Blue Collar Scientist

I’ve said a number of times here that Christian creationists, whether ID or otherwise, who deny science are religious extremists. At various times, I’ve pointed out Ken Miller, the Clergy Letter Project (which has 11,000 religious leaders affirming evolution), and other examples to support my claim that creationists are minority radicals.

(Of course one reason that I promote this meme over and over is to marginalize creationists and assist any split that may develop between them and more mainstream religionists. But don’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t want to be accused of doing framing wrong, or anything.)

Today there’s another example of how radical creationism is a fringe view. Reasons To Believe is an non-denominational Christian think tank, and they take Christian apologetics pretty seriously. They are also among the more thoughtful such groups. Some time back, they posted some tentative comments on Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which opens today:

Many people have asked Reasons to Believe (RTB) to make a statement about the movie. For the sake of integrity, we cannot offer an assessment until our scholar team has had a chance to view the movie.

RTB views the scientific enterprise as a vital component of carrying out one of God’s first recorded commands to Adam and Eve. Without the understanding derived from scientific investigation, it would be impossible to take care of this home God provided for us.

I’m quoting selectively. They have some questionable material up there, but on the whole these are reasonable people that you could talk to. They understand their own shortcomings, and they understand the value of science.

Now some of the Reasons To Believe leaders have seen the movie, and sources say they have released this statement:

After previewing the promotional materials provided by the movie’s marketers, we were concerned that the movie took an adversarial approach to the scientific community. A number of RTB scholars and staff attended a prerelease screening in Los Angeles recently and confirmed that EXPELLED definitely does take such an approach…. EXPELLED implicitly argues that the scientific community deems certain questions off-limits, particularly any question about the legitimacy of neo-Darwinian evolution. The movie further argues that academia, the media, and the courts all conspire as “thought police” to oppress any and all dissent from the party line.

Clearly some oppression and discrimination have occurred, but the experience of RTB scholars and many of their contacts refutes the movie’s premise that the scientific community systemically and unilaterally fosters these injustices.

They end with a policy decision:

Therefore, we ask all chapter members and volunteers to refrain from endorsing EXPELLED in any official way.

Reaction to this has been favorable:

Kudos to them. This is outstanding.

And again:

indeed. this is an excellent response!

is this on the web anywhere? I would like to direct others to read this.

And yet again:

Yes. It is posted prominently on the front page of the RTB site at www.reasons.org.

I am very proud of them for this response.

I could go on - the favorable reaction to Reasons To Believe’s stance against the movie continues.

The point of all this? Expelled isn’t even appealing to all of its expected core audience. Expelled is so extremist that it has split their demographic.

Hat tip to Panda’s Thumb.

I just did a quick google search on reviews of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and have come up with the following gems for your entertainment. And I have to say, my respect for movie reviews has gone up a lot in this process - not that I disrespected them before, but I did not have a lot of (ahem) faith that movie reviewers would be able to engage with the scientific issues as well as they have. In my searchings, I didn’t find any positive reviews that weren’t associated with religious or right-wing political publications - and then only two of those.

The Star Tribune gives it one-half out of four stars:

According to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the source of all evil in the modern world is Darwinism, a philosophy that, the film posits, is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

The New York Times leads with:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.

From Time:

It’s in the film’s final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and–wait for it–Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it’s claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler’s killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We’ve always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

From the LA City Beat:

One might accuse Michael Moore of similarly facile, manipulative techniques – and I have – but Moore has never gone to lengths nearly as outrageous as the makers of Expelled. (For what it’s worth, he’s also funnier.)

In the third act, Stein and company move beyond mere visual associations, when they build a case linking Darwinism to Nazism – which is not merely insultingly lame, but also ranks as one of the cheapest, most offensive exploitations of the horrors of the Holocaust I’ve ever witnessed (and I’ve witnessed plenty).

Expelled is another expression of the right wing’s victim complex. It’s classic paranoid thinking: Since we’re pure and correct, any setbacks we suffer must be the result of an Evil Conspiracy. Communists are fluoridating our water. Purity of Essence. We couldn’t be doing substandard academic work. Our poor advancement must have to do with a blacklist! (Stein himself used this idea to bully Norman Lear into giving him a writing job.)

From the New York Post:

After all of his efforts to unhook the ID caboose from the creationism train, Stein makes it clear that his beef with Darwinism is that it weakens religion.

In a long, greasy detour, Stein shows that the Nazis were Darwinists. So what? They also liked skiing. Having Nazi fans doesn’t make Darwin wrong.

From Slant Magazine:

For a film about American freedom of expression and the necessity for open dialogue, it’s hard to imagine Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed being more one-sided, narrow-minded, and intellectually dishonest.

To their film’s catastrophic detriment, Stein and director Nathan Frankowski fail to provide concrete examples of the flaws in Darwin’s theory, content instead to simply have speakers (many with impressive credentials) state that it’s problematic and then treat such unsupported statements as verifiable truth. Nor, ultimately, do they examine the obvious and crucial religious underpinnings of the “intelligent design movement,” whose onscreen adherents deliberately refuse to speculate on the source of this creative “intelligence” because their opinion on the identity of this fundamental biological architect—God—would conclusively reveal Expelled as propaganda for a Christian-right movement whose own champion, Ronald Reagan, Stein ultimately depicts as his spiritual counterpart.

From E! Reviews:

A flunkout of a documentary, this features Ben Stein—still best known for his monotone “Anyone…anyone?”—advocating creationism, er, intelligent design, in science classrooms. Stein’s credibility is blown on this poorly constructed diatribe, and you’d be smart to save your bucks.

Plus, he’s tedious and unfunny.

With a heavy, heavy hand, the pic punctuates every scene with over-the-top archival footage—the Berlin wall, Stalin and other Cold War imagery.

Despite insisting “intelligent design” isn’t pro-God propaganda, Stein argues we’re waging a religious war (cut to cannon fire) with Darwinists smiting the faithful with—gasp!—atheistic ideas. Most outrageously, he plays the overused Nazi card—he tours an old concentration camp and notes Hitler himself was influenced by Darwin. Yes, kids, studying evolution leads to this (cut to dead prisoners).

Expelled pretends it wants to encourage debate but shuts down and edits around every Darwinian scientist who attempts to explain complex issues, as Stein makes snide remarks in voice-over.

From the Colorado Springs Independent:

Nazis? It’s all about Nazis?

In a parallel universe even crazier than our own, Ben Stein, former Nixon speechwriter turned ironic symbol of the anti-hip, may be making a documentary about how the Nazis used the “controversial” theory of gravity to make bombs fall to earth — so, of course, the theory of gravity must be wrong. But we are here, and in this universe Ben Stein is actually telling us that because the Nazis thought it would be a good idea to breed people like animals, the theory of evolution must be wrong.

It’s nuttiness right from the opening moments of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Images of Nazi atrocities and the terrors of life behind the Berlin Wall are smugly deployed in an attempt to editorialize away basic scientific fact.

Expelled isn’t about “intelligent design,” about an alternative scientific theory, or even about academic freedom. It’s about Stein believing he has proven that acceptance of evolution leads to atheism (and also, we’re told, to such horrors as birth control). Hence, evolution cannot be allowed to be true. Even if it is.

From Newsday:

Ben Stein, the actor, lawyer, columnist and onetime speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, is probably smarter than you. He’s definitely smarter than I am. What’s galling about his new documentary, “Expelled,” is that he seems to think we’re both slobbering idiots.

In an increasingly hysterical tone, Stein lambastes Darwinians as misguided, ignorant fascists, cutting repeatedly to old footage of the Berlin Wall - a metaphor for squelched thought.

Finally, he unleashes his biggest attention-getter, holding Darwinism responsible for Nazi atrocities and genocide. I’m no lawyer, but that’s a pretty lousy argument.

Did Stein really think audiences wouldn’t balk at being suckered into a propaganda rally? Or was he preaching to the converted from the start? Stein claims to denounce the tyranny of dogma, then browbeats us with his own.

From Variety, whose reviewer is predisposed to like the movie:

Even more offensive is the film’s attempt to link Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ideas and Hitler’s master-race ambitions (when in doubt, invoke the Holocaust), complete with solemnly scored footage of the experimentation labs at Dachau. Evocations of the Berlin Wall, treated as a symbol of a bullheaded scientific establishment on the verge of collapse, are equally fatuous.

The Village Voice:

[Stein's] thesis: Teaching Darwinian evolution but ignoring intelligent design in America’s public schools and universities is the biggest threat to American freedom today—bigger, presumably, than Al Qaeda, Iraq, and the recession combined. A series of interviews with ID true believers has him playing Michael Moore–dumb—no hard questions for the folks at the Discovery Center

ID’ers protest that they’re simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential Communists and Nazis. Bizarre and hysterical.

The Orlando Sentinel, whose review was also run by the Chicago Tribune:

….Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, [is] a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”

It’s a rabble-rouser of a doc that uses all manner of loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts, dubious ID “experts” and mockery of hand-picked “weirdo” legit scientists to attack those who, Stein claims, are stifling the Religious Right’s efforts to inject intelligent design into science courses, science curricula and the national debate.

It just isn’t particularly funny. Or the least bit convincing.

I lost track of the number of times Stalin’s image hit the screen, and in the ways the movie equated science with Darwinism with atheism with Hitler or Stalin. Subtle, it’s not.

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie currently has a rating of less than one out of ten.

Update: As of Saturday, April 19, this post is number four in a google search of “expelled reviews,” and it is getting a lot of traffic. This post keeps switching places on the google front page with “Expelled Exposed,” so I figured that I’d better do an update to reflect more reviews that I’ve found over the last day. Here you are:

The Waco Tribune:

[The] film’s arguments are a rhetorical mishmash of straw men, red herrings, guilt by association, quote harvesting, gotcha interviews and post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) associations that may cause your head to pop. It’s a propaganda form highly polished by director/activist Michael Moore on the other end of the political spectrum.

Those coming to Expelled hoping to learn something about any research behind ID, a fair appraisal of weaknesses in evolutionary theories or — perhaps the film’s most glaring and telling omission — how Christian evolutionists reconcile faith and science will leave sorely disappointed. The latter is quickly dismissed by a chain of quotes that brand them as liberal Christians and duped by militant atheists in their efforts to get religion out of the classroom.

From TV Guide:

It’s hard to pinpoint the most insulting aspects of this obvious propaganda piece from Ben Stein, the eye-drops spokesman, conservative writer and pundit whom most people remember from a bit part in FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF.

But surely the film’s greatest offense is the utter shamelessness with which it exploits the Holocaust, veering far off topic for a side trip to Nazi killing centers at Hadamar and Dachau in an attempt to tar Darwin with the old “Evolution led directly to eugenics and the Final Solution” brush. The camera’s slow tracking shots through the death camps are followed by a similar creepy crawl through Down House, where Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. None of this has anything to do with the validity of evolutionary theory or intelligent design, and only serves to point up how any theory can be used to justify evil ends.

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

The scholars Stein and the film’s producers interview say they just want an open debate where creationism - pardon, intelligent design - and Darwinist evolution can be discussed side-by-side. What’s wrong with that? Stein asks with mock-innocence.

Alas, the movie’s makers (Stein and co-writers Kevin Miller and Walt Ruloff, and director Nathan Frankowski) don’t debate honestly. Stein mocks university officials for not “getting off [their] script,” but says nothing about the repetitive talking points from the ID crowd. The ID folks complain that the term “evolution” is too vaguely defined, and yet never adequately define what “intelligent design” is. They swear they aren’t espousing religion, then try to discredit the leading evolutionary biologists - such as Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers - because they are atheists.

Oddly enough, the tactics employed in “Expelled” undercut the movie’s argument, most notably in the interviews with Dawkins and Myers and in Stein’s trip to Darwin’s British home (now a museum). Either the filmmakers suckered these participants under false pretenses, or the evolutionists are more open to debate than Stein suggests. Perhaps the intelligent-design proponents know that in a truly open debate, their argument isn’t fit enough to survive.

From the Seattle Times, hometown newspaper to the Discovery Institute:

Pop quiz: What is the real source of evil in the modern world? Greed? Intolerance?

Well, according to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” it’s Darwinism, described as a philosophy that posits the pointlessness of life and encourages the “de-privileging of human beings” — and as such is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

But Jon Stewart is a lot funnier than Stein.

From BeliefNet:

Like the tobacco companies once they could no longer question the legitimacy of the scientific evidence connecting cigarettes and disease, Stein quickly shifts the debate from a head-to-head assessment of analysis of data to frame the issue as one of freedom of speech. The movie opens with archival footage not of science labs or the animal life on Galapagos Island, where Darwin first began to develop his theory, but of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Stein tries to draw a parallel between the wall that divided Germany and the impenetrable wall that keeps Intelligent Design out of the science establishment. But he is also associating Darwinian science with Godlessness, communism, and totalitarianism, with detours into Nazi atrocities and atheism so over-the-top that it becomes shrill and irrational.

The conservative Ayn Rand Institute:

“The premise of Expelled is that proponents of ‘intelligent design’ have been shunned, denied tenure, and even fired because of a conspiracy to quash the scientific evidence supporting their theory,” said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. “But the truth is: there is no evidence supporting their theory. Intelligent design is completely devoid of any positive scientific content, and consists of nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on evolution. To the extent intelligent design advocates are facing obstacles in academia it is because they are not doing real science: they haven’t been ‘expelled’ they have flunked out of the scientific community, just as a faith healer would flunk out of medical school.

A Scientific American podcast reports on the movie’s dishonest quoting of Charles Darwin:

Toward the end [of the movie], Stein reads the following quote from the book Descent of Man: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

…I went to a full text of Descent of Man online and found the quoted passage. And then found the sentences that come right after where Stein stopped quoting.

So here’s Charles Darwin again, from Descent of Man: “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.“

(Update: It is now April 28, and this post is still getting a lot of traffic, so I wanted to provide a link to an article about the film by noted conservative columnist John Derbyshire and appearing in National Review. It is probably the strongest slapdown of the movie I’ve ever seen.)

National Review says:

…creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

…The creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science” engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all! I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles.

Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media…. Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization.

Zach of When Pigs Fly Returns has put together a reading list for people interested in dinosaurs. The genesis of the idea was selfish - I wanted to learn more about dinosaurs - but it blossomed into the idea that Science and Skepticism in Anchorage could offer these kinds of resources to people and other similar groups on the web. We’re hosting this over at the SSA site as a PDF, as well as here at BCS, and maybe it will find its way elsewhere on the web as well.

This is the third and last in a series of three posts about framing science as advocated by Nisbet, Mooney, et al. In the first part, I set out some understandings that I have about science framing as advocated by Nisbet and Mooney: First, that framing broadly understood is something we all do when we communicate on any issue, but that framing as it is associated with Nisbet and Mooney seems to me to be a set of disjointed, unsystematic techniques for communicating science, which avoids offending or alienating those who believe in antiscience. Their recommendations seem to be driven by several ideas:

1. controversies about science are analogous to political campaigns;
2. these campaigns need to be won;
3. they are best won by appealing broadly to religious science deniers;
4. through various specific techniques.

I said before that Nisbet and Mooney are wrong in several ways, and in Part 1 I explored the ways in which science controversies were not like political campaigns. In Part 2, I questioned whether there is any evidence that a broad appeal to science deniers is necessary to win public policy debates.

In this part, I’m going to wrap up the series with some observations about censoring Dawkins and Myers and the Overton window.

Excluding Myers and Dawkins

Nisbet notoriously told PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins to shut up, while Mooney said they help creationists. Both have said that if Myers and Dawkins are the voices of science, they do harm to the cause - whatever that cause is. These claims are supported by no research, which requires me to fall back on inadequate methods to decide if this is true or not.

So I did an Amazon author search on Matt Nisbet, and it tells me that

Your search “matt nisbet” did not match any products.

On the other hand, the same search on Richard Dawkins shows eleven pages and 132 results - including several best sellers that Dawkins wrote, and a bunch of general science education books that Dawkins did not write, but contributed to.

I’ve learned practically everything I know about evolution from Dawkins (and to a lesser extent Mayr and Zimmer). I’d never even heard of Matt Nisbet until he started to tell people what to do with their lives.

It is pretty clear on anecdotal grounds that Dawkins, at least, is doing a great job communicating science - he has wide exposure, and a knack for explaining complex subjects simply. By contrast, apparently Nisbet has no experience. But my objections to having the framists tell people to shut up, and say that they are doing harmful things when communicating science¹, goes a little deeper than this anecdotal analysis².

The Overton Method

In politics, there is a metaphor called by various names, but perhaps most widely by the term “Overton window.” What Overton actually described is a method for changing the range of acceptable opinions in public policy, and the “window” is a metaphor that describes public reactions to those ideas. It works like this.

If you have an issue, the range of opinions on which go from popular to unpopular, all you have to do to make the unpopular ideas more acceptable to the public is to start promoting even more unpopular ideas. By going to the extremes of the spectrum of opinion, and pushing what is considered acceptable, it becomes easier for people who embrace previously-marginal opinions to be taken seriously. Their standpoint looks downright mainstream. There’s a brief and somewhat inadequate treatment of the concept of the Overton window on Wikipedia.

One of the great examples of the Overton window was being played out in the late 60’s. At that time, race riots, militiant black groups, and similarly extreme political expressions were pushing hard on the Overton window. One result has been a significant advances in racial equality that probably would not have been achieved without the presence of an extreme wing of the civil rights movement. The presence of the Black Panthers on the political landscape made the Southern Christian Leadership Conference look very mainstream and acceptable by comparison, and most experts doubt that the SCLC would have achieved what it did if its ideas had not been mainstreamed by comparison to more radical movements.

There was, obviously, also a significant amount of backlash against civil rights as a result of the extremist activities. The Overton window cannot be shoved around with impunity; it exists in a complex environment of communication, and many things influence public perception. But the concept is, at least, not unknown; in presenting it, I’m trying to do something Nisbet and Mooney rarely do - to support my arguments with widely recognized and well-researched concepts from the communications and public policy social sciences.

Not long ago, there was a thread in the JREF forums discussing the thoroughly debunked vaccine-autism link and related issues. After noticing some bullying in the discussion - specifically, some petulant demands from a self-proclaimed expert communicator that someone make some recommendations about how to communicate about vaccination, if others thought it wasn’t being done effectively. I made some recommendations that were³ fairly radical. It turns out that the so-called experts contributing there didn’t seem to know about the Overton method. Their response to my recommendations was to suggest I was a Nazi. They didn’t recognize that by moving the Overton window more toward the side of pro-vaccine, pro-immunization interests, the anti-vaccination activists are inherently marginalized, even if the extreme views used to move the window are never adopted. These so-called communicators weren’t interested in discussing effective communication; they were interested in the status quo and in protecting their roles as gatekeepers in public health risk communication. Much like, I suspect, Nisbet and Mooney want to install themselves as the gatekeepers of science communication.

But if my recommendations on vaccination were to be carried out - as several of them are in the case of the recent measles outbreaks in Tucson and Salzburg - the evidence suggests that antivaccinationists would become more and more strongly marginalized. The public perception of antivaccinationists as extremist radicals, subscribers to a vast and implausible conspiracy theory, and as profiteers by way of frivolous litigation against health care providers, and sale of unregulated quack medicines, would go a long way to bolstering the pro-immunity cause. And the above frame has the additional virtue that it is all true.

Of course it is an open question whether there are better ways to accomplish this marginalization, or whether the Overton effect should be exploited in this way at all - but at least I know about about the Overton effect. The other self-styled experts in communicating vaccine risk issues weren’t able to discern that the communication technique I was advocating was (a) mainstream and (b) well-supported from evidence.

Nisbet and Mooney are in the same boat. They present no explanation of why Overton-ing the creationists is a bad idea. And in their more uncompromising statements, guess what role Dawkins and PZ Myers represent? They Overton the creationists. They make strong, loud, public acceptance of science and ridicule of antiscience acceptable. By doing so, they allow people like me to sneak pro-healthcare messages into presentations at religious schools⁴ without seeming like I am attacking the foundation of religion by telling religionists that they have to see a doctor, and not just beg their god to solve their problems.

The antiscience lobby have no shortage of people radically hard on the opposite end - Answers in Genesis, and Discovery Institute, for example - and by maintaining their public profile, Myers and Dawkins at the very least prevent the creationists from Overton-ing us. At the very most, they offer those of us in the trenches of science communication opportunities to tell the truth about things that we would never otherwise enjoy. Believe what you want about Myers and Dawkins, and what impact they are really making with the mainstream; but it is very hard to argue that their activities aren’t helping by using the Overton effect to our advantage, much like having good air cover is a good idea if you are planning to go to war.

Gratuitous Closing Thoughts

I’d encourage you to go out and take a look at what Nisbet has said in glossy publications (pdf) about framing science. This article provides a soft, largely statistics-free analysis of “framing” as it has been applied to various scientific controversies in the past, in several cases without the “framers” of the past understanding they have been engaged in “framing.” It is at certain points pretty remarkable:

Some critics have argued that scientists should stick to research and let media relations officers and science writers worry about translating the implications of that research. They are right: In an ideal world that’s exactly what should happen.

Which I of course reject wholeheartedly. I make it a habit to expose bad science communication and subject it to criticism here, and have previously nominated an award for worst science press release ever, called out UC Davis for totally screwing up a release, and have concluded another one was merely odd and bad. At least two of these had heavy help from the institutional media relations officers. The fact is that professional communicators cannot be trusted to communicate the truth about science, unless they have knowledge of the field. It is also worth pointing out that media relations officers are motivated by institutional concerns, not science communication concerns. I would rather have every press release talk competently about science; the institution would often rather have it bolster its public reputation in its community, protect it from criticism, or serve other purposes.

The article goes on to admit that scientists will nevertheless play a key role in communicating science, but then tells them they should go learn how to be a professional communicator before they screw this up. The only substantive recommendation about how to communicate science is an advocacy of audience-bridging, the only example provided being to bring inoffensive biology communication to fundamentalist biology deniers.

In an otherwise decent summary article about “framing” science, here again are the problems:

1. There are no techniques offered about how to do this (other than, apparently, ‘be E. O. Wilson, and write a book just like his’).
2. There are no statistics or other evidence showing that bridging to this particular audience is necessary,
3. or possible.
4. There is no research suggesting how this audience might be reached.
5. There is no research showing that reaching a currently-marginalized, but more accessible, audience than this one is a less desirable way to expend limited resources.

The bottom line: The self-appointed “framers” of science are not doling out evidence based advice. Given that they combine their lack of evidence with a very offensive and poorly-framed message about how to communicate science, I’m thinking it is justified to disregard their suggestions.

1. Especially when things like Answers in Genesis exist, and are taken seriously and not as parodies. Things like AiG actually do harm science education; the most incompetent pro-science communication duffer can’t harm it in comparison. [↩]
2. It has to go deeper than anecdotal analysis - because that’s all that Nisbet and Mooney seem to provide. [↩]
3. Deliberately. [↩]
4. Expect a video sometime this week. [↩]

Greg Laden reports on Louisiana’s recently-introduced pro-Creationism legislation.

The commentary in the Daily Advertiser points out that Lousiana was the original test case in which creationists forced the issue into the courts, and lost:

In the early 1980s, the Legislature passed a law requiring the teaching of creation science alongside evolution in our public schools. In its 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision, the U.S. Supreme Court smote down the Louisiana law, yea, even unto the dust. The justices cited the Establishment Clause.

Almost immediately, people calling themselves the Discovery Institute decided they could slip creationism into schools if they didn’t explicitly mention God.

The bill is a so-called “academic freedom” bill.

As usual, the religious community is split, with religious extremists favoring the bill, and sensible religious people opposing it:

There’s nothing stupid about believing that God created everything - at least not to me, since that’s what I believe. But intelligent design is an affront to both religion and science.

Another story in the Times-Picayune

The creationists are with us again, determined in the upcoming legislative session to make the whole of Louisiana like Ouachita Parish. Lord, have mercy upon us.

Ouachita Parish adopted an “academic freedom” policy (pdf) in 2006 which has since been used to harass and suppress science teachers teaching evolution in the district. The Louisiana bill is modeled on the Ouachita Parish policy, while “academic freedom” bills introduced in other states were written by, or based on an exemplar written by, the creationist Discovery Institute.

Back to the Times-Picayune:

Now [creationism] has painted on a new face and emerged on the arm of state Sen. Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa, who is pushing what he humorously terms the “The Louisiana Academic Freedom Act” in the upcoming session.

Nevers has filed Senate Bill 561 with the spurious premise that evolution is a matter of serious scientific debate and that both sides are entitled to a hearing. A lot of people have fallen for that line, including Gov. Bobby Jindal, although, of course, scientists, save a few stray zealots, regard the evidence for evolution as overwhelming.

The acts seem to be consistent with the creationist strategy to get the government to force their religiously extreme views upon children, and also gain large tax subsidies for their “textbook” publishing businesses.

Is anyone else tired of the creationists’ political correctness? Let’s start calling these what they are: creationism acts, not academic freedom acts.

This is pretty cool:

The idea involves inviting the public to help monitor earthquakes by simply using their laptop computers at home. In doing so, the laptops join a network of computers designed to take a dense set of measurements that can help capture an earthquake.

Anyone with a personal computer will be able to participate in the experiment….

Because the project makes use of inexpensive motion sensors, called accelerometers, which are already in place as safety devices in most new laptops, participants incur no significant costs related to the project.

Nice! This is a BOINC project, so it runs on the same computing platform that has been used to process data looking for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, figuring out how proteins fold, looking for signals in gravitational wave detectors, and so on.

According to Cochran, a person’s laptop needs to remain inactive for at least three minutes before the system starts up. “This is to get rid of noise in the data and to ensure that any movement the laptop’s accelerometer is detecting is indeed out of the ordinary,” she said.

Don’t have a laptop? Jealous? No problem:

“We also are working on developing an accelerometer which can be plugged into a desktop like a USB flash drive,” she said. “That way, we’d have less interference from typing on the keyboard. It also would allow for a more robust and reliable system, with computers running the software all of the time.”

The PI is not blind to the outreach possibilities:

Cochran also plans to involve K-12 schools through education and outreach. “We think this would be an excellent project for students to take an interest in,” she said, “so we’re hoping we’ll see more of their participation.”

Sign me up!

Mike the Mad Biologist, one of my favorite bloggers, gave a presentation at Boston Skeptics in the Pub a week or so ago on the topic How to defend evolution the right way. The video is now available. I haven’t finished watching yet, but I’m about 1/3 of the way through it. Very cool so far.