Reaching creationists: here’s the toolbox, do you know how to use the tools?

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading the articles in the latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach. This is a fairly new journal with the mission stated in the title, and I have to say that it is very, very good — the articles are almost always easily readable, and they address significant issues in the public understanding of evolution. This particular issue focuses on transitions, and not just on transitional fossils, but all kinds of evidence for change over evolutionary time. It’s been commented on by Larry Moran and Jerry Coyne, and they’re entirely right that these are extremely useful articles, not just in providing helpful data when addressing arguments about evolution, but they’re also loaded with figures that I’ll be stealing using for my own lectures.

I have to say something a little peculiar, though. It’s not really a criticism, because I’m not going to argue against these articles at all—I repeat, they are informative and useful and great to read! However, I am concerned that they address one audience, but it’s not the audience we have to really worry about. The kinds of people who will read and enjoy those articles are scientists who appreciate a good overview of a field, the kinds of informed citizens who would, for instance, read a science blog, and educators in general who want more substance about evolution to include in their classes. Creationists are not the journal’s clientele. That means that sometimes the articles miss the mark on who we need to persuade.

For example, T. Ryan Gregory’s overview of the principles of natural selection, Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions, makes an important point: selection is surprisingly difficult for many people to grasp. This is entirely true, but we sometimes mislead ourselves because once you get those few basic principles, and I mean really understand them, suddenly selection seems simple and even intuitive…and most of us doing the teaching and public outreach are solidly in that blissful state of easy comprehension.

And this isn’t at all unusual. Gregory provides a taxonomy of common conceptual errors, and points out that many of these errors, such as the idea of inheritance of acquired characters, have been held by some of the greatest minds of Western civilization, from Aristotle to Darwin.

Here’s the catch: we can see how to explain selection to Aristotle and Darwin now, but unfortunately, creationists are not a collection of Aristotles and Darwins. I wouldn’t go far the other way and say they’re all stupid, but they do have lots of ideas that are so egregiously wrong that they don’t fit into Gregory’s schemata.

For instance, here’s a nice diagram of correct and incorrect views of how selection works.

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A highly simplified depiction of natural selection (Correct) and a generalized illustration of various common misconceptions about the mechanism (Incorrect). Properly understood, natural selection occurs as follows: (A) A population of organisms exhibits variation in a particular trait that is relevant to survival in a given environment. In this diagram, darker coloration happens to be beneficial, but in another environment, the opposite could be true. As a result of their traits, not all individuals in Generation 1 survive equally well, meaning that only a non-random subsample ultimately will succeed in reproducing and passing on their traits (B). Note that no individual organisms in Generation 1 change, rather the proportion of individuals with different traits changes in the population. The individuals who survive from Generation 1 reproduce to produce Generation 2. (C) Because the trait in question is heritable, this second generation will (mostly) resemble the parent generation. However, mutations have also occurred, which are undirected (i.e., they occur at random in terms of the consequences of changing traits), leading to both lighter and darker offspring in Generation 2 as compared to their parents in Generation 1. In this environment, lighter mutants are less successful and darker mutants are more successful than the parental average. Once again, there is non-random survival among individuals in the population, with darker traits becoming disproportionately common due to the death of lighter individuals (D). This subset of Generation 2 proceeds to reproduce. Again, the traits of the survivors are passed on, but there is also undirected mutation leading to both deleterious and beneficial differences among the offspring (E). (F) This process of undirected mutation and natural selection (non-random differences in survival and reproductive success) occurs over many generations, each time leading to a concentration of the most beneficial traits in the next generation. By Generation N, the population is composed almost entirely of very dark individuals. The population can now be said to have become adapted to the environment in which darker traits are the most successful. This contrasts with the intuitive notion of adaptation held by most students and non-biologists. In the most common version, populations are seen as uniform, with variation being at most an anomalous deviation from the norm (X). It is assumed that all members within a single generation change in response to pressures imposed by the environment (Y). When these individuals reproduce, they are thought to pass on their acquired traits. Moreover, any changes that do occur due to mutation are imagined to be exclusively in the direction of improvement (Z). Studies have revealed that it can be very difficult for non-experts to abandon this intuitive interpretation in favor of a scientifically valid understanding of the mechanism.

This is very nice. I can see using this in my freshman biology class right away — it’s very handy to be able to contrast correct and incorrect views, and it would provoke some thinking and discussion, since I know many of my students think just like the right panel illustrates (at least, before I’m done with them they do). Of course, my students tend to be motivated to understand, with some background in biology already, or they wouldn’t be biology majors.

Unfortunately, whenever I sit down and talk with full-blooded creationists, their views aren’t even incorrect. They’re so wrong, they’re completely off of Gregory’s charts.

For a public example of this phenomenon, look at Ray Comfort’s ideas about the evolution of sex. He seriously believes that every kind of animal had to independently evolve all of its primary properties in one sudden sweep. When elephants evolved, they had to simultaneously evolve female elephants; the idea that some traits do not have to evolve anew because they are shared with the parent population is incomprehensible to him.

Another fellow with a similar misconception is Jim Pinkoski, who states this idea rather baldly.

If “evolution” is true, then each major life form would have to evolve it’s own eyes (as well as every other major organ of its body)!

He illustrates this with a picture of a T. rex that has evolved a single eye, and then “wants” to evolve another eye. This is a really common belief, that new features arise as a consequence of desire by individuals.

These are the beliefs of the people doing public outreach on behalf of creationism, and the ordinary guy who passively accepts this stuff is even weirder. Every time I’ve had a one-on-one conversation with a casual creationist, there is always a moment when I am weirded out to the max by some genuinely twisted irrationality they trot out in their defense. We make a mistake when we look to the intellectual history of an idea to figure out how they rationalize creationism, because there is virtually no intellectual history there. They are not building on a foundation of ideas at all — they have a religious preconception of how species arise, and their vision of evolution is a hodge-podge of ad hoc contrivances chosen specifically to be absurd and unbelievable. They are not trying to explain, as Aristotle and Darwin were; they are trying to invent reasons to reject.

Like I said, this is not a criticism of Gregory’s paper, which does an excellent job at its purpose of making reasonably knowledgeable people even better informed. I think, though, that there’s a missing piece in the story: how do we turn grossly ignorant people into reasonably knowledgeable people? That’s a really difficult problem.

This is an even bigger problem in the other articles in the issue. For instance, probably my favorite article in the whole issue was Edgecombe’s Palaeontological and Molecular Evidence Linking Arthropods, Onychophorans, and other Ecdysozoa, which weighs the evidence in the great dispute between the cladists who favor a grouping of invertebrates into an Articulata clade, vs. an Ecdysozoan clade. It’s grand, big-picture macroevolution, discussing the relationships of whole phyla in deep time, and it also promotes the importance of multi-disciplinary thinking, basing conclusions on molecules, morphology, and fossils. It isn’t shy at all about bringing up the problematic taxa (where the heck do tardigrades belong, anyway?) either. It’s a wonderfully chewy article that helped clarify my perspectives on the discussion.

Again, not a complaint — this article is going straight into my file of very helpful reviews. But now imagine sitting down over coffee with an enthusiastic Hovind supporter right after church; this article is going to lose him right at the title. He doesn’t know what you mean by arthropod, let alone onychophoran. Throw articulata, cycloneuralia, and ecdysozoa at him from the abstract, and he’s going to tell you how much smarter the Hovinds are than you, because at least what they say is in English and makes sense to him.

This is tough stuff. How I would explain this paper to you, the readers of a blog like Pharyngula, would be close to what Edgecombe wrote, but how I would explain it to a run-of-the-mill church-going creationist would have to be very different. I think the way I would try it would be to start with figure 1 from the paper, which shows diverse representatives of the Ecdysozoa:

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Examples of the phyla of molting animals grouped with arthropods in Ecdysozoa. a Nematoda (Draconema sp.); b Nematomorpha (Spinochordodes tellinii); c Loricifera (Nanaloricus mysticus); d Onychophora (Peripatoides aurorbis); e Tardigrada (Tanarctus bubulubus); f Priapulida (Priapulus caudatus); g Kinorhyncha (Campyloderes macquariae).

Then I would explain that the paper describes the multiple lines of evidence that support macroevolutionary explanations for how all these extremely different kinds of invertebrates had a common ancestor, and then let him raise any questions about how it was done. And I would brace myself for some radically weird questions that I would never have imagined ahead of time. This is a business where flexibility is a requirement.

I am not saying that my hypothetical creationist conversationalist is stupid at all — but that he is grossly uninformed and misinformed, and comes from a background that did not provide him with the rational history of the ideas that would give him any reasonable context with which to even consider the paper. It’s a missing piece of the mission for evolutionary outreach: how do we wake those people up?

Don’t let that dissuade you from reading the journal, though. I think that where it helps most is that it will give non-experts with a reasonable grounding in science more information that they can use in arguments with creationists. When it comes to communicating the information to others though, you’re on your own…and in a lot of ways, that part, getting complex ideas across to people who are actively denying the evidence, is the hardest part of the story.

The Darwinius hype is beginning to burn

Oh, man. I’m willing to keep saying that Darwinius masillae was an important discovery, but the PR machine is making it hard to do so without cringing. Carl Zimmer has the History Channel ad for their program on it.

Oh. My. Dog. “The most important find in 47 million years”? “A global event: this changes everything”? This is not helping. It is inflating a good discovery beyond all reason, and when the public hears the creationists declare that it’s one fossil of a monkey-like creature, and they’re right, it’s going to damage the credibility of science.

Seed Media has a bit of a scoop: they’ve got an interview with a PLoS One editor, a History Channel executive, and Jørn Hurum, the scientist behind all the promotion. It’s appalling. They’re bragging about how a “production company got in on the ground floor”. Shall we anticipate the brave new world when paleontologists have to beg for McDonald’s happy meal tie-ins to get funding?

And I’m sorry, but Hurum comes off as a complete ass.

But in order for the story and the film to pack the most punch–and to reach the public–Hurum and the production company knew they had to keep it secret. Hurum seemed particularly preoccupied with the way the blogosphere is able to dissipate a story, mentioning an Arctic excavation he worked on several years ago that was picked-up by a blog in Japan within three hours of posting his pictures on the internet. “I’ve seen Chinese specimens of dinosaurs and so on destroyed like this with lots of bad early descriptions [from] blogging,” he says. Hurum wanted to subvert the system and take his story straight to the masses in a way that would appeal to the average person, especially kids: “If we really want kids to get involved with exciting scientific findings, no matter what kind of field, we really need to start [thinking] about reaching people other than [our] fellow scientists. This paper could have been drowned in other papers and would have been read by 15 people around the world.”

That’s revealing. The fossils would not be destroyed by someone blogging about it prematurely; what would be destroyed would be Hurum’s chance to play P.T. Barnum and make himself the center of the show. Apparently, those are the same thing to him. And he thinks it a problem that his paper would be “drowned” in a large volume of papers on the fossil? Jebus. This is what we want in science, lots of open discussion.

And if he thinks a few bloggers chatting prematurely about a find would ruin it for him, he should take a look at the damage this commercial hype and bogus hysteria about the specimen is doing. Misperception is rife, and the exaggeration is diminishing the importance of other finds.

It gets worse. Here’s the trailer for the show.

Creationists freak out over Darwinius

How are the creationists reacting to the discovery of Darwinius masillae? With denial and outrage, of course, but one thing that is an interesting datum is that they are all responding to the extravagant hype surrounding it. The fossil is important and has a significant place in the evolutionary record, but the way its purchasers and the media have described it with overblown rhetoric has actually damaged public perception. It’s an interesting transitional form from an early point in the history of primates, and the sloppy media coverage had people expecting a revivified Fred Flintstone carrying a video camera that had been left running for 47 million years.

Rapture Ready is hilarious. They are deeply offended that Google used a doodle of Darwinius as their logo yesterday. It’s a sign of the End Times (but then, everything is a sign of the coming rapture to those loons), it’s actually the bones of the Nephilim, and besides, they never use Google anyway, because it’s a liberal search engine. Rapture Ready is always a guaranteed source of insanity.

Ray Comfort focuses only on the hype. The news is reporting Darwinius masillae as the missing link that finally confirms evolution (a claim that all the scientists I know have laughed over), so therefore the evil Darwinists have been lying all this time when they say evolution has been long confirmed. Then he gets to have it both ways by finding a news report that advocates more caution in interpreting the fossil, so — a-HA! — the evilutionists don’t have proof after all! It’s typical Comfort-logic, that is, lunacy.

Answers in Genesis belittles the whole find. It’s only an “extinct, lemur-like creature” that doesn’t even look like a chimpanzee. They also focus on the hype that has annoyed so many of us, citing that horrible Sky News report that claimed “proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution” (how anyone could have written that phrase and still claim to be a science journalist is a bit of a mystery — it’s so bad, it’s not even wrong.) Oh, and its preservation is evidence of a global, catastrophic flood.

It’s really too bad. The media provided a distorted image of the find, aided and abetted by a grandstanding scientist, and now we’re going to hear creationists claiming for years that there wasn’t any evidence for evolution before, and when we did come up with something, it was “just” a dead lemur.

Bad science reporting, even by journalists who seem to be sympathetic to evolution, is destructive to good science. There are about a dozen writers I can find with minimal effort and the assistance of that liberal search engine who need to be taken out to the woodshed. And a certain Dr Hurum has caused a self-inflicted wound to his own reputation, as well.

SciAm, how could you?

As another sign of the ongoing decline of our traditional science media, Scientific American runs a superficial article on plastic surgery with a rather dubious source.

We spoke with osteopathic physician Lionel Bissoon to help us get to the bottom (so to speak) of some of the cellulite hoopla. Bissoon runs a clinic for mesotherapy (injections of homeopathic extracts, vitamins and/or medicine designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite) in New York City, and is the author of the book The Cellulite Cure published in 2006.

Why, SciAm, why?

Also, I had to gag on the guys analysis of cellulite as a modern problem — he look at old photo albums from the 40s-60s, and “women had perfect legs”, despite not having photoshop. Does he really think they didn’t have photo retouching in the days before personal computers? Or that women’s legs have suddenly developed a fundamental difference in the last 50 years?

50 years ago, Scientific American also had a little more rigor.

Daughters need letters

When I teach genetics, I like to pull a little trick on my students. About the time I teach them about analyzing pedigrees and about sex linkage, I show them this pedigree and ask them to figure out what kind of trait it is.

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It’s a bit of a stumper. There’s the problem of variability in its expression, whatever it is, which makes interpretation a little fuzzy — that’s a good lesson in itself, that genetics isn’t always a matter of rigid absolutes. They usually think, though, that it must be some Y-linked trait, since only males (the squares in the diagram) have it at all, and no females (the circles) are ever affected.

Then I show them the labeled version, and there’s a moment of “Hey, wait a minute…” that ripples through the class. Keep in mind that even the science classes at my university contain typically 60% or more women.

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It’s a truly horrible pedigree. Not only is it trying to reduce a very complex trait like “scientific ability” to a discrete character, but its assessment is entirely subjective — a point that is really brought home by pointing out that the pedigree was drawn by Francis Galton, who judged himself brilliant, and that he was evaluating his own family.

The silent tragedy here, though, is all those women judged as lacking in the characters of brilliance and scientific ability. They are rendered as nullities by the prejudices of the time — even if they had shown the spark of genius, they probably would not have been recognized by Galton — and by a culture that wouldn’t have trained or encouraged girls to do more than master needlework and laundry and household management, and would have brought them up to value the fruitfulness of their ovaries over the product of their minds.

Look at all those empty circles. I’m sure some of them had the capacity to be an entrepreneur like Josiah Wedgwood, or an eclectic philosopher like Erasmus Darwin, or a deep and meticulous scientist like Charles Darwin, or even just a successful doctor like Robert Darwin (II-4; not someone I would have characterized as brilliant, and also an indicator of the variety of abilities Galton was lumping together in his arbitrary judgments). Half the scientific potential in that pedigree was thrown away by restrictive social conventions.

That’s the kind of blind bias we have to end, and I think this Letters to our Daughters project is a wonderful idea. Stop pretending the circles are empty, and ask them to speak; color in those circles with talent. If you are a female scientist, or you know a female scientist, write in and set an example, and show the next generation of our daughters that they have a history, too.

You can read the first letter in the project now. I think it needs a few thousand more.

Weekend update

Allow me to recap. Jerry Coyne set a few people on fire with a post arguing that national science organizations have gone to far in blithely conceding the compatibility of science and religion. He strongly suggests that they stick to complete neutrality on the topic, something they all promise to do, but then ignore what they say to tout a philosophical accommodation that doesn’t really exist. He does not argue that they should go the other way and advance an atheistic position (even though we know that that is the only correct stance), but wants them to back off on the misleading happy religion stuff.

Richard Hoppe fired back with a claim that nuh-uh, they aren’t pushing a particular religious view, and besides, we need concessions to religion in order to get along politically…and then he threw in a lot of tactless and politically self-destructive accusations about how ivory tower atheists don’t know a thing about politics or tact.

Of course I responded to that, pointing out in the NCSE’s defense that they are an indispensable element in protecting our classrooms, but that the US is currently deadlocked in the evolution/creationism struggle, and has been for a long time…and that central to the stalemate is our constant abasement to religion. It’s time to stop, and the atheists are the ones who are working to break that logjam. At the same time, I agree that the NCSE, to be politically useful, needs to be neutral on the issue of religion. The problem is that they are not.

Then there was lots of piling on. Check out Russell Blackford’s take, or Wilkins’ mild disagreement. Taner Edis takes a strange position: the incompatiblists are completely right, but we can’t say so. You can guess that Larry Moran didn’t waffle. Unfortunately, Chris Mooney gets it all completely wrong, accusing Coyne of claiming that the national organizations are “too moderate on the extremely divisive subject of religion”, when what he and I are actually saying is the exact opposite — that they aren’t moderate enough, and have drifted too far towards appeasing religious views. I shall repeat myself: no one is demanding that the NCSE and NAS go all rabidly atheist, and we can even agree that a neutral position is more productive towards achieving their goals. The problems arise when they get so entangled with the people they should be arguing with that they start adopting some of their views, and suddenly the science is being compromised to achieve a political end.

Now to make it even more interesting, Richard Hoppe has put up a partial retraction. He concedes that in some cases the NCSE has drifted too far into promoting a particular religious view.

In its Faith Project, then, I think that NCSE has gone beyond its remit and past where it can be effective. I now think — in agreement with Coyne, PZ, and others — that it should back off from describing particular ways of reconciling science and religion. Pointing to religious people and organizations who have made their peace with science and evolution is appropriate, but going past that to describing particular ways of making that peace is a mistake. NCSE ought not wade into theological swamps.

It’s good to see some progress in the argument (and Jerry Coyne sends his regards, too). The ultimate point, I think, is that we all think the NCSE is a marvelous organization — you should join if you haven’t already — but that does not mean it is above criticism, and some of us are seeing signs of the incipient Templetonization of the group, something we’d rather not see happen. If it is to be useful to both the religious and the infidels, it can’t wander too far to one side or the other.

Foot soldiers who lack vision

The NCSE is an excellent organization, and I’ve frequently urged people at my talks to join it. However, it’s also a limited organization, and this post by Richard Hoppe at the Panda’s Thumb exposes their flaws. It’s blind. It’s locked in to one strategy. It’s response to people who try to branch out in new directions is to discourage them, often in a rather patronizing way. This is not a good approach to take when we’ve been deadlocked for years and they offer no prospects for future victory.

I’ve been making the argument for some time that the NCSE is our defensive line, and they are great at that…we don’t want to lose them. In fact, they are so good that we haven’t lost a creationist court case since Scopes, in recent years thanks to the invaluable assistance of the staff at NCSE, and we’ve built up such a body of legal precedent that we can feel fairly secure that they creationists are going to consistently get their butts kicked in the courts (it also helps that the creationists are incompetent at both science and the law). With that success, however, comes complacency and overconfidence and a belief that their approach is is the One True Way…and now, a gradual drift into identifying more with the opposition than with a significant percentage of their own team and their own fans. They also seem determined to ignore reality — we live in a country that is split in the middle on the topic of evolution, and the creationists are not in decline. Victories in the courtroom are not the same as victories in the minds of the population.

Here’s our big problem: we have had no offense at all, and we’re never going to make any progress without one. Keeping the other team from scoring is important but doesn’t win us any games if we can never carry our arguments forward — we’re always being told to stop at the point where we are drawing the logical implications of science and evolution and told to back off…it might alienate the other team. Worse, our defense is then rushing to help the apologetics of the opposition. This is all done in the name of what they call political pragmatism. Always, they say, they have to mollify the religious people on school boards, in government, and the electorate if they want to get anything accomplished; they can’t possibly state outright that evolution refutes most religious views of creation, that science reveals a universe dominated by chance and necessity and natural processes, because, well, they’ll throw science out then.

How patronizing. How condescending. If true, this means that our so-called allies in this fight are actually not — they don’t ultimately want to support science as it actually is, but are instead fishing for scientists willing to use their authority to support the continued dominance of religious thought. And our defenders are happy to give it to them. Is it any wonder that we are making no progress in changing American culture? The ruling ideology would like nothing better than to perpetuate the stalemate, and the leadership of the opposing minority willingly cedes them all kinds of ground in order to maintain what little we’ve got, and never takes a step forward.

How are we succeeding if the only way we can promote our ideas is by hiding the implications of those ideas, and pretending that the antithesis of scientific thought is fully compatible with science? Collaborating with our opponents is not the same as making allies.

And when real allies in the cause of science do show up and try to make a difference, we are misrepresented in order to discredit us. This doesn’t help, either.

I did a 3-Sunday series of talks on religion, evolution, and morality in a local Protestant church recently. Had I walked in there and opened with “OK, folks, in order to understand and accept evolution as I’ll present it today, you have to deconvert” I’d have lost my (overflow) audience in the first five minutes. That would have robbed me of the opportunity to introduce religious people to the power and breadth of the theory and to describe the misconceptions that the fundamentalist Christians have been feeding children and adults in my community.

I’ll have to remember that line. I’ve never started a talk that way myself, even though I have also spoken in churches. Funny thing is, in those situations (as well as in the classroom) I just focus on telling the story of the evidence. That is our strength, right? I don’t have to announce that the Book of Genesis is wrong and silly, but I also don’t have to go out of my way to tell them some pretty excuse to allow them to continue to believe in talking snakes. And if I’m asked, I tell them straightforwardly that literal religious accounts are falsified by the evidence.

I’ve also told them that one factor in my loss of faith was the promulgation of bad interpretations of the Bible that contradicted the evidence of science, and that they were going to drive more intelligent people out of their congregations if they insisted on adherence to falsified ideas. That often seems a more effective and pragmatic approach than pretending they can believe whatever they want and still remain true to science.

I am also amused by the asymmetry of these situations. Francis Collins and Ken Miller can build reputations as public speakers on pronouncements of their faith, yet somehow the atheists in their audiences don’t go running for the doors when they mention god. Are we to assume that Richard Hoppe’s audiences are all weak and stupid, and incapable of coping with anything less than an affirmation of their faith?

I have a little more confidence in them. I wouldn’t start with the ridiculous line he suggested (it’s false, for one thing), but I wouldn’t be at all reluctant to say that science contradicts many interpretations of the audience’s religion, and that if anyone needs to do any accommodation to reality, it’s not us, it’s them. I don’t think anyone would flee; I might get more argument in the Q&A, though, which would be a fine and enlightening thing. I also don’t think that honesty about our differences necessarily makes enemies. I also think that ultimately, it is far more — and here’s a word you’ll rarely hear from me in regards to the foes of science — respectful.

Speaking of respectful, there’s another tactic that the allies of the NCSE have often used against the outspoken atheists in their midst, and it is one guaranteed to piss me off. It is the condescending attitude that they alone are actually doing any work; that the real people are the True Americans of the heartland who don’t have the fancy-schmancy educations and get their hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day work.

I’m one of the foot soldiers in this battle, a sergeant operating in a conservative rural county far from the ethereal heights of the University of Chicago. I’ve been at it (off and on, mostly on for the last 6 years) for more than 20 years. I published my first article on the political nature of the evolution/religion conflict in 1987. I am engaged at the local and state levels, the former on a weekly basis (search this blog on “Freshwater” for local stuff and see here for just one example of State BOE stuff). My political experience goes back to 1968, when I was a big city Democratic party ward officer. I have a hell of a lot better view of what’s pragmatically necessary and what is effective at the level of the local school board and the local church than Coyne can even imagine. Coyne (and Myers and Moran and Dawkins) are not engaged at that level on anything approaching a regular basis. They lead their congregations from high pulpits. They sit above the choir preaching a message that is disconnected from — indeed, sometimes antithetical to — the reality on the ground. They’re the generals who argued against air power, courtmartialed Billy Mitchell, and then watched ships sink at Pearl Harbor. Coyne wants to argue philosophy in a political war. That’s not a tactic, it’s a politically lethal red herring.

Whew. I’m lucky that he didn’t rail against the ethereal heights of Morris, Minnesota, and chose instead to sneer at a great university in a mere working class midwestern city. I might have felt picked upon. I’m also glad he chose not to hurl his contempt using that frequently vilified term, the “elites”, or I might have mistaken the Panda’s Thumb for World Net Daily for a moment. Isn’t it such an American thing, to treat all but the lowest, most local level of action as a liability? To scowl at intellectual expertise as if it were a scarlet letter marking the bearer as worthy of ostracism?

This is another failure of the NCSE. Rather than taking advantage of those voices like Dawkins and Coyne, they neglect them as dangerous and corrupting to their One True Message of the compatibility of science and religion. It’s a shame, too. I have nothing against Richard Hoppe and would agree that his work on the ground is invaluable, but he will not get the audiences and the media attention or spark the discussion and thinking of those “high pulpit” luminaries — and I doubt that he even gets the crowds of the lesser glimmering of a PZ Myers.

A while back, I got the same attitude from Ken Miller in a podcast we did together. At one point he accused me of doing nothing to help science education, and bragged that he was busy criss-crossing Kansas doing talks while I was sitting at my little blog (and also teaching college biology courses, although he didn’t mention that). It was remarkably condescending, and it also ignored the facts: people like Hoppe and Miller and the staff at NCSE have also been busily promoting the idea that atheists like me or Dawkins or Coyne are anathema in the public discourse, since we don’t preach the message of compatibility. I was not giving lectures in Kansas because I was not asked. It was not because I somehow think I am above the fray, or do not value public education as much as Ken Miller; I would enthusiastically take on the foot-soldier role if voices of my kind were not squeezed out of the forum by our own allies. This is why some of us are beginning to express our resentment of the approach taken by the NCSE and its friends: they have chosen as their preferred face of science spokespeople who are not representative of the majority of scientists, and who are definitely not at all representative of the significant fraction of even more militant atheists among us.

Another part of our message is also being ignored and misrepresented, all, apparently, as part of a campaign to make sure atheist voices are kept out of the much-valued “foot soldier” role. As Jerry Coyne has repeatedly said, our grievance is not that the NCSE is an insufficiently atheistic organization. We are most definitely not arguing that pro-evolution, pro-science promoters must be atheists — we are not urging a reversal of the current situation with a boycott of religious speakers, and we do not want NCSE’s help promoting atheism (we are doing a phenomenal job of that already, I can say smugly). We are asking that this pretense that religion and science are compatible, and that the only way to get political support is for the majority of scientists to sit back and shut up about their rational views while the scientists who endorse superstition are propped up as our façade, has got to end. If the national science organizations want to be pragmatic, then stop speaking only favorably of religion. Stop bringing religion up altogether, and stick to the science. Or let godless voices join the chorus.

Richard Hoppe’s complaint did make me laugh aloud at one point, with his analogy to the atheists being the generals who tried to stop air power. He got it backwards. He’s representing a view that wants to keep doing the same thing over and over again, fighting the last court case endlessly, disdaining those radicals who want to shake things up with innovative approaches. I’m sorry, Richard, but the atheists are your air force. We’re going forward with a bold new offense against the regressive forces that have kept this country locked in a stalemate — we are going to change the culture with an aggressive promotion of rational ideas and our ongoing opposition to religious superstition. We like your slow old boats and your foot soldiers, and think they have an effective, even essential, role to play, too — but we’re going to fly with your support or without it.

Get used to it. Of course, we’d be even more effective if we coordinated, rather than that you constantly refused to take advantage of our potential.

Jerry Coyne lobs another bomb at the accommodationists…to the barricades!

It’s another one of those long traveling days for me today. I’m on my way to Oregon (I’m at the airport already, so don’t worry about any more accidents!), so I may be a bit quiet for a while. Which means I should put something here to keep everyone in a busy uproar for a while.

My job is done, and Jerry Coyne has done the dirty work for me. He has put up a long post criticizing the accommodationist stance of several pro-evolution organizations, particularly the NCSE.

Among professional organizations that defend the teaching of evolution, perhaps the biggest offender in endorsing the harmony of science and faith is The National Center for Science Education.  Although one of their officers told me that their official position on faith was only that “we will not criticize religions,” a perusal of their website shows that this is untrue.  Not only does the NCSE not criticize religion, but it cuddles up to it, kisses it, and tells it that everything will be all right.

In the rest of this post I’d like to explore the ways that, I think, the NCSE has made accommodationism not only its philosophy, but its official philosophy. This, along with their endorsement and affiliation with supernaturalist scientists, philosophers, and theologians, inevitably corrupts their mission.

Let me first affirm that I enormously admire the work of the NCSE and of its director, Eugenie Scott and its president, Kevin Padian.  They have worked tirelessly to keep evolution in the schools and creationism out, most visibly in the Dover trial.  But they’re also active at school-board hearings and other venues throughout the country, as well as providing extensive resources for the rest of us in the battle for Darwin.   They are the good guys.

I give it ten enthusiastic thumbs up, not just for the deserved criticism but also for the praise given to the NCSE’s efforts. As Coyne explains, they are trying to have it both ways, arguing that science is a secular enterprise, but at the same time leaning over backwards to incorporate theological arguments, an act of political pragmatism that compromises their mission. It’s a failed strategy that is leading us down a dangerous path — I already feel that there is an unfortunate atmosphere that favors scientists with religious leanings over the more sensible majority.

He also includes a marvelous quote from Charles Darwin. As I’ve said many times, Darwin was not an atheist, but an agnostic, and that he refused to engage in conflict with religion…a sentiment that I think is fair and a personal choice, and one that I think the NCSE wants to follow as well (which I would think is also a reasonable strategy). However, by favoring theism as much as they have, they have broken away from the spirit of that plan.

I entirely reject, as in my judgment quite unnecessary, any subsequent addition ‘of new powers and attributes and forces,’ or of any ‘principle of improvement, except in so far as every character which is naturally selected or preserved is in some way an advantage or improvement, otherwise it would not have been selected. If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish. . . I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

Note that what Darwin is rejecting in that statement is what we now call theistic evolution.

I freely admit to being anti-religious myself, and I would agree that an organization trying to represent all of science and promoting science education does not have to be on the same page with me (and maybe even ought not to be), but the NCSE, NAS, and AAAS have all been erring in the opposite direction, jumping merrily into bed with every evangelical god-botherer who blows them a kiss. If they are going to snub the raging new atheists in the name of religious neutrality, they should be similarly divorcing themselves from Christian apologetics.

Richard Dawkins has weighed in…and asks whether we should take the gloves off in dealing with the accommodationist position. Too late! They’re off!

Larry Moran shares a similar view.

Many people seem to be misinterpreting Coyne’s article — it actually makes much the same point I have in talks over the last year. The science classroom must remain secular — that is, it is not a place to endorse atheism or theism, or for those conflicts to take place. We should be teaching about science and science only, and let the implications of that science on culture be discussed freely outside. Organizations like the NCSE and the NAS and AAAS are supposed to be defenders of that secularism. Nobody is asking them to promote atheism. What we’re objecting to is that they have gone too far in mollycoddling theistic views, and have falsely represented science as being congenial to religious interpretations, to the point where godless explanations are being actively excluded.

I know they have a very narrow path they have to walk to be diplomatic and try to gather popular support for science education. The point is that they are wobbling off the tightrope to court the faithful — and the science they are trying to encourage is looking less and less secular.

A video contest!

Discover Magazine is running a contest: make a video that explains evolution in two minutes or less.

Can you communicate the most important idea in biology, and one of the most controversial ideas in our society, in a mere 120 seconds? Think you can convince even the most hard-headed creationist that Darwin was right? If so, show us–and that creationist–how it’s done.

Your task is to create a video of no more than two minutes that will get the idea and significance of evolution across to an educated lay audience. Along the way, you can touch on points like how evolution works, how we know it to be true, the evolution of humanity, and the future of evolution.

They’ve done this before, with string theory, so you can see examples. You’ve got until 1 June to come up with a scintillating and creative lesson in evolution, so get cracking!

Run for the hills! It’s the Framingstein monster again!

The criticisms must have stung, because Matt Nisbet has put up short replies on Russell Blackford’s and Jerry Coyne’s blogs. Unfortunately, in response to the substantial criticisms of the idea of compatibility between faith and science, Nisbet only offers a feeble and wrong correction to a minor point.

A correction is in order on Blackford’s post. Contrary to his framing, market research was not used to decide the position of the NAS, nor the 20 professional scientific organizations in the editorial at FASEB that endorsed the themes in the booklet. These organizations have had a long standing position on science and religion that has emphasized compatibility. The audience research indicated that emphasizing this long standing position was an effective way to communicate about evolution.

I suggest taking a look at what NAS staffers wrote in an article at Life Sciences Education about how they used public opinion data and evidence-actually listening to their audience-before trying to communicate with them about a complex and sometimes controversial area of science.

The most severe insult offered in this comment is the part where he accuses Blackford of framing. Is that actionable, I wonder? Did Russell weep hot wet salty tears of shame when he was lanced with that horrific rhetorical thrust?

The serious issue he’s addressing is the National Academy of Sciences useful little booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism. When it came out, I said good things about it — it’s a handy short introduction to evolution for the layman. However, it also contained a rather objectionable section that perfectly represents the problem that Larry Moran and I have been complaining about for years, and that Jerry Coyne has recently torn into: it also pukes up a thick wad of partially digested, slimy religious pablum claiming that “Science and Religion Offer Different Ways of Understanding the World”.

You know how much I detest that phrase.

It’s not true, and it’s also unrepresentative — there is a significant (and growing) strain of scientific thought that finds the claim objectionable. That argument is completely omitted from the NAS booklet. As I wrote in my original comment,

Do science and religion offer different ways of understanding the world? Sure. One is verifiable, testable, and has a demonstrated track record of success; the other is a concoction of myths that actually leads to invalid conclusions. Perhaps it ought to be rephrased: science provides one way to understand the world, while religion provides millions of ways to misunderstand it.

What the NAS published contained an intentionally one-sided version of the state of affairs in science — it emphasized only the accommodationist view that religion and science are compatible, soliciting comments on the subject from the usual subjects, people like Collins and Miller and Ayala. These are good people and good scientists, but dear dog, they are a poor reflection of the attitudes of the scientific community. If the only people these organizations ever put up as the face of science were Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, everyone would see the problem immediately…but Collins and Miller have become the reassuring tranquilizing narcotic that scientists fire into the faces of the public, to fool them into thinking that science really doesn’t offer any world-changing perspectives on comfortable old myths.

It’s a lie. Science will make you uncomfortable. It will change your ideas about the universe. It will force you to confront awkward facts and difficult consequences. It is not a balm to reinforce the status quo, and if you try to present it as if it is, you’re doing it wrong.

What does Nisbet offer in his brief reply? His defense is that the NAS did not use market research to define their message. They used institutional tradition (which, I would argue, ought to be more accurately called institutional inertia, and give the strength of creationism in the US, ought to be rejected as a failure), and gives us a link that shows…the NAS used market research in composing the booklet!

It’s not like you have to read between the lines to figure that out. It says it plainly.

…this new edition was shaped to a large extent by a careful program of audience research.

There’s a section entitled “Listening to intended audiences” even. They come right out and say that whole sections were rewritten: they cut out any emphasis on the Dover decision, because, they say, “the public does not readily understand the role of the courts in such matters”. They admit that they expanded the section on science and religion, and solicited statements from various religious denominations and religious scientists. And it repeats something that many people, atheists and theists alike, have been saying is a lie.

It makes clear that acceptance of the overwhelming and continually growing body of evidence for evolution need not be in conflict with religious beliefs for many people.

It “need not”? But it is. This head-in-the-sand approach of pretending that all those fervently-held religions that make anti-evolutionism a central part of their creed is precisely the kind of befuddled and condescending obliviousness that has put us in the situation we’re in right now. Face it. Reality erodes faith-based belief, and science is all about dredging up reality and rubbing your faces in it. Nothing in science supports religious beliefs, and all those acclaimed scientists who are trotted out to issue their homilies about the importance of their faith are operating in defiance of reason.

I would also argue that market research, which is all about tailoring the message to what the audience wants to hear, is antithetical to science, which should be about telling people what they need to know, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them.