Hawaii is a beautiful place until the lava starts flowing.

That’s me! Today was our last day of classes, and rather than me doing the work of teaching, I invited Ken Miller to do it for me over Google.

I should have thought of this months ago — let’s see, 15 weeks, 3 classes a week, I could probably find 45 friends willing to cover for me for a day each.

David Berlinski! Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. He appeared on Fox News last night, with his standard air of disaffected ennui to explain science to Mark Levin. It was a series of own goals.

He has little regard for science — they’re all shallow thinkers. That’s why they’re all atheists, who regard 5,000 year old religious traditions with contempt. He explains what he knows about the academy, which isn’t much, and portrays us all as people who go around sneering at religion. Well, I do…but I’m not at all representative. If I were to interrupt a committee meeting with complaints about the pervasive religiosity of the community I live in, that would be discouraged — we’re supposed to be reality-based, so the question would be about how we can adapt to the reality of our situation, how can we get along with our neighbors, and generally getting specific about our opinions on religion while carrying on our academic business is considered a faux pas. That goes for someone promoting a religion as well as for someone promoting no religion.

Berlinski then accuses scientists, and especially atheist scientists, of being shallow thinkers. That, I think, is generally true of everyone: we work in our little niche, and sometimes some of us poke our heads out and try to explore other ideas more broadly, but we each have our domains of expertise and tend to focus on those. But Berlinski goes further, and wants to proclaim the facts of science as inadequate because they aren’t wrapped up in enough philosophical baggage. For example, he says that the hypothesis that we are nothing but cosmic accidents has been widely accepted by the scientific community, and that is true — people have been looking for a teleological cause for centuries, and failing, while stochastic explanations for physics, chemistry, and biology have been succeeding wonderfully. In the absence of a cosmic plan, we have to accept that we are cosmic accidents.

I think that has significant social and moral and psychological explanations that ought to be explored further. Most scientists don’t worry about it; their job is to accurately describe reality, now let others figure out what it means. That’s not shallowness — science requires a great depth of knowledge — but only specialization. The thing is, if you’re going to claim scientists haven’t done a great job of fitting their answers to the greater puzzle of culture, neither have those advocates for 5,000 year old religious traditions. And the religious advocates have a more challenging job of propping up ideas that are demonstrably wrong and fly in the face of the observed facts.

Berlinski also can’t avoid elitism and lying about the science. Levin makes a mind-bogglingly stupid comment about climate change: they can’t tell us the temperature next week within ten degrees but they can tell us within a degree what it will be in a century, which is a goofy way of confusing local weather with global climate. Berlinski has a unique way of addressing the evidence of climate change: well, the “top physicists” aren’t studying climate change. Berlinski dismisses studies of the climate with I’m talking about top physicists, to get to climate change we all have to go down that ladder all the way down to the bottom. Then he claims that all those petty little substandard physicists who call themselves climatologists are all squabbling with one another with inconsistent results.

Then he gets to what Levin calls “Darwinianism”.

Here’s Berlinski’s arguments: he invents a series of just-so stories. Why did the giraffe develop a long neck? Because he wanted to reach leaves at the top of the trees. (That, by the way, is no element of any modern evolutionary explanation — he seems to be reaching back to vague memories from grade school of 18th century explanations). Why aren’t women born with tails like cats? Women don’t seem to need them, even though it would make them more alluring. He expresses every bit of biological diversity as a matter of whim and personal preference. He explains the problem: the anecdotes pile on interminably, and there’s no fundamental leading principle. Oh, nonsense. Berlinski invents anecdotes, and then uses his ignorance of the mathematical principles underlying, for example, population genetics to claim that population geneticists are just sitting around inventing myths.

He’s an annoying and pretentious kind of fool. He needs to fly back to France and disappear again, because he’s too out of touch to be able to contribute anything to any discussion except for his cultivated air of superciliousness. Which, I will admit, he has honed to razor sharpness. Too bad there’s no substance at all behind it, and that he is such a shallow thinker.

Actually, everything is. Evolution is inescapable.

I should warn you: I’ve submitted DNA samples to both the National Genographic project and to 23andMe. As we’ve just learned, that means the police can use that data to connect DNA samples collected at crime scenes to my relatives, which means they have a lead to you even if you haven’t given a DNA sample. Honestly, if I do have any criminals in the family, I would kind of hope they could stop you with that information.

However, I don’t remember giving the police permission to use my genetic information — it was probably buried in tiny print somewhere in an agreement I signed. That’s a bit troubling. OK, a lot troubling. Now I’m wondering who else has access. So, if there’s a disease-associated trait somewhere in my background, are the insurance companies going to knock on the door of my second cousins somewhere and announce that they now have grounds to suspect that there is a medical problem lurking in their genome, and they’d better cough up some increased rates?

The New Yorker has a wonderful story about Rachel Carson which points out that we ignore most of her writing. She’s most famous for Silent Spring, which of course I’ve read, but much of her prior work was about the sea and the shore, which I have not. I guess I’m going to have correct that deficiency.

It also fills in many biographical details about her life, which was full of family responsibilities and struggles. My respect for her keeps going up and up.

I have to highlight one detail, though. After Silent Spring, this quiet, private woman who was dying of cancer (and refused to mention it in public), was savagely targeted for harassment by the American chemical industry. Remember this if anyone tries to tell you that science is not political.

“What she wrote started a national quarrel,” “CBS Reports” announced in a one-hour special, “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” in which footage of Carson was intercut with footage of government and industry spokesmen, to create a de-facto debate. (Carson refused to make any other television appearance.) In the program, Carson sits on the porch of her white-railed house in Maine, wearing a skirt and cardigan; the chief spokesman for the insecticide industry, Robert White-Stevens, of American Cyanamid, wears thick black-framed glasses and a white coat, standing in a chemistry lab, surrounded by beakers and Bunsen burners.

Whoa. Caricature much? White coats & beakers, the trappings of scientism. I am amused, and appalled.

White-Stevens questions Carson’s expertise: “The major claims of Miss Rachel Carson’s book, ‘Silent Spring,’ are gross distortions of the actual fact, completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence and general practical experience in the field.”

Carson feigns perplexity: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”

White-Stevens fumes: “Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist believes that man is steadily controlling nature.”

Stop right there. White-Stevens is simply wrong — that is a horrifying attitude to take, that rather than existing as a part of nature, humans are responsible for controlling nature. I can’t imagine any modern biologist taking White-Stevens position, in part thanks to Rachel Carson.

You can now watch the whole 1963 program, thanks to the intertubes. It’s not a pleasant experience: there’s a train of expressionless, somber white men all positively asserting that all of the chemicals they’re spraying across the landscape are harmless, that they have been thoroughly tested and do no harm to people at all, which is not particularly reassuring coming from people who think all of nature is to be brought under their control.

Watch for the scene where White-Stevens is lecturing at a lectern, and the camera pans to the audience…which consists entirely of men in crewcuts, white shirts, and/or ties. There are also scenes where the defenders have to reluctantly admit that widespread pesticide use sometimes damages the environment — they talk of streams full of dead fish, and one says that he’s seen the elimination of 80% of the wildlife in some areas. Watch the whole thing and it gets more and more clear that the overuse of pesticides has led to serious effects on animals at concentrations far lower than the industry endorses. White-Stevens does not come out of this looking good.

Rachel Carson, on the other hand, is magnificent. She doesn’t get enough air time.

Note that this was all before the EPA was established, which the current administration is trying to destroy.

Feeling so inferior right now.