I could hear the smack from here

Apparently the guy who testified in the Intelligent Design hearings in Kansas was just seriously dope-slapped by his own colleagues, who point out the feebleness of his grip on the facts. They actually claim to be embarrassed by some of his testimony.

It is clear from these statements about his own research that Dr. Ely knows literally nothing about the evolutionary processes that he claims to be competent enough to criticize, which is understandable in that he is a physiologist with no graduate-level training in evolutionary biology whatsoever.

A year late, and yet no less gratifying...

A win for the reality-based community!

The teaching of Intelligent Design in Dover biology classes was forbidden by the judge in a ruling released today. I wrote it up here, but I'll add this quote:

Anticipating that his decision would be attacked, Judge Jones, in an unusual move, categorically stated that the ruling was not the "product of an activist judge."

"This case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy," the judge said.

Moreover, Jones declared: "The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has not been fully revealed through this trial," which lasted six weeks.

Whoot!!

Aw, just for fun: it's always a good time to recall this lovely sticker, based on a similar one proposed for use on textbooks in Georgia a year or so ago...

A few interesting late-day bits

• Reid has had enough of Lieberman v. Murtha and requests an end to unilateral pronouncements by Democrats. Interesting to see who does or doesn't listen.
  
  
• A UMass professor explains Incompetent Design, which points out the numerous engineering flaws in human design, all of which make simple sense for evolution but sort of make a recent creator look a bit underqualified.

  All of our pelvises slope forward for convenient knuckle-dragging, like all the other great apes. And the only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution's way of modifying something or else it's just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student.

  heh. Both serious and tongue-in-cheek.
  
  
• Mike Wallace pulls no punches on the state of the nation --- leadership, press, et al...

  Q. President George W. Bush has declined to be interviewed by you. What would you ask him if you had the chance?
  
  A. What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? ...

  Read the whole thing. Feisty bugger.

Hah! gottcha!

In case you missed it, one of the good outcomes of Tuesday's elections is that the entire school board of Dover, PA, was voted out in favor of a slate that is against teaching Intelligent Design in science classes. Now Pat Robertson puts the lie to claims that Intelligent Design is something other than creationism when he chastizes Doverites for "voting God out of their city" . . . Too rich!

(via Medley)

Not just bad science

An article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer (registration required) looks at the Intelligent Design debate going on to its west from a less common perspective: that it makes for bad theology too.

[U. Penn. anatomy professor Peter] Dodson, who has lectured on the relationship between religion and science, said the intelligent-design argument falls into an old philosophical notion called "God of the gaps" - the search for signs of the supernatural in otherwise unexplainable natural phenomena.
. . .
The trouble with this as theology is that when science fills these gaps in, Dodson said, it can squeeze the role of God out. Just as physics later found natural explanations for what Newton attributed to God's outreach, so biology may more fully explain complex cellular machinery in the future.

Those who seem most insistant on forcing their religion on the masses seem also to be those whose grounding in it is the most fragile...

A modest proposal (scientific version)

A brilliant piece by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate points out that rationalists have been overlooking the potential benefits of Intelligent Design-style arguments:

Let's face it: The problem with science has always been that each new discovery unleashes thousands of new questions and ambiguities. So really, the more we discover new stuff, the stupider we get. Clearly, that isn't working. ID says we shouldn't bother ourselves with resolving scientific inconsistencies or untangling puzzles. We should recognize that what God really wants is for us just to stop learning.

Beautiful.

(via a Medley furling)

Noodly goodness

In case anybody has managed to miss it, there's a wonderful movement afoot to demonstrate the absurdity of Intelligent Design by clever analogy: the Flying Spaghetti Monster cult, which demands equal time in schoolrooms. Read their open letter to the Kansas School Board at a site that also gives some philosophical background for the movement, demonstrates the critical link of global warming to a decline in worldwide pirate population, and provides the full range of visuals developed in support of the cause (now popular on many sites and forums).

(via Follow Me Here)

Another apt giggler

The Onion comes through again, with an excellent satirical piece:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New "Intelligent Falling" Theory

(hat tip to boing boing)

A church divided?

Apparently the Catholic church is divided over the acceptability of evolution. Almost a decade ago, Pope John Paul II made news when he said that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis" -- indeed, he spoke as one aware of the breadth and depth of the explanatory power of the theory:

It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

But, as usual, Vatican scholars can find room for many interpretations in the interstices of what their predecessors have and haven't spelled out. At least one Cardinal seems to think that scientific approaches to the origins of life are inherently incompatible with faith, but many of his colleagues disagree. The opinion of the current pope is unclear -- he's been involved in previous statements of principle that endorsed the compatability of scientific research and religious faith, but he also stated at his installation that an individual is "the result of a thought of God" rather than "casual and meaningless product of evolution." Not known whether he will wade into the present debates . . .

(first article via Follow Me Here)

Update: a group of Catholic scientists are asking the pope to weigh in.

What I believe in this microsecond is what counts...

Senator Rick Santorum professes uncertainty about whether Intelligent Design belongs in the classroom...
(?!)

(via Atrios)

Who'd design *this* thing?

An editorial in the LA Times takes on "Intelligent Design" from the vantage of obvious design flaws in human beings -- exactly the sort of things that make sense in the context of gradual evolution of form and function, but no sense in terms of directed design. A good contribution to the debunking oeuvre.

(via Follow Me Here)

What we all "know" to be true

If I suggested to you that highschool students were in a reasonable position to rewrite the rules of English grammar to their own liking, or to insist that complex mathematical calculations could proceed without recourse to calculus, you would laugh and point out that students have to learn the basics before they can even understand the reasoning behind the more complex concepts, let alone defy common wisdom and pioneer a new way. And yet somehow large groups of people think that it's reasonable to present gradeschool and highschool children with advanced scientific theories and wobbly objections that have been raised to them, and trust that the students can decide for themselves whether to accept the consensus of a century of specialists. This quote from a recent article really captured this insanity for me:

"It takes less faith to believe that God put this all in place for me," Dill said, "than for the amount of faith it takes that a blind-chance combination of atoms over how many billions of years" created the universe.

Well sure. It's also easier to believe that daylight just emanates from the sky, rather than that it arrives at the earth in discrete units of energy from a huge ball of gas in outer space. It's easier to believe that time is an absolute than that its experience depends on the observer's reference frame. Ease of comprehension is not the proper measure of the validity of a theory.

And yet that's how Intelligent Design, as an "alternative" to evolution and natural selection (or even to basics of chemistry and physics), is being presented. It should be obvious that this isn't good pedagogy, and probably a waste of the intellectual potential of our youth, and yet somehow science is enough outside the realm of the average person's experience that they're willing to believe it's all up for debate (or maybe even irrelevant to life). Genuinely not true, any more than correct subject-verb agreement or solution to a simple equation. Intellectual laziness leads only to mindless acceptance, which is bad not only for academia but for the functioning of a participatory citizenry.

Intelligent Design: not just for biology anymore

'Cause if you just don't believe that nature could get so complex on its own (see this New Yorker piece for more on how pathetic the ID arguments really are), then organisms are just the tip of the iceberg. Pharyngula catches the dropped hint and predicts the response thusly:

The Discovery Institute is doing a fine job of raising the visibility of creationism and focusing the attention of their enemies. They say things like this:

Although much of the public controversy over intelligent design has focused on the application of design to biology, it’s important to remember that design theory itself reaches well beyond biology, and that some of the strongest evidence for design comes from such fields as physics, astronomy, and cosmology.

And suddenly, scientists in disciplines other than biology perk up and realize that these clowns are coming to pester them next.

Glad to see astronomers and others coming aboard -- this isn't a fight about biology, but about the nature of testable theories and the primacy of empirical evidence.

(via Fables of the Reconstruction)

Pithily put

Eliot at Follow Me Here unearths an excellent article in Scientific American from a few years back, which could provide explanations to nonscientists and/or pithy arguments to those arguing with creationists (or advocates of Intelligent Design):

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

(Of course, I don't know whether the author was prepared for the twist in which the opponents attempt to redefine science to encompass armchair philosophy... Sigh.)

Coming out in the open

The creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design are discovering that nobody buys their "alternate scientific theory" veil for religious dogma. So they take the next logical step, proposing that Kansas "alter the definition of science, not limiting it to theories based on natural explanations." Well, that would be a change!

I'm with Hunter at dailyKos, who opines

My problem with this debate is that this isn't about being pro-religion or anti-religion or faith-neutral; it's about institutionalizing stupidity as a valid lifestyle choice.

And I'm less worried about stupidity as a lifestyle choice (which natural selection can handle) than with institutionalized stupidity as a societal choice, which means we could all go down in flames together, comfortably free of any pesky notions of action and consequence . . .

Because it didn't explain anything then either

Via R, a short Inquirer opinion piece pointing out that the tenets of Intelligent Design (very trendy in, say, York, PA just now) were debunked a couple of centuries ago by none other than David Hume.

(Of course, this requires that you be interested in Enlightenment philosophy and its logic of rationality. Not much evidence for that these days.)

Because it explains nothing, that's why

Well, that's not the author's argument, really, but this New York Times Magizine article does one of the best jobs I've seen of succinctly explaining why Intelligent Design fails as a scientific explanation and offers nothing substantive to a theist either.

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious.
. . .
But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. ... If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Stephen J. Gould did a pretty good job of explaining how many "mistakes" and other design oddities fit well into evolutionary theory, provide evidence for it rather than undermining it (see The Panda's Thumb, for instance). A bit of humor is found in the current article from the notion that an intelligent agent would sow similar chaos...

(apologies to my referer; flu grogginess caught up with me just in time to erase all traces of who you were...)

Cultural evolution?

Score one for the good guys in the ongoing battle between the 21st century and the 15th: A federal judge ordered the removal of stickers claiming evolution is "a theory, not a fact" from high school biology books in suburban Atlanta.

Scientists, several of whom testified in the case, say the sticker confuses the scientific term "theory" with the word's common usage and inappropriately combines science with personal religious belief.

(For a prior humorous rant about the Georgia stickers, see this, and for a discussion of Intelligent Design and science as a way of viewing the world, start here.)
Of course, the local religious conservatives decry another foul act by "activist judges."

The school district just north of Atlanta approved the stickers after more than 2,000 parents complained the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life.

Just another battle in the ongoing Fundamentalism Wars taking place in countries around the globe. In Europe (most notably France and The Netherlands), this seems to be taking the form of debates about Muslim girls who want to wear the veil, but here in the US our fundies are home-grown, so it seems to be about whether we pass along to the next generation our current best understanding of the natural world.

(news via LaDiDa)

And yes, Jeremy, I haven't forgotten your question. It may get some time this weekend...

Um, yeah, what he said

A great comprehensive article by Rand Simberg about science as not only a set of facts but a philosophy about how to approach the world (and how the misunderstanding of approach versus conclusions leads to useless discussions of evolution and other hot topics):

More on Intelligent Design

(via the Daou Report)

There are theories and there are theories

I've been following the story of the Dover, PA, schoolboard's insistence that Intelligent Design be taught alongside evolution in classrooms. There are now a couple of court cases in the works challenging this weak cloaking of Creationism, but ID was pretty specifically designed to leverage ambiguities in the original court rulings that made mandatory Creationism curricula illegal.

Anyway, here's an interesting examination of why the teaching of Intelligent Design should be considered unconstitutional. It points out the challenges and suggests some solutions for putting this issue to bed once and for all; in a nutshell, (1) ID is a thin veil for a religious viewpoint, and (2) it's really a label more than an actual theory. I particularly appreciated the well-considered arguments made for point (2).

In both biology and physics, in other words, supernatural phenomena may be conceivable. But for an account of such phenomena to qualify as science, it must do more than simply posit an intervention from outside the ordinary natural order. It must also explain how the intervening agent interacts with the natural world. Otherwise, it is simply an article of faith rather than a scientific explanation.

Who knows whether any justices will have the nerve to set standards of good science...

(via How Appealing)