Category: Evolution Denialism

If you haven’t been keeping up, let me give you a quick heads up about this whole Expelled brouhaha.

A bunch of lying Creationist cultists decided to make a film whining about how oppressed Creationist “scientists” are. Ben Stein got involved somehow. They hoodwinked a bunch of real scientists into talking to them. They excluded any scientists who were religious but accept evolution. They hyped the film to evangelicals, but barred reviewer, journalists, or the scientists who are in the film from seeing it. They expropriated copyrighted material. They lied a lot.

But really, the part that bothers me the most is that they are trying to link evolutionary biology with the Holocaust, which is bad enough, but they don’t even believe it. It is strictly a scare-tactic. If they believed it, then perhaps they would be less anti-semitic.

If you want to see the details and haven’t been keeping up, just use Expelled as a search term at ScienceBlogs, but start here.

So, Answers in Genesis cranked out the first issue of its new journal, and with all deliberate speed! It’s remarkable. I’m guessing that creation research doesn’t take quite as long as, say, real science. The pilot issue is a true testament to the idiocy of the Creation Cult. I guess we have to actually look inside this waste of electrons to see what’s going on.

While it is true that no scientist with an intact cerebral cortex will take the Answers Research Journal seriously, still, it’s hard to ignore. If this is the best shot the Creationist cults can do at making their point then I don’t think the NIH is going to be sending them a lot of money any time soon. Each article from the pilot edition has its own kind of stupid..

Remember that “Answers” is supposed to be a “professional, peer-reviewed technical journal.” One article is called “Proceedings of the Microbe Forum”, but what this “forum” was is not clearly indicated. This doesn’t start well (nor does it end well). If fact, it ends so badly, that I’ll start with the footnotes:

These are pseudonyms. The writers, who hold PhDs in fields related to the topics of their abstracts, are scientists at prominent research facilities in the eastern part of North America. They prefer to keep their creationist credentials hidden for the moment until they achieve more seniority.

If you publish a scientific paper anonymously, it isn’t scientific. There is no way to verify anything. If what they publish is quality research, then they have nothing to fear. If it is crap, well, then academia can be very harsh on non-productive idiots (productive idiots, however…). Let’s go back to the top and see what has the authors so verschrecked.

Introduction

For many years the roles of microbes as part of God’s wonderful design have been neglected. Creationist literature is largely void of topics related to these tiniest creatures. Perhaps it is because many people associate microbes as the cause of death, disease, and suffering. This is true for only a fraction of microbes; the large majority are extremely vital for sustaining life on earth. Their roles range from recycling nutrients in soil and water to symbiotic relationships that provide necessary factors to their host. Their role in death and disease is a result of the Fall and the Curse on all living things.

Ouch! That is a steaming pile of burning stupid. I can see why the authors are scared. A tenure committee would look pretty foolish if they promoted a microbiologist who believes that “the role [of microbes] in death and disease is a result of the Fall and the Curse”….

(more…)

There’s a new facebook group set up to protest Expelled.

I am ambivalent for the usual reasons—protest, and you give the reactionary religious cults more publicity, and an illusion of power. Fail to protest, and you appear to consent to their insanity.

I figure there will be protests either way, so go and chose your way…protest loudly, or protest silently. But please, at least let someone know what you think, even if it’s just your friends or coworkers. I’m not one to keep my mouth shut, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be pissing someone off.

Let’s talk about Uncommon Descent for a moment. One of the recurring complaints we’ve been hearing from the evolution denialists there is this refrain that whenever a evolutionary explanation for a result gets reevaluated, it’s a sign that we “Darwinists” are somehow being dishonest and fitting any data to the theory of evolution. Evolution, therefore, isn’t falsifiable. For example, two posts, one from BarryA, the other from O’Leary (commenting on this ARN nonsense, wrongly suggesting that results that falsify evolutionary theory have been discovered – like the recent hypothesis the appendix has a function – and that we just ignore the problem.

BarryA:

In Edge, Behe talks about Ernst Mayr’s 1960’s prediction that on Darwinian grounds the search for homologous genes would be quite futile. Now Darwinists use homologous genes as evidence for the theory; after all the existence of such genes was predicted by the theory (after the fact).

What can you say about a theory that can just as easily predict “X” and the opposite of “X”?

I commend to our readers sections 19 and 20 of Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery, in which he discusses “conventionalist stratagems” to rescue a theory from falsification. Popper writes, “Whenever the ‘classical’ system of the day is threatened by the results of new experiments which might be interpreted as falsifications . . . the system will appear unshaken to the conventionalist.” Popper goes on to explain the stratagems the conventionalist will use to deal with the inconsistencies that have arisen between the predictions of the theory and the results of experiments:

And O’Leary:

Despite its name – which means “hanger on” – the human appendix works for a living, according to recent research (helping kill germs). [ed – note she didn’t even read it!]

As British physicist David Tyler notes, despite the claim of evolutionary biologists from Darwin to the present day that the appendix is junk left over from evolution, the appendix actually has a function – and the current crop of evolutionary biologists try hard to avoid acknowledging that they were wrong about that.

I think this warrants further discussion for two reasons. One is that it exposes, again, how the UD cranks just don’t get science. As someone who favors Popper’s view, I’m particularly pissed that the purveyors of the unfalsifiable would use him to promote their crankery. Second, there is often a problem in scientific communication that some people propose sloppy evolutionary speculations for findings that feeds these cranks ammo. First, let’s go over why the statements by our UD cranks are incorrect:
(more…)

BarryA drops this idiot bomb on us:

Obviously, by definition, materialists cannot point to a transcendent moral code by which to measure moral progress. Indeed, it is difficult for them to account for moral progress at all because if materialism is correct, the “is” in a society defines the “ought.”

Gosh, given that the cdesign proponentsists are all about science they do spend a hell of a lot of time criticizing materialism. Until they get their god-o-meter up and running it seems as though that this is a fundamental conflict between their stated beliefs and practice. But that’s nothing new.

What I am curious about is whether or not materialists (code for atheists) can or cannot point to a transcendent moral code by which to measure human progress? And further, can the religious? I would argue the religious, if anything, are far more incapable of pointing to a transcendent moral code. After all you must ask, which religion, which book, which interpretation? Sure they can point to all sorts of crap, but they certainly can’t agree on the moral interpretation of their scripture. They change which parts of their code they listen to in any given century (we only really take 3 of the 10 commandments seriously for instance), how can they suggest they are in possession of a transcendent morality because of their religiosity?

Then see this whopper:

On what basis do you say that the recognition of the humanity of African-Americans is “progress” unless you have held up the previous nonrecognition and the present recognition to a code and deterermined the former was bad (i.e., did not meet the code) and the latter is good (i.e., does meet the code)? In other words, when you say we have “progressed” it is just another way of saying that the previous state of affairs was bad and the present state of affairs is good. But how can you know this unless there is a code that transcends time and place by which both states of affairs can be measured. Certainly to say that things were previously one way and now they are another is not the same as saying there has been progress. Change is not the same as progress.

Now, I don’t quite get what BarryA is talking about here. Is he saying ending slavery is not progress? Or is he saying that ending slavery can only be judged as a moral good if you are religious? Because, you know, none of those religious codes prohibit slavery buddy. If anything, they encourage it, and tell slaves to be obedient. So if you guys are in charge of the transcendent code, and it’s in one of your outdated books of silly metaphors, where are your slaves? Slavery was ended in this country when many people – including many religious people — decided we could transcend dogma that defended the practice.

Here’s a job for my commenters. Leave me your transcendent materialist moral code that you can use to measure human moral progress. Mine is something like, “Progress can be measured by increasing rationality, human happiness, and abandonment of the hateful dogmas that bind us to tribalism and bigotry.”

Mark at Boing Boing proposes an excellent new name for Intelligent Design creationists – “cdesign proponentsists”. It’s in honor of this wonderful observation from “Of Pandas and People” the creati … I mean cdesign proponentsists textbook:

This is one of numerous examples of their dishonesty in suggesting that they’re anything but creationists in disguise.

I like Mark’s this idea, this should be their new name. It’s a bit of a compromise. They don’t want to be called creationists, and we don’t want them to get away with lying. It’s perfect!

Now as to the pronunciation. How about “see-design proponent cysts”?

Just giving everyone a heads up. If you’re an atheist and you’re starting to get a little demented make sure someone is there to protect you from religious people with an axe to grind. The story of the so-called turning of Antony Flew is sad, and really very cruel, as IDers and religious ideologues have clearly exploited a man in decline.

TWO YEARS LATER, Flew’s doubts have disappeared, and the philosopher has a reinvigorated faith in his theistic friends. In his new book, he freely cites Schroeder, Haldane and Varghese. And the author who two years ago was forgetting his Hume is, in the forthcoming volume, deeply read in many philosophers — John Leslie, John Foster, Thomas Tracy, Brian Leftow — rarely if ever mentioned in his letters, articles or books. It’s as if he’s a new man.

In August, I visited Flew in Reading. His house, sparsely furnished, sits on a small plot on a busy street, hard against its neighbors. It could belong to a retired government clerk or to a career military man who at last has resettled in the mother country. Inside, it seems very English, with the worn, muted colors of a BBC production from the 1970s. The house may lack an Internet connection, but it does have one very friendly cat, who sat beside me on the sofa. I visited on two consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flew’s wife of 55 years, served me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”

He said this with a laugh. When we began the interview, he warned me, with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from “nominal aphasia,” or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.” I pointed out to him that in his earlier philosophical work he argued that the mere concept of God was incoherent, so if he was now a theist, he must reject huge chunks of his old philosophy. “Yes, maybe there’s a major inconsistency there,” he said, seeming grateful for my insight. And he seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.

As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort — slightly more, anyway. “There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,” Varghese said. “There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.”

So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages, especially in the section that narrates Flew’s childhood. With three authors, how much Flew was left in the book? “He went through everything, was happy with everything,” Varghese said.

Cynthia DiTiberio, the editor who acquired “There Is a God” for HarperOne, told me that Hostetler’s work was limited; she called him “an extensive copy editor.” “He did the kind of thing I would have done if I had the time,” DiTiberio said, “but editors don’t get any editing done in the office; we have to do that in our own time.”

I then asked DiTiberio if it was ethical to publish a book under Flew’s name that cites sources Flew doesn’t know well enough to discuss. “I see your struggle and confusion,” she said, but she maintained that the book is an accurate presentation of Flew’s views. “I don’t think Tony would have allowed us to put in anything he was not comfortable with or familiar with,” she said. “I mean, it is hard to tell at this point how much is him getting older. In my communications with him, there are times you have to say things a couple times. I’m not sure what that is. I wish I could tell you more. . . We were hindered by the fact that he is older, but it would do the world a disservice not to have the book out there, regardless of how it was made.”

It is clear, reading the article, that they have convinced a man named Antony Flew into accepting these silly arguments from design. They wrote a book, ostensibly about his conversion, and convinced him to put his name on it while he’s completely unable to understand or even remember the contents. It is also clear that this man is not the same one who wrote on atheist philosophy. They may claim this as some great victory that they turned an atheist – which is questionable in this case – but even if they convinced Dawkins or Hitchens it’s all just missing the point. It’s not about dogma and popes and figureheads for atheists. Converting some famous atheist changes nothing with regard to the absence of evidence for their ideas or their pseudoscience. This ultimately will change no one’s mind, if anything the fact that they were willing to exploit an old man in such a tawdry fashion is just a reminder of how wrong these people are. They’re vultures, or as PZ would say, ghouls.