Let’s bring back barber-surgeons

Spot is quoting Kevin Phillips and his new book, American Theocracy(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). He’s describing the stagnation of scientific progress in the West when religion set its heavy hand on learning.

Symptom number two [referring to attributes regimes that become increasingly theocratic], related to the first, involves the interplay of faith and science. What might be called the Roman disenlightenment has been well dissected in Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind (2002). He dwells on how Rome’s fourth- and fifth-century Christian regimes closed famous libraries like the one in Alexandria, limited the availability of books, discarded the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy, and embraced the dismissal of Greek logicians set forth in the gospel of Paul [well, there is no gospel of Paul, but never mind]. To Freeman, the elevation of faith over logic stifled inquiry in the West- leaving the next advances to Arab mathematicians, doctors, and astronomers-and brought on intellectual stagnation.” It is hard,” he wrote, “to see how mathematics, science or associated disciplines that depended on empirical observations could have made any progress in this atmosphere.” From the last recorded astronomical observation in 475, “it would be over 1,000 years-with the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in 1543-before these studies began to move ahead again.”

Keep that in mind while reading Orac’s discussion of creationists in medicine. It’s depressing that such an important and respected profession is overrun with shortsighted ignoramuses.

You can be an adequate doctor and be a creationist: you don’t need to understand evolution to follow your training and cut out a gall bladder or give an injection or diagnose a known disease. It just means that you will follow by rote the procedures of your predecessors. The practice will stay the same, but progress will stop. We will fall once again into the situation Phillips describes (although I suspect our successors will emerge from Farther Asia this time around.)

Orac talks about some of the reasons why it’s difficult to get doctors to be solidly and openly on the side of good science, but I think it’s essential for the prestige and future advancement of the medical profession that more of them think about correcting this failing in their training policies. Are they to be smart, flexible, adaptive, creative, and intellectual people striving to understand the workings of the human body, or is it enough to be a collection of technicians who know how to manipulate the tools of their trade? What makes a doctor different from a chiropractor if neither are to be rooted in good science?

Death of science by multiple organ system failure

Science fairs usually have a few pleasant surprises, a lot of ho-hum projects done by rote with little thought (sometimes clearly done the night before), and a few stinkers that reveal nothing but the student’s ignorance. The science teachers are supposed to screen the project proposals to prevent that from happening, though, so the really bad projects usually don’t get through. There’s also a hierarchy: local to county or regional to state, and only the best are supposed to progress. State science fairs usually have some very impressive work and some that might be naive, but at least the student has enthusiasm. This description of a state level science fair project is disturbing, not just because the student’s work was substandard, but because it somehow made it through what should have been multiple levels of screening.

Then I saw it. “Creator or Not? YOU DECIDE”

The title claimed we could decide, but the project left no room for vacillation. It started with a hypothesis that “The universe was created by an intelligent designer.” It went on to make the standard big number argument, and closed with the conclusion, “The universe was created by an intelligent designer.”

The big number argument: there are twenty amino acids. The average human protein has around 460 amino acids in it. Thus the number of possible combinations is a huge number. The age of the universe in seconds likewise is a huge number, but less huge than the number of possible amino acid combinations. Thus you would have to have been randomly generating these protien chains at the rate of bunches every second from the Big Bang to now before you got human protein chains. Clearly that didn’t happen; therefore, an intelligent designer did it. Quod erat demonstratum.

That’s extremely distressing. It’s sad that some kid has such a poor knowledge of logic and evidence, but it is even more troubling that the educational system has rotted out so much that shoddy work like that can actually advance that far. We should worry about individuals, of course, but this is a sign that the educational infrastructure that leads to good scientists isn’t working—there was a complete failure from parents to science teacher to fair judges, and all of those people ought to be ashamed of themselves. This is not how we get kids into the Siemens Westinghouse competition.

(via The Scientific Activist)

No sense of humor

Connie Morris is the lead creationist kook on the Kansas state board of education. She recently took a tour of a middle school and was horrified at the depravity on display:

State Board of Education member Connie Morris took exception Wednesday to a picture of a made-up creature that satirizes the state’s new science standards hanging on a Stucky Middle School teacher’s door.

Fellow board member Sue Gamble told The Eagle that Morris asked for the picture to be removed.

It was a picture of…The Flying Spaghetti Monster!

You know, when word gets out that pictures of noodles and meatballs get Connie Morris all twitterpated, there is going to be a thousand of these blooming on school teachers doors now. Especially since, when Morris asked the principal to have it removed, the teacher was advised that a school board member had no jurisdiction on the matter…and the picture is still up.

Dead Cat Museum builds silly arguments

Logic and knowledge are a couple of things creationists are lacking. I’m surprised at the fate of the corpse of that poor cyclopic kitten:

A one-eyed, noseless kitten that stirred debate last year over whether it was a hoax will be the centerpiece of a new museum intended to promote the theory of creationism.

John Adolfi plans to feature Cy’s remains at The Lost World Museum when it opens later this year. The Phoenix, N.Y., museum will feature such oddities as giant plants and eggs, deformed animal remains and unique archaeological finds, he said.

Adolfi believes in creationism—a literal reading of the Bible’s story of creation.

He wrote on the museum’s website that the theory of evolution states that “environmental pressures can lift species from the ape-like creature … to us today. My question is this. Are there really positive mutations?

“All I can see are neutral or negative,” said Adolfi, a real estate agent from Granby, N.Y.

Wow. So many errors in so few words. Holoprosencephaly, the defect in that kitten, is not usually caused by a mutation. It’s a developmental abnormality caused by a failure of anterior midline signaling. I’ve mentioned before that I do some work on making cyclopic fish, and I can induce it routinely with embryonic alcohol exposure. If Mr Adolfi is paying good money for one-eyed oddities, I can provide him with bucketsful.

It’s not a mutation, so Cy says nothing about the frequency of negative mutations. Even if it were a consequence of a mutation, an example of a deleterious mutation does not mean there are no beneficial mutations.

There is an interesting coincidence here, though. I looked up the Lost World Museum, which is going to be housing the dead cat (there is something quite appropriate about that. “Centerpiece of Creation Science Museum: Dead Cat.”), and learned that it’s a branch of Bibleland Studios. Bibleland Studios is the publisher of…the amazing Jim Pinkoski! Poking around on their site, it looks like one reason they like the cyclopic cat is they believe it backs up the argument from asymmetry, that animals had to have evolved from one-eyed to two-eyed forms, and that the one-eyed form is not viable.

Maybe it does make a little sense, as long as you understand they’re basing their science on a comic book and the misunderstandings of a real estate agent.

(via God is for Suckers)

Complex biochemical systems slap Behe upside the head

Ian Musgrave does a wonderful job explaining the recent Science paper on the evolution of hormone binding sites. This is the work that Behe has called “piddling”, and claims that it has no relevance to the evolvability of complex biochemical systems. Ian takes this idea apart with a quick tour of the wandering goalposts of irreducible complexity:

Behe and the Discovery Insitute have reacted quickly and negatively to this paper. But in doing so they display a curious amnesia. Behe says:

I certainly would not classify their system as IC. The IC systems I discussed in Darwin’s Black Box contain multiple, active protein factors. Their “system”, on the other hand, consists of just a single protein and its ligand.”

Yet this “system” is precisely the thing that Behe uses in his exemplar for the Behe and Snoke paper, the binding of DPG to haemoglobin. And Behe has said in testimony to the Dover trial that the Behe and Snoke paper on evolution of binding sites is about irreducible complexity. So if the evolution of the DPG binding site (where you only need two mutations to make a functioning DPG binding site) is an example of IC, then the evolution of the aldosterone binding site is also.

Poor Behe. The man continues his ever-accelerating slide into the land of pathetic jokes.

Make-work for creationists

Creationists are always carping about that darned methodological naturalism and how we don’t make room for supernatural explanations. How about if we make a deal: we’ll reserve the boring ol’ natural explanations for things like Tiktaalik, and the creationists can move on to bring their deep knowledge of the supernatural to bear on more relevant questions, like Divine Evolution? That should keep them occupied for a while.

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Now they’ve done it—they’ve got the Royal Society angry

There will be a webcast by Steven Jones tomorrow at 1730 GMT, titled “Why Creationism is Wrong and Evolution is Right” (ooo, nice sharp title), for anyone interested. I think that means it’s going to be on at 11:30AM CST, unfortunately…I’ll be in class. Even though I’m going to have to miss it, it sounds like the Royal Society is gearing up to pound on creationism, which is always a good thing.