Score one for the good guys

Actually, score two.

Not only did Mike Huckabee finally bow out of the race for President last night (so I won't have to move to Canada), but a creationist was defeated for a spot on the Texas school board also. Barney Maddox, an avowed creationist, would have tilted the board of education towards insanity (see Time for more details), but his challenge was held off by the moderate incumbent, Patricia Hardy, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram:

Social conservatives failed in their attempt to take control of the State Board of Education on Tuesday when incumbent Pat Hardy of Fort Worth retained her seat against a challenge from Cleburne's Barney Maddox.

Hardy, a career educator, has been a moderate voice on the board. The 15-member body still shows a close ideological split, but Hardy has helped keep it on a straight path.

Maddox's entry in the race had set the stage for debate over the scientific theory of evolution, which he has described as "fairy tales." Hardy took a better course: Teach kids about all theories, she said, from creation to evolution, and give them enough information to make up their own minds about what to believe.

She's wrong about teaching all theories especially where one has no evidence to back it up and one has the full support of the entire scientific community, but it does preserve the teaching of evolution in the state, which had been under fire, and it's better than the alternative.

Science Education in the US

While we're on the subject of ignorance (see the last post), The Washington Post had an editorial this week on the "Dumbing of America":

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

They posit a number of reasons for this (and to my mind, they focus a little too much on the internet killing newspapers, but they are a little biased!), but the bottom line is correct.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism. (emphasis mine)

So what do we do about it? Well, the presidential campaign isn't helping - candidates are pandering to the lowest common denominator, as usual. We need to elevate the debate, focus on where we're losing out as a nation, where we're letting down today's kids - tomorrow's scientists who will drive the future of this country. Sciencedebate2008 is one place to start, but we also have to push at the grassroots level - at the local school board level, at the state government level to make sure that we're not left behind.

There was one glimmer of hope this week - Florida adopted new science standards that include the word "Evolution" for the first time, despite the pleas of the religious right who pushed to have creationism taught alongside science:


There's a story on the vote here.

Happy Darwin Day!

Couldn't pass up the opportunity to wish the big guy, over there on the right hand side of this blog, a happy birthday. He's 199 today!
From the Darwin Day Website:

Darwin Day is an international celebration of science and humanity held on or around February 12, the day that Charles Darwin was born on in 1809. Specifically, it celebrates the discoveries and life of Charles Darwin -- the man who first described biological evolution via natural selection with scientific rigor. More generally, Darwin Day expresses gratitude for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.

There's plenty of events being run around the world, so go ahead and party - but don't forget to leave something in reserve for his 200th next year!!

Sanity in the Media.

The New York Times wrote a nice piece yesterday on the film "Expelled" - a controversial work which sets out to establish that scientists who promote "Intelligent" Design are being ostracized from academia.

What's interesting here is not the old re-hashing of discredited ideas, or even that Ben Stein narrates, or even that there's such a controversy about how real scientists like Dawkins, Eugenie Scott and PZ Myers were misled into being interviewed for the film (see here for some background), no.

What's really interesting that this is the first time in a long time that I can remember that the mainstream media hasn't pandered to every crackpot idea under the sun. It's refreshing to read that:

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.” (emphasis mine)

Finally! The Times has the guts to call it like it is.

Life, but not as we know it...

Life will find a way. That's the message from a new study in the New Journal of Physics that posits lifelike structures may form from inorganic substances in space. An international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organized into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

Computer models were created to predict the behaviors of inorganic molecules in a plasma, a state of matter common in space where electrons are torn from atoms leaving behind charged particles. As the plasma becomes polarized as the charges separate, the molecules self-organize into corkscrew structures. These structures are also charged, and attract one another. But there's more:

...they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

According to V.N. Tsytovich of the General Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Science in Moscow, working with colleagues in Germany and Australia:

"These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".

Finding life that evolved in a completely different way from life here on earth would be a huge step forward, and further refutes the arguments of creationists. It opens doors to contemplating myriad forms of life in the universe, in many different environments, and makes the discovery of life more probable outside of a narrow range of conditions on earth-like planets. Stay tuned!

BBC Horizon - War on Science

For some reason, this video made it to the front page of Digg today, even though it's over a year old. Still, it's an excellent overview of the "debate" between Evolution and Intelligent Design, including all your favorite good guys like Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough. Horizon begins by going into detail about Intelligent Design, before demolishing the arguments pretty thoroughly. I found the full video on Google Video.


I'm not sure anything this in depth or well done would make it onto TV here in the US.

Evolution in the Times

The New York Times today devotes it's entire Science section to evolution - and not a creationist nut in sight! It's a good read, and should send those folks over at the Discovery Institute into a frenzy, although I'm sure they'll be able to quote-mine as usual.

One of the things I find most interesting is that the science continues to evolve (pun intended!). As new discoveries come to light, the theory is constantly being refined and updated, and old ideas are tossed aside if they don't fit the facts - see this article for an example. This is, obviously, the complete opposite of creationism.

Science and Religion in America

I found an interesting post over at Marginal Utility last week, dissecting data from the General Social Survey about belief in science among Americans. In the post, scientific knowledge is broken down by religion, on a range of "controversial" (in the sense that deniers don't want to believe the evidence) scientific subjects. For example, here's the one on evolution:What it clearly shows is that as religious belief become less fundamentalist, scientific understanding grows. Much of this may be due to the lower schooling standards in the parts of the country where fundamentalist protestantism is ascendant, and it points up the growing divide in the U.S. regarding science and reason on one hand, and religion on the other.
As an aside, I recently saw a review of an interesting new book "Deer Hunting with Jesus" by Joe Bageant:

From the Amazon review:

After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a “dirt-poor” childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas. Nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, and many have no health care. Credit ratings are low or nonexistent, and alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.

I think that description applies here - poor families with no education and no future are the backbone of the fundamentalist faith, so it's no surprise to see results like these.

Even more astounding, only 40% of fundamentalist protestants believe the Earth orbits the sun in one year. That's less than half. Frankly, I think this may invalidate most of the rest of the data, because even for those with no religious affiliation, the numbers are only around 60%, which clearly indicates to me that most Americans are unqualified to answer questions on any scientific topic. It does however seem to me that on the whole, those people categorized as having no religious affiliation, or those who are jewish or catholic, are more highly educated and open to scientific reason than fundamentalist protestants.

Ham-fisted science

Sorry for not blogging for a while - I've been away on business with only limited connectivity (how is that even possible these days?!).

Anyway, I wanted to weigh in on the whole Creation museum issue. For those of you who've been living under a rock recently, the Creation Museum in Kentucky is designed to show the literal biblical view of creation. It's great if you think the Flintstones is a documentary.

Lawrence Krauss, the noted theoretical physicist, debated the museum's founder, Ken Ham last night on Fox. Here's the clip:



Krauss has also posted an article that lays out the facts about the age of the Earth, and let me tell you, it doesn't add up to 6000 years.

The media has, surprisingly given the museum pretty much a free pass. I won't bother to go into details here (you know who you are, and I'm looking at you, NY Times). At least the LA Times has done a much better job of reporting on the Yabba-dabba science.

The museum, a 60,000-square-foot menace to 21st century scientific advancement, is the handiwork of Answers in Genesis, a leader in the "young Earth" movement. Young Earthers believe the world is about 6,000 years old, as opposed to the 4.5 billion years estimated by the world's credible scientific community. This would be risible if anti-evolution forces were confined to a lunatic fringe, but they are not. Witness the recent revelation that three of the Republican candidates for president do not believe in evolution. Three men seeking to lead the last superpower on Earth reject the scientific consensus on cosmology, thermonuclear dynamics, geology and biology, believing instead that Bamm-Bamm and Dino played together.

If you want a (very) detailed rebuttal, Pharyngula has a creation carnival that's a must read.

Here's the deal. $27 million was pumped into this travesty of science. That's $27 million that could have gone into helping the cause of science education in this country, or providing clean drinking water for the poor in Africa for example - that would be a much more Christian activity.

Good science education is under attack from all sides, and as a start, let's use the opening of this "educational" "museum" to go to our local school boards and make sure good educational standards for science are enshrined in their teaching guidelines. And look out for those Flintstones documentaries!

Conservatives and Darwin

Well, they're at it again: Blaming Nazism and Communism on Darwin, and this time, The New York Times is responsible for regurgitating the same old, thoroughly debunked story. In a May 5th story, George Gilder is quoted as saying:

Skeptics of Darwinism like William F. Buckley, Mr. West and Mr. Gilder also object. The notion that “the whole universe contains no intelligence,” Mr. Gilder said at Thursday’s conference, is perpetuated by “Darwinian storm troopers.”

“Both Nazism and communism were inspired by Darwinism,” he continued. “Why conservatives should toady to these storm troopers is beyond me.”

Aside from the obvious (The Communist Manifesto was written 11 years before Origin of Species), and the fact that Stalin actively suppressed Darwin's ideas in the 1950s, there are clearly more important motivations for communism than Darwin. It's like saying that both Stalin and Hitler had a mustache, so all people with mustaches are clearly mass murderers. It's nonsensical.

As for Nazism, Hitler certainly did not need Darwin's science to come to the idea that certain unfavorable traits could be removed from a population by selective breeding; that realization stretches back through thousands of years of human civilization. Take a look at dog breeders, farmers, even pigeon fanciers, who have bred out unfavorable traits for thousands of years. Darwin may may have formalized the knowledge in science, but here was no "secret" truth that Darwin alone came upon. Hitler's atrocities came about because he identified ethnic origin as an unfavorable trait, and sought to use the force of government eradicate the Jewish people, leading to the holocaust. The idea that natural selection ought to be government policy simply doesn't originate in Darwin. Darwin identified a natural process, a process that works all on its own.

Now, the story is actually about a larger split amongst conservatives about how to approach evolution and Darwin. The argument is outlined below:

For some conservatives, accepting Darwin undercuts religious faith and produces an amoral, materialistic worldview that easily embraces abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other practices they abhor. As an alternative to Darwin, many advocate intelligent design, which holds that life is so intricately organized that only an intelligent power could have created it.

Yet it is that very embrace of intelligent design — not to mention creationism, which takes a literal view of the Bible’s Book of Genesis — that has led conservative opponents to speak out for fear their ideology will be branded as out of touch and anti-science.

Some of these thinkers have gone one step further, arguing that Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and that natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.

The bottom line here, however, is that both sides of the debate seem to be missing the point (emphasis mine):

To many people, asking whether evolution is good for conservatism is like asking if gravity is good for liberalism; nature is morally neutral. Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard and Carson Holloway in his 2006 book, “The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion and the Future of Democracy,” for example, have written that jumping from evolutionary science to moral conclusions and policy proposals is absurd.

As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true.

And that's the key thing. Science isn't political, it's just a set of theories that hope to describe what we see around us, and allow us to make predictions about what will occur in the future. It's got nothing to do with politics, and shouldn't be used as a measuring stick to hold up against political ideologies.

Republican Debate

Nice to see most of the Republican field came down on the side of rationality last night, despite what must have been overwhelming pressure to pander to their religious nut-job base. John McCain was asked whether he believed in evolution (the entire transcript is here):

MR. VANDEHEI: Senator McCain, this comes from a Politico.com reader and was among the top vote-getters in our early rounds. They want a yes or on. Do you believe in evolution?

SEN. MCCAIN: Yes.

MR. VANDEHEI: I’m curious, is there anybody on the stage that does not agree -- believe in evolution?

(Senator Brownback, Mr. Huckabee, Representative Tancredo raise their hands.)

SEN. MCCAIN: May I -- may I just add to that?

MR. VANDEHEI: Sure.

SEN. MCCAIN: I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.

Update: Here's a link to the video of the exchange (at Crooks and Liars)

I think it's a pretty good sign when most of the candidates, despite potentially alienating their base vote, came down on the side of science, although McCain was clearly nervous about it - hence his lame "but I still believe in God!!" response when he felt that the answer might not go over well with the religious right.

For the others, I wonder just how deeply they've studied the evidence. Not very, would be my guess. You'd have gotten the same response from them if the debate was in 1407, not 2007. It's called progress, people.

Unbelievable.