Blue Collar Scientist

Tony Zirkle, Republican candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Second Congressional District, spoke to a Nazi party celebrating Hitler’s 119th birthday. For video, go here.

Zirkle claims to be a devoted Christian. That’s his excuse for speaking at a Nazi event:

This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

Zirkle is, as is consistent with his “faith,” a supporter of intelligent design creationism. He thinks that people who home school their children so as to avoid good science education should be refunded a third of their property taxes:

Two of the issue that have been flaming the controversies over public education are the evolution/creation debate and indoctrinating kindergarteners that homosexual domestic partners constitute merely one more acceptable, alternative lifestyle. Our public schools should not be exploiting our elementary school children to become pawns in these highly emotional, divisive debates.

Under the 1st and 14th Amendments, Congress has authority under the due process clause to ensure that states are not depriving citizens of their religious free exercise. Therefore, in any district where public schools take either position on these two issues and force their opinions on public school children, I will propose legislation that will entitle parent(s) to a refund of the approximately 1/3 of their property taxes (or percentage of rent that derives from property taxes) that go the public schools so that the parent(s) can either home school or send their children to a private school.

Now, I’ve not heard of even a single biologist who supports the Nazi cause. But here’s an ID creationist, and such a respectable one¹ that he’s a congressional candidate, who is speaking right there in front of a picture of Hitler and next to a Nazi flag.

What does that say about Expelled’s message that biologists are Nazis?

Orac has a more complete takedown.

1. I use the term loosely. [↩]

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.

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.

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.

If you haven’t heard - and really, if you are learning of this here, you really should read some other blogs - the makers of Expelled, a propaganda movie claiming that science professors kick intelligent design creationists out of classes, lectures, and discussions of evolution in order to censor debate, have kicked a science professor out of a screening of their movie in oder to censor debate.

Repeat after me: HYPOCRITES!

What’s truly baffling about this is that they kicked out PZ Myers, but they let his guest in. His guest? Richard Dawkins. You know, the virulently anti-intelligent design guy who even wrote a book called The God Delusion. Nobody could write fiction this good.

Repeat after me: DUMBASSES!

The movie also apparently claims that frail bespectacled science professors sitting in their offices and writing letters to one another were responsible for the murder of six million Jews in Nazi Germany.

Repeat after me: Deplorably disrespectful of the millions of people alive today who lost family as a result of a genocidal Christian dictator and his devout henchmen. These intelligent design creationists are just uncivilized for suggesting such a thing.

Greg Laden, from whom I’ve lifted the images, has a running mini-carnival of posts about this. If you haven’t heard the story, it should be enough to convince you that (a) intelligent design creationists are radical religious extremists, and (b) religious extremism is inherently silly, at least when it isn’t deadly.

I was just looking around on Casey Luskin’s web site, and I noticed that on one of the pages he says:

“God isn’t merciful enough to forgive us when we screw up” which is why “good things always happen to good people and bad things only happen to the bad.”

Is this true? Did Casey Luskin actually say such a blasphemous thing?

No. He didn’t.

Both sentence fragments come from different parts of his web page on Judaism, but I’ve re-arranged them and put them together so that they make up a misleading statement. Nothing on his website suggests that he thinks anything like this at all, and he certainly never wrote such a thing on his website.

So what is the point of this exercise?

Well, it’s to show Christians like Luskin why it is wrong to do something like this. What I’ve stitched together is pretty innocuous, but I bet I can stitch together unrelated quotations of Luskin’s that would seem to promote genocide, or imprisoning Christians, if I wanted to. And the only thing stopping me from doing it, and passing it off as real, is that I have morals and principles about such things.

One would think that the ninth commandment¹ would be enough to provide devout Christians with a similar set of morals and principles. We all understand lying is wrong, but it appears they disagree. Luskin recently did this very thing when quoting the National Academy of Science book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism.

Luskin wrote:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,” because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter” it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

This quotation is crafted to suggest that even if new evidence were introduced that refuted neo-Darwinism, scientists would not accept it or change their opinions. This is of course false - over the century and a half that evolution has been scientifically tested, a number of evolutionary hypotheses have been discarded by scientists as incorrect (including, ironically, something called neo-Darwinism), and a number of at first seemingly implausible ideas have been shown to have merit and are now part of mainstream evolutionary theory. Scientists have changed their thinking in response to evidence, as part of the long and painstaking human process of learning more and more about how the world works.

So Luskin is lying, the same way I was lying when I said Luskin had written that God is not merciful and bad things only happen to bad people. The difference, of course, is that I openly crafted a lie for the sake of discussion and told you I was lying right up front - whereas Luskin secretly crafted a lie with deliberate intent to deceive, and as of this writing has still not confessed his sin².

Luskin got the first half of his quotation on page 52, close to the end of the book:

There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Notice that he took an entire sentence from the source, but misrepresented it as only part of a sentence when he quoted it. And notice also that the sentence is in a paragraph that specifically advocates teaching about controversies associated with evolution - and that it has nothing to do with neo-Darwinism.

To get the second half of the quote, he had to go backward 36 pages to the beginning of the book. In his use of the material, he implies that he’s quoting related text - perhaps from the same sentence, or at least a nearby sentence - in order. But he’s not. He’s not even quoting text about remotely the same subject.

Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

Here, Luskin has taken a sentence fragment about theories other than evolution, and grafted it in a Frankenstein-esque manner to an unrelated sentence so as to apply it to evolution. This is a great way to mislead people about the meaning of the author being quoted!

Now, Luskin has a page on his website about intelligent design creationism, where he says:

Many critics of intelligent design have promoted false, straw [man] versions of intelligent design.

He then goes on an eleven paragraph rant whining about how unfair it is that people misrepresent intelligent design creationism³. Meanwhile he stitches together quotations from science books so that they appear to mean whatever old thing he wants them to mean.

Hypocrite.

If intelligent design creationism had any legitimacy at all, they wouldn’t need to misquote science books to promote it.

1. Eighth commandment in Roman and Lutheran traditions. [↩]
2. I’d just say what he did was wrong, not that he had sinned. But I’m willing to adopt his religious standards out of respect for his beliefs. [↩]
3. Just for the record, I disagree that many of his examples of “misrepresentation” are in fact misrepresentative. [↩]

It has finally penetrated the awareness of the Sciblings, or whatever the heck they call themselves, that Ken Miller, noted witness in the Dover trial and author of a good biology textbook that was attacked by intelligent design creationists in South Carolina, has used the term “design” when describing biology and wants those of us who do science education and outreach to do so as well. I’m not sure why it took so long - Miller’s halfhearted publicity blitz on his new ideas came at the time of a controversial panel discussion at the AAAS meeting organized by Matt Nisbet about a week ago. The topic of that panel discussion was framing science, and the discussion deliberately excluded the voices of scientists who oppose framing. That was the source of the controversy and much of the notoriety of the panel.

The Sciencebloggers reactions are muted.¹ PZ Myers says:

The word “design” carries other implications: purpose, planning, calculation. These are not present in evolution! Miller isn’t even trying to propose purposefulness in evolution — design, he is saying, is a consequence of the natural mechanism.

I don’t think it can work.

Greg Laden, after an extensive analysis of word frequency in the works of Erasmus and Charles Darwin:

So, I reject design. Both the intelligent kind and the use of the word in standard biological writing.

John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts:

Ken Miller is going to bow to the intelligent design crowd and try to refurbish design as a biological concept. And why? I ask myself. There’s no need. Design in the absence of information about the manufacturers of an object is a totally otiose notion.

I’m amazed by these understated reflections. Kenneth Miller’s proposal is suicidally destructive to science education, and his actions are are already causing problems among people trying to offer sound science outreach. Perhaps the above feel a natural reluctance to offer the appearance of delivering a bitch-slapping to a respected colleague, but their response is a little surprising considering the severity of the problem.

My concern over this situation is a result of understanding that most science education and outreach comes from people who are not scientists, and a close familiarity with intelligent design creationist tactics.

Scientists are, with certain notable exceptions, not well known for being good at science outreach and (nonmajor) education. Laden, Wilkins, and Myers are exceptions to the rule, but despite this they enjoy a status that people doing the trench warfare of science education do not. As a result of their academic credentials and affiliations, they enjoy a reasonable assurance that people in their community will at least respect them. It is my observation that you don’t often see people in such positions volunteering at the local kid’s science museum², dealing with laypeople in this direct way, day after day. While these people have correctly discerned the insanity of the various antiscience activists, they don’t have to deal with it except at a fairly high level: I’ve never seen Behe or Ham putting in time at the local science museum either, and the antiscience crowd generally sends first-stringers into radio debates and the like, not an everyman armed with the standard talking points. The professors provide a very necessary service for those of us who are working in education and outreach outside our fields of expertise. Without their work, we couldn’t as easily respond to the waves of cannon fodder that the antiscience activists throw at us on a daily basis. But I doubt it is in the daily routine of a PZ Myers or a Greg Laden to deal with the cannon fodder directly.

Let’s step back a bit and look at what Miller’s publicity says:

Miller will argue³ that science itself, including evolutionary biology, is predicated on the idea of “design” — the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life.

Let’s contrast that with an interaction I experienced with an antiscience nutcase:

Me (talking to an ID creationist): But what is it that you mean when you say “design?”

They: Design means that, or it refers to the idea that structure is associated with, or coupled with function.

If this guy had thought of⁴ the word “correlated,” he probably would have used it. The intelligent design creationists are already using Ken Miller’s talking points. Miller knows this - this is why he’s adopted them.

The framist’s ideas are supported by research into how people perceive rhetoric. There is some support for the notion that appropriating an opponent’s semantic space can convince undecided people to support your side. That’s fine as far as it goes, and in policy debates those tactics can help. The problem is that when doing this, you have to be very careful not to give the appearance that there’s no difference between you and your opponent. If you do that, the audience will conclude your opponent got there first and knows better what they are about. You also have to avoid giving the appearance that you are trying to ride on the coattails of an idea with wide appeal, which you don’t really accept. These problems have plagued political campaigns for generations - this isn’t a new realization.

One problem with framing science, as Miller and Nisbet propose doing it, is that they apply research on questions of public policy debates to science education. Policy debates have no clear “right” or “wrong” conclusion; some policies are obviously not good, and some may be better than others; but these conclusions aren’t as black-and-white as science issues. In many science concepts, the only choice is between reality, and wrongness. I think it is a methodological error to apply research about influencing people to adopt ideas of indeterminate correctness, to the problem of educating people about reality.

Perhaps I am wrong. If I am, it is still incumbent upon people proposing these ideas to provide us with techniques to avoid the two big pitfalls of appropriating someone else’s rhetorical space. We don’t want to be confused for intelligent design creationists, or even as people who, with slight adjustments to the way we think about things, would find such ideas amenable. And we don’t want to give the appearance that we’re hitching a ride on the supposed “popularity” of ID ideas.

If we’re going to do this framing thing, we need a rigorous method to prevent these outcomes. We need some focus groups and polling to determine the relative appeal of different methods. We need to get the word out in an organized way so that everyone can at least understand what is being done.

Miller offers none of this. He’s a loose canon, acting unilaterally, releasing a trial balloon that is dangerous because he is the one letting it go, rather than some insignificant third-string underling (like me).

Finally, the framists want to adopt a body of research about influencing people on matters of opinion - questionably adopted for the task of educating people about facts, as I see it - instead of adopting evidence based biology education techniques that are unquestionably pertinent to the issue at hand, and result from research methods that have a long history, wide acceptance, and proven effectiveness.

Let’s get back to the crank I mentioned above. Here’s how I responded to that guy’s definition of design:

Me: Well, ok, but does that mean it is intelligently designed?

They: Yes, because when things are used for a task they are the things that are best able to do that task.

Me: Well, that sounds nice, but it isn’t true. I have a shed in my backyard. When I use a screwdriver to chip ice off the latch, I’m not using the “thing that is best able to do that task.” It just means I don’t own an ice pick. Or a heat gun. And that’s how organisms use their body structures. When a chimp hits another chimp with his fist, the fist isn’t the “best thing” for hitting, it’s just what he has. An Ankylosaur tail would be better⁵, but he doesn’t have one of those.

This response was not great, but it was good enough - my interlocutor was speaking during Q&A at a public speaking engagement, and the audience understood what I was saying. Contrast and compare:

Antisciencer: But if all these creatures are so well adapted to the long winters, why don’t you think they are designed?

Me: Just because these animals body designs are well adapted, doesn’t -

Antisciencer: So you admit there is design there, then?

That’s what you call a stupid and embarrassing mistake. You now have to back up and explain what design means, so that you don’t leave your students with a misconception. In doing that, you are going to look like some smug and pedantic college professor type. Some people are going to think you are splitting hairs in order to look smarter than the other person. Some people are going to say “they were saying the same thing, they just didn’t want to admit it to each other, they both want to be right.”

If you do get through to some percentage of the audience, you still have the burden of explaining the difference between “design” the way you used the word, and “design” the way it is commonly understood. That adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the concepts you are trying to teach. It’s a needless burden upon the instructor. Miller seeks to impose this burden, and I’m unhappy with that.

More, from a different talk:

Me: Sure, the structure of organisms have functions. We eat with mouths. We also speak with them. And we ski down mountainsides, but that doesn’t mean the owner of the ski resort made the mountain for that purpose.

Antisciencer: Why can’t you just admit there is design?

Me: Because it doesn’t look like there is design. There are attributes, but to say design means that something was put together deliberately for an intended effect. That might be right, but nobody can come up with an experiment that shows that it is, so it isn’t science. And I don’t see how molecules work with “intent.” Genes don’t want to do things, they just make proteins. So as long as I’m up here to talk about science, I’ll use scientific concepts and scientific language. Design isn’t one of them, in this case.

Antisciencer: So you really do disagree?

Me: Oh, yes, I disagree completely. Our ideas about biology are completely incompatible, this isn’t a matter of splitting hairs. Now if you could tell me how to do an experiment which would prove a designer, I’d sing a different tune. Until then, I’m sticking with the science.

I came out of that one in considerably better shape. I had an educable moment there, in which I could make clear to the whole audience the depth of disagreement between science and antiscience. Some of the other material from this interaction, which I haven’t reproduced here, shed some light on that difference.

What the sciencebloglingadingalinglongs don’t seem to fully appreciate here is the way that antiscience activists are constantly in your face when you are doing this kind of education, looking for any opportunity to take something that you say, and twist it into support for their strange beliefs. Now that Miller has taken leave of his senses and begun worshiping at the church of framing, I am shortly going to have to deal with this:

Antisciencer: You may say that, but Kenneth Miller is a real biologist, and he says there is design. Why should we believe you instead?

And frankly, I’ve got nothing.

1. Presumably, Nisbet is in favor. [↩]
2. You know, the kind of place usually called the “Imaginarium” or “Exploratorium” - a place where kids go to get overstimulated with sciencey stuff. [↩]
3. The quotation refers to the AAAS panel discussion, which has now taken place. [↩]
4. Or knew. [↩]
5. This tactic works better if you have a cartoon monkey with an Ankylosaur tail to project on the screen at the proper moment. As I do. [↩]

Intelligent Design Creationists have said for some time that bats pose a problem for evolutionary theory.

Things are even tougher for the evolutionist with the knowledge that the ‘oldest known’ complete fossils of bats … show indications of a fully-developed echolocation system.

Evolutionary theory predicts that in such cases, transitional forms did exist, and are possibly waiting to be discovered in the fossil record. And today, Carl Zimmer reports on his blog about a newly discovered bat fossil.

The ear bones in its head don’t have the distinctive shape found in living bats that echolocate, suggesting that it had to rely on sight and sound to catch prey–insects, judging from its teeth. Flight evolved first in bats … and echolocation only came later.

Oh. That must really suck to be an intelligent design creationist who thinks that bats popped out of nowhere with echolocation fully developed, then.

It turns out this bat fossil is the most primitive bat ever found, and it has several other transitional attributes:

1. Evolutionary theory predicts that early bats would have body proportions similar to that of the walking mammals from which bats evolved. This fossil has shorter arms, and longer legs, than modern bats. Prediction fulfilled!
2. Almost all modern bats have only a single claw. Evolutionary theory predicts that early bats should have a full compliment of claws, and that bats who lived in between these times should show a gradual loss of claws. Many bat fossils are single-clawed with vestigial claws on other fingers, thus fulfilling the prediction as far as was able. But this bat completes things - it has claws