Light Posting

I am gathering information for the first chapter of this book that I am trying to get written. As a result, I will be posting less information and, perhaps, less frequently until I can make headway. On to the research!

The Great Debate

The Free Library has a story on the round of debates going on between Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Dinesh D'Souza, Lee Strobel and others around the notion of whether or not the concept of religion in general and God in specific is useful or harmful to society. D'Souza and Hitchens squared off in Las Vegas. Of note is the emphasis on ID placed by Strobel:

"I think today more than ever in history we have strong scientific evidence that points in the direction of a creator of the universe in the areas of cosmology, physics, astronomy, biochemistry, genetics and human consciousness," said Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune and author of "The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ."

In recent decades, scientists have made a series of extraordinary discoveries, including that the universe, space and time had a beginning, and that the laws of the universe are fine-tuned with almost microscopic precision to make life possible.

"The speed of light, the expansion rate of the universe, the strength of gravitational attraction and the strength of many other fundamental forces are balanced within very fine tolerances to allow for the possibility of life in the universe," said Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Seattle, Wash.-based Discovery Institute, in another debate at Freedom Fest entitled "Is There Scientific Evidence For Intelligent Design in Nature?" "The evidence has led many physicists to suspect that the universe itself is intelligently designed."

The problem I have here and have always had with this "evidence" is that, while it is certainly information that causes one to scratch the head in puzzlement, it is circumstantial and proceeds from argument based on personal incredulity. Further, there simply isn't any way to test the hypothesis that God is behind these "tweaks." To accept that God created the universe in just this way boils down to...uh, what's that word—Oh yeah, "faith."

Evolution and ID: A Compromise?

In an article written by Amy Binder and John Evans, the authors wonder whether or not a compromise can be reached in the teaching of evolution. They write:

We propose a compromise that would neither violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment nor limit the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Most defenders of evolution do not consider valid the critics’ fears that evolution teaches values. Even so, teachers could take these concerns seriously by clarifying what evolutionary theory does not imply about values. To assuage the type of concern articulated by William Jennings Bryan, teachers could tell students that even though evolutionary science talks about the survival of the fittest organism, it is not a model for how humans should treat each other. They could explain that students should not make an “ought” about human behaviour from an “is” of nature and that competition in contemporary society will not lead to increased survival rates. Moreover, they could explicitly note that just because mutations in organisms are random, it does not follow that human morality is random.

I would suggest that this problem stems from an additional supposition, intrinsic to the nature of evolution—that humans have evolved as well as other animals. This is a major stumbling block for many Christians who see humans as specially created not only in thought but in deed.

Ben Stein on Foxnews

Ben Stein had an interesting exchange with Chris Wallace on Foxnews:

WALLACE: Do you believe that evolution and intelligent design should be given equal weight in the science classroom?

STEIN: Well, I don't think that you should teach them on any kind of proportional basis that I can figure out, but I think that if a student or a teacher says Darwinism will take us so far and no farther, he should not be punished.

So, is it possible that Ben Stein sees himself as champion of the underdog, rather than a crusader for Intelligent Design? Sorry there is no link. It is a transcript behind a subscription wall.

Meanwhile, Over in Indonesia...

According to local scholars, the teaching of evolution is a problem in Indonesia, as well. Doesn't this sound familiar?

Like the U.S., there are two school systems in Indonesia: State-funded public schools that are mostly secular, and privately-funded schools, like madrassahs, that often incorporate religious education into the curriculum.

In public schools, evolution is taught independent of religion; in a madrassah, evolution is taught alongside religion.

Unlike the U.S., however, Indonesian public school students have to fulfill a religious studies requirement to graduate, despite the secular nature of the public schools. This almost forces any interpretation of evolution to fit within the bounds of Islam; according to many professors, this is not problematic.

"There shouldn't be any disagreements because the Koran is compatible with science," says Fahma Wijayanti, a lecturer at the Biology Department at State Islamic University (UIN). "If we learn more about evolution, we can discover and learn more about God's plan."

Baiq Hana Susanti, another lecturer at UIN, says that Darwin's theory is "largely inconclusive, with many missing links. The Koran fills in these holes or mysterious parts where there is no science to explain them."

Intelligent Design, Islamic-style. Oh, joy.

A Zen Rebuttal to Chris Hitchens

The Gazette has published a rebuttal to Chris Hitchens by Albert Low, the director of the Montreal Zen Center. He writes:

To feel that creativity and evolution share so much in common, that evolution seems to be slow-motion creativity, does not mean that one must automatically invoke a god who is the creator. Creativity does not need a creative agent; it does not even need consciousness.

This is confirmed by much research into creativity and attested to by us all when we are faced with a difficult problem and decide "to sleep on it." Buddhism is quite at home with a creative and intelligent world, and with intelligent evolution in that world, even though a Buddhist neither affirms nor denies the existence of God.

Something new to think about.

A New Complete Dinosaur Skeleton

A new dinosaur skeleton has been described from the Gobi Desert in China. It is a juvenile Tarbosaurus from the Cretaceous. As the story notes:

Poor Tarbosaurus. Even though it was a top predator during the Cretaceous most people have never heard about it, the theropod from Asia being a poor man's Tyrannosaurus. (Some people think that Tarbosaurus = Tyrannosaurus, but I side with those who hold that they are distinct.) Still, even though it is not as famous as it's North American cousin it is still pretty cool that the recovery of a nearly complete skeleton of a juvenile Tarbosaurus has just been announced. Discovered two years ago in the Gobi Desert the fossils have now been prepped, revealing a young dinosaur only about 7 feet long.

Another piece of the puzzle. Yay.

Chris Hitchens and the Salamander Eye

Chris Hitchens has an article that appears in the CanWest Gazette called The eyes have it. Hitchens waxes about the salamanders that live in caves that are sightless but have vestigial eyes. His letter to Richard Dawkins about these salamanders was answered thus:

Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them - had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on Earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors?

As much as I disagree with the theology of Dawkins, he is correct. The thing is that this is only one example of many that strongly suggest an evolutionary path for so many animals—the whale being one of them. Why would such an animal have a rudimentary pelvis and vestigial limbs? Further, why would there be evidence in the fossil record that its precursors once lived on land? How does ID explain this? How can it? Or is this the undesigned part of creation?

Creationism in Iowa...Again

A community college professor has won a $20 000 wrongful termination settlement against Southwestern Community College in Creston because he was fired after he told students that they ought not to take the biblical story of Adam and Eve literally. According to the story:


Bitterman said college officials fired him over the phone and told him it was for teaching religion instead of history. He argued that academic freedom should have outweighed religious concerns.

"What was for him a purely objective, academic exercise in studying the religious beliefs of different Western civilizations became a group of fundamentalist students taking exception when it came time for their God to be put under the microscope," Bitterman's attorney, Brad Schroeder, said earlier this week.

I would have asked for more money than that. That is just plain silly. You don't fire someone for that. You might talk to them about students' sensibilities—maybe, but any more than that is excessive.

A Plug for The Quest for Right

Reader C. David Parsons suggests, in reference to my post on the Texas State Board of Education, that the board ought to adopt the seven book series The Quest for Right, billed as "The ultimate marriage between an in-depth knowledge of biblical phenomena and natural and physical sciences." Here are some reasons that might not be a good idea. On the fossil record, volume two states:

Balancing the issue, the all-inclusive fossil record (the standard by which the history of all living creatures, to include man, may be reckoned) has failed to produce a solitary intermediate specimen showing said graduation. Instead, the record reveals a marked continuum; all species appear to be as they were from the beginning. Great credence, based on the testimony of paleontologists throughout the world, may, therefore, be justly added to the scientific version of prototypes.

Yes we do have intermediates. Thousands of 'em. In all major orders. No they don't appear as they were from the beginning. They appear sequentially, in steps, over time. This has been rebutted so many times that I am not sure where to go for a link. Here is the TalkOrigins page on intermediates, with loads of references at the end. The chapter continues:

If the whale had, in fact, progressed through the different orders as prescribed by the scientific council—fish, amphibian, lizard, quadruped carnivore, amphibian, and whale, cumulating (increasing) in size with each transformation of its organic structure, there should have been at least a partial record encapsulated within the earth’s crust. The purported trip of the nostrils from the tip of the snout to the top of the head, the telescoping of the large head, and the disappearing hind limbs would have presented hundreds, if not thousands, of intermediate specimens. Yet, not one intermediate specimen showing said transition has ever been discovered; this is a remarkable fact.

Yes, it is remarkable, especially since it is wrong. There are many intermediates, detailed here starting with Sinonyx and leading up to Dorudon. Once again, look for the long reference list at the end. Although this only represents two examples in the set of books, these suggest strongly that this is simply repackaged creationism—arguments that have been refuted time and again. No, based on these examples, I would not recommend this series of books.

Anti-Evolutionism, Turkish Style

LGF, once again, posts a link to a radio broadcast that occurred last year, in which it is revealed that the Discovery Institute and the Institute for Creation Research have worked and are currently working with Turkish creation groups to remove evolution from Turkish classrooms. Here is the radio broadcast. It is a Real Audio link, so you will need that first. At one point in the broadcast, Paul Berlinski of the DI says that there is a world-wide revival going on of Islam and Christianity and that in 500 years, people will be talking about this revival. Newsflash: creationism may be one thing that Christianity and Islam have in common, but it is the ONLY thing they have in common. The Turkish government is shifting toward a hard line Islamist perspective. To collaborate with that just to promote creationism, is myopic indeed.

Evolution of the Eye

Charles Johnson, the creator and moderator of the blog Little Green Footballs, a blog I ordinarily look to for political commentary (It was he that broke the news that the George Bush National Guard letters had been faked), seems to have gotten interested in the Intelligent Design debate and has posted a link to a video that I should have caught up with a bit back, myself. It is a short video on the evolution of the eye and how different eyes exist in nature. It also includes a short section how the eye develops in utero and how that mirrors development evolutionarily. No that is not "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," but it does show how development likely occurred over time.

News From Texas and a Startling Revelation

Janet Phelps of The Bryan College Station Eagle, writes that teachers are agitated about the new legislation paralleling that in Louisiana. Along the way, this little bit of information is passed:

The State Board of Education is to meet this week to discuss revising the science curriculum. Whether to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories has been a topic of debate for months.

Opponents call the phrase an underhanded way for creationists to cast doubt on evolution.

Don McLeroy, a creationist and the chairman of the state board, said he would make it a priority to keep the phrase in the state science curriculum.

"It was written for evolution, and everybody admits that," he said. "They say we're trying to put in creationism. We're not. To me, this whole evolution controversy is a distraction." (emphasis added)

How can it be a distraction if you have specifically singled it out among all of the science disciplines???? The whole point of the legislation is to allow for the teaching of something other than evolution. It isn't a distraction. It's the main point. Calling it a distraction is a smokescreen and is flat-out dishonest.

Carl Zimmer on the DI and Tiktaalik

Carl Zimmer has written a piece on his Discover blog in which he takes aim at the latest circular from the Discovery Institute on Tiktaalik, the slightly pre-tetrapod discovered in northern Canada that has incensed the creationism community. He writes:

The subject of the post is a 375-million-year-old fossil that helps reveal the transition of our ancestors from the water to land, known as Tiktaalik. I’ve written about Tiktaalik here, and you can get more details from the book Your Inner Fish, written by Neil Shubin, one of Tiktaalik’s discoverers. (Here’s a review I wrote in Nature.)

Luskin claims that Neil Shubin calls Tiktaalik a fish with a wrist, but “from what I can tell, Tiktaalik doesn’t have one.” The bulk of the post is taken up by Luskin’s fruitless search for a diagram or some other helpful information, either in Shubin’s book or the original papers. He is frustrated not to find a picture showing a wrist on Tiktaalik compared to the wrist of a tetrapod (a land vertebrate). This sort of “evidence” leads Luskin to conclude that Shubin has something to hide. “In the end, it’s no wonder Shubin chose not to provide a diagram comparing Tiktaalik’s fin-bones to the bones of a real tetrapod limb,” he writes.

The problem, of course, as Zimmer points out, is that Shubin did exactly that. He does so in the book. I just read the description. That is what led to my post about the ulnar-humeral joint. This reminds me of the DI's response to Laura Beil's NYT article linking creationism to the academic freedom bills in legislation. As I pointed out at the time, the entire response by the DI was based on a misreading of the original article by Ms. Beil. It is as if they are so caught up in the fever that they just aren't paying attention.

It seems as if the DI is employing scientists to do the work but all of the PR work is being done by creationists with no knowledge of the fossil record or of evolution. I used to think there were more than subtle differences between the DI and, say, the ICR. That is becoming less true as time goes on.

Dan Gardner on the Templeton Foundation

Dan Gardner, of the Ottawa Citizen, has a long piece on the Templeton Foundation and the extravagant prize that it bestows once a year to a researcher pushing the boundaries of faith and science. It is an interesting read.

How'd I Miss This??

It seems that the government made good on its threat to imprison Dr. Dino, Kent Hovind. Back in late 2006, no less. Here is the story. Hat tip to Gordon Glover. Here is the nuts and bolts:

• The Hovinds were charged with a total of 58 counts of tax evasion.
• Counts one through 12 include Kent Hovind’s alleged failure to collect nearly $470,000 in employee taxes.
• Counts 13 through 57 include both Kent and Jo Hovind. They are charged with structuring cash transactions of $430,500 to avoid reporting requirements.
• Count 58 includes the following charges against Kent Hovind:
  • Filing a frivolous lawsuit against the IRS,
  • demanding damages for criminal trespass.
  • Filing an injunction against an IRS agent.
  • Making threats against investigators and those cooperating with the investigation.
  • Filing false complaints against the IRS for false arrest, excessive use of force and theft.

He was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to ten years in the pen. Kent Hovind, if you will recall is the one who offered $250 000 to anyone who could prove that evolution was true. Here is the original (now out-of-date) TalkOrigins article detailing the challenge and information about Kent Hovind, himself.

Gordon Glover on "Appearance of Age"

Gordon Glover over at Beyond the Firmament has an excellent discussion on the old creationism stand-by, appearance of age. He writes:

Consider the Garden of Eden on the day God rested from His work. If we understand the narrative as a historical account, the universe would have been fully functional. Light from distant stars was already reaching Earth. Large trees with their many annual rings populated the Garden. Mountains and valleys appeared weathered by erosion. Adam and Eve presumably spoke a human language with rules and conventions already learned and rehearsed. Adam appeared to have some experience with horticulture and animal husbandry, and Eve appeared to have some domestic skills. Millions of different species each filled their ecological niches as if they had been doing so for ages.

He is quite correct. If everything were created in six days, some appearance of age would be unavoidable. To me, though, the biggest stumbling block in the whole appearance of age thing is that the YEC crowd tries to have it both ways. First, they try to show that the earth shows signs of being created in six days (for example, the RATE Project, The Grand Canyon Research Project), then, when it doesn't, it reflects the appearance of age. Uh, sorry. That doesn't work. If it shows the appearance of age, then it should show the appearance of age EVERYWHERE. If it doesn't, then it means that God screwed up in places when He was going around artificially aging things. As I have written before, this becomes a Time Bandits God, not the God we know from the Bible.

Intelligent Design and Canada

The Star has a story about the rise of Intelligent Design in Canada. Brian Alters is the director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University. Apparently:

Alters says informal research by his centre has found that about one-third of teachers report pressure from parents to teach creationism or intelligent design, the theory that God directs the development of life, in the class as an alternative to evolution.

Most respond by teaching neither evolution nor creationism, leaving students with the impression that the two are of equal merit, he says. Others tiptoe around the issue, acknowledging that people of some faiths believe in creationism.

Alters, if you recall, sought to do a study to determine whether or not ID was gaining ground in Canada and was his grant proposal was turned down. As the story relates:

The committee reviewing his application said there was inadequate "justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct."

Read the whole thing, especially for the mind-boggling comments by Kent Hovind (Dr. Dino).

Expelled on Rotten Tomatoes

Here is the Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed page on Rotten Tomatoes. It is not pretty. Although the US box office numbers are around 7.7 million, the numbers in Canada are atrocious: 24 thousand dollars so far. While it is true that no documentary makes the kind of money that a mainstream fiction piece will make, this is bad by any standards. The reviews don't help.

John Derbyshire on John West and Academic Freedom Legislation

John Derbyshire, no friend of creationism in any of its forms, takes aim at the academic freedom legislation that was just recently passed in Louisiana. He is smack on the money:

Whether or not the law as signed is unconstitutional per se, I do not know. I do know, though — as the creationist Discovery Institute that helped promote the Act also surely knows — that the Act will encourage Louisiana local school boards to unconstitutional behavior. That's what it's meant to do.

Indeed, one should wonder when a distinctly anti-evolution organization strongly supports an "academic freedom" bill just after the state school board changes its policies to include more evolution in the classroom.

Commenting on the inevitable lawsuits that will come when a science teacher starts teaching creationism and gets caught doing it:

Where will the Discovery Institute be when these legal expenses come due? Just where they were in the Dover case — nowhere! What, you were thinking that those bold warriors for truth at the Discovery Institute will help to fund the defense in these no-hope lawsuits? Ha ha ha ha ha!

Stealth anti-evolutionism once again. The first time there is a lawsuit of the nature that Derbyshire notes (and there will be one soon, I bet), Jindal needs to repeal the act.