Category: Creationism • Culture Wars • Policy and Politics
Richard Dawkins has a new book out – for kids no less – and Casey Luskin is on the case. Luskin, you'll recall is the Disco. 'tute's chief pettifogger (in the classical sense), and his tendency to work himself into uncanny heights of excitement over every new creationist argument has earned him the affectionate nickname "fainting dachshund."
Dawkins's book is about myths, how we tell stories to explain things, but that sometimes those stories aren't true, and how science offers a way to tell stories that are true, and how kids can tell the difference. It's got lovely illustrations by Dave McKean, and there's an excerpt of The Magic of Reality available at NCSE's website.
Casey has many objections, but perhaps his most entertaining charge is that the book is simply too scary even for nominal grownups like himself:
One odd aspect of the book is its apparent obsession with occult-style images. A friend and I went through The Magic of Reality and together we counted over a dozen pages with pictures of demons, devils, and the like. The one above [a dragon merging with an airplane -JR] is pretty tame compared to other stuff in the book. These aren't cute cartoony-devils -- they're probably enough to give the average kid nightmares. And I say this as someone who loves sci-fi / fantasy media and has a pretty strong stomach for this sort of thing.
Depending on your ideological leanings, right now you might be thinking either "Sweet!," or "Uh, that's a little weird." As much as I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, I'm definitely leaning toward the latter end of the spectrum. After all, if you wanted to give your kid a fun book about science, why would you want it to be full of creepy pictures of demons and devils? I'm also left wondering: Why is Dawkins apparently so obsessed with occult topics and iconography?
I had a copy of the book at hand, so I checked it out. Unless you count a drawing of a fairy godmother and some Norse and African gods, I can't see how you'd say there are demons or devils on over a dozen pages. I counted 4 pages with devils on them, and those were fairly tame. Why does Dawkins include drawings of deities and spirits from other cultures? Because he's writing a book about myths, and deities and spirits are central to most myths.
If anything, the drawings of people are scarier than the drawings of the mythic beasts. The magicians Penn and Teller are shown in the midst of their famous bullet-catching trick, with smoke still rising from the gun in Penn's hand. The Amazing Randi is shown riffling a deck of cards, with a glint in his eye that would give Old Nick shivers. But these are humans, and indeed quite friendly ones.
I don't know what science fiction Casey reads or watches, but a bit of scary imagery is par for the course. The Lord of the Rings books involve orcs and sorcery and Balrogs and elves and the Nazgûl, and a higher density of gruesome death than anything Richard Dawkins has offered.
Indeed, I'd file Casey's claim to be a science fiction/fantasy fan alongside his previous claims to love Snoop Dogg, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, etc. Not as wrong, necessarily, but as irrelevant. I'd guess his reading (and perhaps his "friend"'s) runs more in this vein:
Complaining about the "demons" in The Magic of Reality makes as much sense as attacking "satanism" in Harry Potter.
There's another aspect of Casey's essay that's worth noting, which is that he basically cuts the legs out from under Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Bill Dembski.
Casey complains that Dawkins "simply assume[s] that miracles don't happen," then quotes Dawkins:
Hume didn't come right out and say miracles are impossible. Instead he asked us to think of a miracle as an improbable event -- an event whose improbability we might estimate. The estimate doesn't have to be exact. It's enough that the improbability of a suggested miracle can be roughly placed on some sort of scale, and then compared with an alternative explanation such as hallucination or a lie.
And Casey replies:
Of course it's good advice not to simply accept without investigation every claim of a miracle. But under all other circumstances you can think of, you would consider the testimony of a sane, credible witness trustworthy. Why not about miracles too? Dawkins wants us to disregard the testimony of such a credible witness, and hold miracles to an unreasonably high standard of proof -- a standard unknown in any other human discipline of truth seeking.…
Dawkins's method similarly assumes the untruth (read: insane "improbability") of miracles before the inquiry even begins.…
"At least," the skeptic may respond, "Dawkins admits the possibility of miracles. He's just trying to be logical.'" Not so. … Dawkins's parting wisdom to kids is that it is never, under any circumstances OK to accept a miracle. Kids must adopt the faith of scientism, which always denies even the possibility that miracles or the supernatural might be real.
We'll set aside Casey's gross misdefinition of scientism to get to a more interesting slip.
Readers familiar with the work of ID creationists may see something familiar in that passage. Bill Dembski's arguments against evolution has long centered on an "explanatory filter," by which one would assume biological structures (or indeed the entire universe) were designed unless the probability of those structures coming into existence by random chance exceeded some absurd probability threshold.
Critics objected that Dembski was assuming the untruth of evolution by letting "design" be the default state, they objected that his probability arguments set an insane threshold for justifying non-supernatural explanations, and ultimately to his holding evolutionary explanations to a higher standard of proof than any other human endeavor.
The difference between those charges against Dembski and Casey's essentially identical charges against Dawkins are that Casey is wrong and Dembski's critics were (and are) right. It's good that Casey recognizes that the form of the argument is appropriate, he's just chosen the wrong target. Dembski is setting up an undemonstrated concept as the default explanation for anything, and requires extraordinary levels of evidence (so extraordinary no one has ever carried out the computations for any realistic system) before he'll accept any non-design explanation for anything.
While I disagree with much of Dawkins's theology, the issue Casey takes with Dawkins is a nonstarter. Miracles are definitionally events that would be impossible within the natural laws we all know about and operate within. It's hardly unreasonable – let alone scientism – for someone to say so, and to note that they are inherently extraordinarily rare. By granting them nonzero probability under normal conditions, Dawkins is actually granting more leeway to miracles than I – or traditional Christian theology – would do. And not to nitpick, but eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, so being dubious of eyewitness claims that run counter to everything else we know is not an insult to the eyewitness, it's common sense.
At the end of the day, miracles are inevitably in the eye of the beholder. Miracles that can be put to rigorous testing have always wound up having natural explanations, and since miracles are by their nature one-time events and are (as the Catholic Encyclopedia says) "the direct opposition of the effect actually produced to the natural causes at work", there's no way to test them in any reliable way. If you believe in miracles, you believe in miracles, and you do so not because of evidence, but because of faith. Faith, as one of Casey's holy books explains, is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." To demand proof that miracles are supernatural is, if not sacrilege, at least missing the point. There's a reason that the god Casey worships says to Doubting Thomas: "because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."
All of which raises an important question: if the Discovery Institute wants us to believe they are a nonreligious organization dedicated purely to scientific investigation, why are they so keen on defending belief in miracles and the supernatural?
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:44 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism • Culture Wars • Policy and Politics
Just under a year ago, I quoted and endorsed Stephen Post's argument that lack of civility isn't the problem we face in society, that incivility is a symptom, not an end unto itself.
Civility matters, and there are good reasons to urge people to be more civil in their interactions, and to model that behavior ourselves. It's no accident that many uncivil styles of discourse are also informal logical errors. And there's a reason that deliberative venues - like the Senate floor - impose a standard of decorum and civility. Uncivil discourse often replaces substantive exchanges about ideas with personal reflections or even outright attacks, and that serves no one. As Post argues, incivility often reflects "a vicious ingroup-outgroup demonization that is entirely dysfunctional."
I'm reminded of that post because Casey Luskin - a staffer at the ID creationist Discovery Institute - has used the company blog to launch one of his periodic tirades about the supposed incivility of "Darwinists."
It's not always clear what code of civility is he's trying to enforce, or even if there is any clear standard at all. His public silence about the abusive, slanderous, malicious, and misleading language used by fellow staffers at the Discovery Institute undercuts any claim that this is simply an effort to elevate the entire debate. Rather, I think Casey's goal is to weaponize civility, to use these charges of incivility to silence criticism of his ideas. In his multi-post series, Casey attacks people by name for expressing ideas with which he disagrees. At times, he engages with the underlying substance of the claims (alas, getting it wrong, as we'll see below), but for the most part, he's simply trying to shame people into not saying mean-but-true things about the Discovery Institute or creationism.
I would argue that people are inherently worthy of respect and of being treated civilly (though they can lose that respect with concerted effort). With apologies to Mitt Romney, corporations like the Disco. 'tute are not people, and deserve no inherent respect or civility (though they can earn respect, and civility should be the default behavior); even if the Disco. 'tute did deserve respect at one time, they forfeited that respect long ago. Ideas (e.g. creationism) do not deserve inherent respect either, though certainly the people who hold those ideas do. An idea either proves itself useful or it falls by the wayside. Various scholarly and lay communities have developed tools for evaluating ideas and separating the wheat from the chaff: unbiased peer review and testability play key roles in the process used in the sciences.
In treating criticism of his corporate master and his pseudoscientific pseudotheology as "uncivil," Casey essentially tries to shortcircuit the normal processes by which we evaluate ideas and institutions. And in targeting a few of his critics by name and trying to use their allegedly uncivil behavior as an argument against evolution in general, he actually commits the uncivil acts which he wrongly accuses others of.
Let's talk specifics, particularly his post attacking me. In that case, the personal attacks begin in the title: "Josh Rosenau's 'Potemkin' arguments." He's replying to a paragraph I wrote 6 months ago, in which I was arguing against analogies some people were drawing between the Discovery Institute's pernicious effect on science and the effects they claim the John Templeton Foundation has had. Ophelia Benson had written: "one can see Templeton as in fact interfering with science just as the Discovery Institute does, but in a more subtle fashion." I responded:
There's no question that the Discovery Institute is ideologically driven, that their fellowships are wingnut welfare, a way to employ creationists and give them the gloss of respectability. Disco. 'Tute fellows seem to have lifetime appointments, while [Chris] Mooney's [journalism] fellowship from Templeton was a single event - a financial award and a series of lectures and discussion which, once ended, entail no ongoing obligation. That's not how DI fellowships work.
The DI does not fund external research. They have a Potemkin laboratory, and a house journal dedicated to publishing their own staff's "research." All of this is oriented towards creating a pseudoscientific infrastructure, the semblance of an active research program and academic community, so that they can convince schools to teach claptrap and can interfere with the administration of colleges and universities, the content of textbooks, and by such means to advance a narrow version of Christianity. Their fellows are chosen because of their support for this ideological agenda, just as papers in their pseudo-journal are selected for their adherence to the Disco. 'Tute agenda, and so forth.
By contrast, Templeton doesn't run its own journals. They do help fund societies which run journals, but no one has given any evidence of Templeton interfering in the editorial independence of those journals. They fund research projects, but no one has shown any evidence that they interfere with the research or the researchers' interpretation of it. While the Templeton folks did provide some funding for IDC-related work, they did so at a time in the 1990s when quite a few people held out hope that there might be some real research program spawned by the movement. In time, they learned better
At the time, I didn't bother filling those paragraphs with links because my point wasn't about the DI, it was about Templeton. Folks making an analogy between the Templeton Foundation and Discovery Institute generally already know that background, so I didn't feel the need to substantiate the claims there.
In Casey's eye, this post about the John Templeton Foundation was written because I "apparently felt the need ... to deal with the fact that Discovery Institute is funding scientific research that challenges neo-Darwinism, and is being published in peer-reviewed scientific journals." He claims I "suddenly became so concerned about this only in 2011 when he blogged about it." Both claims are false, the first from the context of the blog post Casey is addressing and quoting, and the second from his own knowledge of my work.
You see, in late 2009, Casey and I took part in a symposium on Intelligent Design and the Law. We both presented our papers at the University of St. Thomas Law School, and we both published papers in their law review. In my law review article, published almost 2 years ago, I wrote about the claimed scientific research from the DI, and even used the same "Potemkin" language (citations omitted here, but you can find them all in the PDF):
Intelligent Design advocates have struggled without success to achieve academic acceptance as scientists. For example, some attempts have been made to create ID-specific journals comparable to those of creation scientists, but they have all become moribund, and an academic society dedicated to ID is similarly defunct. Major academic ID goals set in a fundraising document in 1998 have gone unachieved, such as the promise of a major monograph by Discovery Institute fellow Paul Nelson, which has been reported as nearly ready to print for over a decade. The proceedings of a Discovery Institute conference held in the summer of 2007, supposedly highlighting "the very kind of research our critics say we don't sponsor," remain unpublished. William Dembski, once heralded on a book jacket as "the Isaac Newton of Information Theory," has been reduced to rewriting and analyzing toy computer programs originally written for a TV series and popular books in the 1980s by biologist Richard Dawkins as trivial demonstrations of the power of selection. Dembski explained his poor record of publication in peer-reviewed scientific literature by saying, "I've just gotten kind of blasé about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well." Alas, they don't convince mathematicians of his mathematical arguments, prompting Dembski to reply to one critic: "I'm not and never have been in the business of offering a strict mathematical proof for the inability of material mechanisms to generate specified complexity." This, despite his claim to have developed a "Law of Conservation of Information" about which he states in one book: "The crucial point of the Law of Conservation of Information is that natural causes can at best preserve CSI..., may degrade it, but cannot generate it."
In 1998, the Discovery Institute explained to its donors that research was crucial stating, "Phase I [described as 'Research, Writing and Publication'] is the essential component of everything that comes afterward. Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade." Judges and others seeking to assess the merits of ID going forward need issue no harsher judgment than the Discovery Institute has presented here. By its own standards, ID is intellectually stagnant, and must be regarded as "just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade," in line with previous creationist movements.
The Kitzmiller ruling cited as "[a] final indicator of how ID has failed to demonstrate scientific warrant... the complete absence of peer-reviewed publications supporting the theory." The movement, however, did not take this as a call to return to the labs and produce novel results in readiness for future legal challenges [fn: Discovery Institute did create what amounts to a Potemkin laboratory - the Biologic Institute. ... Attempts to view the lab spaces or examine their research have been blocked. See Celeste Biever, Intelligent design: The God Lab, THE NEW SCIENTIST, Dec. 15 2006, at 8-11. According to one report, the only research finding offered by Biologic actually contradicts a central claim of ID. ..."We shuffled off for a coffee break with the admission hanging in the air that natural processes could not only produce new information, they could produce beneficial new information").]. Instead, the movement has produced a the third edition of Pandas (renamed Design of Life and no longer aimed at high schools) and a successor to Pandas, called Explore Evolution, which contains even less substance and scientific accuracy than its predecessor. The Intelligent Design documentary, Expelled!: No intelligence Allowed mangled interviews and the history of the Holocaust, and has been called "one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time." In addition, Michael Behe published a successor to Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, while still failing to address criticism leveled at the earlier work, even those he himself acknowledged.
I specifically considered a document drafted by Casey, claiming to show the strength of pro-ID peer reviewed scientific papers:
To understand a theory's impact and scientific validity, it is necessary to review how it fares when later researchers examine its claims, and how much new research is generated by insights from a given line of thinking. In the case of those few papers claimed as peer-reviewed defenses of ID, none has met any favorable response, or been cited as generating successful predictions for future researchers.* By contrast, the number of papers building on evolutionary theory and deepening our knowledge of the field has grown rapidly in recent years, due in part to the theory's ability to generate new insights into the burgeoning fields of molecular biology, genomics, and developmental genetics. This reflects a community-wide consensus among relevant scientists on the merits of evolution, a consensus further strengthened by assessments of scientific bodies. Groups including the National Academy of Sciences and its international counterparts, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and professional societies representing groups with special knowledge of evolution, including biologists of many sorts, geologists, physicists, historians, philosophers, and many others, have issued statements representing their members' agreement that evolution is foundational to modern biology, is well-supported, and belongs in science classes.
* DISCOVERY INST. THE COLLEGE STUDENT'S BACK TO SCHOOL GUIDE TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN (2009), available at http://www.evolutionnews.org/BacktoSchoolGuide_Sept2009 _FN.pdf. The pamphlet states, "Criticss [sic] often claim that intelligent design proponents do not publish peer-reviewed scientific papers or that they do not do scientific research." To rebut this claim, 6 papers are cited, none from later than 2004. One of those was discussed at length in testimony by Kitzmiller defense witnesses, with the court describing that paper as "The one article referenced [by defense's scientific witnesses]... as supporting ID .... A review of the article indicates that it does not mention ... ID. In fact, Professor Behe admitted that the study which forms the basis for the article did not rule out many known evolutionary mechanisms and that the research actually might support evolutionary pathways if a biologically realistic population size were used." Another proffered article was repudiated by the journal which published it, with the editors noting that it "represents a significant departure from the nearly purely taxonomic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 124-year history. ... We have met and determined that all of us would have deemed this paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings." A review of the other papers listed by the Discovery Institute in Science Citation Index finds two of the papers have no citations at all, and the few citations garnered by the remainder are either self-citation by the same ideologically driven group of authors, or are citations rejecting the paper's findings. For context, the 254 papers turned up in a search for the narrow topic "evolutionary developmental biology" published in 2004 have been cited an average of 13 times, compared to an average 7 citations for ID's top papers, some of which have had many more years to accumulate citations. The marketplace of ideas has spoken.
If Casey had read my paper (or paid attention during the symposium, when I read that last passage), he'd know that my interest in the purportedly pro-ID research literature far predates the blog post he cites.
I lay this out at length only to note that from Casey's first paragraph, he's trying to make this not about the substance of what I said or the merits of my case, but about whether or not I'm a good and nice person. And to paint as grim a portrait as possible, he's misstating obvious facts, and is imputing motives to me that are false and which he could have known were false by a) reading the blog post he was responding to, and b) familiarizing himself with the contents of a volume he himself contributed to. That isn't a pattern that speaks well of Casey's own civility.
Casey's submission to the law review ultimately bore the innocuous title "The Constitutionality and Pedagogical Benefits of Teaching Evolution Scientifically." We can certainly dispute that Casey's ideas of how evolution should be taught would be scientific, let alone pedagogically or constitutionally appropriate. But instead, I'll note that the working title for this paper was the rather spicier "Bluffed Into Dogmatism: How the Evolution Lobby Seeks to Block Perfectly Legal and Beneficial Policy Proposals to Teach Neo-Darwinism Scientifically." Civil? No!
While Casey did catch that title before it went out to the wider world, he did publish a paper with the uncivil, and inaccurate title, "Zeal for Darwin's House Consumes Them: How Supporters of Evolution Encourage Violations of the Establishment Clause." That's a reference to Psalms 69:9, a charge that "supporters of evolution" are idolators, worshipping Darwin (or maybe Down House), and falsely claiming that these groups advocate unconstitutional policies. Regular followers of the creationism/evolution battle know that Casey works for the only side which has actually found its policies declared unconstitutional in courts.
After his ironically uncivil opening, Casey attempts a substantive defense of Disco., of their purported research wing the Biologic Institute, and of their supposedly scientific journal BIO-complexity.
First, Discovery Institute does fund research conducted by people external to Discovery Institute. It funds research by Christians and non-Christians alike.
It's impossible to review every penny the DI has ever spent, but the Center for
Renewal of Science and Culture does not advertise any program for merit-based grants. In official IRS filings, the C
RSC's activities are described as "Production of public service reports, legislative testimony, articles, public conferences and debates, plus media coverage and the Institute's own publications in the field of Science and Culture." Nothing about research funding there.
According to DI's most recently published 990 form (an IRS form which nonprofits file, explaining where their money came from and how they spent it), the Discovery Institute spent about $17,000 on 10 of its fellows in 2009, and they itemize $274,000 in grants for "scientific research" to Biologic, and $11,592 in grants to Grove City College, home of DI Fellow and Biologic staffer Guillermo Gonzalez.
I don't think that the fellowships (or other funding of fellows) count as "external grants." Almost all DI fellows and senior fellows have held that status since the founding of the CRSC within the Disco. 'tute in the 1990s. While various of these fellows work outside DI's offices, many of their long-term activities were cited in a founding fundraising memo (the famous Wedge Document) as important DI activities, and DI fellows function in public like DI employees. And the Biologic Institute is almost entirely funded by DI (in 2009, their total intake was $317,770, of which $274,000 came from DI, $20,983 came from "rental income" and the remainder came in grants from unspecified sources), and DI staff serve on the Biologic Institute's board of directors, making it hard to claim that they're a truly external organization.
If the Discovery Institute funds truly external research, there's no evidence of it.
Casey adds, regarding Biologic:
Rosenau's attempt to ridicule the Biologic Institute laboratory as "Potemkin" of course intends to suggest the laboratory is fake. How, then, does Mr. Rosenau explain the multiple scientific papers published by Biologic scientists in the past few years that report research conducted at the lab? (Here's an impressive recent example.)
The "impressive recent example" is published in the Biologic house journal,
BIO-complexity. If my contention is correct that this journal is "pseudoscientific infrastructure," then the example is irrelevant. Casey offers no other basis for judging Biologic's merits.
I referred to the Biologic Institute as "Potemkin" partly because if the difficulties Celeste Biever had in 2006 simply getting access to Biologic or anyone who worked there. When I was in Seattle a few years back, I also swung by the publicly listed address for the Institute, and found a few rented rooms in an office building, with the lights off and the windows shut in the middle of a work day. From outside, I saw an empty meeting room, but nothing resembling scientific laboratories, nor did anyone answer the door. Their online list of research publications lists nothing at all after 2008, which may reflect poor web management, but could also indicate a lack of productivity.
Certainly that list omits any of the publications in the house journal BIO-complexity. I don't emphasize that it is a house journal to disparage BIO-complexity, just to put it in context. NCSE has a house journal, too, and I think it's pretty darn good. But if I thought I had a paper that would revolutionize science, I wouldn't publish it in RNCSE, because an independent publisher would be a more trusted outlet than a journal run by my own employer.
Anyway, here's what Casey says about BIO-complexity in reply to my earlier post:
the journal Rosenau refers to, BIO-Complexity, is anything but "Potemkin." It has an editorial board with over two dozen PhD scientists and scholars in fields such as biochemistry, evolutionary computing, evolutionary biology, microbiology, cladistics, and physics, from respected academic institutions around the world. Yes Discovery Institute has obvious connections to the journal -- some of those members of the editorial board are also our fellows. But many of the editorial board members have no affiliations with Discovery Institute, though they share with us a common conviction that the debate over ID and neo-Darwinism needs to be fostered at the high level of peer-reviewed scientific journals. Thus, the journal invites submissions from both ID proponents and ID-critics, and isn't committed to publishing papers that only express one viewpoint. Whether affiliated with Discovery Institute or not, BIO-Complexity has an impressive body of scientists that run that show, and they impose high quality peer-review quality control.
First, note that I applied the adjective "Potemkin" not to the journal, but to Biologic itself. Casey didn't address that charge, instead misreading and misrepresenting my argument.
Second, he's not actually defending the content of the journal, merely arguing that because people with doctoral degrees are on the editorial board, it must be a legitimate journal. That makes no sense.
Third, the journal makes it clear that they do not "impose high quality peer-review quality control." Their website's "Peer Review Process" section explains:
The goal of pre-publication peer review should ... be to decide whether the work in question merits the attention of experts, rather than to predict the final result of that attention. BIO-Complexity uses an innovative approach to pre-publication peer-review in order to achieve this goal.
Basically, reviewers and editors are not asked whether the results are right, but whether others "would benefit from considering both the merits and the limitations" of a paper, a much lower standard than generally employed by science journals. There are legitimate reasons to prefer this laxer form of peer review, but Casey's claim that it's a rigorous sort of peer review is contrary to the journal's own stated policies.
Fourth, whether or not they "invite[] submissions" from opponents of creationism, they haven't published such papers. And it is far from clear that their editors could give pro-evolution (or anti-creationist) articles a fair shake. As Glenn Branch noted in 2010 in NCSE's house journal, all but two of the editorial board members have long histories of anti-evolution and creationist advocacy (including advocacy for intelligent design). A third pro-evolution scientist was offered a position on the board, but refused, explaining:
Publishing on this subject in mainstream journals is also better for ... the credibility of the eventual answer to this question, as well as for the integrity of the scientific process in general.
Fifth, the content of the journal more than justifies these concerns. In the 2 years the journal has existed, they've published exactly
7 papers, with
15 authors listed in the journal's archive. But Douglas Axe constitutes 3 of those 15 authors, since the editorial board's rigor apparently didn't extend to ensuring that author's names were entered consistently.
Analyzing each of the 7 papers is hardly worth it. Two of the 7 are "critical reviews," not meant to communicate new research results. Others appear to be minor contributions from graduate students and undergrads associated with Biologic Institute staff and fellows. Every paper has at least one author who is funded at least in part by Biologic or Disco.
I'll just dig into one of the papers, to point out that these papers are inadequate even by the authors' own standards. The paper in question is by Ann Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, and describes some experiments Seelke described in his testimony to the Kansas Board of Education in 2005.
John Calvert asked: "Can you describe to me a-- in more detail a campaign of unsuccessful evolution?" and Seelke replied:
Well, one of the things I'm doing now is one of the-- one of my other heroes is Michael Behe. And Behe said that if you have multiple independent events that have to take place you will simply not be able to observe evolution.
And so at this-- last year at this time I was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and I basically built some molecules. I made some changes in a gene and I put in one mutation, two mutations, three mutations, and four mutations all in different types of that gene. All mutations inactuate the gene. And so if this-- and then-- and now I'm in the process-- I only have ten-- I only have ten billion cells that I'm looking at which is whoosy in this field. I wouldn't publish this until I had probably 10 to 100 trillion, but-- so then I can take-- I can take these mutants that I know exactly what they need to do to evolve and I can ask them to evolve and put them in a medium where if they do evolve I would know overnight. Because the selective advantage of being able to make, in this case, the amino acid triptyline [sic, probably tryptophan] is so enormous that I would find that out overnight if that happens.
And so I can ask, what happens when you need two mutations and only get an advantage when you have both. At this point the answer is nothing. And that is actually supported by the literature. What's different about this is I am specifically asking these questions. Most cases people-- these are things that people discover are kind of on the side. You know, you don't do experiments to test the limits of evolution and particularly my work is designed to actually test that.
Emphasis added. As far as Seelke of 2005 was concerned, anything less than 10-100 trillion cells was "whoosy" and not worth publishing. Guess how many cells his
BIO-complexity paper reports?
About 1 trillion. That's about a tenth of the lower limit Seelke set in 2005. Not only did Seelke of 2010 think it was worth submitting this "whoosy" research to BIO-complexity, but BIO-complexity's supposedly awesome editorial board agreed to publish this "whoosy" research. (All of this sets aside the fact that the premise of the research is fatally flawed, embodying a trivial misunderstanding of how evolution works, and what it takes to properly test the powers and limits of evolution.)
In short, BIO-complexity shows every sign of being exactly the sort of pseudoscientific apparatus that I said it was. As far as I know, it is now the only venue in which DI and Biologic Institute staff currently publish their supposedly pro-ID research, and it was the only evidence Casey offered for the existence of any research program at Biologic or the Disco. 'tute. His claims about the journal's quality control are falsified by simple reference to the journal's own stated policies, not to mention a look at the journal's minimal content and the poor quality of the content - poor qulity by the authors' own standards.
Casey's attacks on me - failed attempts to divine my "design," false charges of inaccuracy, personal attacks charging incivility, etc. - all fail, and do so in ways that highlight Casey's incivility, and the underlying problem in Casey's view of the world.
Stephen Post talked about incivility arising from "a vicious ingroup-outgroup demonization." Casey certainly sees that distinction, speaking of his critics as if they formed some unified "Darwin lobby." This lobby, to his eyes, is a unified group who he seems to think worship Charles Darwin, and who he holds responsible en masse for the "incivility" of anyone he chooses to place into that outgroup. It's a view that's incoherent on its own terms, but that justifies him in these sort of pettifogging attacks. If he can paint all ID's critics as part of an organized "lobby," then he can write off that entire lobby by saying they're rude, and therefore unworthy of "dignifying ... with an evidential rebuttal."
Casey's goal here is not to elucidate the strengths of ID, and expresses a strong preference for addressing the motives, tone, and character of its critics instead of even try responding substantively. That's uncivil. Tone matters, civility matters, and indeed, character matters.
But which is less civil: saying mean things about the Discovery Institute, or creating a pseudoscientific apparatus so that one can subvert scientific norms and indoctrinate students?
I say "indoctrinate," because in 1998, the Discovery Institute stated that their first priority had to be research, because:
Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.
Since then, they've produced nothing of substance. But when people point that out, all we hear in response are accusations of incivility.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:48 PM • 40 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Policy and Politics
This morning, OaklandBecks tweeted:
I just realized that this is the first morning since Oct 10 that there have been no #occupyoakland camps in Oakland.
I'm not sure that's an entirely bad thing. The camps were an effective protest for a long time, but it may well be time for the movement to move on.
The first reason is that the camp in Oakland is becoming a divisive issue internally. When the city evicted the camp from Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, a group proposed that the camp move to an empty lot at 19th and Telegraph. But that site is next to the Oakland School of the Arts, by affordable housing, and is about to undergo construction to become a sculpture garden. The effort to create the sculpture garden was a subject of community activism on behalf of the working class neighborhood. In other words, the camp moved from the front steps of city hall – where police violence emphasized the nature of the conflict between the 1% and the 99% and forced the government and the police to pick sides – to placing schoolkids and a community of the 99% in danger should police attack. This would create a hassle for working folks heading to the nearby BART stop or kids getting off it to get to school, but wouldn't inconvenience the government or the corporate workers further downtown. When people proposed that the camp choose a different location, the folks who put forward these concerns about the wellbeing of working class Oaklanders were shouted down and the proposal was ultimately rejected (apparently quite nastily). The lot was briefly occupied on Saturday, but police quickly and peacefully cleared it out. They also cleared out the longstanding camp in Snow Park, where campers had been clean, quiet, and peaceful. That camp's eviction undermines the claim that the camps were being closed down because of public health and safety concerns.
I fear that the fights over where to camp and whether to re-occupy old spots or find new spots has distracted the movement from its core message, the concerns about income inequality, the pernicious effects of that inequality on society at large, and the need for radical changes in order to fix those problems. If the public face of the movement is a self-serving argument over the protesters' eviction, rather than the many families being evicted from their homes, then the camps are a distraction and an ineffective tactic.
Moving on from the encampments is also fully in keeping with time-tested rules of political activism. At this point, the camps no longer fulfill Alinsky's 3rd and 7th rules (and many others):
The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat. …
The seventh rule: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings. New issues and crises are always developing and one's reaction becomes, "Well, my heart bleeds for those people and I'm all for a boycott, but after all there are other important things in life" – and there it goes.
I'd say that by last week, the camps were a drag on the movement, and it's better to be moving forward. In addition to generating internal dissent, they were no longer outside the Oakland PD's experience. They didn't confuse or scare the police or the city or the corporations. They were a nuisance, and one that they figured out how to handle. As Alinsky says in his 10th rule: "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
I don't know quite how to formulate this as a proposal for the Oakland General Assembly, but I'd like to see the tactic shift from occupation of City Hall's front door to an occupation of lots which have been abandoned for years, or (with the occupants' permission) the front yards of houses due for foreclosure. This would help defend people from foreclosure and return the focus to the nation's economic woes, and occupying abandoned lots would emphasize that this economic crisis is not news for Oakland. These sites might be farther from a BART stop and harder for the media to find, but by now they know to look for the camps, and this would create a different set of challenges for them, without violating the second of Alinsky's rules, "Never go outside the experience of your people."
The violence on the UC Berkeley campus and last weekend at UC Davis, and the subsequent challenges to the chancellors on both campuses, emphasize that the Occupy movement still has legs, and shows that there are still ways for the 99% to express its power through that movement. "Power is," as Alinsky says, "not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." When a crowd of students managed to talk riot police into lowering their guns and retreating, they took power, and they took it again in forcing their school's chancellor to make a walk of shame past a crowd of angry but silent students. In the first case, the people's mic became a weapon that overcame pepper spray and body armor. In the second, it was silence which tore away the armor of power and privilege.
How we bring that power to bear is the question. Camping for the sake of camping is no longer outside the opponent's experience, nor is it inherently powerful any more. But we still have power, and still have grievances, so we have to keep moving forward.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:24 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia • Biology • Policy and Politics
Marie-Claire Shanahan teaches science education at the University of Alberta, and blogs about her own research and about the state of science education (and science education training: science education education if you will). Her latest post summarizes her findings from reviewing science teaching guides going back over a century:
Educators, critics, and scientists often argue for improving science education by teaching the processes of science, emphasizing critical thinking, and actively engaging students in doing science. Almost always, this is argued to be a great improvement over “traditional” approaches to science teaching that prioritize the rote learning of facts–an approach that is said to have dominated in the past. The problem is, it’s always a different past that we’re talking about – for us, it’s maybe the 80s, for those involved in writing the book, maybe the 40s. …
Modern science education – to go further, the inclusion of science in school curricula at all – owes a lot to Louis Agassiz and Nature Study education. … One of Aggasiz’s most famous arguments was the students should “study nature not books”. They should engage in the processes of science (Agassiz emphasized the power of observation) and learn to analyze evidence and draw their own conclusions. …
At the turn of the 20th century, science was not a typical part of the school curriculum. Standardized curricula that flowed from elementary to high school were really just beginning to be created in North America in the 1890s. Including science in these plans was seen as modern choice, a way to prepare for the future but also to challenge the rote approaches of a classical education. Instead of memorizing Latin conjugations, students should be learning things that would help them live better and survive economically. Sound familiar?
So what happened? Greater efforts to standardize education and concerns about teacher education and training (among other things) created the same kind of push/pull that we see today. A flexible science education that emphasizes engaging in science in the local environment became a difficult thing to do when inspections, prescribed texts, and standardized exams became the norm.
The barrier that prevents active, critical and process oriented science teaching has never been the fact that it’s a new idea. It’s not. When you scratch the surface of these arguments it turns out to be a rabbit hole. There is no past where rote teaching of scientific content was thought to be the best approach. This past is a rhetorical one.
The challenge this presents is that arguments presented in this way can’t lead to change because the actual challenges are covered up. When those challenges (e.g., (standardization pressures, assessment practices, changing curricula, to name just a few)) are invisible, they become a lot harder to address. A more fruitful approach might sound like this: “ We recognize that many teachers, scientists, and science educators have been asking for the same things for a long time. For many reasons it’s been difficult to realize this vision of science education. Let’s see what we can do to address the underlying issues.”
This can’t happen if the real reasons are constantly covered up by the rhetoric that this is new and non-traditional. So what do you say, can we leave that reason alone for a bit?
The whole post is well worth reading: a fascinating historic look at the place of science education in North American schools as well as a thoughtful analysis of how we currently teach science, how we seem always to have thought we ought to be teaching science, and why we haven't been able to make a reality of that ideal.
So what are the underlying issues, and how do we address them? In my own (limited and perhaps skewed) experience, the conversation tends to focus on pre-service teacher training, and lack of resources for hands-on teaching. The solutions proposed often involve razing every school of education and starting from scratch. At which point everyone starts arguing and then they all go to the bar.
Shanahan's point is well-taken, though, that there are various structural reasons why we teach science how we do. It's hard to stick to a standardized curriculum if you're having students design their own experiments, or if you encourage students to explore the outdoors in a relatively free manner. The need to cover specific topics can require narrowing the scope of these investigations, pushing lab exercises away from the (often unpredictable) practice of hypothesis-generation and hypothesis testing toward duller but more controllable lab demonstrations, or cookbook experiments where the teacher knows that a right answer exists and knows what it is.
Similarly, the rising importance of standardized testing and the use of these tests (and the statewide standards they're based on) to hold teachers and schools accountable encourages rote learning. While I'll grant that it's surely possible to devise tests which assess a student's ability to develop a hypothesis and design and experiment to test it and to evaluate the results, it's far cheaper and easier to administer and score multiple choice tests focusing on retention of certain factoids from textbooks. If that is the sort of learning we reward, that's the sort of teaching we can expect.
Shanahan also rightly highlights the problem of prescribed texts. In practice, many master teachers have come to supplement their assigned textbook with so many other exercises and resources that the book itself is essentially ignored, it still shapes how they think about teaching, and about science. A unified textbook tends to emphasize what I think of as the science-as-encyclopedia mindset. For over a century, science educators have been wanting to shift away from that idea of science as a collection of facts, and to emphasize the science-as-process mindset. But textbooks rarely teach a scientific mindset in any consistent way. Indeed, the existence of a textbook is in some sense antithetical to that mindset.
Many states' published science standards emphasize the importance of teaching science as a process, but the inherent limits which Shanahan lists – including the focus on standardization embodied in those documents – undermine that focus. The essays praising inquiry-based learning that often open the standards don't affect which textbooks are adopted or how the tests are written, and so those exhortations are easily ignored.
Compare how we teach science to how we teach English (or at least, how we did in the schools I attended). We use grammar textbooks because the rules of grammar are established (though they change over time). But in learning about literary techniques like metaphor or about the ways that stories and essays are structured, we don't just rely on a textbook. We hand out novels and short stories and essays and plays. We don't just read essays about Shakespeare, we read the Bard himself, and the teacher helps students puzzle through the structure of the play and the way he's using language to get the desired effect. We teach students to do literary criticism. English teachers might use texts that include excerpts which represent the major themes, but what primary or secondary school teacher would think of teaching English without having the students read literature and analyze it themselves?
In science classes, you may not see the primary scientific literature until an upper-level college science class, and may not do a real scientific experiment until that point, either. Working from textbooks and canned experiments is the equivalent of giving students a copy of the Hamlet Cliff's Notes and asking them to read a section of the play and regurgitate the Cliffs' Notes explanation. The results for science education are predictable.
I have to believe that students could work through annotated versions of scientific papers, and analyze those scientific results the way that a scientist would. The language and concepts could be tricky at times, but no more more so than Shakespeare, and good teachers could help students navigate the trickier bits. I could easily envision a textbook consisting of important historic papers (including those whose authors were wrong, but which influenced later and better work), so that students would not just learn the end result of science, and not just how science is done in the lab and in the field, but how scientists think about new results and devise new hypotheses and test them.
Assuming someone wrote such a textbook, how would we get teachers to use it? It wouldn't necessarily be aligned to the particular information required by state standards, nor would it necessarily prepare students to do better on standardized tests. Running science classes as discussions rather than lectures would make a lot of teachers uncomfortable, and could require massive retraining.
It would surely be possible to introduce this style of learning without a wholesale revolution. Even reproducing a handful of scientific papers in textbooks would make it easier for students and teachers to see how science works. Science and English teachers could even co-teach classes with those papers, to emphasize the interdisciplinary aspects of those lessons and to give cover to any science teachers who weren't comfortable with that style of classroom management.
The ongoing effort to unify the state standards – the framework of which emphasizes the importance of teaching science-as-process – could allow better tests to be developed and deployed which would better assess students' science skills (and not just factoid retention). Better tests and strong standards could press policymakers and administrators to give teachers leeway to explore different ways of teaching.
And of course, parents and scientists could get interested in helping teachers make this shift. Locally, that could mean bringing the issue up in parent-teacher conferences and PTA meetings, offering to help teachers develop such lesson plans and labs, and to sell that pedagogical shift to administrators. They could interrogate their state boards of education about how the state's standardized tests assess scientific thinking. They could make sure local school boards and science supervisors and superintendents are on board, and that the textbooks they choose reflect that choice. They could make sure it's easy for teachers to take students outside, ideally without requiring permission slips just to go out into the schoolyard or to a nearby park.
For over a century, we've known how science should be taught. These ideas aren't new, and they shouldn't be scary.
Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:10 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
