Teaching Evolution

Google in China: The Big Disconnect

2006-04-20T14:06:00.000-07:00

A fascinating New York Times magazine piece.

'Galileo Was Wrong,' claims geocentrist writer

2006-03-30T10:22:00.000-08:00

Motivated by Biblical teachings, Robert Sungenis has written a 1,000-page work that shows that the sun actually revolves around the earth. How long until some school district demands that its science teachers teach this controversy?

A Hunt for Genes That Betrayed a Desert People

2006-03-21T14:50:00.000-08:00

An interesting piece from the always worthwhile science section of the New York Times discusses the Bedouins, an ethnic group whose ancestors long roamed the Middle East and married their cousins. The Bedouins now have some serious genetic diseases. Money quote:

Bedouins do not carry more genetic mutations than the general population. But because so many marry relatives — some 65 percent of Bedouin in Israel's Negev marry first or second cousins — they have a significantly higher chance of marrying someone who carries the same mutations, increasing the odds they will have children with genetic diseases, researchers say. Hundreds have been born with such diseases among the Negev Bedouin in the last decade.

Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story

2006-03-07T02:27:00.000-08:00

Researchers have found 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been shaped by natural selection within the last 15,000 years. Taste, smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function all appear to have evolved relatively recently.

I'm most interested in what this says about the concept of race. That racial differences have evolved so recently reinforces that those differences are relatively slight and have to do mostly with surface appearance.

At Least He Didn't Smoke Pot

2006-03-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

You no doubt know about Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-California), who was just sentenced to more than eight years in prison for taking bribes. I'm not going to rehash the whole story here, but I do want to point out the great piece of reporting that broke the whole thing wide open. When first confronted with the odd fact that a defense contractor had bought Cunningham's house for $700,000 more than it was worth, Cunningham said,

"My whole life I've lived aboveboard," Cunningham said. "I've never even smoked a marijuana cigarette. I don't cheat. If a contractor buys me lunch and we meet a second time, I buy the lunch. My whole life has been aboveboard and so this doesn't worry me."

I think it's extraordinary that we live in a country where some people think smoking marijuana is a greater offense than accepting bribes. But we do.

Anti-Darwin Bill Fails in Utah - Yes, Utah

2006-02-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

We're winning.

That's the only reasonable conclusion after reading this. If Utah can't even pass anti-evolution legislation, can any state? The fight will never be over, but the forces for good are way ahead right now.

Thanks to Julie for the tip.

Update: Yahoo Relents

2006-02-22T09:37:00.000-08:00

That was quick. I still don't like Yahoo, though.

Yahoo: Democracy Bad, Allah Good

2006-02-22T07:46:00.000-08:00

Just to make sure we're all clear: If you're using a Yahoo account to promote Democracy in China, Yahoo will turn you in to the Chinese authorities.

And if you have a name like Callahan, you can forget about Yahoo giving you an e-mail address. Why? Because "Callahan" has "allah" in it. And we can't have anyone using the name of "allah" in a Yahoo e-mail address. Of course, Yahoo is more than happy to give out e-mail addresses that have names like Jesus or jehova. But not allah.

Gmail and Google are vastly superior to Yahoo from a technical perspective. And from a moral perspective. What on earth is anyone doing still using Yahoo?

Olympics vs. NASCAR

2006-02-21T12:21:00.000-08:00

I've written before about how ludicrous it is to claim that NASCAR is the second most popular sport in America. The latest example is this Los Angeles Times article, which refers to a "ratings dip" for the Olympics but still makes clear that the Daytona 500, the most popular NASCAR race, gets lower ratings than the Winter Olympics. I'm puzzled at why people continue to insist that NASCAR is the second most popular sport when that claim is demonstrably false.

China's Cyberdissidents and the Yahoos at Yahoo

2006-02-19T19:31:00.000-08:00

You'll need TimesSelect to read the whole thing, but Nicholas Kristof, who has probably done more than any other journalist in the world to explain the way China cracks down on dissidents, has an absolutely devastating lead on his column today. Echoing Representative Chris Smith, he writes:

Suppose that Anne Frank had maintained an e-mail account while in hiding in 1944, and that the Nazis had asked Yahoo for cooperation in tracking her down. It seems, based on Yahoo's behavior in China, that it might have complied.

Kristof also does the best job of any journalist I've seen at explaining what each of the four companies called before Congress has done in China:

"Yahoo sold its soul and is a national disgrace."

"Microsoft has also been cowardly, but nothing like Yahoo."

"Cisco in China is a bit sleazy but nothing like Yahoo."

"Google strikes me as innocent of wrongdoing."

It says a lot about the place Google now holds in the American consciousness that this story has been almost entirely about Google.

For more, check out BooYahoo!

David Baltimore on the Bush Administration

2006-02-19T14:15:00.000-08:00

David Baltimore is a great American. The president of Cal Tech, Baltimore is a brilliant scientist, a tremendous writer, and an outstanding administrator. I have exchanged e-mails with him and am consistently impressed by what he has to say.

What he has to say about the Bush administration is no surprise. The New York Times reports,

David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist and president of the California Institute of Technology, is used to the Bush administration misrepresenting scientific findings to support its policy aims, he told an audience of fellow researchers Saturday. Each time it happens, he said, "I shrug and say, 'What do you expect?' "

But then, Dr. Baltimore went on, he began to read about the administration's embrace of the theory of the unitary executive, the idea that the executive branch has the power or even the obligation to act without restraint from Congress. And he began to see in a new light widely reported episodes of government scientists being restricted in what they could say in public.

"It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of scientific freedom," he said. "It's part of the theory of government now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose." Far from twisting science to suit its own goals, he said, the government should be "the guardian of intellectual freedom."

Ohio Board Undoes Stand on Evolution

2006-02-15T13:03:00.000-08:00

Here's the first paragraph of the New York Times story.

The Ohio Board of Education voted 11 to 4 Tuesday to toss out a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution and an accompanying model lesson plan, dealing the intelligent design movement its second serious defeat in two months.

This is good news, but there's something bothersome to me about the phrasing. There's certainly nothing wrong with a "critical analysis of evolution." In fact, I think if it's done right, a critical analysis of evolution would give the students a wonderful understanding of what evolution is. The problem, of course, is that when they say "critical analysis," what they mean is, "teach the kids bogus doubts about evolution, confuse them about what a scientific theory is, and pass of pseudo-religious instruction as science."

House Members Criticize Internet Companies for Practices in China

2006-02-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft came under attack from Congressmen who believe they're keeping information from the Chinese people at the behest of the Chinese government. I tend to agree with the Congressmen, but I also think there's something to be said for the idea that some Google in China is better than no Google in China. (And let's face it, this is all about Google. The others were brought in just so it wouldn't look like Google was getting picked on.) If you're a Chinese dissident and you want access to information about the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989, you're probably still more likely to get that information even with the filtered Google than you would have been with no Google at all.

Ex-Press Aide for NASA Offers Defense

2006-02-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

This guy George Deutsch is really something. He went from an undergraduate at Texas A&M to a worker on the Bush re-election campaign to a spokesman for NASA without completing his undergrad degree or, seemingly, knowing anything about science. He tried to use his position to prevent NASA from educating people about the Big Bang, which runs contrary to his religious beliefs. Now he has offered a defense of his actions.

My favorite part of this is his account of a correspondence he had with a NASA Web designer. "We are both Christians, and I was sharing with him my personal opinions on the Big Bang theory versus intelligent design," he said. What I find fascinating is that this guy is a proponent of intelligent design, and according to him, intelligent design somehow disproves the Big Bang. Intelligent design must be one hell of a theory if it's able to disprove both evolution and the Big Bang, two scientific theories that have nothing to do with each other.

Dealing with the Depths of Depression: Shock Therapy

2006-02-02T07:25:00.000-08:00

I was engaged in a conversation with a psychologist once, and I asked her, "What do you think of electroshock therapy?" She looked at me as if I had said, "Don't you think it's fun to torture kittens?"

I find it sad that even a mental health professional would be unable to see past the popular culture depictions of mad scientists torturing people by administering electric shocks. It's actually a very effective treatment for depression. I quote the Food and Drug Administration's own Web site:

When people are unresponsive to antidepressant medications or can't take them because of their age or health problems, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), or "shock therapy," can offer a lifesaving alternative. Like antidepressants, ECT is believed to affect the chemical balance of the brain's neurotransmitters.

Before ECT, the patient is given anesthesia and a muscle relaxant to prevent injury or pain. Then electrodes are placed on the person's head, and a small amount of electricity is applied. This procedure is usually done three times a week until the patient improves. Some patients may experience a temporary loss of short-term memory.

I plan to write more about this in the future, but in the meantime, consider this a public service announcement. Electroshock therapy can be a wonderful thing. (This is usually the point where you'd read something along the lines of, "Of course, electroshock therapy isn't right for everyone..." as if that's not incredibly obvious. Chemotherapy isn't for everyone, either. That doesn't mean we should ban it, as many insist with electroshock therapy.)

If you have personal experience with electroshock therapy, know someone who has, or have just read anything interesting about it, I'd love to hear from you, either in the comments or at teachevolution@gmail.com. I'll assume any e-mails I get are strictly confidential unless you specifically tell me otherwise.

Tags: depression electroshock ECT shock therapy

Tienanmen - Google 图片搜索

2006-01-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard about Google.cn, the new Chinese version of Google. The search company has agreed to filter information so that it's to the Chinese government's liking. Google's official blog discusses the matter here.

I wanted to know what the Chinese version of Google is like, but I can't read Chinese, so I decided to try some Google Images searches on the Chinese version of the site. It sure doesn't look like it's doing much filtering to me. Here's what you see when you type in "Tiananmen Square."

UPDATE: Apparently I didn't think they were filtering it because I was spelling it wrong.

Fox News columnist Steven Milloy, Pundit for Hire

2006-01-30T12:26:00.000-08:00

I just love the phrase "junk science." Using that phrase makes me feel good, because there are so many people whose pseudo-scientific claims belong in the trash. The only problem is, the phrase has been so co-opted by so many people that it has ceased to have much meaning. Now if you google "junk science" you get this guy.

Fortunately, The New Republic has exposed Steven Milloy for what he is, a shill for businesses that pay him to write badly researched pieces that dispute how much the businesses are polluting the air. Will he stay on the Fox News payroll?

Numbers Guy: Results are In

2006-01-27T04:06:00.000-08:00

The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal has published the results of the quiz we discussed previously. Now that I look at the answers, I have to admit that I'm not 100 percent positive that I had all of them right before. (The first time I read the quiz I thought I knew all of them, but I didn't write the answers down and now that I'm looking at his answers I think a couple of mine were off.) Anyway, it's nice to see that he used the one answer I e-mailed to him.

Journalists and Numbers

2006-01-20T07:16:00.000-08:00

This great column details how many journalists just plain have an aversion to numbers. That has always really bothered me. There's a 10-question quiz at the end of the column, and it pains me to realize that many journalists wouldn't score 10 for 10. There's no reason anyone with an education beyond ninth grade shouldn't know all of them. But regarding No. 9, a couple of points: The obvious one is that a 100% graduation rate couldn't possibly be NEAR the top, it would have to be, by definition, the top. I don't think many schools are graduating more than 100% of their students.

But here's the less obvious and more important one: The news media ALWAYS report high graduation rates as if high=good. It never seems to occur to any reporter that a high graduation rate could be the result of pushing students into easy classes, or even outright academic fraud. I'm more impressed by a school with a low graduation rate, as the students who actually graduate obviously did something out of the ordinary.

Vatican Calls Pennsylvania Judge Correct

2006-01-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

This is certainly good news:

The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as "correct" the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

"If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another," Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano.

"But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science," he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. "It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious."

Law of the Land, Supply and Demand

2006-01-11T02:25:00.000-08:00

Has anyone ever said anything so smart and so stupid simultaneously? Check out this quote from Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee:

"If the law of the land ignores the law of supply and demand, the law of supply and demand will win."

I think that's true. But just think about Mehlman's GOP, and how often it ignores that maxim: prescription drugs from Canada, medical marijuana, recreational drug use, prostitution, online gambling, etc.

I'll make a deal with Mr. Mehlman. If he takes this belief of his to its logical conclusions, I'll vote straight Republican this year.

Can You Revive an Extinct Animal?

2006-01-08T09:07:00.000-08:00

The quagga was a zebra-like species that went extinct in 1883. The front half of its body was striped like a zebra's, but the back half was brown with no stripes. Here's a picture.

This New York Times Magazine article reports on a movement to bring the quagga out of extinction. No, this isn't a Jurassic Park-type idea; that wouldn't work because DNA breaks down too quickly to take the remains of a dead animal and clone it. What the Quagga Project wants to do is take the Plains Zebra, the quagga's closest relative, and breed specimins that have similar traits to the quagga. They've only done it for three generations, but they've already made progress.

However, I really don't buy that they'd be creating anything more than a zebra that looks like a quagga. Still, this raises some fascinating questions of whether we can recreate natural selection in a lab.

DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution - New York Times

2006-01-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

A great New York Times article. Read the whole thing, but I absolutely love this paragraph, which reminds us that evolution doesn't always make a species stronger or faster or better at hunting.

Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.

2005-12-26T05:20:00.000-08:00

Private companies have little incentive to develop a vaccine for AIDS. The research and development costs would be high, and the company that developed the vaccine would immediately become the target of overwhelming worldwide pressure to give it away for free.

I thought the above statement was so obvious that anyone who had ever given it a moment's thought knew it, but apparently when the federal chief of AIDS research said it, it was "an unusually candid admission."

"If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we're going to have an HIV vaccine. It's not going to be made by a company," Dr. Edmund Tramont said. "They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it."

What struck me as especially odd here is that the drug companies immediately denounced Tramont's comment. Why? I guess they want people to think they're deeply committed to public health. If instead they'd be honest enough to admit that (like all companies) what they're deeply committed to is their own profits, we could have much more intelligent discussions about the costs of health care.

The Worst in Science and Statistics Reporting

2005-12-23T16:58:00.000-08:00

Do you remember all the news reports about a CDC study that said it's not unhealthy to be overweight after all? I read a couple of them and sensed immediately that something was up. It was quite clear that the media were overreacting to a few statistically insignificant findings.

That was only the seventh-worst of the many lousy reports tallied in the annual “Dubious Data Awards,” issued by the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University. It's a short post, so read the whole thing.

Katie Couric, Handcuffs on a 13-year-old, and the Future of Journalism

2005-12-20T08:49:00.000-08:00

I don't watch the Today Show and I don't watch the CBS Evening News. The media world is atwitter with rumors that Katie Couric will jump from one to the other. Here's why it shouldn't happen:

I saw about three minutes of the Today Show this morning because I happened to flip to that channel to find out how cold it was outside. Couric was interviewing the parents of a girl who was handcuffed on a school bus and their attorneys. I hadn't heard anything about this case, but I've now had a chance to read a bit about it, and I feel confident of two things:

1. The cop was wrong to handcuff the girl.
2. The girl was not harmed in any serious way.

Ordinarily, this would be a minor story that no national news outlet would carry. But because the school bus had a security camera, that makes it huge news in the eyes of the Today Show. Fine. I really don't care what the Today Show broadcasts.

I do care, though, about fairness to people like the police officer, who, because he was the subject of a national news story will now likely never live down what was, ultimately, a rather minor mistake. And there was nothing fair at all about this interview. Couric gravely intoned that the girl was injured so badly that she had to go to the hospital. Not an ounce of skepticism came from Couric's mouth, even as the home audience was treated to a laughable photograph of the girl's wrists. The parents said they took their daughter to the emergency room, where she was treated for a contusion. Do you know, dear reader, what a contusion is? It's a bruise. The girl's wrists were slightly reddened. If you have fair skin like the girl in question, you can make your own wrists red right now. Just firmly grip your right hand around your left wrist, let go, and you have a contusion. Do you feel the need to go to the emergency room?

So what does this have to do with the future of journalism? The person who sits in the anchor chair at CBS Evening News isn't just a reader of a TelePrompTer. He (or, perhaps soon, she) is the public face of important news events. The next time truly serious news breaks, millions of Americans will turn to the person in the anchor chair at CBS. If that person is Katie Couric, viewers will be hearing about history in the making from the kind of person whose news judgment prevents her from knowing the difference between bruised wrists and police brutality.

Judge Bars 'Intelligent Design' From Pa. Classes

2005-12-20T08:42:00.000-08:00

The Dover School Board members who lost at the polls have now lost in court.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.

The school board policy, adopted in October 2004, was believed to have been the first of its kind in the nation.

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy," Jones wrote.

How much money did the school board spend on legal fees? Do you think a school district could find better uses for that money?

Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds

2005-12-18T05:37:00.000-08:00

This is discouraging news, but not for the reason that the Department of Education seems to think.

Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.

"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.

If college graduates are failing tests at basic literacy, the probelm isn't television or the Internet, the problem is that colleges are handing out diplomas too easily. If the Department of Education really wants to do some good, it will publicly release the information about which colleges graduated these illiterates to publicly shame the schools.

I get angry when I read people blame television and the Internet for the illiteracy of our nation because I spend a lot of time watching television and surfing the Internet. Yet, somehow, I'm able to overcome my use of these mind-deadening devices, and I make my living as a writer. (Obviously, most time people spend on the Internet involves reading and writing, so it's just plain stupid to blame the Internet for low scores on reading tests.)

So how about this as a solution to the problem: Next time the Federal government conducts one of these tests, they announce that the colleges graduating people who can't perform on basic literacy tests will no longer receive federal funding.

Mirecki Treated after Roadside Beating

2005-12-15T08:19:00.000-08:00

Kansas University professor Paul Mirecki reported that he was beaten up by two guys who made reference to Mirecki's controversial statements. Among those statements are that he planned to teach intelligent design as mythology in an upcoming course. He wrote it would be a “nice slap” in the “big fat face” of fundamentalists.

I hate to speculate like this, but conservative activist John Altevogt has accused Mirecki of making the whole thing up, and, frankly, the details are so sketchy that that seems entirely possible.

The Onion is, of course, on the case.

Hat tip: dhodge.

Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.

2005-12-14T06:49:00.000-08:00

Is imitation the simplest form of learning? It doesn't seem that way. This piece compares how young children learn to solve a puzzle with how chimpanzees learn to solve the same puzzle. Money quote:

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.

ABC, ESPN Join Fox, Turner in NASCAR Television Deal

2005-12-08T05:08:00.000-08:00

One of the things I want to do with this blog is debunk some of the common claims we hear in the media that are simply false. A good example is this:

"NFL ratings for 2004 were the only national regular-season network viewer numbers higher than Nascar's, at 9.2 percent of U.S. television homes."

That is, technically, true. It is also completely irrelevant to the rest of the article, which is about why NASCAR is a valuable property for a TV network. Notice how the writer slipped in "regular season"? In NASCAR, everything is considered regular season. So the most-watched program, the Daytona 500, is being compared to, say, a July Braves-Brewers game. If you compared the Daytona 500 to baseball's most-watched program, the World Series, you'd find that many more people watch baseball than auto racing. Same with basketball and the NBA Finals and March Madness.

Yes, NASCAR has a devoted core audience, and if ABC and ESPN have determined that they'll make money off this deal, more power to them. But I'm tired of reading that NASCAR is "the second most popular professional spectator sport in terms of television ratings". It simply isn't. The real order is pro football, the Olympics, Major League Baseball, college football, pro basketball, college basketball, NASCAR.

The Hubris of the Humanities

2005-12-06T08:09:00.000-08:00

You need TimesSelect to read it, but Nicholas Kristof's op-ed today is very good. He points out that only 13 percent of Americans know what a molecule is, then writes:

But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.

One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

The problem isn't just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you.

What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares. A century ago, Einstein published his first paper on relativity - making 1905 as important a milestone for world history as 1066 or 1789 - but relativity has yet to filter into the consciousness of otherwise educated people....

Without some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines.

I can't count the number of people I've met who seem almost proud of their ignorance of math and science. It amazes me. I have about as little formal training in math and science as you can get and still be a graduate of the University of Illinois, but I enjoy reading science-related books and learning new things. It's a shame how many educated adults have so little curiosity.

Hooked on the Web?

2005-12-01T07:21:00.000-08:00

If you've been reading this blog, you know by now that I really hate it when the news media trivialize science. This article is a good example of that. Addiction is a serious matter. I don't doubt that people who would answer yes to all of these questions have messed up lives, but to take the fact that a lot of people use the Internet all day and conclude that "6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction" would be offensive if it weren't so stupid.

You have to wait until the 20th paragraph to learn that "there is little hard science available on Internet addiction." Better for the New York Times to have acknowledged that in the lead paragraph. Better still not to write the article at all.

Lady Goes Crazy on Trading Spouses

2005-11-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

I've never seen even a minute of Trading Spouses other than this clip, but if they're all as good as this at showing religious fanatics, maybe I should watch more often.

NPR and 'Intelligent Design': Skeptical or Credulous?

2005-11-30T10:41:00.000-08:00

As a journalist myself, I struggle with the issue of whether news stories should be objective. On the one hand, I believe in having media that explore all sides of an issue -- I don't want to live in a world where liberals get their news from liberal sources, conservatives get their news from conservative sources, and people's opinions and beliefs are never challenged. On the other hand, I think balance is often inserted into a story where it doesn't belong. Intelligent design is a good example of that -- a good journalist, when reporting on intelligent design, needs to make it clear that this is a controversy among people who don't understand science. Among people who do understand science, there's no controversy.

The NPR ombudsman takes a look at how public radio has reported on the issue.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2005-11-24T05:23:00.000-08:00

Hola, amigos. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I've been feeling stagnated lately regarding the stated purpose of this blog. Evolution is still a subject of fascination and importance for me, but as I watched an American Enterprise Institute discussion about Intelligent Design on C-SPAN this morning I realized that most of what I had to say about the topic, I've already said. So I'm going to start introducing new stuff to this blog, just things that happen to be on my mind at any given time.

We're going to start with another great interest of mine, lifting weights. I don't have the genetics to be a bodybuilder, so if you looked at me you wouldn't guess this, but I'm really into lifting weights. I'm pretty good at it and quite knowledgeable about it, too. I lift weights regularly with my wife, who's a truly gifted weightlifter. If she wanted to, she could be a competitive powerlifter; I've spent a lot of time at gyms and my wife is the only woman I've witnessed who can bench press more than her own body weight. So yesterday, when the wife proposed that we use our guest passes at the new gym in the neighborhood, I was excited.

But the problem with this gym, like the problem with so many others, is that it doesn't really cater to people who are serious about their workouts. Here's what happened to me: I was doing dumbbell bench press with 65-pound dumbbells. At the end of my set, I lowered the bells to the ground. I didn't drop the weights -- they were in my hands all the way to the ground -- but I did lower them quickly for a very simple reason: It's impossible not to. If you're doing an amount of weight that challenges you on the bench press, there's no way you're going to be able to gently set the weights on the ground. So, when I lowered them quickkly and they hit the floor, the gym attendant came up to me and told me not to drop the weights. Immediately, I knew this was not a place for me. Go to any gym where top-notch athletes work out, and you'll find that if what I was doing was dropping the weights, everyone drops the weights. If you're really challenging yourself, at the end of a set you won't have enough energy left to set them down gently.

So, if you're looking to join a gym, and you really want to go somewhere where the people take their lifting seriously, what should you do? Ask if Olympic lifts are allowed. If they say yes, you're in business: The Olympic lifts are the most challenging of all lifts, and at the end everyone drops the weights to the ground. Great gyms like Quads specialize in the Olympic lifts. If they say no, this probably isn't the gym for you. If they say "What are Olympic lifts?" you're probably at Curves, and it'd be better to get so fat and out of shape that you can't leave your home than it would be to join Curves.

Pope Echoes Arguments of Intelligent Design Advocates

2005-11-11T08:42:00.000-08:00

The Catholic Church and science have a long and entangled history, of course, but one thing you've got to admire about those Catholics is that they admit their mistakes. Sure, it took them a few centuries of convincing before they acknowledged the earth revolves around the sun, but they did it eventually.

Unfortunately, the Pope's latest statement indicates that Catholicism is moving away from its longstanding support of evolution. I wouldn't really care if this were just some esoteric theological debate, but I worry about what will happen if Catholic schools start teaching "intelligent design" in science classes. Right now, if you want your kids to learn about science, you're probably better off, on average, sending them to Catholic schools than to public schools. That might not be the case much longer.

Signs of Crocodile From Dinosaur Era Are Found

2005-11-10T13:43:00.000-08:00

The journal Science has announced the discovery of a large sea-dwelling crocodile that lived 135 million years ago, in the middle of the dinosaur era. "Paleontologists have known about crocodiles living in the oceans since the 1800's when their fossils were uncovered in Europe. Some had even evolved flippers and a fish-like tail.... Despite its unusual shape, the 13-inch-long skull possessed telltale features like the shape of the nostrils, eye sockets and the roof of the mouth that indicated it was a crocodile. A detailed comparison by Dr. Pol with other marine crocodiles of the time indicated that the new species resembled a group with the flippers and fish-like tail." Details are here.

Dover Area School District

2005-11-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

In case you're wondering, this is the official Web site of the Dover, Pennsylvania school district. It still has a prominent link on the right side to the pdf of the statement that is read to all biology students, although this week's elections ensure that students won't be subjected to that much longer.

What I really hate about the pdf is that it includes a definition of a scientific theory one sentence after it suggests to students that scientific theories are just guesses.

Bad News in Kansas, Good News in Dover

2005-11-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

In Kansas yesterday, the state board of elections voted 6-4 in favor of teaching their students that evolution is wrong and intelligent design is right. "This is a sad day. We're becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that," said board member Janet Waugh, a Democrat, getting it just about right.

But all is not lost. The conservative Pennsylvania town of Dover went eight-for-eight in last night's school board elections, kicking out all eight Republicans, who changed the curriculum to favor teaching intelligent design, and electing eight Democrats who favor evolution. A judge will rule on a lawsuit in Dover in January, but this election makes the trial irrelevant to Dover (but still very relevant in the big picture).

Hat tip: The Washington Monthly. (And thanks to ejswanso for pointing it out.)

Evolution on ESPN.com's Page 2

2005-11-08T13:01:00.000-08:00

I could happily go the rest of my life without ever reading ESPN.com's Page 2. And I don't know anything about Chuck Klosterman. But I did like the opening to his column:

I am an apolitical person. Absolutely nobody believes me when I say that, but it's true. Every conservative person I know thinks I'm mixing Noam Chomsky's personal Kool-Aid, and every liberal I know seems to assume I want to shampoo Ann Coulter's hair while watching outtakes from "The Passion of the Christ." I have no idea how this happened. For example, I don't have an opinion on abortion. I really, truly do not. You want to have an abortion? Fine; take my car keys, You think abortion is murder? Well, you're probably right. Who knows? Either way, it doesn't have anything to do with me. Do I think George W. Bush is the worst president of my lifetime? Well, of course I do -- but that's not because he's a Republican. It's because he somehow (a) got into Yale, yet (b) claims "the jury is still out" on the theory of evolution.

Domino's Pizza is to Blame for Intelligent Design

2005-11-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

The Thomas More Law Center has been at the forefront of efforts to sue schools that insist on teaching biology and defend schools that insist on teaching nonsense. For a primer on the center, and how the man behind Domino's Pizza funded it, I recommend this article.

U.S. Court Allows Survey of Children on Sex Topics

2005-11-04T07:48:00.000-08:00

This is good news, I think. A court has ruled that parents don't have control over what their children are exposed to at school. I think parents should play a role in their children's education, but I also think it's the schools that should have final say over the curriculum. Parents who don't want their kids learning evolution may have been dealt a setback with this ruling.

In other news, I've been away from this blog for a while, concentrating on other projects. I'm still around, though, so please keep checking back.

"They Tried To Teach My Baby Science"

2005-10-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

I've always despised those stupid little supplement magazines they put in the Sunday paper. I was thrilled to see The Onion skewer those magazines in the way that only The Onion can.

Hat tip: EJSwanso.

In other news, if you like The Onion, you absolutely must read this.

Data Janitor: Intelligent Dog Design

2005-10-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

I don't pay much attention to the comics in the newspaper, but my good friend dhodge over at Data Janitor does, and he always keeps me informed about the latest evolution-related comics. Be sure to check out his latest post.

The 'Scientist' who Supports Intelligent Design

2005-10-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

Slate has some good coverage by Hanna Rosin of the trial going on in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She writes primarily about Michael Behe, whom we've discussed before.

I've met biologists who are strict Biblical literalists. Usually they exhibit a certain humility and reconcile their twin beliefs by admitting that there are many mysteries of creation the tools of science can never explain. Behe utterly lacks that deference. In his book, he writes that ID should be ranked as "one of the greatest achievements in the history of science," rivaling "Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur and Darwin." The evidence of design is all around us, and any honest scientist would embrace that as the obvious Ur-Explanation.

My 4-year-old daughter feels this way, too. She marvels at how a katydid looks exactly like a leaf, or how stars really do twinkle in the sky. But I'm hoping by ninth grade her thinking will have evolved.

National Academies Press: Rising Above The Gathering Storm

2005-10-14T06:46:00.000-07:00

There's a new report out from the National Academies called Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. (It's free to download the pdf, although for some reason they make you give out your e-mail address and zip code.) Thomas Friedman wrote about it today, although I won't bother linking since I assume most of my readers don't have TimesSelect.

However, here's Friedman's synopsis of the report's recommendations, and I think it's a pretty good list:

(1) Annually recruiting 10,000 science and math teachers by awarding four-year merit-based scholarships, to be paid back through five years of K-12 public school teaching. (We have too many unqualified science and math teachers.)

(2) Strengthening the math and science skills of 250,000 other teachers through extracurricular programs.

(3) Creating opportunities and incentives for many more middle school and high school students to take advanced math and science courses, by offering, among other things, $100 mini-scholarships for success in exams, and creating more specialty math-and-science schools.

(4) Increasing federal investment in long-term basic research by 10 percent a year over the next seven years.

(5) Annually providing research grants of $500,000 each, payable over five years, to 200 of America's most outstanding young researchers.

(6) Creating a new Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Energy Department to support "creative out-of-the-box transformational energy research that industry by itself cannot or will not support and in which risk may be high, but success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation."

(7) Granting automatic one-year visa extensions to foreign students in the U.S. who receive doctorates in science, engineering or math so they can seek employment here, and creating 5,000 National Science Foundation-administered graduate fellowships to increase the number of U.S. citizens earning doctoral degrees in fields of "national need."

You already know where I'm going with this, though. How seriously can we take the government's recommendations about beefing up academic research when the government wants to pollute young minds with the pseudo science of intelligent design? I'd really love to see some recommendations about taking science education seriously at the elementary level, which of course would include basic facts about what a scientific theory is, and why evolution is such a strong theory that it serves as the bedrock of biology.

Scientists Are Unmoved by Claim of New Species

2005-10-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

You probably remember the new species of extinct "little people" that was discovered a while back. More have been discovered, but some scientists believe this isn't a separate species at all, and that scientists just happened to find some regular plain old humans who happened to be short and/or deformed.

Half of Americans Don't go to Church

2005-10-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

I am stunned. I always assumed the broad opposition to the teaching of evolution was fostered by huge masses of people who go to church every Sunday. But a new Gallup poll shows that 43 percent of respondents answered no to one of the following questions:

1. "Do you happen to be a member of a church, synagogue, or mosque?"
2. "Apart from weddings, funerals, or special holidays, such as Christmas, Easter or Yom Kippur, have you attended the church, synagogue, or mosque of your choice in the past six months, or not?"

Surveys of church attendance tend to be skewed by people who think they should say they go to church even though they don't, so let's round it off and say that means half of all Americans aren't members of a house of worship or haven't gone in six months or more. So why does it feel like it's the other half of the American people who are always the ones out there in front of the cameras on the issue of teaching evolution?

Scientific Ignorance

2005-10-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

I caught a documentary on TV last night called Born with Two Heads. A couple of observations:
1. The baby in question was born in Egypt. All the nurses were Muslims wearing veils, and many of them refused to treat the baby because they thought looking at a baby with a birth defect would cause them to one day have babies with birth defects. These are nurses, and that's how ignorant they are. We talk a lot around here about the way that religion has a negative influence on the understanding of science. I imagine it's worse in Muslim countries than it is in Christian countries.
2. I really dislike the way this is referred to as a baby born with two heads. It's not. It's two babies, conjoined twins, one of whom was born without a body. They decided to kill one of them to save the other, which is fine with me, but it bothers me that neither this documentary nor any of the media accounts I've read could be honest about that.

British Bishops: Not Everything in Bible is True

2005-10-07T12:11:00.000-07:00

I don't think we'll be hearing anything like this from their American colleagues any time soon.

Seeing Creation and Evolution in Grand Canyon

2005-10-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

I love the Grand Canyon. It's a beautiful thing to behold. It makes me said that people like these can't see the Canyon for the Bible.

Roy Moore for Governor?

2005-10-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

We've talked before around here about how evolution and other science-related issues could cause a split within the Republican Party. The pro-business side of the party knows that the future of many of our nation's industries depends on educated people who understand science. But the religious right side of the party opposes the teaching of evolution and much scientific inquiry.

I think next year's Republican gubernatorial primary in Alabama could be a good test case for what will happen when the religious side takes on the business side. Roy Moore, best known for his refusal to remove a Ten Commandments monument when he was chief justice of the state Supreme Court, has announced that he'll seek the Republican nomination. That means he'll take on Bob Riley, the pro-business incumbent.

It so happens that I like Bob Riley. (When I say that, I mean I like him about as much as I could conceivably like an Alabama Republican. Read this Paul Krugman column to find out why.) Unfortunately, it's inconceivable to me that a person I like could win a Republican Alabama primary against a person like Roy Moore. So my guess is that Moore becomes the next governor of Alabama. I can only imagine what the state's biology standards will look like once Moore is in office.

100 Most Frequently Challenged Books -- Where's Darwin?

2005-09-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

I guess I should be pleased that the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 doesn't include any that have anything to do with evolution. (When a member of a community asks the library to pull a book from its shelves, that constitutes a challenge.)

But I really was baffled when I read the list. Yes, I know a lot of people don't like Huck Finn, and Of Mice and Men has lots of cussing in it. And obviously, any book that aims to teach adolescents about the changes in their bodies during puberty is going to be highly offensive to a certain segment of the population. But some of these titles are seemingly benign. I read A Day No Pigs Would Die when I was a kid and I can't think of any reason anyone would have a problem with it. (The No. 1 type of challenge is the "Anti-Family" category, and A Day No Pigs Would Die describes a loving relationship between a child and his parents.)

If you're looking to buy a book as a gift or for yourself, this list looks like it would be a great place to start.

Grow Some Testables

2005-09-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

William Saletan writes about the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, over the school board's requirement that intelligent design be taught. Money quote:

Under the policy, "Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's Theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, Intelligent Design." Notice the "of" before "other theories." The policy doesn't tell teachers to discuss gaps and problems in ID. It tells them to discuss gaps and problems in Darwinism—and then to discuss ID as an alternative "theory." The board's brief makes clear that the policy's aim is "informing students about the existing scientific controversy surrounding Darwin's Theory of Evolution, including the fact that there are alternative scientific theories."

The professor best known for championing intelligent design is Michael Behe, and Saletan discusses Behe's claim that intelligent design is, in fact, a falsifiable theory. Behe describes a hypothetical experiment that could disprove intelligent design, but you know what? I don't buy for a second that Behe would accept any experimental findings like the ones he describes. Once a "scientist" uses the old "because God made it that way" answer, why wouldn't he keep using it to explain anything that occurs in the lab?

Thanks to Paul Noonan for the tip.

Aids Virus Could be Weakening

2005-09-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

This is so obvious I'm amazed I never thought of it before. It makes perfect sense that one of the reasons HIV has gone from a death sentence to a treatable illness is that the virus itself is weaker. We usually think of Darwinian evolution as the strong thriving while the weak die off, but think about what that means from the standpoint of a virus. If a virus is extremely strong, it will kill its host immediately -- before the host has had a chance to spread the virus to anyone else. And therefore the virus will be contained and will eventually die off, because it hasn't had the opportunity to find new hosts.

But a weak virus will stay around for a long time. If a virus takes decades to kill its host, it has decades to find new hosts.

As this article makes clear, newer samples of HIV appear not to multiply as well.

[Keith Alcorn, senior editor at the HIV information charity NAM, said] "This would suggest that over several generations, HIV could become less harmful to its human hosts.

"However, we are still far from that point - HIV is still a life-threatening infection."

Dr Marco Vitoria, an HIV expert at the World Health Organization, said other diseases - such as smallpox, TB and syphilis - had shown the same tendency to weaken over time.

"There is a natural trend to reach an 'equilibrium' between the agent and the host interests, in order to guarantee concomitant survival for a longer time," he said.

Note: Although I understand why it's necessary, I think it's a shame that writers of articles like this always feel the need to include so many disclaimers that "the latest findings should not lull people into a false sense of security." Only an idiot would come across this article and conclude that AIDS is no longer anything to worry about. I guess there are enough idiots out there, though, that it's a point that needs to be stressed.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

UPDATE: An interesting look at the evolution of the cholera virus here.

ACLU Blogs on the Dover Trials

2005-09-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

The ACLU, which is providing legal help to the courageous parents who are fighting to get rigorous science standards back in their children's classes, has its own blog to keep people posted on the trial.

One in Five Americans Say Evolution "Definitely False"

2005-09-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

No link because as far as I know this isn't online anywhere, but I just saw the latest Gallup poll on evolution. According to the summary, "By 58% to 26%, a majority of Americans express their belief in creationism; by 55% to 34%, a majority also accept evolution." Not entirely sure how that works, but I guess some people are able to explain to themselves why both are true.

But what disappointed me most was the question of whether creationism, evolution, and intelligent design were definitely true, probably true, probably false, or definitely false. Only 8 percent said creationism is definitely false, 10 percent said intelligent design is definitely false, and 20 percent said evolution is definitely false. Creationism also beats evolution in the definitely true category by 29-20 percent, with intelligent design coming in at 8 percent (more than a quarter of all people are not familiar with intelligent design, so it gets lower marks in all the categories.)

A simple way of reading this would be to say that if you know five people, chances are that one of them thinks evolution is definitely false. Fortunately, that's not true. You, the reader of this blog, likely surround yourself with educated, intelligent, curious-minded people. Sadly, even you probably know some people who think evolution is definitely false, but I'm betting it's less than one in five.

2005-09-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

With the lawsuit starting over the Dover, Pennsylvania school board's decision to teach "alternatives" to evolution, here's a profile of some of the town's residents. Money quote:

For Mrs. Hied, a meter reader, and her husband, Michael, an office manager for a local bus and transport company, the Dover school board's argument - that teaching intelligent design is a free-speech issue - has a strong appeal.

"I think we as Americans, regardless of our beliefs, should be able to freely access information, because people fought and died for our freedoms," Mrs. Hied said over a family dinner last week at their home, where the front door is decorated with a small bell and a plaque proclaiming, "Let Freedom Ring."

If that's the best argument they can come up with, I feel a lot better about the prospects for the lawsuit than I did before I read this article. Anyone who gives it even a moment's thought realizes that this is in no way a free speech issue. No one is suggesting that people who doubt evolution should be barred by law from explaining themselves. The simple and obvious point that no one wants to guarantee the right of a history teacher to tell students that the Holocaust never happened will demonstrate how bogus that argument is.

Thanks to ejswanso for the tip.

Lessons from the Stem Cell Debate

2005-09-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

I was doing some research unrelated to evolution today when I came across something that, I think, illustrates how the media are complicit in the general misunderstanding of science that taints our society.

First, take a look at this August 10, 2001 piece from the CNN archive. In it, CNN gives ample time to Tommy Thompson insisting that 60 stem cell lines were available and viable for research, just as President Bush had said when he announced the federal policy on stem cells. "Are they adequate?" Thompson said at a Washington news conference. "The answer is a resounding 'yes.' They are diverse, robust and viable for research." Although the first paragraph acknowledges "some scientists' concerns about the viability for research," no scientist is quoted explaining those concerns. Instead, we get Thompson repeating the administration's talking points.

Is it any wonder, then, that the CNN piece concludes with a heading that reads, "Poll shows public support"? Well, of course the public supported Bush at first. The public got its information from places like CNN. And CNN didn't tell people the whole story. It wasn't until May of 2003 -- nearly two years later -- that National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni acknowledged in Senate testimony that "NIH support has helped increase to 11 the number of human embryonic stem cell lines that are widely available for all researchers."

So two years after Bush told the country there were 60 lines available for research, the director of NIH is bragging about an increase to 11 lines.

Sadly, I don't think Bush was lying when he said there were 60 lines available. I think he surrounds himself with science advisors who are so incompetent that they honestly believed there were 60 lines available.

And that brings us back to evolution. The people at the top in our government aren't very good at science. But they are very good at media spin. So I can forgive the folks at home who try to sort out information about evolution and can't. What I can't forgive is the way the press fails us all by repeating the talking points of political hacks instead of shedding light on science.

What is a Germ?

2005-09-22T13:02:00.000-07:00

Stories like this bother me because of their use of the words "resistant" and "germ" without putting them into context.

The story talks about a "germ" that caused three deaths and says it's "resistant" to drugs.

But how hard would it be to make clear that the "germ" is not a virus, but bacteria, and that bacteria become resistant to drugs because of natural selection? It's very easy for people to understand that the bacteria that can't resist antibiotics are killed, those that can resist antibiotics survive, and when they reproduce, the drug-resistant bacteria are all that's left.

Of course, evolution is the bedrock of biology, and the way bacteria become resistant to drugs is a case study in how evolution works. Sadly, I think many journalists fail to understand this, and their readers suffer.

Robert Trivers

2005-09-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

The Guardian has a great profile of Robert Trivers, who as a graduate student in the 1970s became one of the most eloquent writers about evolution. My favorite part:

Despite his history degree, it was obvious to his supervisors that he knew little about human biology, so he was given the animals to write about, and started to learn modern Darwinian biology. He fell in love with the logic of evolution. In the flow of genes through generations, and the steady, inexorable shaping of behaviour by natural selection, he saw a geometry of time, as beautiful as the geometry of space that Newton and Galileo had discovered.

Read the whole thing. Hat tip: aldaily

Challenged by Creationists, Museums Answer Back

2005-09-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

It's a shame that it's come to this, but I think museums are right to train their docents "on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds."

One company, called B.C. Tours "because we are biblically correct," even offers escorted visits to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Participants hear creationists' explanations for the exhibitions.

So officials like Judy Diamond, curator of public programs at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln, are trying to meet such challenges head-on.

Dr. Diamond is working on evolution exhibitions financed by the National Science Foundation that will go on long-term display at six museums of natural history from Minnesota to Texas. The program includes training for docents and staff members.

"The goal is to understand the controversies, so that people are better able to handle them as they come up," she said. "Museums, as a field, have recognized we need to take a more proactive role in evolution education."

One museum offers this list of answers to frequently asked questions to its docents, which seems like a good thing.

I worry, though, that National Science Foundation money will dry up. The politicial pressure to stop teaching evolution is only going to get worse.

Note: Be sure to check out the New York Times' index of articles on evolution.

Why Darwin's still a Scientific Hotshot

2005-09-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

James D. Watson, who would know, writes a great piece on the modern application's of Darwin.

It may astonish those who think that evolutionary studies are carried out in the dusty rooms of museums amid all those specimens collected so many years ago, that the most impressive data supporting the laws of evolution come from the studies of the past 40 years in molecular genetics. The clearest evidence for the common ancestry of all living organisms comes from the universality of the genetic code, which provides the translation between the information in a gene and the protein encoded by that gene. With some variations, this code is the same for viruses, bacteria, worms, human beings, beetles, mice and slugs. The most extreme example is that bacteria can be given a human gene and they will make a human protein. What an extraordinary vindication of Darwin's ideas!

Darwin would have been thrilled to learn that the same set of 25,000 to 30,000 genes is present in most animals. Almost every gene in our DNA has a homologous gene in the DNA of other mammals, such as the mouse. It is even more extraordinary when we look at more distantly related organisms; the invertebrate sea squirt, for example, has only half our number of genes, but as many as two-thirds of these have homologues in human DNA.

Darwin had not anticipated that "Origin" would find an audience beyond the scientific elite, his peers. And yet the first printing of the book sold out at the pre-publication sale, with no fewer than one-third being bought by Mudie's Circulating Library, an endorsement equivalent to a recommendation today from Oprah Winfrey. The book, in short, was a sensation for the general public, and with good reason. Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had removed the Earth from its central position in the universe, although there was yet a grandeur in the ways the planets swept through space, and the regularities of their movements revealed the hand of the Creator. But the position of Man, as the image of God on Earth, was left unchanged by their revisions of the received cosmology. Darwin changed this. Although he made only the cryptic remark in "Origin" — "Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" — his readers were under no illusion of the consequences of accepting evolutionary arguments for the origin of man.

Today, there is a concerted effort by some religion-dominated scientists to treat evolution as a theory, as though that in some way diminishes its authority and power as an explanation of how the world works. Fortunately, the courts are exercising their wisdom and rejecting arguments of equal time for creationist beliefs in schools. We can only hope that a time will soon come when rational, skeptical thought renders the creationists' stories as what they are — myths.

Sadly, I'm not so sure that Watson is correct when he writes that the courts are rejecting equal time for creationism in school. But I've always found it amazing how well DNA has worked in establishing the fundamental truths behind Darwin's ideas. Think about how much the scientific world has changed since Darwin. (Darwin was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln, if that helps you envision what the world was like during his lifetime.) No one, in the middle of the 19th Century, could have imagined the discovery of DNA. And yet DNA has worked almost perfectly to illustrate that Darwin was right.

Science Without Borders

2005-09-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine a Christian or Muslim leader telling his followers that if science ever showed something they believed was wrong, they'd have to change their beliefs? I can't. But that's exactly what the Dalai Lama says.

"My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."

March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder

2005-09-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that I liked the movie Grizzly Man, and that I hadn't seen March of the Penguins because I had some reservations about what it suggested.

It turns out that some conservatives drew exactly the conclusions that I had feared, based on the reviews I've read.

On the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com, an opponent of abortion wrote that the movie "verified the beauty of life and the rightness of protecting it."

At a conference for young Republicans, the editor of National Review urged participants to see the movie because it promoted monogamy. A widely circulated Christian magazine said it made "a strong case for intelligent design."...

In part, the movie's appeal to conservatives may lie in its soft-pedaling of topics like evolution and global warming. The filmmakers say they did not consciously avoid those topics - indeed, they say they are strong believers in evolutionary theory - but they add that they wanted to create a film that would reach as many people as possible.

"It's obvious that global warming has an impact on the reproduction of the penguins," Luc Jacquet, the director, told National Geographic Online. "But much of public opinion appears insensitive to the dangers of global warming. We have to find other ways to communicate to people about it, not just lecture them."

That's gutless. Jacquet already has found another way to commuincate to people other than lecturing them. It's called making a movie. If the goal of his movie is to educate people about penguins, and people come away from the movie thinking they were designed that way rather than evolving to adapt to the conditions in which they lived, he's failed as a filmmaker.

I hope Roger Ebert has something to say about this.

Thanks to reader B for the tip.

Evolution Schmevolution

2005-09-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show is devoting this week to evolution, and, of course, it's been great. Kurt Vonnegut's appearance last night was a bit strange (a brilliant guy, no doubt, but he's in his 80s and couldn't really keep up with the fast pace of Jon Stewart), but the previous night I enjoyed the discussion with Chris Mooney of The Republican War on Science.

Mooney made an interesting point about the anti-science views within the Republican Party, and how those views are one link between the religious right wing and the pro-business wing. There's no doubt that plenty of businesses have lied about science in an effort to cover up the deleterious effects of their products, but I think the religious folks and the business folks have such different aims that it's a relationship that can't last.

People who oppose science for religious reasons do so because they believe everything in the Bible is true. Science has disproved much of the Bible, so those folks have no choice but to deny the fundamental truths we've learned through scientific inquiry.

People who oppose science for business reasons, however, fully understand the need for scientific inquiry. General Electric executives might lie about science when discussing PCBs in the Hudson River, but they fully understand that having educated scientists is vital to their corporate goals. Ultimately, they'll support the teaching of science in a way the religious right won't.

Finally, one last note: Plenty of Democrats lie about science, too. Whether it's environmentalists overstating damage to the ecosystem or lefty sociologists insisting that genes have nothing to do with IQ, it's easy to find such examples. A book called The Democratic War on Science probably wouldn't have as much raw material to draw from, but it would still make a good read.

America's Future Foundation ID Discussion

2005-09-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

My Washington readers will be pleased to know that the America's Future Foundation is planning a roundtable discussion of Intelligent Design. I don't know anything about the panelists, but the two questions that they say will be answered speak volumes:

Is ID backlash for loss of local control over public schools and secularization of the curriculum? Is it symptomatic of a deepening cultural divide in America?

1. Backlash? If you feel that you're losing local control of your public schools, shouldn't you respond by doing all you can to make the education at your schools better? I don't see how turning science class into Sunday school accomplishes that.
2. The divide isn't about culture. It's about science, namely that a large (and, I fear, growing) number of Americans don't understand it and fear it. And worse, many of those Americans want to impose their anti-science views on the rest of us.

Teaching Science in Science Class

2005-09-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

The Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon has a good editorial that places a bit of blame for Americans' ignorance of evolution on the public schools. I think it's a reasonable argument.

Most importantly, I think it's obvious from hearing public debate that the vast majority of Americans don't understand what a scientific theory is.

What seems abundantly clear from the Pew Center poll is that American public schools have consistently failed to teach students the fundamentals and vocabulary of the scientific method. Critics of evolution constantly repeat that it is "a theory, not a fact," clearly implying that alternative "theories" ought to get equal time in the classroom.

But this is a semantic subterfuge that succeeds precisely because so many products of the U.S. public school system - including many who now serve on school boards - don't know the difference between a scientific theory and the common usage of theory to mean a hunch or a speculation.

We need better science education in our schools, but I don't know if we're ever going to get it. There's such an anti-science mentality at the top of our government today that it's hard to imagine rigorous scientific standards becoming the norm in our classrooms.

Brain May Still Be Evolving, Studies Hint

2005-09-09T09:13:00.000-07:00

Evolution is an ongoing process, not a path from Point A to Point B. So headlines like Brain May Still Be Evolving don't do much for me. Neither do sentences from the article like "It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago." I don't think that's true. Evolution never really stops; certain traits will continue to make some people more likely to have children than others, and those traits will become more common. That's what evolution is, and it certainly didn't stop 50,000 years ago.

This article is interesting, though. Take a look at this:

The new finding, reported in today's issue of Science by Bruce T. Lahn of the University of Chicago, and colleagues, could raise controversy because of the genes' role in determining brain size. New versions of the genes, or alleles as geneticists call them, appear to have spread because they enhanced brain function in some way, the report suggests, and they are more common in some populations than others.

But several experts strongly criticized this aspect of the finding, saying it was far from clear that the new alleles conferred any cognitive advantage or had spread for that reason. Many genes have more than one role in the body, and the new alleles could have been favored for some other reason, these experts said, such as if they increased resistance to disease.

What bothers me is that there's a natural inclination to dispute any findings that some racist fool might possibly use to suggest that one group of people is naturally more intelligent than some other group of people. We ought to encourage researchers to find information without suggesting that a researcher who reaches a conclusion that isn't politically palatable has therefore committed bad science.

The President and Pseudo-Science

2005-09-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

I read this post over at Andrew Sullivan without giving it much thought, other than my general feeling that South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, is almost certainly responsible for more AIDS deaths than any other person in history.

But my friend (and frequent commenter here) dhodge pointed out that Mbeki has some striking similarities with our own President Bush.

Read the whole article, and you'll see that because of Mbeki's complete ignorance of science, he wasn't able to discern the difference between the real medical breakthroughs that have been made in the fight against AIDS and the fools who espoused the idiotic idea that anti-retrovirals were toxic and there was no proof that HIV caused AIDS. As dhodge said to me, "It's very reminiscent of the ID/evolution debate in the US in many ways. A head of state propping up lies and pseudoscience in the hope of political (or perhaps financial) gains. Fortunately, no one is the US is dying due to ID."

The Legend of the Scopes Trial - Science didn't Win

2005-09-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

"By the time of World War I," wrote the historian William Leuchtenberg, "an attack on Darwin seemed as unlikely as an attack on Copernicus."

But only a few years later, attacks on evolution were front-page news in every paper in the country as a science teacher in Tennessee went on trial for teaching Darwinism. David Greenbergwrites in Slate that science didn't win the Scopes trial, and he is of course right, both in the sense that Scopes had violated the law and in the sense that many people remained unconvinced by Clarence Darrow's effective deconstruction of creationism.

Many conservative Christians assumed they had prevailed at Dayton. While liberalism ascended in the public sphere, fundamentalism withdrew into local pockets and private subcultures where it thrived. Christian presses churned out anti-evolution books and pamphlets. Ministers warned their flocks of Darwin's folly. In Dayton, fundamentalists established Bryan College "based upon unequivocal acceptance of the inerrancy and authority of the Scriptures."

Indeed, large numbers of Americans continued to doubt Darwin and subscribe to literal readings of the Bible, some quite passionately. Anti-evolution sentiment was sufficiently strong in enough regions of the country to lead many biology-textbook writers to paint Darwin's teachings as less definitive than they are. Even George W. Hunter modified his Civic Biology—the book from which Scopes had feloniously taught—to make it palatable to scriptural literalists.

Note: Greenberg also writes that in the 1920s, Klan membership in the United States was about 5 million. I've done a bit of research on the Klan in the 1920s and plan to write about it some day, but I didn't realize it was that high. According to the 1920 census, U.S. population was just over 100 million. That would mean one in every 20 people was a member of the Klan. Stunning.

Undoing Darwin

2005-09-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that I like the way Cornelia Dean has covered evolution and intelligent design in the New York Times.

The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review also praises Dean's coverage of the issue but notes that many other media outlets haven't done such a good job of informing their readers about this "controversy." Read the whole thing.

Note: The co-author of this piece, Chris Mooney, has an interview here.

Chimps, Humans 96 Percent the Same

2005-09-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

When determining the strength of a scientific theory, we need to test whether it's predictive. Darwin died before anyone knew what DNA was, but if his theory was right, once DNA is discovered and genomes can be encoded, humans and chimps will be found to be genetically similar.

Well, what do you know? Scientists have sequenced the genome of the chimpanzee and it's bad news for creationists.

[O]ur closest living relatives share 96 percent of our DNA. The number of genetic differences between humans and chimps is ten times smaller than that between mice and rats.

Survey on Religion and Both Parties

2005-08-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

About half the public (48%) says that humans and other living things have evolved over time, while 42% say that living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. Fully 70% of white evangelical Protestants say that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time; fewer than half as many white mainline Protestants (32%) and white Catholics (31%) agree.

I tend to be most bothered by the one-third of Catholics who believe in the literal truth of the Genesis creation tale, since the official doctrine of the Catholic church is accepting of evolution. Unfortunately, the new pope may change that. Overall, I find this survey troubling but not surprising.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan, who writes, "I must say that there are times when one is rendered speechless. No educated intelligent person could possibly look at the evidence of science and say such a thing. And yet we are supposed to have a reasoned debate with these people on the matter. How is that even possible?"

UPDATE: Kevin Drum reminds me that 25 percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. The link is to a PDF of the study results, which are all fascinating.

Penguins and Grizzlies

2005-08-31T09:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen March of the Penguins, but from the almost unanimously positive reviews I've read, I have to say I find it a little disappointing that it's become the stunning box office hit of the summer. It sounds to me like a rather silly attempt to make penguins seem like they have human qualities.

I have seen Grizzly Man, and I think it's probably the best movie I've seen so far this year. How is it possible that so many more people are interested in seeing penguins than grizzlies? What's wonderful about Grizzly Man (which also has been almost universally praised)is that director Werner Herzog points out that grizzlies aren't like people at all: Grizzlies basically think of every other animal they encounter as a potential mate, a potential attacker, or potential food. Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man of the title, thought he could become one with the grizzlies. He was wrong.

George Will comes to the same conclusions as I did. Money quote:

Reality's swirling complexity is sometimes lovely, sometime brutal; its laws propel the comings and goings of life forms in processes as impersonal as Antarctica is to the penguins or the bears were to Treadwell or Alaska was to Drop City North. It is so grand that nothing is gained by dragging an Intelligent Designer into the picture for praise. Or blame.

And it's really those last two words that say it best. Why do Intelligent Design believers want the Designer to get the blame that would have to be accorded to the Designer of the harsh realities of nature?

Hat tip: dhodge

More Conservatives on Intelligent Design

2005-08-30T11:45:00.000-07:00

John Derbyshire gives his opinion here, and Andrew Sullivan seconds that opinionhere.

But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?

2005-08-30T06:52:00.000-07:00

If you're going to teach religion in schools, do you have to give all religions equal time? Flying Spaghetti Monster believers think so.

Bobby Henderson, a 25-year-old with a physics degree from Oregon State University, had a divine vision. An intelligent god, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, he said, "revealed himself to me in a dream."

He posted a sketch on his Web site, venganza.org, showing an airborne tangle of spaghetti and meatballs with two eyes looming over a mountain, trees and a stick man labeled "midgit." Prayers to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, his site says, end with "ramen," not "amen."

Then, Mr. Henderson, who says on his site that he is desperately trying to avoid taking a job programming slot machines in Las Vegas, posted an open letter to the Kansas board.

In perfect deadpan he wrote that although he agreed that science students should "hear multiple viewpoints" of how the universe came to be, he was worried that they would be hearing only one theory of intelligent design. After all, he noted, there are many such theories, including his own fervent belief that "the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster." He demanded equal time in the classroom and threatened a lawsuit.

Hat tip: ejswanso

Remember: Scopes Lost at Trial

2005-08-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Tennessee teacher John Scopes won in the court of public opinion but lost at trial in 1925. A lot of people, including, apparently, radio host John Gibson, seem to think Scopes won the trial but lost the court of public opinion. Media Matters is on it here, although I think they're missing the big picture in what Gibson was saying. Gibson said:

Hey, everybody. It's John Gibson in for Bill O'Reilly. And uh, this hour threatens to be big trouble. Big, big, big, big, big trouble. Because this subject has been big trouble in this country since at least -- 1925? Wasn't that when the Scopes trial happened? Inherit the Wind, 1925? And we're still arguing about it, although the argument has transmogrified in a lot of ways and is something different. And it's probably not even fair to talk about the Scopes trial of 1925. When the ACLU found John Scopes and was able to challenge, uh, the teaching of Bible-based science in schools. Successfully. And ever since then, we've had science-based science in schools.

Media Matters criticizes Gibson for saying "Successfully," although he might have been referring to the success in persuading people to believe in evolution. But more importantly, we should remember that it was actually Clarence Darrow, who was operating separately from the ACLU, who did such a fine job of arguing the case for evolution to the broader American audience, even though he knew he couldn't persuade the 12 men in the jury box in Dayton. The ACLU actually wanted to defend Scopes without Darrow's involvement, but Scopes insisted that Darrow come on board his legal team.

Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science

2005-08-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

A fascinating opening to this article:

At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: "Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?"

Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and sharp. "No!" declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.

Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, "this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race."

But the rest of the article features many scientists who do believe in God, and includes information about the poll conducted by Edward J. Larson, who we've discussed around here before, that revealed that 40 percent of scientists believe in God.

Poll numbers

2005-08-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

This is depressing. It turns out that only 12 percent of Americans think evolution-only should be the way to teach science classes. As Matt Yglesias writes, "The evolution-only view is less popular than gay marriage, less popular than the abolition of the death penalty, and generally speaking one of the very least popular liberal cultural causes."

What can we do about that? I'm not sure. Matt thinks we need to persuade people, but how? The evidence is already there and people are choosing not to be persuaded. Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.

New York Times: Darwinists and Doubters

2005-08-22T14:23:00.000-07:00

This is the type of article I don't like because it doesn't really tell the reader much of anything. OK, so some people say the complexity of life is proof of a designer, and others say otherwise. But how does that advance the story? If I could find a historian somewhere who said the Roman Empire had never existed and was simply the work of a bunch of fakers who made bogus artifacts, would the Times give my historian his say in its pages?

Exploiting Journalism's 'Both Sides' Rule

2005-08-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

We've discussed before in this space the tendency of the news media to report every issue as if opposing sides always have equal merit. Evolution vs. creation/intelligent design is just one example, but it's the example we're most interested in here.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Jon Carroll writes:

The thing is, people savvy in manipulating the media have figured out the "both sides" rule, and sometimes they create another "side" where one barely existed, so the two sides can be seen to be in conflict. Obviously, giving equal weight to a fringe idea just lends unwarranted legitimacy to that fringe idea -- a fringe idea like "intelligent design."

"Intelligent design" used to be called "creationism," but some of the wackier creationists began alleging that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time and that the Earth was only 6,000 years old, and that sort of stuff made even the theocrats nervous. So "intelligent design" was born.

Intelligent design is not science. It is not even a field of study. It is a belief system wrapped up in "scientific" language. Scientists have been studying the origin and nature of life on earth for at least 4,000 years. In that time, they have come up with a number of hypotheses. Then new evidence has been turned up, and the old hypotheses have been discarded, often reluctantly.

Read the whole thing.

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

2005-08-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

The Onion is on the case. My favorite part:

"Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Hat tip: EJSwanso

Harvard Project Angers Swank

2005-08-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

Our buddy J. Grant Swank, Jr. is back. This time he's angry about the Harvard study that seeks information about the origins of life. Mr. Swank pretty much just rehashes the last column we linked of his, though. And will someone please tell the editors over at the MichNews site how to spell "hokum"?

Harvard Jumps Into Evolution Debate?

2005-08-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

OK, is it just me, or do the headline and the first paragraph of this story not make any sense in the context of what this story is actually about?

The story begins:

Harvard University is joining the long-running debate over the theory of evolution by launching a research project to study how life began.

But evolution isn't about how life began, it's about how life continues to develop. I see nothing here to indicate that this has anything at all to do with the "controversy" over evolution. I think the AP reporter and the editors of the papers that chose to run this article are doing their readers a disservice.

It appears that the AP got its story from this story by Gareth Cook of the Boston Globe. Cook just won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the stem cell debate, so I assume he's a good reporter and knowledgeable about science. But it's weird that there doesn't seem to be any clarification of the origins of life vs. the development of life.

South Carolina Fills the Hall of Shame

2005-08-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

Are there any politicians in South Carolina who believe in evolution? It doesn't seem like it. State superintendent of education hopeful Karen Floyd said she'll run in 2006 on an intelligent design platform. State Sen. Mike Fair wants to require schools to teach intelligent design, and he has support from U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint and U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis.

I wonder if, even in the more progressive parts of South Carolina, any politicians have the guts to stand up for evolution.

Evolution and the Boll Weevil

2005-08-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

One thing that's interesting about the intelligent design folks is they're willing to acknowledge "micro-evolution" but not "macro-evolution." In other words, they'll acknowledge that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, and they say that's part of micro-evolution. But they say macro-evolution never happens. They say only the designer can create a new species.

I don't really understand where a line exists. At what point would micro-evolution stop? Just short of where the differences were too great for mating to occur? Why?

Anyway, that's what I thought about as I read this interesting article that addresses cotton farmers and their enemies, the Anthonomus grandis Boheman, more commonly known as the boll weevil.

J. Grant Swank, Jr.: One Brilliant Writer

2005-08-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

This column is hilarious. Mr. J. Grant Swank, Jr. (I love that name, by the way) writes that evolution is "hockum." How does he know this for sure?

The bottom line is this: The Bible is the divine revelation. There Genesis states that Creator God did what He did. It spells it out in as much detail as any mortal needs to know in this life.

Therefore, be done with it.

Yep, that's it. He knows he's right because the Bible tells him he's right, and he's not particularly interested in the "mentally unstable people" who don't see that.

I don't know how I lived as long as I did without ever coming across MichNews.com, the Web site where this column appeared. It's worth a look at their About Us page.

Evolution vs. Religion - Quit Pretending they're Compatible

2005-08-11T07:46:00.000-07:00

In Slate, Jacob Weisberg writes that "this is not a disagreement with two reasonable points of view, let alone two equally valid ones." He's exactly right.

There are two types of arguments that we see in the media, and one of the things I really hate is that the arguments are completely different, but the media's presentation of them is exactly the same. Arguments over tax policy don't really have a right and wrong answer. Both sides can present their evidence, of course (and politicians who say they'll dramatically cut taxes, raise spending on every popular program, and eliminate the national debt all at once deserve to be scorned), but by and large it's OK for reporters to cover those arguments by simply repeating both sides' claims.

But the other type of argument clearly has a right side and a wrong side. A good example of this, I think, would be the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their ads against John Kerry. They were saying one thing, Kerry was saying something else, and there was no question that one side was simply wrong. The media should have investigated Kerry's claims, investigated his critics' claims, and then reported on who was more believable. Instead, they just repeated both sides' claims and left it to the audience to decide. That's a mistake.

And they make the same mistake when it comes to evolution. It might play well in the polls when President Bush says he thinks both sides in the intelligent design/evolution "controversy" should be taught, but it's nonsense. Read Weisberg's whole column.

Wikipedia: Hands Off Intelligent Design

2005-08-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

I love Wikipedia. Obviously, only an idiot would take an online encyclopedia that allows anyone to post anything as gospel, but if you just want some general information on a topic, it's probably the single best resource available. The reason is that there's a lot of knowledge among the millions of people who use it, and most of those people are eager to share their knowledge in a way that makes a meaningful contribution.

The problem comes when there's a dispute. Who decides who's right and who's wrong? Checking out the Intelligent design Wikipedia page, I see that it's one of the few pages on the site that can't be edited. There's a disclaimer at the top saying, "This page is protected from editing until disputes have been resolved on the discussion page."

I don't know how long that disclaimer has been up there or what Wikipedia's policy is for resolving such disputes, but I certainly hope a site as smart as Wikipedia will ultimately make clear on the intelligent design page that it's a pseudo-science and a critique that in no way diminishes evolution.

See also Wikipedia's pages on evolution and the creation-evolution controversy.

DNA Traces Evolution of Sabretooths, American Cheetah-Like Cat

2005-08-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

Interesting analysis of how computer models and DNA evidence can be used to help us learn about the relationships among big cats. It turns out that the modern African cheetah and an extinct American species that looks like the cheetah are an example of parallel evolution. They have similar features because they experienced similar environments, but genetically they're not closely related.

Kansas Board OKs Evolution Criticism

2005-08-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Apparently an outside academic will review the standards before they go into effect. I have no idea what that means.

Teach Science in Science Class

2005-08-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

This is the editorial stance of USA Today. This is the rebuttal USA Today ran. A few paragraphs from the rebuttal:

These vehement critics claim that there are mountains of scientific proof that man evolved from some lower species also related to apes. But in this tremendous effort to support Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, in all these "mountains of information," there has not been any scientific fossil evidence linking apes to man.

The trouble with the "missing link" is that it is still missing! In fact, the whole fossil chain that could link apes to man is also missing! The theory of evolution, which states that man evolved from some other species, has more holes in it than a crocheted bathtub.

I realize that is a dramatic statement, so to be clear, let me restate: There is zero scientific fossil evidence that demonstrates organic evolutionary linkage between primates and man.

Why does USA Today print something like that? I'm sure the editors at USA Today would tell us they're supporting evolution and doing the fair thing by giving the other side equal time. But when that other side is printing something factually inaccurate, shouldn't the USA Today editors step in? I'm reminded of the Saturday Night Live skit where Bill O'Reilly insists that the capital of New York is New York City, and when he's presented with the evidence of the other side, he says, "We'll just have to agree to disagree," as if he's being very magnanimous by allowing the other side to have its say. Journalists need to be able to distinguish between matters of opinion and matters of fact and let their coverage reflect that.

Hat tip: Chris Mooney.

Charles Krauthammer: Let's Have No More Monkey Trials

2005-08-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

When we were talking about the conservative intellectuals and their views on evolution, I mentioned that I have a lot of respect for Charles Krauthammer, who now devotes a column to the topic. You should read the whole thing, but I especially liked:

Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.

In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, Schönborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.

The Reaction to Bush's Statements

2005-08-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

I certainly wasn't the only one who objected to Bush's support of intelligent design.

Bush Remarks Roil Debate on Teaching of Evolution

2005-08-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger 3rd, sought to play down the president's remarks as common sense and old news.

Mr. Marburger said in a telephone interview that "evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology" and "intelligent design is not a scientific concept." Mr. Marburger also said that Mr. Bush's remarks should be interpreted to mean that the president believes that intelligent design should be discussed as part of the "social context" in science classes.

I have no idea what the "social context" in science classes means. Is that like teachers saying, "Now, children, you should be aware that some idiots don't believe this"?

Bush Endorses Teaching `Intelligent Design' Theory in Schools

2005-08-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

The current president thinks evolution is only one theory that should be taught:

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. " You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

OK, now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about something else in the same article. (As many readers know, my real passion is not evolution but sports.) Keep reading and you see that the president -- who in the past has insisted that steroid users must be banished from sports -- now says that Rafael Palmeiro should be believed when he said he never used steroids, despite a positive steroid test to the contrary:

"Rafael Palmeiro is a friend. He testified in public and I believe him," Bush said, referring to Palmeiro's denials under oath to a congressional committee on March 17. "He's the kind of person that's going to stand up in front of the klieg lights and say he didn't use steroids, and I believe him. Still do."

And here's what infuriates me about the mainstream media. I've read and heard Bush's quote a dozen times already, but no one has bothered to point out that Palmeiro and his homemaker wife donated $8,000 to Bush's 2004 campaign. That's a very important part of the story: Why aren't reporters asking him whether he's going to send back the eight grand? It was given to him by a steroid-fueled player. Doesn't that taint the donation?

Schools stay out of Evolution Fray

2005-08-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned many times, if you want your children to learn about evolution, you'd be better off sending them to a Catholic school than to a public school. That could be changing. I interpret thisarticle as bad news.

Saying that schools are staying out of the fray when it comes to evolution probably comes across to most people as a good thing. Actually, it's terrible. Do schools stay out of the fray when students ask whether there really was an ancient Rome, or whether a bunch of archaeologists just faked all the evidence? Some Catholic educators are using the code words that I hate to hear:

"Evolution should be taught as one of many theories," said Louis P. DeAngelo, who oversees curriculum for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. "But the one true principle above all is there's one creator."

Obviously, Catholic schools are going to teach that there's one creator. Fine. But don't confuse your students by teaching "many theories" if one of them is a predictive, testable, and repeatable theory like evolution and another is a pseudoscience like intelligent design.

New Study Explores Evolution Of Male Parental Care And Female Multiple Mating

2005-07-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

It's quite simple, really. Males will have more offspring if they have sex with more females. But females will have the same number of offspring whether they have sex with one or many males. It's more interesting and fun to study it in humans, but here it's studied in birds.