If you won’t pay people what they’re worth, you’ll get people worth what you pay

Here’s another twist on the problematic trend to hire more temporary/part-time/adjunct faculty at universities. It’s a disgraceful abuse of skilled academics and good teachers — would you believe that some schools hire adjuncts to teach four courses a semester (a brutal load, let me tell you) and pay them $16,000 per year? Who would be insane enough to accumulate all that college debt, then invest 4+ years in an advanced study program to get a Ph.D., for a poverty-level income? But that’s where we stand.

Here’s the other ugly side of the problem. The University of Idaho needed someone to teach microbiology, so they carried out a ‘national’ search for a temporary microbiologist, offering $6-8,000 per semester for a one year position with no promise of a continuation. Moscow, Idaho is a truly lovely place, but would you pack up and move across the country to spend one year in Moscow for maybe $16,000, and then probably have to move somewhere else again after that year was up?

No, you would not, if you had a choice. If you were really desperate, maybe.

But they hired someone. Someone local. They got Gordon Wilson who teaches at the New Saint Andrews College in Moscow. New Saint Andrews got some fame from Christopher Hitchens; Hitchens did a debate tour with Doug Wilson, the founder of the school. It’s notorious for a number of other reasons, too, including this stunning list:

  • In some circumstances, the penalty for adultery should be execution.
    Women should be permitted to date or “court” only with their fathers’ permission and, if they’re Christian, date and court with only other Christians.

  • Woman “was created to be dependent and responsive to a man.”

  • A rapist should pay the victim’s father a bride price and, if the father approves, should marry the victim.

  • Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people are “sodomites” and “people with foul sexual habits.” He favors the “exile [of] some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of the victim.”

  • Cursing one’s parents is “deserving of punishment by death. Parental failure is not a defense.” Christian parents “need not be afraid to lay it on” when spanking their children. If fact, in Wilson’s world view, “godly discipline” should include spanking 2-year-olds for such “sins” as whining.

  • “A rapist should pay the victim’s father a bride price and, if the father approves, should marry the victim.”

  • “Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. … There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world.”

It’s also an incestuous little place of marginal academic credibility.

The faculty at New St. Andrews is hardly diverse. Several are N.S.A. graduates who went on to do master’s degrees elsewhere and came back to teach. Only 4 of 17 faculty members have Ph.D.’s (those few are always addressed as “Doctor” — proof that N.S.A. has not entirely escaped the intellectual insecurity typical of evangelical colleges). Doug Wilson’s son, son-in-law and youngest brother teach at the college. “Someone’s going to say, ‘Isn’t that a little cozy?’ ” Wilson admits. “Part of modernity’s negative legacy is the pretense of objectivity. All institutions thrive on interconnectedness, affection and loyalty.”

Read their statement of faith. Of greatest relevance is that they say:

In the beginning, God created the material universe from nothing in six ordinary days. He spoke, and by the Word of His power, it was. Our science on the nature and time of this event must be determined in full submission to the Word of God.

That’s right. The University of Idaho has just hired a young earth creationist, biblical literalist, and racist evangelical Christian to teach microbiology. UI biology students: you are getting ripped off.

For a sample of the mental gymnastics involved in creationist “science,” look no further than Wilson’s contribution [PDF] to a 2004 conference, in which he posits that God created every living thing with extra “gene sets” for carnivory, venom, pathogenicity, and other “natural evils,” which were, metaphorically, stored under glass to be activated by the Deity in the event of human malfeasance.

He’s going to be teaching microbiology.

He says he won’t be teaching creationism in the class — I don’t believe him — but this is what he does consider legitimate to teach.

I made it clear 9 years ago and this semester that I wasn’t going to promote my views or disparage evolutionary views in class. That said, I have stated that I do not share the views of common descent held by the main stream scientific community. Which is well with in my rights to do. The only thing that I have presented (briefly) is a distinction between historical science and empirical science, and that conclusions drawn from the former don’t have the high level of certainty as conclusions drawn from the latter. This distinction is not a creationist invention. Ernst Mayr holds to this as well. The conclusions drawn from historical science are as good as the presuppositions on which they are based. This was simply a moment to encourage students to exercise some critical thinking skills in assessing truth claims of the scientific community.

That should sound familiar — it’s the same bogus rhetorical ploy Ken Ham uses.

I do not consider Mayr the sine qua non of the science of philosophy (pretty far from it, actually), but you don’t get to use him to defend Ham’s idiocy. All biologists acknowledge a historical component to our science, but we don’t treat it as a pejorative, nor do we claim that it lacks observational power. Mayr’s thoughts on the subject are quite clear.

Despite the passing of a century before this new branch of philosophy fully developed, its eventual form is based on Darwinian concepts. For example, Darwin introduced historicity into science. Evolutionary biology, in contrast with physics and chemistry, is a historical science—the evolutionist attempts to explain events and processes that have already taken place. Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques for the explication of such events and processes. Instead one constructs a historical narrative, consisting of a tentative reconstruction of the particular scenario that led to the events one is trying to explain.

For example, three different scenarios have been proposed for the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous: a devastating epidemic; a catastrophic change of climate; and the impact of an asteroid, known as the Alvarez theory. The first two narratives were ultimately refuted by evidence incompatible with them. All the known facts, however, fit the Alvarez theory, which is now widely accepted. The testing of historical narratives implies that the wide gap between science and the humanities that so troubled physicist C. P. Snow is actually nonexistent—by virtue of its methodology and its acceptance of the time factor that makes change possible, evolutionary biology serves as a bridge.

So basically, Wilson is saying, Mayr used the word “historical”, therefore our wacky weird abuse of the word “historical” is valid. He’s an idiot.

The University of Idaho just hired an incompetent religious crackpot who thinks black people were happier as slaves and who despises women to teach a biology course.

And everyone is going to sit back and be fucking fine with it. And if you point out that this man isn’t fit to be pretending to be a microbiologist, he’s going to whine about the persecution of Christians.

The biological species concept is not an anti-choice argument

Oooh, I have annoyed Secular Pro-Life so much. I disagreed with the confusion they sow by equating status as a human being with being members of the species Homo sapiens; the former is a property of an entity, the latter a property of a class. It is highly problematic to freely switch between the two, and it is especially misleading to use a class definition to assign rights and privileges to a subset, particularly when it involves denying the existence of clear distinctions between members of the group. It is also dishonest to declare that the authority of science specifies a sharp, clear boundary line in development, when what science actually says is that there is a continuum, and cannot define the instant when a clump of human cells makes the transition into having “fully equal” human status.

Here’s their complaint:

If PZ could give a commonly accepted definition of "species" that debunked the idea that human organisms–including zygotes, embryos, and fetuses–are part of the human species, he would. If he could give a commonly accepted definition of "organism" that did not include zygotes, he would. But he doesn’t give those definitions. He can’t. Because zygotes are organisms, and human organisms are part of the human species. PZ can do a bunch of hand wavy complaining about how he’s not sure what Kristine means (and try to assert that his alleged lack of understanding equals her dishonesty), but that’s all he’s got. There’s no substance here.

He’s right that there are many ways of thinking about the concept of "species." But Kristine’s perspective doesn’t rely on some obscure, slippery definition. How about a group of organisms having common characteristics and capable of mating with one another to produce fertile offspring? You can find that description on the lying, anti-woman, secretly religious website: Biology Online.

Kristine claims "science defines a fetus as a biological member of our species." PZ tries to brush off Kristine’s perspective as "traditional and colloquial" (as if those attributes, in themselves, make an idea anti-scientific), but in reality Kristine’s assertions rely on a very common–and scientific–species concept: the biological species concept. UC Berkeley’s "Understanding Evolution" website describes the biological species concept as the concept used "for most purposes and for communication with the general public." How dare Kristine fail to define that for someone like PZ–he only has decades of background in developmental biology. That must have been very confusing for him.

That’s exactly what I mean! You cannot cavalierly apply a definition appropriate to populations to individuals. Here’s that definition: “The biological species concept defines a species as members of populations that actually or potentially interbreed in nature”. If you take that literally, then sterile individuals are not members of the human species. No one takes it that literally. Even the site they link to spells out problems with the BSC, and lists a small subset of other species concepts.

Another problem with the BSC is that it doesn’t address development, and this really is a problem in developmental biology. What does “potentially interbreed” mean? Are embryos part of the gene pool? How about menopausal women? Do men with vasectomies lose their ontological status with that little snip? If you’re going to say that embryos have the potential to reproduce, then you can’t deny that sperm and ova also have that potential, and SPL’s distinction that sperm don’t count is invalid. Scientists are also crystal clear in defining human sperm and human ova; does the use of the label imply that sperm therefore have all the rights of a human being?

The biological species concept doesn’t apply to this problem, and it is not only scientifically invalid to try and use it that way, it is offensive. We do not and should not define a person’s status in society by their reproductive potential. We do not measure the broader social and familial relationships of individuals by reducing them to biological abstractions — having the right number of chromosomes, complementary sperm-egg recognition proteins, matching genitalia for efficient intromission and docking. The species problem is a whole different problem from the humanity problem! And when your argument rests on a willful conflation of two completely different issues, you’ve got a credibility problem. And claiming that science decrees a simple clear answer when it actually says the answer is murky and complex and ambiguous on multiple levels means you’ve got an honesty problem.

But yes, please do try to imagine a world where your status as a human being was determined by applying the biological species concept to individuals. Dystopias are fun logical exercises, if not so fun to live through.

I do have one little quibble with Cosmos

I don’t want to give the impression that I think it is perfect — there are some flaws. This one had me scratching my head.

What the hell is this?

cosmos_dna

I’m used to noticing if a diagram of DNA has the correct right-handed twist of B-DNA or the proper number of bases per rotation of the spiral, but jebus…what are these random dots and lines and this strange stringy attenuated look that corresponds to nothing in the molecular structure? Is this what happens when an astronomer tries to draw a molecule?

I wonder if every other biologist’s brain came to a screeching halt when this animation came on the screen.

A Discovery Institute hack watches Cosmos

I told you that the Discovery Institute really hates Cosmos. On Sunday night, Jay Richards, Master of Divinity, Master of Theology, Ph.D. in philosophy and theology, former instructor in apologetics at Biola, Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, watched the show and occasionally curled his lip in disdain on Twitter. It was very amusing, and rather revealing. These guys really are just gussied-up creationists.

I can’t help myself. I have to reply to these nonsensical complaints.

On #Cosmos, Neil Degrasse Tyson is recapitulating Darwin’s non sequitur that artificial selection + time = natural selection.

Oh, right: his Twitter name is “FreemarketJay”. You are allowed to laugh.

Cosmos introduced the concept of selection by first describing how dogs were domesticated by selection for a subset of animals that were less fearful of humans and could scavenge from our garbage; we have since selected for variations that produce the great diversity of dog breeds, much of it done over the last few centuries. The lesson: you can get radical biological change from artificial selection in a very short time.

Then Neil deGrasse Tyson explained how you don’t need humans to provide the selection: the environment can also favor different variants, using the example of bear coat colors.

Where was the non sequitur? It was quite clear that the situations were analogous and obvious, and remarkably hard to argue against. Artificial selection demonstrably works, natural selection requires no novel mechanisms, it all hangs together beautifully.

Anyone think Neil Degrasse Tyson will summarize the known evolutionary limitations of random genetic mutations? Nah. #Cosmos

Oh. That’s his objection, that there are some imaginary evolutionary limitations. Yes? What are they? Richards doesn’t say. Go ahead, explain how you can make Great Danes and Chihuahuas by selection from an ancestral generic, wolf-like dog, but you can’t possibly have pigment mutations produce white bears from brown bears.

He won’t be able to. The actual limitations are nothing but the inability of creationists to comprehend a simple process that makes them uncomfortable.

Cool. Dogs evolve into … dogs, and bears…into bears. #Cosmos

If only the dogs had evolved into frogs, and the bears into broccoli, then at last he’d be able to accept evolution. Sorry, guy, evolution predicts that dogs will only evolve into doglike descendants, and that the ancestor of modern dogs and bears was a primitive mammal (but they’re still only mammals!) and before that, primitive tetrapods (but we’re all still only tetrapods!) and before that, primitive animals (but we’re still only animals!).

That Richards would think that is a reasonable objection is just more evidence that he doesn’t understand even the simplest basics of evolution.

On eye evolution, the #Cosmos editors again failed to do a Google search: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1061 …

Cosmos referred to the calculations by Nilsson and Pilger that the morphological changes to transform a flat light sensitive patch into a spherical eye ball with a lens that could form an image on a retina would require conservatively a few hundred thousand generations. They did this by incrementally modeling the shape of an eye is it transformed, determining that a) 1,829 steps with a magnitude of a 1% change in shape were required, and b) calculating the optical acuity at each step, and showing that each 1% change would increase acuity slightly (no backtracking or loss of optical quality was required in any step). They then used reasonable estimates of heritability and phenotypic variance and weak selection to calculate that a 0.005% change in shape in each generation was possible, meaning that you could easily get the whole transformation in 364,000 generations.

At every step they used minimal, conservative estimates for all parameters. The whole point was to demonstrate that this one process could be easily completed in geologically tiny amount of time.

Richards cites an awful attempt at a rebuttal by David Berlinsky, which consists mostly of sneering and posturing and complaining that it was improper to refer to the calculations as a “simulation” (never mind that a computer simulation of the process was produced; the paper describes the calculations). I have to say — why would anyone complain that the Cosmos writers hadn’t made note of a sloppy and pretentious internal document — it was not published anywhere — that actually didn’t refute the content of the Nilsson and Pilger paper in the slightest? Maybe because Richards has a ridiculously inflated view of the importance of his nest of loons in Seattle.

An eyeball isn’t a visual system. #Cosmos

Nor has it ever been claimed to be. They were talking about one piece of the visual system, and demonstrating that natural processes can produce that structure in a fraction of a million years. The Discovery Institute claims that no significant physiological or morphological change can occur at all, so simply demonstrating that making an eyeball from an eyespot is possible effectively refutes the Intelligent Design creationism position.

They’re just moving the goalposts. They say that making an eyeball is impossible; we show that it is, and not that hard, and they then say we have to show that every single step is possible. You know, we can show the molecular basis for light perception is present in single-celled organisms, that all of the molecular pathways are homologous and linked, and that general developmental processes can produce functional connections between sensory cells and visual perception centers of the brain, and they still claim that it requires their magic deity.

I can’t believe how bad #Cosmos is. They must have given up all hope of persuading anyone but the already persuaded.

No, but I’m sure we’ve all given up any hope of persuading the dogmatic, the ignorant, and the obtuse. Someone first has to be willing to look at the evidence, and if you’re up to that, then yes, I think Cosmos can be an effective tool for letting people understand the basics of evolution.

All bets are off for IDiots.

One more. Richards’ latest tweet:

Another confirmation that the universe had a beginning: Astronomers discover echoes from expansion after Big Bang http://reut.rs/1ivSjez

So confirmation of a specific and empirically founded physical theory is going to be used by these kooks as confirmation of their superficial and stupid explanation of the origins of the universe because it supports one trivial observation? The universe had a beginning. So what? The question is how it started, and no, that ain’t in the Bible.

Are you planning to go out to eat today?

We did. My wife and I went out to Mi Mexico in Alexandria for a celebratory lunch (she has put up with me for 34 years! Yay!). It was very good — they have a vegetarian menu and prices were reasonable.

But just before I left, I was reading this terrible site, Sundays Are the Worst, which has a huge collection of stories from restaurant waitstaff about serving the Sunday-after-church crowd. You know where this is going: appallingly rude Christians stiffing people right and left. And then we went to a restaurant.

I think I over-tipped. I felt like I had to compensate for Jesus’ selfish followers.

I’m not willing to trade one woman for the entire membership of CPAC

That’s what I don’t get about American Atheists courting CPAC. I could see it as an attention-getter, to highlight and criticize the right-wing religiosity of an organization of nutbags, but as outreach? No way. Dana Hunter won’t compromise on some things, and trading one Dana Hunter for even a million freakish conservatives wouldn’t be a fair deal.

Amanda Marcotte is bored by the bad arguments from the prolifers. Why do we want dishonest phonies and irrational kooks in our atheism, anyway?

When your name is prefixed by “reality star”…your ideas are immediately suspect

From the first sentence, I could tell that the opinions of Kristin Cavallari were garbage.

Experts warned against the dangers of following celebrity advice after reality star Kristin Cavallari acknowledged Thursday that she and husband Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler decided not to vaccinate their children.

When directly asked whether she was opposed to vaccines during an appearance on the Fox Business Network program, The Independents, Cavallari said, “we don’t vaccinate.” The reason? “I’ve read too many books about autism and the studies,” she said.

Also, “Chicago Bears quarterback” does not confer any credibility in matters of medicine on Jay Cutler. These are people that should be laughed at.

But then the article cites a doctor:

Homefirst Health Services, meanwhile — if that’s what Cavallari meant — is a Rolling Meadows-based pediatrics practice that embraces home births and shuns vaccines. Dr. Mayer Eisenstein and his practice were the subject of a 2009 Chicago Tribune investigation that shed light on the use of potentially dangerous alternative autism treatments. On the Homefirst website, Eisenstein maintains that “personal religious convictions, not scientific studies, are the main reasons, upon which to base your vaccination decision.”

Is there no accreditation process for medical clinics? How does one that refuses to carry out basic preventive medicine for “religious” reasons, manage to stay in business without the medical establishment — or at least the insurance companies — stomping on them?

The only sensible words in this article…

Alexander said Cavallari’s comments illustrate the problems with celebrity spokespeople, namely that they often have their facts wrong. “Celebrity status does not indicate scientific expertise,” he said.