Royal Society statement regarding Professor Michael Reiss

Michael Reiss has resigned from his position as the director of education of the Royal Society.

Some of Professor Michael Reiss’s recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society’s Director of Education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the Society’s reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the Society, he will step down immediately as Director of Education a part time post he held on secondment. He is to return, full time, to his position as Professor of Science Education at the Institute of Education.

The Royal Society’s position is that creationism has no scientific basis and should not be part of the science curriculum However, if a young person raises creationism in a science class, teachers should be in a position to explain why evolution is a sound scientific theory and why creationism is not, in any way, scientific.

The Royal Society greatly appreciates Professor Reiss’s efforts in furthering the Society’s work in the important field of science education over the past two years. The Society wishes him well for the future.

The second paragraph above is a short, clear outline of how creationism should be handled in the classroom. Reiss may have been trying to say the same thing, but unfortunately his words got all tangled in the appearance of an unwarranted accommodation to creationism.

Richard Dawkins responds:

Although I disagree with Michael Reiss, what he actually said at the British Association is not obviously silly like creationism itself, nor is it a self-evidently inappropriate stance for the Royal Society to take. Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who ‘respect’ creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to respect ignorance or stupidity. The accommodationists include such godless luminaries as Eugenie Scott, whose National Center for Science Education is doing splendid work in fighting the creationist wingnuts in America. She and her fellow accommodationists bend over backwards to woo the relatively sensible minority among Christians, who accept evolution. Get the bishops and theologians on the side of science — so the argument runs — and they’ll be valuable allies against the naive creationists (who include a worryingly high proportion of Christians and almost all Muslims, by the way). No politician could deny at least the superficial plausibility of this expedient, although it is disappointing how ineffective as allies the ‘sensible’ minority of Christians turn out to be. The official line of the US National Academy, the American equivalent of the Royal Society, is shamelessly accommodationist. They repeatedly plug the mantra that there is ‘no conflict’ between evolution and religion. Michael Reiss could argue that he is simply following the standard accommodationist line, and therefore doesn’t deserve the censure now being heaped upon him.

Unfortunately for him as a would-be spokesman for the Royal Society, Michael Reiss is also an ordained minister. To call for his resignation on those grounds, as several Nobel-prizewinning Fellows are now doing, comes a little too close to a witch-hunt for my squeamish taste. Nevertheless — it’s regrettable but true — the fact that he is a priest undermines him as an effective spokesman for accommodationism: “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he!” If the Royal Society wanted to attack creationism with all fists flying, as I would wish, an ordained priest might make a politically effective spokesman, however much we might deplore his inconsistency. This is the role that Kenneth Miller, not a priest but a devout Christian, plays in America, where he is arguably creationism’s most formidable critic. But if the Society really wants to promote the accommodationist line, a clergyman is the very last advocate they should choose. Perhaps I was a little uncharitable to liken the appointment of a vicar as the Royal Society’s Education Director to a Monty Python sketch. Nevertheless, thoughts of Trojan Horses are now disturbing many Fellows, already concerned as they are by the signals the Society recently sent out through its flirtation with the infamous Templeton Foundation.

Accommodationism is playing politics, while teetering on the brink of scientific dishonesty. I’d rather not play that kind of politics at all but, if the Royal Society is going to go down that devious road, they should at least be shrewd about it. Perhaps, rather than resign his job with the Royal Society, Professor Reiss might consider resigning his Orders?

I particularly like that last point. Dawkins and I are both often slandered as being relatively uninterested in promoting good science education, preferring to fight the culture war against religion (a claim that ignores the fact that we may feel strongly that the only way to achieve a lasting investment in understanding science is by reducing the pernicious influence of religion) — we are told that we think atheism more important than science. Let us ask, though, if these brave paladins of Jesus-compatible science would be willing to set aside their religion to better endorse science…and I think we all know what the answer would be.

Palinology

Get ready for more fallout over Sarah Palin, who seems to be even crazier than I thought. There was an attempt to rehabilitate her from the accusations of pushing creationism recently, but the counterclaims got the facts all wrong. They claim that she only said that schools ought to “debate both sides,” but that’s the creationist position — pointing out that she was reciting creationist slogans does not somehow get her off the hook. And then there’s this litany of eyewitness stories from residents of her home town, who seem to be cheerfully trotting out to stick a knife in her campaign.

At one point during the hospital battle, passions ran so hot that local antiabortion activists organized a boisterous picket line outside Dr. Lemagie’s office, in an unassuming professional building across from Palmer’s Little League field. According to Bess and another community activist, among the protesters trying to disrupt the physician’s practice that day was Sarah Palin.

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'”

Spare us. That’s crazy talk.

Another revelation: remember all the Republican buzz about “small town values“, and how Palin invoked them in her speech? The source for her quote has been tracked down, and it isn’t pretty, but it is fitting for a Republican thug.

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous “writer,” which is to say, Pegler, who must have penned that mellifluous line when not writing his more controversial stuff. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin “hit the wrong man” when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt.

This Pegler fellow has quite a reputation for fascist rhetoric:

He was also known for what Philip Roth described as his “casual distaste for Jews,” which had become so evident by the end that he was bounced from the journal of the John Birch Society in 1964 for alleged anti-semitism. According to his obituary, he’d advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were “instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared.”

And Robert Kennedy Jr has grounds for finding Palin’s choice of sources distasteful.

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies.”

Jebus. What has Sarah Palin been reading in order to get her political education?

The only good news I’ve seen so far: The biggest political rally in Alaskan history was an anti-Palin demonstration. Not that the news media will cover it.

I despise quote-miners so much

We got one in the comments, a pompous ass named Darin Reisler who popped in to announce of evolution that “When the evidence is looked at beyond the surface level- it fails,” and to back this up he offered a string of quotes from “prominent evolutionists”.

Man, Darin is a contemptible liar, and incompetent on top of that. It’s one of the things that annoys me most about creationists: they are anti-scholars, people who lie and distort to reinforce prior erroneous conceptions, and they really think they’re scoring points by pretending that great minds in biology agree with them, when they don’t.

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Dazzling the innumerate

I was sent the following argument by email.

A new breed of ID is in the process of supplanting the former fact-free versions on U.S. university
campuses. The new breed looks like this (from recent lectures on several University of California
campuses):

The following design argument does not require evolution to produce a specific result. It calculates the probability that evolution reaches a certain level of biological complexity (measured in terms of the number of protein-coding genes) and compares this probability with the number of trials available for evolution to that level.

Any of the thousands of extant vertebrate species possesses at least 10,000 more protein-coding genes than the primordial single-celled organism from which all these vertebrate species evolved. Thus, at least 10,000 protein-coding genes must have been added during the course of vertebrate evolution. Assuming that the probability is 10-3 that a new gene useful for vertebrate evolution came into existence, the probability that evolution just happened to produce any one of the vertebrate species is 10-3 multiplied by itself 10,000 times, which equals 10-30,000.

To avoid concluding that God exists, 1030,000 evolution-supporting planets must now exist or have existed in the past, which requires: (A) a single large universe with that many planets, each of which exhibits some stage of evolution from the primordial soup up to vertebrates, or (B) nearly that many small universes, each of which has a few such planets, or (C) a small universe with a few such planets that had undergone nearly that many Big Crunches and subsequent Big Bangs. Regarding (A), only a few hundred extra-solar planets have been detected so far. Since it becomes more difficult to detect a planet the further from the earth it is, we can safely conclude that there is no way that even an insignificant fraction of 1030,000 evolution-supporting planets will be detected within the next few decades. The speed at which light reaches us and the speed at which electrons move through semiconductors in our computers impose fundamental limits on the speed at which even the best equipment can operate. Suppose this equipment can identify a new planet every pico-second (10-12 seconds), which is an outrageous rate far beyond present or conceivable technology. This still means that we must wait 1029,980 years to identify the number of planets needed for the chance hypothesis. Regarding (B), the unambiguous detection of a few other universes is presently considered difficult work, if it can be done at all, not to mention observing life on planets within those universes (Aguirre A. et al, “Towards Observable Signatures of Other Bubble Universes,” E-published 20 September 2007, Physical Review D.). Even if we had equipment capable of identifying a suitable planet in another universe every pico-second, we would still have to wait 1029,980 years to verify the existence of the number of evolution-supporting planets required for the chance hypothesis. Regarding (C), even if each pico-second we could verify that our universe had, in the past, undergone a cycle of Big Crunch and subsequent Big Bang, we would still have to wait 1029,980 years to verify the existence of the number of cycles required for the chance hypothesis. This means that the chance hypothesis is effectively unverifiable.

It’s pathetically bogus. Shall we take it apart?

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What I hear when creationists speak

I like it. This is a perfect analogy to creationist argument.

The theory of childhood, also known as child origin, is a damnable, loathsome and indefensible lie. How can any thinking person suppose all humans used to be babies once?
There is no development path from babies to adults, no transitional forms between these two species. Show me even one baby with the head of a grown man on his body. Can you? No? Not even a bearded toddler? No adults with unfused skullbones, outside unfortunate disorders? Not even a tiny little newborn girl suddenly sprouting a respectable bosom? You can’t find them, because they don’t exist. There isn’t a single transitional form between children and adults, and you will never find one because the theory simply is an unscientific lie.

The development of children has been well-researched in our six-month study following a sample of one thousand children and adults of various ages. We have conclusively proven that while there are minor changes in features like height and body fat, and replacement of deciduous teeth with permanent teeth, incontravertibly still every creature in the study that started out as a child had only slightly more adult features at the end of the observation period than at its beginning. Children and adults are separate kinds and there will never be sufficient changes to change one into the other. We reject any evidence from longer-term studies as we believe the laws of physics have changed within the last year.

To claim people come from children is demeaning and morally degrading. We have observed how children behave. If we acted like small children we’d all be demanding and impatient, and we’d be cheating, lying, and stealing from each other all the time. If the theory of childhood were true there would be no morality, and with no morality to build one on, no society. Childhood is a wicked lie used by charlatans to justify evils such as public schools.

There is no consensus on the theory of childhood in the scientific community. We should teach the controversy. Our children will be served well to learn that the prospect of them becoming adults is merely a theoretical idea. Many children come from families that do not subscribe to the theory of childhood, and they could be disturbed if the theory were taught as fact.

(via)

A story, continued

When we last saw our intrepid (and inebriated) pair of godless ladies in Seattle, they had just buzzed the Discovery Institute’s door and been admitted by the ever-eager Casey Luskin. Now read about how Luskin protects them from the Terrible Annika, and then, after getting loaded down with free propaganda, learn a deep dark secret from Luskin: Judge Jones, the infamous trial judge in the Dover case, wasn’t a real Christian. Lordy. No wonder he was in the pocket of the ACLU, the devil’s own lawyers.

Poll…but you’ll have to see Ken Ham’s homely face to do it

This is a danged ugly poll, accompanying an interview with the slimy Ken Ham. It asks,

Regarding creation and evolution, I believe:

The universe was created in six days as described in Genesis.

Evolution is true, but God began and/or directs it.

Evolution is true, and religion has nothing to do with it.

Answer 2 is winning, with answer 3 dead last. Can you all fix that, please?

And the right-wing calliope plays on…

Cindy McCain is not running for high office, fortunately…but this still seems to be the predominant attitude among the Republican leadership.

Couric: How do you feel about creationism? Do you think it should be taught in schools?

McCain: I think both sides should be taught in schools. I think the more children have a frame of reference and an opportunity to read and know and make better decisions and judgments when they are adults. So, I think you know I don’t have any problem with education of any kind.

What about miseducation, Ms McCain? Do you have a problem with that? Apparently not.

(via Atheist Media Blog)