Blue Collar Scientist

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.

The makers of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, are well-known to lie early and often, even when there is no particular reason.

After kicking PZ Myers out of an Expelled screening, but letting Richard Dawkins in, the creationist cretins said:

• PZ was kicked out because he was screaming at people and causing trouble or something
• PZ was kicked out because he didn’t have an invitation
• PZ was kicked out because the producer of Expelled wanted to make him pay to see the movie
• Dawkins was let in because nobody recognized him
• Dawkins was let in because he used his confusing full name of Clinton Richard Dawkins (calling “Clinton” the surname), which is on his passport
• Dawkins was let in because he’s a kindly English gentleman
• …

Whatever. All those things can’t be true, so some of them are definitely lies.

But now the Expelled people are lying deliberately. When they have a showing, and people sign up, they are going through the sign-up list and vetting the attendees. (They are no doubt scared of an embarrassment similar to that of the Dawkins-Myers fiasco.) Once they’ve found out who the bad guys are - i.e., anyone interested in telling the truth, about science or anything - they tell them that the screening has been cancelled.

But it hasn’t actually been cancelled. They just reschedule it to an hour earlier. And tell the people they do want to come about the change.

Seriously, I’m not making this up - check it out.

About six months ago I had a situation with a person who wanted to come to a party I was throwing at my house. They had done something wrong that had caused a lot of pain to several of my guests, and I didn’t consider myself to be this person’s friend in any case. I had the moral fortitude to tell them that they were not welcome in my home and would not be admitted if they did come to the party. But what do the Expelled people do when faced with a vaguely similar situation? They lie and manipulate people.

Creationists just aren’t capable of telling the truth.

…because so many of the science ones seem perfectly plausible if you’ve ever talked to a creationist.

Over on Panda’s Thumb, there is a posting about the case of Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Bretheren, opposes intelligent design, and she wrote an article critical of creationist Philip Johnson’s book, Darwin on Trial. She has said that intelligent design creationism is not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”

For her trouble, Philip Johnson called up a trustee of Fuller and reportedly tried to have her fired.

“His tactic has always been to fight dirty when anyone attacks his ideas,” (Murphy) said. “For a long time afterward, I would tell reporters I don’t want to comment, and I don’t want you to say I don’t want to comment. I’m tired of being careful.”

According to the story, Johnson denies it:

Johnson denied he had tried to get Murphy fired. He said that he had spoken with a former trustee of the seminary who was himself upset with Murphy but that he was not responsible for any action taken against her.

Yeah, right. Both the trustee and Johnson were pissed off at Murphey but they didn’t talk about being pissed off at Murphy and nothing they said could have encouraged such persecution. Makes perfect sense.

Anyway, if you read down through the comments, you come to a very interesting list of people that creationists have harassed, gotten fired, threatened, or killed because of their understanding of evolution. (Yes, creationists have killed someone over evolution.) It kind of puts the lie to creationist Johnson’s further remarks:

“It’s the Darwinists who hold the power in academia and who threaten the professional status and livelihoods of anyone who disagrees,” Johnson said. “They feel to teach anything but their orthodoxy is an act of professional treason.”

Apparently, Johnson is having some trouble telling the truth. Here’s a working list of people fired, compromised, or killed by creationist nutbags (no claim is made that this list is complete, and I’d like to see some citations to sources, so maybe I’ll work on that for a future post):

2 professors fired, Bitterman (SW CC Iowa) and Bolyanatz (Wheaton)

1 persecuted unmercifully Richard Colling (Olivet)

1 attempted firing Murphy (Fuller Theological by Phillip Johnson IDist)

1 successful death threats, assaults harrasment Gwen Pearson (UT Permian)

1 state official fired Chris Comer (Texas)

1 assault, fired from dept. Chair Paul Mirecki (U. of Kansas)

1 killed, Rudi Boa, Biomedical Student (Scotland)

Death Threats Eric Pianka UT Austin and the Texas Academy of Science engineered by a hostile, bizarre IDist named Bill Dembski

Death Threats Michael Korn, fugitive from justice, towards the UC Boulder biology department and miscellaneous evolutionary biologists.

Will Expelled be talking about these cases? Right. Didn’t think so.

Edit to add: Link for Richard Colling.

My TIVO has a season pass on the word “evolution,” and it has just informed me that a half-hour TV show called “Epelled: No Intelligence Allowed” will air on April 6 at 11:30 PM Alaska Daylight Time on FAMNET, whatever station that is - definitely a religious station, but nothing I’ve ever heard of. The program appears on my schedule as an infomercial.

Is this already available online somewhere? Or is this going to be the first airing?

Edit to add: Assuming there’s no eastern/pacific split on this station, that would be at 3:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time. Not exactly a great time slot.

For years, creationists have shrilly insisted that the more complex a life form is, the slower it could evolve adaptive traits. Supposedly this showed that evolution wouldn’t work, or something.

Of course, just bleating that something is true doesn’t make it so. And as in so many other cases when we are dealing with creationist rhetoric, this one isn’t true either.

Yesterday Nature published a paper with the inspiring title Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the ‘cost of complexity.’ The experiments described in the paper deliver a body-blow to the so-called “cost of complexity” hypothesis.

The researchers did something very straightforward - they caused mutations in mice, and then measured the results. If the “cost of complexity” crowd were right, then making a single genetic mutation should affect many different unrelated traits. If they were wrong, then the effects would be limited to either a single trait, or several related traits. The researchers found that the latter was the case.

A more technical way of discussing the findings is to say that pleiotropies are rare. A pleiotropy exists when a single gene strongly affects a variety of phenotypic traits. While pleiotropies do exist - a famous example causes phenylketonuria in humans - the study shows that they are not common in a broad sample of gene mutations, as creationists claimed. As a consequence, even complex organisms can adapt through mutation without paying a price for their complexity.

From the abstract:

As perceived by Darwin, evolutionary adaptation by the processes of mutation and selection is difficult to understand for complex features that are the product of numerous traits acting in concert, for example the eye or the apparatus of flight. Typically, mutations simultaneously affect multiple phenotypic characters. This phenomenon is known as pleiotropy…. Some authors have suggested that pleiotropy can impede evolutionary progress (a so-called ‘cost of complexity’)…. Here we show, by studying pleiotropy in mice with the use of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) affecting skeletal characters, that most QTLs affect a relatively small subset of traits and that a substitution at a QTL has an effect on each trait that increases with the total number of traits affected. This suggests that evolution of higher organisms does not suffer a ‘cost of complexity’ because most mutations affect few traits and the size of the effects does not decrease with pleiotropy.

Wired has a nice article about the paper including some quotes from the PI:

“I think the main broader impact of this work is on the evolution-creationism debate,” wrote [Yale University evolutionary biologist Gunter] Wagner in an email. “I would say the only intellectually interesting argument that the creationists are using, at least the scientifically more sophisticated ones, is that random mutation can not lead to the evolution of complex organisms. And there are interesting mathematical arguments that have been made to support that. But our results show that organisms found a way around that problem by restricting mutational effects on very narrowly confined parts of the organisms.”

This paper undermines the whole creationist argument based on information theory that has become so popular in recent years. This should be remembered, and pointed out when creationists trot out their silly claims.

By way of Evil Bender, I learn that intelligent Design Creationists on the Uncommon Descent blog have been crowing about how the scientific journal Nature recently published an example of intelligent design, and that this proves god green space aliens the designer, etc.

Here’s what the creationists had to say (emphasis mine):

The following is an edited extract from a Nature paper. It is an example of real ID research…. The novel active site was completely intelligently designed.

Holy smokes! Real intelligent design? And published in Nature?

That must really burn Ben Stein’s shorts, after he went to so much trouble to make a movie about how intelligent design is excluded from schools, scientific journals, and so on.

So, anyway…. The Nature article they cite is called “Kemp elimination catalysts by computational enzyme design.” I went over to the Nature website, and right on the front page was a link to the paper. You can go over there and read its abstract if you want, even if you can’t get the whole paper.

So guess what the paper is about? It is about people designing new enzymes. Yes, folks, the paper is about chemical engineering by humans.

We designed eight enzymes with computationally designed active sites. In vitro evolution enhanced the computational designs, demonstrating the power of combining computational protein design with directed evolution for creating new enzymes.

Again, we see the bad scholarship of creationists. It is bad enough that creationists repeatedly confuse fishing lures for real insects; now it looks like the quality of their scholarship will be limited by their inability to tell the difference between people and space aliens gods supernatural intelligent designers.

Someone recently pointed me to a series of YouTube videos that are well worth watching. The general format of each is that they show actual footage of a creationist saying something stupid, and then show how we know that it is stupid.

I particularly liked Part 4, which used high-school level math to determine how much water you would need to coat the entire Earth in it.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

The series goes on from there - there are 19 episodes in all.

Quick - have a look at these YouTube videos before some creationist cooks up a fraudulent DMCA copyright infringement claim to have these taken down.

Both videos explore phylogeny from the transitional fossil record in an interesting and compelling way, and set to some wonderful music.

Hat tip to Panda’s Thumb.