Witless wanker peddles pablum for CFI

It looks like Michael De Dora is calling me out. The wishy-washy, sloppy-thinking director of the NY CFI, whose main claim to fame lately is a series of blog articles notable only for their fuzziness and willingness to accommodate any nonsense from religious BS artists, is now taking me to task for my post arguing that the Tennessee case of a creationist objecting to a textbook calling creationism “the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days” was a) an example of a true twit peddling ignorance, and b) that the textbook phrasing was accurate and justifiable.

De Dora disagrees. He thinks it is inappropriate for a biology text to directly address a damaging social trend that is hurting the teaching of science — and that we shouldn’t refer to religious stories as myth. He even has the gall to call what he wants to promote a “science only approach,” and in a remarkably weasely bit of wording, tries to imply that I think that just teaching science would “negatively impact the quality of public school education”. Interesting move. Sometimes, lying about your opponent’s position does work.

But he forgets what we’re fighting against.

Why is it that our biology classes — or even public schools in generally — must reject religious beliefs to educate children? I think we will find that, even if decided that our children would be better off hearing critique of their parents’ religious beliefs, this question is irrelevant, as according to our laws we cannot do such a thing. In turn, the answer seems to be that we should ensure our high school science teachers are instructing students on how to think like a scientist, and imparting to students the body of knowledge scientists have accrued (and that all of our teachers generally are doing similar in their respective fields).

Oh, let us confine our discussion to the nebulous vagueness of “religious beliefs”, that we may continue to pretend that charlatans are not lying to our children. There should be nothing special, nothing privileged about calling a falsehood a “religious belief”. When religious ideas directly contradict the scientific evidence, we must be able to point out that they are wrong…and please note, the textbook in question did not even slam creationist foolishness that hard, but merely pointed out that it is the product of a religious myth.

This isn’t simply about religious freedom. It’s about a loony-tunes popular bogosity that explicitly claims the earth is 6,000 years old and was created in six days, both assertions false, unsupported by any credible evidence, and contradicted resoundingly by the body of evidence discussed in the textbook. Those are “beliefs” that must be rejected by any scientist, by any textbook purporting to describe how science works and what conclusions it reaches — anything less is cowardly intellectual dishonesty.

i-1dedeecd642589de98491a43a8261698-religious_principles.jpeg

I am not opposing a “science only approach”. I am saying that a science only approach has a story to tell that must contradict the ridiculous myths our Sunday schools are feeding our children. We don’t need pablum-pushers like De Dora helping the pious frauds further gut our science curricula.

I haven’t even reached the worst part of De Dora’s quisling approach. He has a footnote.

It is important to note that creationism and related ideas like intelligent design do belong to the field of religion, not science; they are theology and philosophy (bad theology and philosophy, but that’s another matter). Hence, science cannot reject them in full — for how does the scientist answer the claim that God made it look like there’s been evolution, and that we are merely natural products, to test our faith? Or that God has been the hand behind the process of evolution? A scientist must here put on the philosopher’s cap to continue.

Great. Creationism? Can’t criticize it in our science classes. Somebody says the universe appeared magically a few thousand years ago, I guess that has to be a valid answer on the test question, “How old is the universe?”. To actually state that it is about 14 billion years old, and make such an answer a necessary part of the student’s grade…why, that is philosophy or theology, and not to be discussed in science class.

And here’s ever-helpful Michael De Dora, reassuring the creationists that “science cannot reject [their ridiculous ideas] in full”. Thanks heaps. Did I mention “cowardly intellectual dishonesty”? Yes, I did. And that’s what De Dora is endorsing.

And a special thanks to CFI. What the hell were they thinking when they gave this milquetoast marshmallow a soapbox? Does CFI stand for the Church of Fatuous Incompetence now?

Let’s hide that embarrassing conflict in American culture

i-024386b5e6ebd393af1c6383a3124484-badstats.jpeg

For many years, the NSF has been producing a biennial report on American attitudes (and many other statistics) about science called Science and Engineering Indicators. This year, as they have every year, they got the uncomfortable news that a majority of our compatriots reject human evolution and the Big Bang (that last one might have been partly because of the dumb way the question is phrased). What’s different, though, is that for the first time the NSF has decided to omit the fact.

This is very strange. It is a serious problem in our educational system that so much of the public is vocal in their opposition to a well-established set of ideas — these ought to be relevant data in a survey of national attitudes towards science. Why were they dropped? It isn’t because of an overt whitewash to hide our shame away, it seems — instead, it sounds like it’s an accommodationist’s discomfort with highlighting a conflict between religion and science. At least, that’s how I read the excuses given. John Bruer, a philosopher who led the review team on this section of the report, is open about his reasoning.

Bruer proposed the changes last summer, shortly after NSF sent a draft version of Indicators containing this text to OSTP and other government agencies. In addition to removing a section titled “Evolution and the Big Bang,” Bruer recommended that the board drop a sentence noting that “the only circumstance in which the U.S. scores below other countries on science knowledge comparisons is when many Americans experience a conflict between accepted scientific knowledge and their religious beliefs (e.g., beliefs about evolution).” At a May 2009 meeting of the board’s Indicators committee, Bruer said that he “hoped indicators could be developed that were not as value-charged as evolution.”

Bruer, who was appointed to the 24-member NSB in 2006 and chairs the board’s Education and Human Resources Committee, says he first became concerned about the two survey questions as the lead reviewer for the same chapter in the 2008 Indicators. At the time, the board settled for what Bruer calls “a halfway solution”: adding a disclaimer that many Americans didn’t do well on those questions because the underlying issues brought their value systems in conflict with knowledge. As evidence of that conflict, Bruer notes a 2004 study described in the 2008 Indicators that found 72% of Americans answered correctly when the statement about humans evolving from earlier species was prefaced with the phrase “according to the theory of evolution.” The 2008 volume explains that the different percentages of correct answers “reflect factors beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science.”

George Bishop, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio who has studied attitudes toward evolution, believes the board’s argument is defensible. “Because of biblical traditions in American culture, that question is really a measure of belief, not knowledge,” he says. In European and other societies, he adds, “it may be more of a measure of knowledge.”

I’ve emphasized the key phrases in that summary, and actually, I rather agree with them. These are issues in which ignorance isn’t the fundamental problem (although, of course, ignorance contributes), but in which American culture has a serious and active obstacle to advancing scientific awareness, the evangelical stupidity of religion. That is something different from what we find in Europe, and it’s also something more malevolent and pernicious than an inadequate educational system.

It seems to me, though, that that isn’t a reason to drop it from the survey and pretend it doesn’t exist and isn’t a problem. Instead, maybe they should promote it to a whole new section of the summary and emphasize it even more, since they admit that it is an unusual feature of our culture, and one that compels people to give wrong answers on a science survey.

Maybe they could title the section, “The Malign Influence of Religion on American Science Education”.

I also rather like the answer given by Jon Miller, the fellow who has actually conducted the work of doing the survey in the past.

Miller believes that removing the entire section was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment. “Nobody likes our infant death rate,” he says by way of comparison, “but it doesn’t go away if you quit talking about it.”

Exactly right. But if we do talk about it, we end up asking why it’s so bad, and then we make rich people squirm as we point fingers at our deplorable health care system. And in the case of the question about evolution, we make religious people, and especially the apologists for religion, extremely uncomfortable, because they have been defending this institution of nonsense that has direct effects on measurable aspects of science literacy.

Unfortunately, Bruer has also been caught saying something very stupid.

When Science asked Bruer if individuals who did not accept evolution or the big bang to be true could be described as scientifically literate, he said: “There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution,” adding that such questioning has led to improved understanding of evolutionary theory. When asked if he expected those academics to answer “false” to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: “On that particular point, no.”

What was he thinking? The question on the NSF survey is not asking about details of the mechanisms of evolution, so his objection is weirdly irrelevant. I don’t know if he’s hiding away any creationist sympathies (that phrasing is exactly what I’ve heard from many creationists, after all), but it does reveal that he’s not thinking at all deeply about the issue. And for a philosopher, shouldn’t that be a high crime?

Bhattacharjee Y (2010) NSF Board Draws Flak for Dropping Evolution From Indicators. Science 328(5975):150-151.

Stop using the lens of your preconceptions

Well. There’s another paper out discussing science blogs, which is a good thing, I suppose. I just find the conclusion a bit disappointing. Bora has an exhaustive dissection, and both The Panda’s Thumb and Cosmic Variance have briefer (they’d have to be! Bora got loquacious) discussions of the topic.

Where the author loses me is with this summary.

To become a tool for non-scientist participation, science blogs need to stabilize as a genre or as a set of subgenres where smaller conversations may facilitate more meaningful participation from members of the public. Science bloggers need to become more aware of their audience, welcome non-scientists, and focus on explanatory, interpretative, and critical modes of communication rather than on reporting and opinionating.

We don’t need to ‘stabilize’ on anything: the virtue of this medium is unfettered diversity. Pharyngula is not to everybody’s taste (really!), but is just right for some others — the wonderful part of the science blogosphere is that we have so many different ideas bouncing around out here. Why, there are even people who disagree with me!

I also think I am pretty aware of my audience, and if you look at the comment threads here, they aren’t just scientists. This is the gladiatorial arena of the science blogosphere, and we don’t restrict attendance to the prissy ol’ patricians — everyone likes a good bloody rhetorical battle now and then. I know my readers like it when the bestiarii take on those animals, the creationists, and they also like the gladiatorial competitions between equals. And then we often break into homilies and tutorials. If that isn’t appealing to a wide audience, I don’t know what is.

I can’t help but think that the author had some preconceptions about how a science blog should be (which usually means antiseptic, pure, aloof, esoteric, and technical) and found that they are rarely that way at all. And was a bit disappointed.

Now the climate scientists get to suffer with the framing wars

I got so sick of dreary beancounting communications ‘experts’ telling me that we need to avoid fighting creationists … because the magical drone of framing was going to make everyone happy and persuade the jebus-loving ignoramuses that evolution was good. There are signs that these parasites are moving on now — to climate science.

Oh, great. Here’s a potentially greater material problem for us than even the sad state of science education, and now the good-haired knob-polishers are moving in to dispense their advice of indolence and tone. Dot Earth has an exchange between Matt Nisbet and Randy Olson on tactics. Nisbet does his usual blame-the-scientists routine, arguing that we out to lie back, shut up, and let the Expert Communicators smooth over public sentiment. Randy Olson is basically fed up with the faceless, passionless passivity that these guys insist is the scientist’s only allowed role.

So I’m tired of the lack of leadership and the overly academic analysis of what are the actions of basically thugs. You guys keep working on the polling data — that’s good and is equally important. But in the meanwhile, I am dragging people like Marc Morano out into the light of day for the community to get a good look at who he is, what motivates him and exactly how his technique manages to be so increasingly successful.

…

I wish it were as simple as just analyzing the situation endlessly and eventually coming up with some cool and subtle strategy where nobody ever had to get dirty. But I’m afraid there’s going to be a lot more Climategates in the near future.

I wish I could say I’m pleased to see these useless weasels have been drawn away from the science education problem, but it seems they’ve just decided to plague another science issue that needs strong activism, rather than feel-good puffery.

Sins of omission

The other day, I got a request for an interview: a reporter was writing a story about Ken Miller. I was happy to do so — this was clearly going to be a friendly piece about Miller, and I thought it was good that he get some more press. I talked on the phone with this fellow for 20 minutes or so, and I told him what I thought: Miller is a smart guy, a great speaker, a hardworking asset to the people opposing creationism, and I also said that his efforts to squeeze religion into science were ill-founded and badly argued. I said, “It’s an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline with foolishness.”

Guess what the only quote to make it into the article was?

Yeah, it turned out to be a crappy atheist-bashing article. It wasn’t enough to talk about Miller’s good work and the respect he gets from others — no, it had to be turned into a fight, with poor Miller unable to win because he’s being “attacked by Darwin-hating fundies and leftie atheists alike,” and the New Atheists are the primary villains of the piece. The more complex story I tried to tell got discarded, and only one short sentence made it to the final result. I must have been a major disappointment to the reporter, since I didn’t give him much in the way of vicious attack-dog quotes.

He also got a little bit from Jerry Coyne. Again, it’s clear but temperate stuff. The story really does not have anything to justify the claim that we’re out to get Miller, or that the New Atheists are somehow in symbiosis with fundagelical loons.

“By discussing science and religion together and asserting that science more or less points you to evidence for God, he blurs the boundaries between science and faith,” says Coyne, “boundaries which I think have to be absolutely maintained if we’re going to have a rational country and we’re going to judge things based on evidence rather than superstition.”

I agree completely with that — Miller does blur the lines in very silly ways. The article even reiterates Miller’s notorious explanation from his book, Finding Darwin’s God, and obliviously confirms Coyne’s point by approvingly citing the way Miller mingles nonsense with science.

But the cell biologist also makes explicitly scientific arguments: maintaining, for instance, that quantum indeterminacy — the ultimately unpredictable outcome of physical events — could allow God to intervene in subtle, undetectable ways.

This sort of sly intervention, he argues, is vital to the Creator’s project: if God were to re-grow limbs for amputees, for instance — if God were to perform the sort of miracles demanded by atheists as proof of his existence — the consequences would be disastrous.

“Suppose that it was common knowledge that if you were a righteous person and of great faith and prayed deeply, all of a sudden, your limb would grow back,” he says. “That would reduce God to a kind of supranatural force . . . and by pushing the button labeled ‘prayer,’ you could accomplish anything you wanted. What would that do to moral independence?”

That is not a scientific argument in any way—I guess the reporter was fooled by the flinging about of “quantum”. All that is is tired old post hoc theological apologetics without a hint of evidence to back it up.

Nowhere anywhere in the article is any reasonable support for the notion of a god, nor especially of any peculiarly Catholic deity. Of course there isn’t, because he doesn’t have any.

What he does do, again, is try to throw atheists under the bus. It’s more bullshit about how science has to compromise with the public’s version of spiritual superstition, rather than remaining true to the evidence.

But Miller rejects any suggestion that the science in his work suffers when he brings in the spiritual. And he argues that the New Atheists, in their forceful rejection of God, are doing damage, in their own right, to a scientific brand already under assault.

…

Indeed, Miller argues that the creationists and New Atheists are in an odd sort of symbiosis — reinforcing each others’ extreme views of the incompatibility of science and religion.

Well, fuck that noise.

The New Atheists are as much a force in opposition to creationism as is Ken Miller; more so, I would argue, because we don’t make fuzzy, muddled compromises with absurd medieval humbug. Even if he disagrees on that last point, his constant efforts to belittle the atheists on his side in this struggle, to repeatedly argue that they are a detriment to science education, is getting tiresome. Miller wants to turn the pro-evolution movement into a stalking horse for Catholicism, while his godless colleagues have repeatedly stated that we want no endorsement of religion or atheism in science education. The only one doing damage to the “brand of science” is the guy with pitiful idea that god is noodling about at the quantum level in ways that are completely undetectable — he wants to claim that he has an invisible dragon in his garage, and what’s more, that that claim is scientific.

Remind me, next time I’m asked about Ken Miller, that I shouldn’t bother to say anything appreciative. It will be ignored and won’t be reciprocated. And I’m not going to endorse his crusade to taint science with supernaturalism.

ChatRoulette used in a science-affirming way

Have you heard about this strange new web service, Chatroulette? It makes webcam connections between random pairs of people with the idea that it’ll spark interesting conversations. I like the idea, but I haven’t tried it yet myself because a) I’ve heard that mainly what you get is pathetic exhibitionist men who aim the camera at their crotch, or b) people who want to chat about sex and flick past anyone who isn’t pretty enough (I think I’d be subject to rather rapid dismissals), and c) I DON’T HAVE TIME TO CHAT RIGHT NOW. MUST WRITE.

However, here’s an interesting use of the service: this fellow would flash the video, The Symphony of Science at people with a request to give a thumbs up for science. Look, it worked! This video is totally safe for work.

Earlier reports about ChatRoulette had given me some misgivings about humanity, or at least the male half of it. This video makes me feel a little better about it.

You mean the accommodationist debates aren’t over yet?

I bumped into Chris Mooney a couple of times this past weekend at ScienceOnline 2010. I tried to talk to him — I honestly don’t have any personal animosity to the guy — but he was mostly rather dour, and the most I got out of him was a claim that the arguments will start up again soon, when the paperback edition of his book comes out. I tried not to roll my eyes and say that no, we’re pretty much through with his book now (see how nice I am in person?). Anyway, he didn’t seem to be very happy any time I saw him, but maybe he was much more cheerful when I wasn’t in the same room.

He’s still trying to stir up the same foolish dead accommodationist debate, though, and while I don’t want to waste any more time on it, since I was the target of much of the complaint before, I thought I’d at least point you to Larry Moran and Sean Carroll and Jerry Coyne. I agree with their take on it. Battle it out on their blogs, just for fun.