling to do of its own.

So why then were three Discovery Institute fellows thisclose to testifying in the doomed Dover effort in the first place? I’ll guess that the DI is at a conflicted road – they may have realized that ID, from a public relations vantage, has a finite degree of public debatability. The Dover case has gotten a ton of press already, and how many Dovers will their possibly be after this? Sensing that Dover was going badly, they reached out to Thomas More in an effort to try and right the ship. But the Thomas More lawyers are even loonier than the DI, and the factions didn’t mix well.

The presence of ‘some other reason’ is backed by the conflicting stories given by the DI participants and Thomas More as to the experts discontinued involvement. The fact that they couldn’t get their stories straight (the stories mostly inovlving the experts wanting to utilize their own lawyers during testimony), we can better assume that the true reason for the parting was ideological – DI showed up to fix what Thomas More thought was working just fine.

Of course, it’s not working fine at all. Cobb County was a far closer case than Dover is turning into – the Dover school district’s proposal is far more overtly violative than was Cobb County’s, and Thomas More lends a religious taint that Cobb County at least wisely sought to avoid (but was eventually burned on anyway). Not that any of this necessarily matters – the district court judge could see things entirely differently (and is not bound to any of the law made in Cobb County).

The White House’s Attack on Science

rbc3 — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 15:43:55 +0000

While I’ve spent a high percentage of this blog’s space to the evolution/ID faultline, let’s not forget that this administration’s attack on science is fought on many fronts. And while sad tales from those battle lines appear each day in the emm ess emm, no one has pulled all the atrocities under one tent as well as Carolyn Abraham of the Globe and Mail in this piece today: American scientists say the Bush administration is interfering with research, especially on sexuality and the environment. Religion and ideology are involved — but so is a public disenchantment with science itself. [reg. req'd - but so well worth it]

While the story is notable for its investigatory zeal, I take minor issue with her casual and disproportionate reference to “public disenchantment with science” in the headline – because: a) it comprises so little of her story; and, b) assuming there is indeed widespread disenchantment, Abraham fails to address possible reasons why that might be. Indeed, it’s reasonable to connect the fact that this administration has spent so much energy attacking science to any disillusionment on the public’s part.