Another reason not to waste time debating creationists

Comments are still trickling in and I still get email about this article, where I explain why debate is a poor strategy for dealing with creationists. I definitely don’t argue that we should avoid engaging the public, but that there are a number of reasons why the debate format doesn’t work for resolving conflicts between legitimate science and discredited malarkey. However, I missed one.

Some of you may know that a couple of commenters here resolved to have an off-site written debate on the dependency of the universe’s existence on, specifically, the Abrahamic god. The debate is at the Topical Octagon, but after The Physicist AKA Equus Pallidus put up his first rambling shamble of a post, the debate was terminated for a very common reason: plagiarism.

There is almost no creative, original work on the creationist side. I sometimes wonder if the only reason that ID gets so much attention is that one thing the ID creationists did accomplish was to infuse a collection of new arguments into their side’s corner — over and over again, the same old arguments, even down to the same words, show up in creationist debates. It’s like the scholarly tradition in creationism is a glorified version of cut & paste, lifting paragraphs from other works and stringing them together, and Behe and company at least provided some new source texts from which to steal words.

Although IDists don’t have much new to add. The last talk I heard by Behe was virtually identical, right down to the same old jokes, to the first talk I’d heard from him, ten years before.

What? Royalty doesn’t come with common sense?

Those European countries seem to have relics of old feudal hierarchies still prancing about, which we (and they) mostly seem to ignore except when they do something amusingly silly. The latest royal clown is Princess Märtha Louise of Norway, who is opening an “alternative therapy center,” which is loony enough, but now we learn that this particular center is going to specialize in harnessing the power of angels. She claims she got in touch with the angels through her experience with horses.

I hadn’t known there was a connection. This makes My Little Pony look a little more ominous.

She’s fourth in line for the Norwegian throne. I hope she isn’t applying her wacky quackery to the first three — is this part of a cunning plan?

It’s a Texas Tradition!

How can anyone be surprised at this turn of events? Governor Goodhair of Texas has appointed a flaming, blatant, unashamed creationist and friend of the Discovery Institute, Don McLeroy, to head the Texas State Board of Education. Phil Plait is not amused. But isn’t this part of the grand Republican and Texan tradition of promoting gross incompetence? Isn’t that how we got GW Bush? This is the state of Terri Leo and Mel Gabler. It’s all more of the same.

Texas is going to be soooo interesting in the next year or two. I wonder if this is where the next big court battle is going to occur? McLeroy is just the kind of conservative theocrat who’d provoke it.

The Evolving World

Feeling pragmatic? Is your focus entirely practical, on what works and what will get the job done? Are you one of those fighters for evolutionary biology who waves away all the theory and the abstractions and the strange experimental manipulations, and thinks the best argument for evolution is the fact that it works and is important? This book, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by David Mindell, does make you sit down and learn a little history and philosophy to start off, but the focus throughout is on the application of evolution to the real world. It does a fine job of it, too.

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Who’s smarter than who?

Oh, no, I’m torn — I’m an atheist who thinks IQ tests are over-rated and over-interpreted, and here’s a Danish study that claims that atheists have IQs that average 5.8 points higher than theists’.

Actually, I’m lying and I’m not really torn at all. I don’t buy it. I think IQ tests are loaded with bias that favors a particular kind of thinking, the kind that signals success in academia, engineering, medicine, and so forth, and doesn’t necessarily reflect any specific biological property. It’s fair to say that atheist values parallel the values rewarded by IQ tests, but the simple-minded interpretation that it reflects an actual measure of greater intelligence is unwarranted. Unless, of course, you accept the tautology that intelligence is whatever it is that an IQ test measures.

I do confess that I suspect there may also be a selection effect: simple-minded people are going to be attracted to simple-minded answers, and you really can’t get much more simple-minded than “god did it”. Also, in the absence of a strong godless tradition in the US, your pool of atheists is going to be populated with people who have put a lot of thought into their beliefs, while the pool of theists is going to contain people who have thought about their ideas and a much larger group of people who have simply blindly accepted indoctrination.

Anyway, it’s a much more complicated situation than can be encapsulated in a magic IQ number.

We’re all just slow birds

Next time GrrlScientist comes to visit, we’re going to have to record what she says early in the morning, and then play it back ten times faster — I have a suspicion that we’ll hear birdsong.

At least, that’s the way this video art installation by Marcus Coates works. He had people sing strange little nonsense tunes (you can hear one here) that, when played back at a greater speed, recreated the songs of wild British birds. Why, if GrrlScientist had only talked a little faster, I’m sure the whole house would have sounded like an exotic tropical island inhabited by parrots!

Those savage Humboldt Squid

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These stories about the Humboldt squid invasion off the California coast keep turning up — the latest from the San Jose Mercury News is broadly informative, and even cites a fresh new paper in PNAS. The work correlates the depth range of the squid with that of the Pacific hake, and also shows a rough correlation between the squid population and hake declines over a number of years. This suggests that maybe “invasion” isn’t the right word anymore: the Humboldts are new California residents.

The present situation off central California appears to be that
a physiologically tolerant species with a fast generation time
has moved into a new area during a period of substantial climatic,
oceanographic, and ecological changes. The occupation has
lasted through multiple generations of the invading species, which indicates a sustained population rather than a relict one
or multiple invasions. The geographical range of the invader now
extensively overlaps that of a large commercially valuable fish
stock. If this trend continues, top-down forcing could have a
major impact on the most abundant commercial groundfish
population off the west coast of North America. A similar
pattern may also be taking place in the Southern Hemisphere.

As a past resident of both Oregon and Washington states, which have experienced some irritating invasions of Californians, I have to say … now you know what if feels like, nyah nyah.

The authors also suggest that we may not be able to pin this one on global warming. The overfishing of swordfish and tuna have reduced the effects of these predators of the squid, and now they’re experiencing a bit of a population boom, one that means other animals on the food chain are experiencing some new pressures. Ecology is never simple, is it?

The newspaper article reports that people are fishing for the Humboldt squid, and it’s turning up on restaurant menus in the Monterey area (anyone try it? How is it?), and there are charter boats that will take you squid fishing. If I ever get a couple of days in Monterey, I think I’d like to try that.

(hat tip to Zeno)

Zeidberg LD, Robison BH (2007) Invasive range expansion by the Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, in the eastern North Pacific. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA. July 23, 2007.