Pat Robertson Goes Rogue

In a response to a question on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson, head of CBN and Regent University in Virginia Beach, caused many jaws to drop when he remarked that the standard young earth creationism model is not all its cracked up to be. Dan Merica of CNN comments:

The statement was in response to a question Robertson fielded Tuesday from a viewer on his Christian Broadcasting Network show "The 700 Club.” In a submitted question, the viewer wrote that one of her biggest fears was that her children and husband would not go to heaven “because they question why the Bible could not explain the existence of dinosaurs.”

“You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things, and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas,” Robertson said. “They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth, and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible.”

Before answering the question, Robertson acknowledged the statement was controversial by saying, “I know that people will probably try to lynch me when I say this.”

“If you fight science, you are going to lose your children, and I believe in telling them the way it was,” Robertson concluded.

This is, of course, exactly contrary to the teachings of Ken Ham, who argues that it is because we aren't teaching creationism that we are losing our children. Robertson's statement is also a paraphrased restatement of what Kenneth Miller once said: Never bet against science.

Interestingly, while the CNN author attempts to tie in the rest of the article with acceptance of evolution, Robertson doesn't say that. He says that he doesn't accept the recent earth model.

This will make waves in both camps and there will be much hand-wringing among young earth supporters.  Humorously, the The Daily Kos' headline reads: “A Sign of The End Times? Pat Robertson throws the Young Earthers under the bus.”

Whether this counts as a renunciation or simply a public statement of long-held beliefs, I am not sure. That this is big news, however, is unquestionable.

Daily Kos Poll Data Faked

I have used two stories on this site that came from polls done by the Daily Kos. Now it turns out that the company that the Daily Kos used for its polling was faking the data. TechDirt has this to say:

You may have heard by now that the political website Daily Kos has come out and explained that it believes the polling firm it has used for a while, Research 2000, was faking its data. While it's nice to see a publication come right out and bluntly admit that it had relied on data that it now believes was not legit, what's fascinating if you're a stats geek is how a team of stats geeks figured out there were problems with the data. As any good stats nerd knows, the concept of "randomness" isn't quite as random as some people think, which is why faking randomness almost always leads to tell-tale signs that the data was faked or manipulated. For example, one very, very common test is to use Benford's Law to look at the first digit of data in a data set, because in a truly random set, the distribution is not what people usually expect.

The two stories I used were on this post and this one. Sorry if I inadvertently misled anyone. Interestingly, several researchers, including the great statistician R.A. Fisher, have suggested strongly that the father of inheritance studies, Gregor Mendel, cooked his data. Piegorsch¹ writes this:

Part of Fisher's effort in the reconciliation of Mendelism and (biometric) Darwinism was the recognition that only superficial scientific scrutiny had been directed at Mendel's article by both its proponents and opponents (Box, 1978, p. 297). By the early 1930s, Fisher had undertaken to critically review Mendel's original article, going further-in a sense-than those earlier researchers. His conclusions included an astonishing calculation: Mendel's data appeared to fit his own expectations and proposed theories far better than expected by chance alone. The quality of the data (but not the theory itself), and even Mendel's historical reputation were soon called into question by the scientific community. Ironically, after reconciling one scientific controversy on the effects of heredity in evolution, Fisher's research helped spark another!

This is a controversy that continues to this day. It has been mitigated somewhat by the fact that most of Mendel's theoretical constructs with regard to inheritance turned out to be true.

¹Piegorsch, W. (1990). "Fisher's contributions to genetics and heredity, with special emphasis on the Gregor Mendel controversy." Biometrics 46(4): 915-924.

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Josh Rosenau Thinks that Southerners are Crazy

Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas relays the results of a new poll by Marcos Moulitsas, the runner of the Daily Kos, in which southerners poll differently from the rest of the nation in a question about date of the origin of the universe. The question was:

Most astronomers believe the universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago in a massive event called the Big Bang. Do you think that's about right or do think the universe was created much more recently?

Here are the results he got in a poll of 1200 people:

	RIGHT	RECENT	NOT SURE
All	62	25	13
Men	60	28	12
Women	64	22	14
Dem	71	17	12
Rep	44	38	18
Ind	66	23	11
White	58	27	15
Black	75	18	7
Latino	73	21	6
Oth/Ref	78	15	7
18-29	69	18	13
30-44	66	22	12
45-59	59	28	13
60+	56	31	13
NE	72	17	11
South	48	34	18
MW	64	24	12
West	69	21	10

The huge problem here, of course, is that even in the original poll on the Daily Kos site, "much more recently" is not defined and might mean different things to different people. Some might think it was created eight billion years ago, which is much more recent than 13.7. Some might subscribe to "last Thursday-ism" (appearance of age). Some might be young earth creationists. There is simply no way of knowing exactly what people think here. Is it bigger or smaller than a breadbox? This is very inexact. Southerners might be crazy, or they might not know what the poller means by the question.

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