A nice, specific request: name a gene that shows no signs of an evolutionary origin.
The argument has long been highly asymmetric. Scientist find a gene, and what do they do? Figure out what it does, and dig into the databases to find its relatives within that organism or in other species. Creationists claim genes can’t be created without the intervention of a designer, and what do they do? Nothing.
Oh, Ben Stein, I shake my fist at you in rivalry. The infamous apologist for Republican criminality, idiotic economics, and creationist inanity got to present a commencement address to a famous university.
As it happens, I’m going to be out of town for a few days now — I’m off to deliver a commencement address myself. Yes, it’s another travel day for me, I’m afraid.
Should I be jealous? Stein got to speak at Liberty University. I’m speaking at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. I might be a teensy bit ahead. After all, this is what Richard Dawkins had to say:
“Many of the questioners announced themselves as either students or faculty from Liberty, rather than from Randolph Macon which was my host institution. One by one they tried to trip me up, and one by one their failure to do so was applauded by the audience. Finally, I said that my advice to all Liberty students was to resign immediately and apply to a proper university instead. That received thunderous applause, so that I almost began to feel slightly sorry for the Liberty people. Only almost and only slightly, however.”
That’s a difference between Stein and myself. I’m the one speaking at a proper university.
Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well.
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.
Pierce then goes through several sublime instances of American Idiocy: the Creation “Museum”, the Terry Schiavo case, the Dover creationism trial, the War on Terror, right-wing talk radio, climate change denialists, the Republican roster of candidates in the last presidential election…it’s terrifying and humbling that this country has so excelled at churning out such appalling stupidity. And, of course, he points out everywhere how our journalists simply gaze on approvingly, churning the chum and making money out of mindlessness. He uses one of my favorite (for a version of “favorite” flavored with schadenfreude) examples, the way the NY Times covered creationism and evolution, and especially that willing palimpsest, Jodi Wilgoren. Wilgoren, by the way, has since been promoted at the Times — I think for vacuity above and beyond the call of duty.
Lest you think Pierce is doing nothing but delivering a thunderation of his own, he also often reveals a fondness for the quirkiness of cranks and kooks — he clearly thinks they spice up American intellectual life. He even starts his book with the tale of a famous local kook, Ignatius Donnelly, a 19th century visionary who founded a utopian city on the banks of the Mississippi…a dream that failed dismally, after which he turned to writing bestsellers about Atlantis and Velikovskian (although he long preceded that crank) cometary catastrophes. He was a crank, but he was an entertaining crank, and most importantly, there was little risk that he could rise to run the country as president.
That’s the heart of the problem. Wild, loony ideas aren’t dangerous in themselves — what’s dangerous is when criticism is set aside and wacky ideas are given unquestioning acceptance and allowed to set the national agenda. It changes the dynamic: no longer do kooks have to work to get their voices heard, but the more insane their claims, the more likely they will be given media attention, promoted and passed around, given the imprimatur of authenticity because, well, Larry King featured them on his show.
What has America become? America has become an episode of The Office, where lovable assholes are put in charge to fumble their way along incompetently, coasting on the slack, disinterested efforts of their underlings. The show is a comedy, and it can be hilarious, in part because there is some stinging truth to it.
You won’t laugh very much at Idiot America, though. It’s too real.
I’ve been doing it wrong. I was looking over creationist responses to my arguments that Haeckel’s embryos are being misused by the ID cretins, and I realized something: they don’t give a damn about Haeckel. They don’t know a thing about the history of embryology. They are utterly ignorant of modern developmental biology. Let me reduce it down for you, showing you the logic of science and creationism in the order they developed.
Here’s how the scientific and creationist thought about the embryological evidence evolves:
Scientific thinking
An observation: vertebrate embryos show striking resemblances to one another.
An explanation: the similarities are a consequence of shared ancestry.
Ongoing confirmation: Examine more embryos and look more deeply at the molecules involved.
Creationist thinking
A premise: all life was created by a designer.
An implication: vertebrate embryos do not share a common ancestor.
A conclusion: therefore, vertebrate embryos do not show striking resemblances to one another.
I like the title of this post: Texas School Board votes on the age of the Universe. In case you were curious, the board decreed 11:3 that maybe it isn’t the age all those egghead physicists, geologists, and astronomers say it is.
VenomFangX is one of those semi-legendary creationists, one so inane that it’s hard to believe. He had a website where he kept all of his ridiculous youtube videos, but it’s about to disappear. If you go there now, this is what you’ll see:
Oh, wow, that’s going to leave a psychological scar.
As long as we’re talking smack about creationists, don’t forget to click on this link and help me win an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind. Click it lots.
The smug and rather imbecilic face in this video belongs to Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, who was interviewed on a conservative talk show, Fox & Friends. Watch it at your peril. Like the recent Matthews/Tancredo incident, it’s two people who know nothing about science babbling at each other.
At the beginning, the host says,
Your main problem with science books is that they take a one-sided look at evolution.
No one seems to notice that this is a show that claims to be examining a “white-hot controversy” with one guest discussing only the Discovery Institute’s position. Hmmm.
Luskin parrots a couple of Discovery Institute talking points, and he lies, lies, lies. He claims all the biology textbooks are completely wrong, and that all they want is for good science to be taught. His evidence? The first thing he talks about is Haeckel’s embryos, and repeats the oft-told canard that Haeckel’s embryos are presented uncritically — that they are fraudulent, the biologists know it, and they still use them.
Oh, dog. Not again. I have been all over the Haeckel story so many times. It’s not true: relatively few textbooks use the Haeckel/Romanes diagram, and when they do, they present it in a historical context. And the Discovery Institute doesn’t object to the obsolete figure itself, since they also castigate textbooks that use photos of embryos. Vertebrate embryos at the phylotypic or pharyngula stage do show substantial similarities to one another that are evidence of common descent. That’s simply a fact. The creationists are just frantic to suppress that piece of information, I guess.
The second piece of ‘evidence’ Luskin throws out is another one that pisses me off: he cites the New Scientist article that claims Darwin was wrong! I told you all that we were going to be seeing a lot of quote mining of that blatantly misleading cover — as I also told you, they ignore the content that says the opposite, and they ignore the strongly worded rebuttals that scientists have published. New Scientist has a lot to answer for; these creationists are desperately mendacious and will be flaunting that rag at us for years to come, claiming that New Scientist has shown that Darwin’s tree of life is all wrong, yet we still keep teaching it.
Luskin’s new twist is that “when you look at one gene, it gives you one version of the tree of life, and when you look at a different gene, it gives you an entirely different tree of life”. Of course, if you actually read the NS article, it’s about horizontal gene flow in bacteria making the root of the tree of life more syncytial, saying nothing about the variation you get when you look at single genes. Luskin’s argument is completely bogus. It’s like saying that when we look at the history of the English language and pluck out one word, it may have a different etymology and rate of change than another, therefore English could not have evolved.
Luskin has had this stuff explained to him repeatedly, and it never sinks in…or more likely, as a dishonest propagandist, he chooses to disregard all the demonstrations of the problems with his claims. How he can accuse scientists of peddling fraudulent evidence when he sits there and lies nonstop is beyond me.
Chris Matthews, who has lately been hammering the Republicans for their problem with science in general and evolution in particular, had a guest on to ‘debate’ the issue: Tom Tancredo, the ignorant Republican congressman who ran for president in the last election, and was one of the candidates who proudly announced that he did not believe in evolution. It was awful. Two people who know nothing about the science babbling at each other. While Matthews’ heart might have been in the right place, he was more interested in stammering out apologies for believing a god might have guided evolution, and sat their stunned and incomprehending as Tancredo blithered out falsehood after falsehood. Tancredo was simply inane.
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What an appalling waste of time. At one point, the two were proudly comparing their backgrounds in science — they both went to Catholic schools as kids. In other words, all the knowledge they have is based on the brief high school level exposure to evolution they might have gotten 30 or 40 years ago, and both have gone on in careers where they’ve never had to think about science again. Why are they debating evolution with one another, and why does MSNBC think this tripe is worth airing to a national audience? Both were out of their depth.
Matthews should have brought on someone qualified to address the topic. We have a host of smart scientists who seem to be fairly comfortable standing before a lay audience and explaining the basics of evolution: bring in Eugenie Scott, Neil Shubin, Jerry Coyne, Kevin Padian, or even Ken Miller (especially if you want to go over and over that nonsensical line that god did it via evolution): any one of them would have destroyed Tancredo. Or even me: I don’t have the prestige of any of those luminaries, but even a guy from a small liberal arts college can demolish Tancredo’s awful arguments.
So what did Tancredo claim?
“There’s Darwinian evolution, and there’s Intelligent Design…the one is equal to the other in terms of the number of people who support it in terms…especially of their backgrounds and the research out there.” Absolutely false. If you go to any biologist, there is maybe a one in a thousand chance you’ll find that he or she gives even a moment’s consideration to intelligent design. ID is a fringe theory held by a tiny minority of scientists. The number of IDists in biology is probably about equal to the number of kooks who have made it through graduate school. To claim parity is simply a damnable lie.
“Crossing a species there is no evidence of that you have to make an assumption. I’m just saying that assuming that is just as tough as assuming that there is intelligent design.” No. We do of course have direct evidence of interspecies hybrids, if that’s what he’s talking about; we also have evidence of species evolving into new species, if that’s what he’s trying to say. His conclusion is sloppy thinking: it is easier to assume natural processes occurred than to postulate magic events without evidence. At least for a scientist, that is — deranged right wing politicians may differ.
“In intelligent design, there is no argument about whether the world was made 8 thousand or 8 billion years ago.” This is a symptom of a problem, not a virtue. The evidence is overwhelming that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Any so-called scientific discipline that believes there is ambiguity and that 8 thousand years is just as good a guess as 8 billion is bankrupt.
“You can see on the micro level we see evolution but we cannot make the assumption on it about the macro level cause there’s nothing there to look at, we have no scientific data.” I have a special level of contempt for people who make this bogus macro/micro level argument — they always get it backwards. Macro evolution is on rock solid ground, and has been for 150 years. Darwin’s work was largely on a macroevolutionary level: the evidence from paleontology, biogeography, systematics, comparative anatomy and physiology, and embryology, all disciplines that Darwin drew upon, describes the big picture of life’s history, and shows common descent. In recent years, molecular biology has provided an even greater body of evidence; where Darwin had to speculate that maybe there were multiple origins for the different kingdoms of life, we now know that they can all be traced back to one common root. When a developmental biologist compares the molecules behind the evolution of eyes in a sea anemone and a cow, he is describing macroevolution. We have scientific data out the wazoo on this one.
In Darwin’s day, micro evolution was the wobbly leg of the structure of evolutionary theory. He didn’t have an explanation for heredity. That has also changed, of course: we now have a robust understanding of genetics, and especially of population genetics. Speciation is complex and there are all kinds of details that we don’t fully understand, but it also is not doubted by scientists.
“Here’s a group of people highly educated, well rounded, and well respected in their field who believe in evolution, Darwinian evolution. Here’s a group of people, highly respected, who believe in intelligent design. These are two theories.” The people who believe in intelligent design do not have any kind of parity with the proponents of evolution. Few IDists have any training in the relevant biology; most are philosophers, theologians, lawyers, engineers, and dentists, among other fields. The few who do have legitimate qualifications in any kind of biological sub-discipline, like Michael Behe, are either pariahs in their own departments or have to seek shelter under the umbrella of conservative think tanks, like the Discovery Institute.
And no, they are not two theories. Evolution is a legitimate theory in the scientific sense: it is well supported by the evidence, and provides a productive, integrated, explanatory framework that guides ongoing research and ties together a large body of data. Intelligent Design creationism does not qualify as a scientific theory at all. At best, it is a highly speculative hypothesis, one assembled without any reasonable evidence, and so far it has been a spectacular failure at provoking any useful research.
Tom Tancredo is an ignorant old fool who knows nothing and simply puked up creationist talking points. Chris Matthews also knows nothing and was a lousy representative for the scientific view. The whole show was pointless, except as an aid to creationists who want to sow doubt and confusion.
Chris Matthews ask Representative Mike Pence a simple question — “Do you believe in evolution?” — and Pence spends 5 minutes squirming avoiding giving an answer. He changes the subject repeatedly, to global warming and stem cells, and tries to pretend that the Republican party doesn’t have a serious problem with an anti-science agenda, which he himself is demonstrating.
I have to commend Matthews, too: he bulldogs that question and won’t let it go. Let’s see more of that from our media, please.
I guess we have our own little anti-blasphemy principle operationally at work in the US. Look what can get you in trouble with the law now:
A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled today.
James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, was found guilty of referring to Creationism as “religious, superstitious nonsense” during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan.Â
I am astounded that Corbett was found guilty of anything.
First of all, he told the truth: creationism is religious, it is a product of superstition, and it is nonsense — it doesn’t fit any of the evidence we have about the history fo the world or life on it. We have to have the right to tell students not only that something is wrong, but that it is stupidly wrong.
Secondly, we are being told over and over again that Christianity is not equivalent to creationism. This teacher has specifically said that creationism is nonsense, and this judge has equated a dismissal of a weird anti-scientific belief with making a rude remark about Christianity. So…where are all the Christians rising in outrage at the slander of their faith?
Thirdly, and this must be said, Chad Farnan is a self-righteously moronic creationist wanker who deserves to have his stupidity pointed out publicly, in the classroom and out of it, far and wide. Spread the word.
