The Pseudo Scientists – Episode 45

In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Belinda, James and Richard discuss the Real Australian Sceptics and Australian anti-intellectualism, and read out some listener emails from California, New Zealand and Finland. Plus, I get mentioned! Because I have a funny accent. No other reason.

This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is a sample of the enlightened views of Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. Listen to the full 12 minute clip, if you can bear it. It’s pretty sickening.

Oh, and we have a new contact email address for the show: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com. Drop us a line if you have feedback, questions, praise, criticism, or spoilers for upcoming television show episodes¹.

What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, become a fan on Facebook, and follow the Young Australian Skeptics on Twitter.

1. Note: If anyone actually does the latter, bad things will happen.

Since I’m floundering about what I should write about next in terms of science or philosophy (I was tossing up about the definition of “function” in biology, but the literature is far too dense for me to get through), I thought I would share another insight into the world of my favourite music. Last time it was the violin-plucking indie rocker Andrew Bird, and this time it’s Björk, everyone’s favourite Icelandic icon.

Now I fully admit that Björk can be hard to get into. Friends of mine are quite familiar with my “Björk journey”, in which it took me four full listens of her entire discography in order to start to realise that the music was actually good. In fact, I was listening to her 2004 album Medúlla for the first time a couple of years back, before one of my sister’s choir concerts (quite appropriate, actually), just sitting in the car thinking “What the hell am I listening to? This is actually really scary – and not in a good way.” That thought didn’t go away until a few weeks later – for some reason, it all started to make sense.

What I’m saying is: don’t expect to like her music when you first listen to it. I’ll try and select some more accessible tracks for you here, but even these might be taxing for people not used to listening to music outside their comfort zone. Listener beware.

So, characteristics of the music itself. Björk’s style is hard to define, as she often switches between genres within albums, and each song rarely contains elements from only one genre. The only real constant is her vocals, which really ground each track and remind you, as you listen to her discography, that it’s all coming from one person – this is all her music. I suppose another characteristic is dense instrumentation and layering, although that’s not true for all her tracks.

I could take you right now on a journey through each of her albums, starting with her 1993 debut Debut (haha, Björk, haha) and ending with her latest, Biophilia, but there are just too many albums to get through, so I’ll only share four songs (far too few, I know) – a selection of my favourites that I’m relatively certain most people won’t find repulsive on a first listen. But, of course, your mileage may vary.

Let’s still do it chronologically (in terms of composition) though, shall we?

“The Anchor Song” is off Debut (1993), and the original (album) arrangement features a saxophone quartet as the sole accompaniment to Björk’s voice, which sounds great, but this more modern arrangement with an all-female Icelandic brass ensemble is good too.

The thing that draws me to this song is the seamless blending of the relatively traditional vocal melody with the harmonic dissonances of the backing band, creating some lovely points of tension and interest. Also, Björk’s Icelandic lyrics are quite haunting.

Moving along through time, “Hyper-ballad” is off Post (1995), Björk’s most famous album and one that broke her into (somewhat) mainstream musical consciousness. If you know only one of her songs, it will most likely be either this one, or her cover of “It’s Oh So Quiet” (also from Post).

This song is just quintessentially Björk. The lyrics are about contemplating committing suicide by jumping off a cliff, but somehow it just seems a bit detached and abstract, like it’s a metaphor for something else. Its musical structure is weird too – the verse is a repeated three-bar chord progression, which is very, very rare to find in even more avant-garde music, let along something this accessible. Also, the snare drum in this live version is brilliant. So good.

This third song is “5 Years”, off Homogenic (1997), which is quite possibly my favourite Björk album. Everything about Homogenic is just so tight, so calculated, and every song is damn catchy, which made it very hard for me to choose just one song from it. So, you know, I picked one at random.

As this is the only non-live song I’ll be showing you, it serves as the only real example of how Björk’s music sounds on her studio albums. I’m wary of calling it electronica, but that’s essentially what it is a lot of the time (barring some acoustic instrumentation like strings, which are relatively common – and present in this song). The reason I don’t want to call it electronica is that it doesn’t sound like electronica – the beats feel very organic and far less computerised than you’d expect. Even the distorted drums in this song don’t sound all that robotic.

If Homogenic is possibly my favourite Björk album, then “Unison”, off Vespertine (2001), is possibly my favourite Björk song. 6 minutes of pure bliss.

From the glitchy microbeats and insanely catchy rhythmic synth in the background, to the choir, to the harp, to the arresting vocal melody, this live version is only one I could find that does the studio album version justice. Jesus Christ, I love this song so much, I can’t describe it.

I could spend another another three whole blog posts analysing Björk’s music, but I think I’ll leave it here, before I get too emotional and sound too pretentious (although that may have happened already). Hopefully I’ve given you some interesting things to listen to and consider. Remember, don’t take these songs at their face value – give them a while and let them sink in.

The Pseudo Scientists – Episode 44

In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Richard, Belinda and I discuss eggless chickens, analytical thought and its effects on supernatural beliefs, and the compatibility of science and religion. Plus, Belinda interviews Eugenie Scott from the National Center for Science Education about recent developments in anti-evolution legislation in the US. This marks the third time Eugenie has been interviewed on the podcast – which means that 6.8% of all the “proper” episodes contain an interview with her. You can’t say she doesn’t deserve such attention though, come on.

This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is from a trailer for the evangelical Christian movie “IndoctriNation”, featuring Answers in Genesis’s Ken Ham. Don’t you just love him?

You can find out more about the National Center for Science Education at their website.

What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, and become a fan on Facebook.

The Pseudo Scientists – Episode 43

In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Belinda, James, Jason, Richard and I – along with special guest Ashley Paramore from the Secular Student Alliance – discuss the Global Atheist Convention 2012, as well as secular/atheist student groups and Ashley’s time in Australia.

This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is from the official trailer of the chemtrail conspiracy movie “Why in the World are They Spraying?”. Fairly insane.

You can find Ashley Paramore on Twitter, YouTube and the Secular Student Alliance website.

What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, and become a fan on Facebook.

I was lucky enough to have my friend Khalil Cassimally interview me a couple of weeks ago for The SA Incubator, a Scientific American blog that focuses on the next generation of science communicators. Now, the interview is online! Have a read whilst it’s still hot. Or even when it’s not. I doubt it’s going away any time soon.

The interview goes into details about my science communication niche, podcasting, geekiness and my plans for the future. More information about what I think: just what everyone is dying to hear. Well, then again, you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you didn’t want to know what I think, right? Right.

If you were wondering, the Global Atheist Convention went spectacularly well. As a volunteer in a vibrant blue t-shirt I was running around all over the place most of the time, but I still got to catch most of the speakers, which were on the whole excellent. Speaker highlights were Sam Harris’s surprise meditation session, the video tribute to Christopher Hitchens, Simon Taylor and Tom Ballard at the Gala Dinner, Leslie Cannold on secularism in Australia, Daniel Dennett on whether or not some Christians actually believe in God, and, of course, Eugenie Scott’s talk on intelligent design. But the real highlights were meeting all of the wonderful people who I never get to see except at large conventions like this – people from across Australia and the world who I’ve met through the Internet.

I finally got my picture taken with Eugenie Scott (at the wrap party, hence my Darwin Tree shirt)! Third time lucky. Also, that's Chris Stedman on the left, who I got to meet for the first time at the convention and is a wonderful (very famous) person.

Kylie Sturgess, who co-MC’d the whole thing with Lawrence Leung, penned a great wrap-up post full of links to various people’s impressions of the convention. Worth a look if you missed out or just want to remember what happened in greater detail because, like me, you have a terrible episodic memory.

Related to the GAC, the Reason for Faith Festival panel discussion on science and religion I was on took place last Monday, which was actually a lot of fun. While six people (plus one moderator) on stage tended to get a little hectic at times, the discussion was respectful and quite interesting. One major thing I learnt was that, for at least the Christians on the panel, who were all accomplished scientists, Christians don’t necessarily think they have the answer to every question (which seems like a silly thing to think now, but for some reason it never crossed my mind that they could be uncertain). When I queried them on the topic of God’s interaction with biological evolution, none of them had formed a coherent idea about what they thought God had to do with evolution – they admitted this. Rather than fall into one of many defined camps (theistic evolution, intelligent design, etc.), they preferred to remain unsure and reserve judgment, something I’d never observed before.

The event was professionally recorded and a video should surface at some point (which I will of course link to when the time comes), so you won’t have to rely on my terrible relaying abilities to understand what happened for long. I was told by a few people who were in the audience (atheists and Christians alike) that I actually did well on the panel and made some interesting points, which I wasn’t expecting, so, er, there’s that.

Oh, and I spent a good deal of this week writing about identifying gene fragments from mouse testis cDNA libraries for a practical molecular biology subject I do at university, and – because of the specific genes I identified – I never want to read or write about histone H3 variants again. Those nucleosomal bastards.

[Insert mouse testis/histone pun here]

Sigh.

Ever since 2009, I’ve been waiting for the indie/art/experimental/genre-bending pop/rock group Dirty Projectors to release another full-length album: the next chapter after their terrific Bitte Orca. Sure, they released an EP with Björk that was pretty cool, but at only 22 minutes, it didn’t fully satisfy my deep need for Dave Longstreth’s songwriting and arrangement skills.

But apparently I need not wait much longer! The first single/track/thing from their new record (whose name has yet to be revealed) has dropped¹, which means the full album is not far away.

Unfortunately, the track is so good that my excitements levels have tripled. That can’t be healthy for my blood pressure.

Is it just me, or has Dave Longstreth been honing his vocal chops?

1. Yeah, I said “dropped”. What of it? Huh? Huh?!

You’re all familiar with the Global Atheist Convention 2012, right? It’s a massive event being held at the Melbourne Convention Centre from April 13th-15th, featuring both international and local speakers – philosophers, scientists, writers, comedians, and more – who will all be discussing various topics surrounding atheism or non-belief in religion. My good friend Kylie Sturgess (along with Australian comedian Lawrence Leung) will be MC-ing it. What, you’ve never heard of it? How curious.

Anyway, whether or not you’ve heard of it is beside the point – all you need to know it that it exists: because various Christian organisations have come together to organise a series of events  - the Reason for Faith Festival - as a counter to the 2012 GAC’s presence, on various aspects of religion, faith, spirituality and disbelief in the weeks afterwards.

One such event, on Monday, April 16th (the day after the GAC), is a screening of part of a documentary called “Test of Faith”, followed by a panel discussion centred around the interaction of science and religious/Christian belief, discussing questions such as:

• What are the limits of science?
• Can theistic belief be rational?
• Does evolution preclude theistic belief?
• Are science and religion in conflict?

The panelists include:

• Professor Graham Oppy, an atheist philosopher from Monash University
• Emeritus Professor John Pilbrow, former President of the Australian Institute of Physics
• Associate Professor Alan Gijsbers, a neuroscientist and specialist in Addiction Medicine at RMH
• Dr Bruce Yabsley, a high-energy particle physicist, involved with the Large Hardon Collider

…and me, little “Mr” Jack Scanlan!¹

Besides Graham Oppy, all of the other members of the panel are Christian scientists² – and academically esteemed ones, too. They’re big names! I’m just an undergraduate science student, with views on the relationship between religion and science uninformed by graduate study and many years in academia.

I feel rather inadequate.

But anyway, it should be fun and hopefully somewhat educational. My thoughts and ideas on science and religion are complex, so I’ll probably need to write them down on here sometime to get them in order before the event. I might more/less sympathetic to the theistic scientist’s position than you might think! Stay tuned!

Of course, if you’re in Melbourne around the time of the GAC, please come along if you can. A good audience is a diverse audience and I have a feeling that the organisers of the festival have been advertising primarily through theistic communities and channels. Skeptics need to get in on this!

EVENT DETAILS

• What: Test of Faith – Screening and Panel
• When: April 16th, 7pm until 9pm
• Where: State Library of Victoria, Village Roadshow Theatrette (Melbourne)
• Cost: $10 per person (no prior registration required – just turn up on the night)

There’s also a Facebook event page if you’re so inclined.

1. I’m described on the event’s page as being “editor of ‘The Pseudo Scientists’ podcast, founding member of Young Australian Skeptics”. Probably the most impressive things they could say about a person such as I, really.
2. Scientists who happen to be Christians, not members of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

If that title doesn’t draw you in, I don’t know what will, honestly. It’s not misleading, either.

The lovely folks over at TBA - Ben Vernel, Tess Armstrong and Andy Balloch – were kind enough to invite me on their excellent podcast to discuss all things science… and quite a few things not-science. I share some amazing science-themed pick-up lines (which I’ve never, ever used, I promise you), Tess asks me about random topics, Ben just sits there being a bit of an hilarious creep, and Andy finds the science (?) in videogames. Other stuff happens too, of course, so listen below (or on iTunes) to find out.

Science Part 1 (with Jack Scanlan)

Science Part 2 (with Jack Scanlan)

As the debate is laid out in a blog format, with Ryder and Mackay responding to each other’s posts in a more-or-less sequential way, it’d be useful to jump right in at the start and check out both guys’ opening arguments. You can then use the “previous/next” navigation links at the top of each post to view the posts in order.

Have fun! May you learn of the somewhat-futile nature of debating creationists. Hopefully the blog also serves as a Google trap for people on the fence about creationism, exposing how silly its proponents can look.

But Will recently wrote something that caught my eye, in the comments to my latest TWiID post:

Jack, you write; “there are indeed other evolutionary mechanisms besides natural selection, such as genetic drift (which can have surprising consequences in various situations), endosymbiosis, horizontal gene transfer, and yes, epigenetic change too. But they come together to explain evolutionary change, they don’t fight amongst themselves in the academic literature for the “one, true evolutionary mechanism”.” 

The problem here is that if natural selection is no longer considered relevant then how do horizontal gene transfers, epigenetic changes, etc. imply “evolution”? The real point that is being challenged is: is there such a thing as evolution? You are simply assuming that there is. You are an ideologue. Al scientist inquires whether it is or is NOT a reality. Without natural selection, there is no question of evolution. Life requires an exchange with its environment in order to maintain itself. It adapts according to circumstances surrounding it, utilizing whatever means it has available.Evolution doesn’t even come up here – except if you have a particular ax to grind, viz. that the whole thing could not have a divine origin. Well, science can’t answer that when we stick to what evidence we have. So why are you pushing your agenda and calling it science? [Emphasis mine - Jack]

Putting aside Will’s misunderstanding of the point I was trying to make about various evolutionary mechanisms coming together (which was well-handled by other commenters) – am I an ideologue? Do I ignore evidence against my preferred viewpoint in order to push an agenda I subscribe to for emotional or faith-based reasons?

Of course, very few people would admit to being an ideologue, so it’s obvious that I deny being one, but it may be helpful for Will and other intelligent design proponents/anti-evolutionists to understand where I’m coming from as a student and eventual scientist, and as a person, so please indulge me in this foray into my own beliefs about evolution, religion and ID.

Evolution

Evolution is simply change over time. In biology, this is reflected as changes in phenotype (the physical, perceivable parts of an organism) throughout human lifespans and through geological periods. That life has evolved, and is evolving, is a fact, clearly visible, for example, in the fossil record, through artificial breeding and the domestication of plants and animals, and through the identification of changes in DNA sequences that can now be done easily in this era of molecular technology. Theories of evolution, as opposed to the facts of evolution, are bundles of hypotheses and overarching frameworks that attempt to explain how and why such change has and does occur.

Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection was the first somewhat-successful attempt at explaining how the phenotypes of organisms change over time and why organisms can be grouped into hierarchical trees. Common parlance has since equivocated evolutionary fact with Darwin’s theory, even though the latter has changed considerably since the 19th century: it was merged with genetics in the early 20th century (forming the so-called “Modern Synthesis”), and has since been revised to include other mechanisms, such as horizontal gene transfer, endosymbiosis, an increased molecular role for genetic drift, as well as others, which have been added over time as they were discovered and characterised. This modern theory of evolution still attempts to explain the facts that Darwin observed in the biological world and puzzled over (as well as new facts coming from the fields of molecular biology and others, which did not exist in his time), but it is now doing so with a much larger toolbox of potential explanations. A few scientists have attempted to rename this new theory as something akin to the “Extended Synthesis”, but none of the names have really caught on, so I’ll just refer to it as current evolutionary theory (CET).

As a third-year undergraduate biology student, majoring in a hodge-podge of genetics, molecular biology and biochemistry subjects, I’ve been increasingly exposed to how and why CET is such a powerful theory and why the vast majority of biologists believe it is the most complete scientific theory currently available for the diversity of life on Earth. But as a scientific skeptic, I’m aware that no theory is invulnerable and as such CET is neither 100% complete nor 100% definitely true. There’s always the chance, however small, that it could be shown to be wrong. I don’t think, personally, that it’s very likely that this will ever happen (at least not in a major way – all theories are constantly being revised and updated on some level), but neither do I think that CET is an unquestionable dogma.

When it comes to my personal beliefs about the most dominant forces in evolution, ala. the neutralist/selectionist debates of the last few decades, I really don’t have much of a position. Being an undergraduate student, I lack the knowledge base to be able to grasp the nuances of each camp. Broadly speaking, I understand where both are coming from, but it’s not something I feel I can choose a side in just yet. The same can be said for the role of epigenetics in adaptation, although I’m very skeptical that it will turn out to be a major player in long-term phenotypic evolution. I am, however, very excited about current research into the promiscuity of protein functions and have a nagging suspicion that shifts in the substrate specificity of enzymes, for example, are much easier to evolve than previously thought, opening up the possibility that metabolic evolution is actually rather flexible. But I could be wrong, of course.

Religion

That’s a brief overview of my thoughts on evolutionary theory, so what about religion? I describe myself to strangers, when asked about my religious beliefs, as an atheist or a non-believer. The truth, however, is a little more complicated. Broadly speaking, I’m an agnostic atheist – one who does not believe that a deity exists, but doesn’t believe that they can prove that a deity doesn’t exist¹ – but that classification of disbelief only extends to deities that could possibly exist. There are two other categories of deities that I need to address: those that I have evidence against existing, and those that cannot be known to exist.

This might seem like a radical statement to some, but I’m a gnostic atheist when it comes to the God of the literal interpretation of the Bible². I have evidence that this God does not exist, in that its existence contradicts known facts about the Universe: the Earth was not formed approximately 6000 years ago, there was never a worldwide flood, etc. As such, the literalist Biblical God is almost certainly non-existent. The same can be said for any and all possible definitions of deities that contradict known facts (I’m an gnostic atheist about a deity that made everything out of cheese, because – quite clearly – everything is not made out of cheese) or logic (deities that have mutually incompatible properties cannot exist).

The last category of deity contains those whose definitions are impossible to parse or whose existence is necessarily unknowable, such as the God of the deists, who exists completely separately from the Universe and does not influence it in any way. For all such deities I can only be a “pure” agnostic: I cannot know if they exist one way or the other.

So in a way, it doesn’t make much sense to ask me what I believe when it comes to religion, unless you’re phrasing the question in such a way that I’m responding to a particular religious claim. I have no positive overall stance, although I have numerous positive stances against deities that contradict known facts. Thus, I’m happy just being called a skeptical non-believer.

Intelligent Design

How do my opinions on evolutionary theory and religion then influence my appraisal of intelligent design? According to Will, I have an ax to grid against divine origins in biology: is this true? Well, it depends what you mean by “divine”. Let’s step back a moment and consider plain ol’ secular ID.

ID, as most commonly defined by the Discovery Institute, is the notion that some features of life were designed by something with an intelligent mind³. Do I a priori reject this hypothesis? Of course not! Even if I were a gnostic atheist across the board, for all possible definitions of deities, I would still have to consider the possibility that life on this planet was started by and/or influenced by extraterrestrial intelligent beings with advanced scientific knowledge. So I don’t regard secular ID as necessarily false, just a hypothesis in the same category as those that postulate alien visitation in the present day via flying saucer and all manner of exotic spacecraft: it could be true, but I don’t have any reason to think that it is. If we find evidence that supports it, I’d be happy to believe it. In fact, I think it’d be the single-most exciting discovery ever made, since it would confirm the existence of non-human intelligences! Aliens! Get excited, people!

My acceptance of evolutionary theory also doesn’t play a role in this decision, because ID is potentially compatible with CET, especially if the act of design was to seed the planet with life, or to cause isolated changes to certain taxa throughout history. CET could be true in general, with sporadic alien intervention.

Things get tricky when people start defining ID as something other than a secular hypothesis. Take, for example, the young-Earth creationist who argues for ID as a part of their wider, Biblical-literalist worldview. I do reject this form of ID pretty much straight away – but note that it’s because I already believe the other aspects of the creationist’s worldview are impossible and/or contradict known facts, not that the concept of some aspect of life on Earth being designed is impossible or contradicts known facts.

Okay, let’s move away from the young-Earth creationists and into a more general playing field – what about the broad hypothesis of divine-ID, that a deity, of some sort, designed/created some or all of life? Like the question of what my opinion on religion is, this is tricky. I don’t have the ability to determine whether or not that hypothesis is impossible, implausible or unknowable. I can only take each sub-hypothesis (ie. each potential deity) on a case-by-case basis, and since deities have entered the picture, my evaluations go back to my specific opinions on each particular deity, as touched on previously. What would the specific deity’s motives been? When would they have created life? How would they have created life? These are all considerations that need to be looked at before I can state, one way or the other, if I believe anything about the divine-ID hypothesis in question.

Let’s recap. I believe that general, secular ID is possibly true, but I have no reason to think that it is. The same goes for some formulations of divine-ID, but for other formulations I believe they are definitely not true, or that it is impossible for me to know whether or not they true.

What this all means is that I don’t like to focus on disproving ID – I prefer instead to critically analyse the ID movement’s attempts to support certain ID hypotheses. When I criticise the pro-ID blog posts over at Evolution News & Views, I’m not claiming that they could not be possibly right, just that their methods for determining whether or not they are right are off the mark.

I’m not an evolutionary ideologue, Will. In the words of Ben Goldacre, I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.

1. Pretty much everyone is an agnostic disbeliever in unicorns – you don’t believe that they exist, but you can’t prove they don’t.
2. A generic Christian God, however, is much harder to disprove, given the sheer number of possible attributes that it could have and actions it could have done – so I’m more of an agnostic atheist when it comes to Christian deities in general.
3. They also extend it to the origin of the Universe too, but that’s a separate topic that I’m not sure Will was alluding to, so we’ll save that for another day.

Semester 1 of my 3rd year of university started last week, so I’ve suddenly found myself with coursework to pore over. Likewise, the Discovery Institute seems to have kicked itself into a high gear, publishing a larger-than-average number of articles about numerous different topics, all of which just so happen to be rather important and weighty. Ah well, someone’s got to cover them, my own studies of evolutionary genetics be damned.

This week I’ll be looking at how the ID movement views the relationships between science, religion and politics, how it operates with respect to criticising evolutionary biology and supporting its own ideas, and how it deals with the “bad design” objection from critics of ID.

———

David Klinghoffer recently wrote a post on Evolution News & Views celebrating the launch of Discovery Institute senior fellow Jay Richards’ new book Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom Before It’s Too Late. I think it’s quite clear what the book is about: the merging of the religious and political realms. Now, a senior fellow of an organisation writing a book with a specific contention does not necessarily mean that the organisation endorses that contention, but in this case it’s obvious the Discovery Institute is 100% on board with Richards’ ideas:

Readers of ENV will know Dr. Richards as a wonderfully illuminating and entertaining writer and explainer especially of all things touching on the relation of science to faith. Making the case that a society’s economic flourishing is “indivisible” from its moral values, the book may seem off-topic for us here. But it emphatically isn’t.

Discovery Institute, our institutional home, is unique among think tanks in being organized around the insight that every aspect of public and private existence follows from the fundamental question of how people in a society understand what it means to be a human being.

Are men just a species of hairless ape bearing no signs of ultimate purpose or design, or do we contain a spark of something transcendent? [Emphasis mine - Jack] For a given culture, no question is further “upstream” than that. From our answer to it flow a myriad of attitudes that determine what it will be like to live in that culture — whether humane or degraded, rich or void in meaning, creative or barren, prosperous or wretched, safe or imperiled [sic].

“Ultimate purpose”? “Transcendent”?  That’s very religious language. Note that ID proponents have, many times, stated that ID doesn’t necessarily propose a supernatural Designer (and I agree with them), but they just can’t seem to be consistent with this message. The Designer always turns out to be divine in the Judeo-Christian  sense, at least when they describe it in their own words in more private settings.

So not only is the Discovery Institute a conservative think tank (we all knew that, right?), it seems to fundamentally contend that religious faith, politics and science are “indivisible” from each other, which is a far more extreme position than mere political conservatism. Leaving aside the theocratic problems with merging religion and politics, this conflation of science with religion reveals (again) just how religious their motivations behind ID are. Yet this conflicts with their public message of ID as a secular scientific theory. How is one to interpret these mixed signals?

The most likely possibility is that they just don’t care. They have their set audience – religious people who either already agree with them or are very close to agreeing with them – and they know that religious language and appeals to socially conservative, “Religious Right” ideas will keep them happy, whilst their press releases, involvements in legal battles and educational reforms, and official definitions all repeat the definition of ID as a secular hypothesis with no influence from religion, so they have something to point to when scientists claim that ID is simply the latest incarnation of traditional US creationism and anti-evolutionism.

History shows that this strategy has had mixed results. People with knowledge about the legal battles over creationism in the last 40 years are able to identify the ID movement’s religious motivations immediately, as are savvy members of the public. Once identified, this knowledge can be passed on relatively easily to many people, as has been done through some branches of the media (including popular science magazines) and organisations such as the NCSE. However, people with a peripheral or non-existent involvement in any of the past disputes (and who haven’t been reached by the NCSE) look to the Discovery Institute and see a scientific organisation being hammered by the academic community for the non-crime of having a new idea. Those with Christian viewpoints may look below the surface and see (very obvious) subtext that they agree with, giving them even more incentive to fight for the ID movement’s “academic freedom”. Most won’t. But the public loves an underdog being treated unfairly, giving the Discovery Institute a good amount of inherent public support.

This is something that people involved with the battle against intelligent design have known for years, and this “exposé” is unlikely to change anything: people with the power to protest and fight against ID are already using this knowledge, and those in the ID movement have their standard retorts to it. But if you’re new to all this, er, I hope you learnt something important.

———

The next thing I want to touch on is not one post, but three: one by Granville Sewell, another by David Klinghoffer, and the last by the anonymous editor of Evolution News & Views. They each seem to be about a different topic – thermodynamics, the origin of language, and epigenetics – but they’re actually very closely linked to each other. Why? Because taken together they reveal the pattern of “dissent” from modern evolutionary theory that the Discovery Institute takes – and guess what? The pattern isn’t so much a pattern as it is a hodge-podge of shots fired randomly and sometimes unthinkingly.

As I discussed in the last TWiID, modern opposition to evolutionary biology is far from organised. Of course, I don’t mean “not organised” in the sense that organisations don’t exist to further the goal of destroying the education and public acceptance of evolution¹, but in the sense that most ID proponents aren’t quite sure what they disagree with when it comes to evolution: except that intelligence must have played a role in the history of life somewhere.

This leads to many disparate, and sometimes conflicting, arguments against “Darwinism” from the ID camp. Take Granville Sewell’s argument from the second law of thermodynamics: on its face, it seems to state that evolution of any kind cannot occur, because it would mean that (locally) entropy would be decreasing. However, he has been clear to point out that he doesn’t make that argument, simply that he believes “the increase in order observed on Earth (and here alone, as far as we know) violates the laws of probability and the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular fashion” because the claim that “ANYTHING can happen in an open system, even the rearrangement of atoms into computers, without violating the second law” is untrue.

So his real argument is that local decreases in entropy do not allow for anything at all to occur. Well, sure! That’s pretty reasonable. I wouldn’t expect that locally decreasing the entropy in my room would produce a cat spontaneously appearing on my bed, that’s absurd. For that to occur, a local decrease in entropy is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. There would need to be some physical, chemical or biological process that would cause the cat to appear, and that’s the real reason the scenario is absurd: such a process probably doesn’t exist.

Similarly, simply stating that the local decrease in entropy on the Earth via solar radiation is sufficient for the diversification of life to occur is incorrect: there also needs to be a plausible process that can use that decreased entropy in a productive way. Evolutionary mechanisms comprise that process.

But that Sewell’s argument is horribly flawed isn’t the issue here (although I really wanted to make sure everyone knew why it’s terrible). The real issue is the fact that if it were true, all evolutionary processes could not occur, contradicting many ID arguments about the amount of change possible given an ID-centric view of life’s evolution. Likewise, the “No Free Lunch” arguments of William Dembski seem to deny that natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism doesn’t work – which is both demonstrably false and contradicts the beliefs of many ID proponents.

While Sewell’s argument deals directly with the mechanistic details of how evolution occurs, David Klinghoffer is taking issue with the naturalistic origin of language:

A technical comment in Science shows how quickly an evolutionary just-so-story can unravel (“Comment on ‘Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa,’” February 10, 2012). Quentin Atkinson, last year in the same journal, had proposed the striking and suspiciously neat theory that worldwide linguistic evidence, based on the size of the phonemic toolbox of languages around the world, showed that language had originated in western African between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

[...]

The problem is this turns out to be a bit of a fable, based on partial and imperfectly analyzed evidence, as Michael Cysouw and his colleagues show in hardly more than a page.

[...]

It’s always tempting to see that one pattern in the carpet and miss all the rest. In fact, we don’t know where language originated.

Huh? How does evidence against the hypothesis that the origin of language occurred in Africa undermine evolutionary theory? Cultural evolution is most likely very different to genetic evolution, considering most of our language skills come from our environment as learned behaviours and are not influenced by inherited genetic information. An infant born to English-speaking parents from a long and proud English-speaking background would probably have no more trouble learning Japanese from its foster parents after its biological parents died in a tragic ballooning accident than learning English like it would have if the hot air balloon carrying its parents had not spontaneously caught fire whilst floating over a harsh and an unforgiving mountain range in the middle of winter.

Klinghoffer’s basically just desperately trying to find something in the human origins literature that doesn’t add up, pointing to counterarguments and yelling “See! See! They sometimes get it wrong, therefore… sometimes they get it wrong!” This is the perfect example of the hodge-podge approach to “dissenting from Darwin”: disprove a hypothesis, imply it’s typical of all evolutionary hypotheses, and relish in your rhetorical victory.

Another example of this is ENV‘s recent post on epigenetics shaping the phenotype of the modern domesticated chicken. While this is interesting in and of itself, the message was twisted to somehow count as a strike against Darwinian evolutionary explanations. Hmm. When genetic drift is found to be the cause of allele frequency changes in a case study, it doesn’t count against selection as a perfectly valid explanation in other cases – so similarly, epigenetic changes (changes in gene expression due to chemical modification of nucleotides or histone proteins) accounting for some phenotypic changes in some cases does not mean that nucleotide sequence changes suddenly lose explanatory power when it comes to explaining the majority of evolutionary change.

So why push the point that epigenetics and Darwinian mechanisms sit opposed to each other? They’re both examples of ways that phenotypes can change through generations of organisms. Nothing supernatural/intelligent to see here, folks! The rhetorical strategy being pushed here is simple, however: define evolutionary biology as relying solely on Darwinian mechanisms, like natural selection, and then show how research is revealing that non-Darwinian evolution occurs as well. Shock! Looks like Darwin was wrong all along! The orthodoxy is crumbling!

The truth is that Darwin didn’t get it all right (and no one expected him to) – there are indeed other evolutionary mechanisms besides natural selection, such as genetic drift (which can have surprising consequences in various situations), endosymbiosis, horizontal gene transfer, and yes, epigenetic change too. But they come together to explain evolutionary change, they don’t fight amongst themselves in the academic literature for the “one, true evolutionary mechanism”. That’s ridiculous.

The Discovery Institute will embrace anything that vaguely challenges the primacy of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms, even if evolutionary biologists accepted them decades ago or they contradict the ID movement’s own ideas. So next time you hear them claim that “Darwinism” is being overturned, it’s probably best to just look the other way and read up on your current journal subscriptions.

———

Bad design! It’s a classic argument from critics of ID, so much so that ID proponents have grown somewhat tired of responding to it. Casey Luskin and David Klinghoffer were no exception when they wrote about the challenges they had received from Keith Gilmour, the author of the website The Centre for Unintelligent Design. Casey writes:

As a science, ID doesn’t address theological questions about whether the design is “desirable,” “undesirable,” “perfect,” or “imperfect.” Undesirable design is still design. Gilmour just doesn’t like it because (in his own subjective view) it’s undesirable.

Why are questions about the perfection of design necessarily theological? Isn’t non-divine design a possibility. I guess so, but Casey keeps forgetting that.

Anyway, I would write on this topic for hours, but I already have. This is, of course, another case of the timeless “Bad Design Paradox”: either ID is scientific and includes testable predictions about the Designer’s characteristics through the examination of the design in question, or ID is unscientific and holds off on identifying anything about the Designer². You can’t really have a scientific ID that shuns all discussion about the characteristics of the Designer, like Casey and Klinghoffer are trying to do.

Hopefully the dialogue between Keith Gilmour and the Discovery Institute continues: I’m interested to see where it’ll head.

1. They clearly do – see the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, the Institute for Creation Research, etc.
2. This is for various reasons – mostly because ID proponents don’t like to stray into what is often theological territory, simply because nearly all of them think the Designer is a deity, but also because they’d find it almost impossible to guess about the motives of a being they don’t really understand.

When I post about a musician or band on here under the guise of a Tabletop Transitional, often I’ll only embed one video of their music. But surely that’s a bad way to really get to know their musical style, right? After all, a sample size of 1 is negligible, statistically speaking.

So, yes, in this short introduction to Andrew Bird, singer-songwriter and violin virtuoso, there will be three songs to listen to: each from a different album of his. Ooh, variety! Variety indeed.

Andrew Bird is a curious musical creature. His work blends together elements of indie rock, folk, jazz and chamber music, producing something very unique, yet highly listenable. In fact, considering how disparate his influences seem to be, it’s kind of weird that the most impenetrable part of his music are the lyrics, which are wonderfully verbose and poetic, but can seem overwhelming on a first listen. Well, at least they did to me.

This first song is “Anonanimal” from his 2009 LP Noble Beast. It’s a great intro to his signature multi-tracked violin sound, as well as his lyrical style. Also, it’s one of his best songs, so how could I not include it?

This next song – “Imitosis” from 2007′s Armchair Apocrypha - is a bit stripped back in the violin department and easily one of his more “conventional” songs, but it’s again a good example his lyrical style. Oftentimes Andrew gets fixated on antiquated science (or the old-fashioned culture of science in years past) and this song exemplifies that fixation. “Imitosis” is a wonderful concept…

“A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left” from 2005′s The Mysterious Production of Eggs is the last song I want to share with you all. It’s a gorgeous song (and very fun to cover – which gives me an idea…) and again the lyrics seem to touch a little on the theme of old-fashioned science: “You’re what happens when two substances collide/And by all accounts you really should have died”.

If you like what you’ve heard, I highly recommend you purchase any of these three albums I’ve mentioned here – Noble Beast, Armchair Apocrypha or The Mysterious Production of Eggs - as a pathway towards full Andrew Bird-appreciation. Good luck and Godspeed.

The Pseudo Scientists – Episode 42

In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Richard, James, Belinda and I honour Douglas Adams by discussing some big questions about Life, the Universe and Everything. What is making up the majority of our universe, and why can’t we see it? How can we more effectively manage Australian wildlife conversation? What is the mass gap problem, and why is it important? What is life, exactly? The answers, unfortunately, probably aren’t all “42″.

This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is a clip from the 2005 film adaptation of Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, and become a fan on Facebook.

The Pseudo Scientists – Episode 41

In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Richard, Elliot, Belinda and I discuss a newly discovered “Super-Earth”, the implications of growing meat in vats instead of living organisms, and some leaked documents from the anti-climate change think tank, the Heartland Institute. Plus, I interview awesome Welsh skeptic Rhys Morgan, who – at the age of only 17 – has lead multiple campaigns against alternative medicine and has been involved in more than his fair share of controversies.

You can follow Rhys Morgan on Twitter at @rhysmorgan and on his blog.

This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is self-proclaimed psychic John Edward talking about his abilities.

What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, and become a fan on Facebook.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

I’ll save you the contrived history lesson. We all know what podcasts are, so this is a post telling you about some of my favourites, ones that I think will appeal to almost anyone reading this. Of course, there are more that I could mention, but, you know, the fewer options you give people the more likely they are to choose any particular one, right? Right? At least I think that’s how human psychology works.

(Pretty much all of these podcasts contain adult language. Just letting you know.)

The Minutes (iTunes | non-iTunes | Website) is the podcast lovechild of Mel Buttle, comedian, and Patience Hodgson, lead singer of Australian band The Grates. Despite not actually knowing each other for a very long time (they met on Twitter), the two act like old friends, discussing extremely entertaining, and often hilarious, stories from their lives. Mel’s parents, particularly her retired, right-wing father, provide the meat for many of her tales, and Patience’s touring history is also a rich source of anecdotes. For some strange reason they often gravitate towards stories about physical fights. They’ll occasionally have on guests, both expected and unexpected, such as band members of The Grates and other Australian musicians who happen to be in Brisbane at the time. They too are often asked about physical fights.

The two also dish out advice like crazy, which has actually evolved into a spin-off podcast called You’re Welcome (iTunes | non-iTunes), released in every fortnight between The Minutes episodes, where they answer questions from and give advice to fans of the show. Well worth a listen as well. Actually, I consider them pretty much the same podcast.

Both podcasts feel very homely and often remind me of a dinner table discussion (or something similar), but they always seem to have something interesting to talk about and it never gets boring. I have no idea how they do it, it’s pretty incredible.

Looking for something with a little more focus, but with just as much hilarity? The Book Was Better (iTunes | Website) is a podcast about novelisations; that is, book versions of films. Not books that films were based on, mind (eg. Harry Potter, Twilight etc.), but books based on films. You know. You saw them as a child. You owned a few.

TBWB is easily the most original show on this list. Novelisations are a rich, untapped seam of entertainment, one that Jess McLeod and Luke Milton, the podcast’s hosts, revealed to me very, very early on in the listening process. Most novelisations are either rushed out at supersonic speed by a disinterested author, or slavishly worked on, infusing bloody chunks of the author’s soul into each page. Both situations – in most cases – lead to horrible books. But Jess and Luke make it funny. Boy do they ever. Don’t listen to this show on public transport: you’ll get weird looks as other passengers wonder if your half-folded, spasming body is something they should actively take an interest in.

Hey! This is a science-y blog! Where’s the science? Well, The Weekly Weinersmith (iTunes | non-iTunes | Website) contains enough science for four podcasts, hence opening up three extra slots in this blog post. Clever, eh? Lateral thinking.

Kelly Weinersmith, an Ecology PhD student at UC Davis, and Zach Weinersmith, creator of the popular webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, are married… to science! And each other! It’s a weird three-way thing, let’s not go into it. As the hosts of this podcast, they handle scientific topics with humour and just plain, raw intelligence. These guys really know their stuff and how to talk about it.

Often, they’ll have scientists on as guests, such as Phil Plait, Sean Carroll and Zen Faulkes, to talk about specific topics, which is always hugely intellectually rewarding.

Plus, dick jokes. Come on.

Much like the first podcast on this list, TOFOP (iTunes | non-iTunes | Website) features a comedian and their non-comedian friend. However, instead of The Minutes‘ Mel and Patience, it has Wil Anderson, beloved Australian comedian and television presenter, and Charlie Clausen, actor, director and producer, as its hosts, who have been friends for nearly a decade.

To be honest, TOFOP is pretty much the older, male version of The Minutes, if you take gender stereotypes seriously. While Wil and Charlie do talk about their lives, there are far more crude jokes, much more swearing and the recurring themes of  prison rape, Hitler, time travel, drug use, sex and celebrities. That’s not to say that it’s unlistenably crass: they’re both likeable guys and aren’t misogynistic or prejudiced, they’re just very open to talking about… certain things.

If you can handle what they throw at you, it’s completely hilarious though. I don’t know about you, but I find a joke becomes ten times funnier when the other person is laughing uncontrollably – and this happens a lot on TOFOP.

———

Of course, there are other podcasts I recommend. If four isn’t enough for you, check out: Kylie Sturgess’s Token Skeptic (iTunes | non-iTunes | Website), full of great interviews with scientists and skeptics from around the world; magician and comedian Simon Taylor’s new radio show/podcast Manthropology (iTunes | non-iTunes | Website), which has interviews men from all walks of life and discusses what they think it means to be a modern man; and perhaps check out my own podcast, The Pseudo Scientists (iTunes | non-iTunes | Website), the official podcast of The Young Australian Skeptics, which is a weekly podcast about science, skepticism and religion, all from a youth perspective (whatever that is).

Happy listening!

That’s right, selected articles from Homologous Legs will be appearing every second Tuesday on the community blog of Vibewire Youth Inc., an Australian non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting the voices of young people on important issues. It was wonderful to be asked to contribute to this growing community and hopefully people will enjoy my take on science and skepticism.

My first article, ““Science Says You’re Wrong!” – How (Not) to Deal with Intelligent Design”, went up yesterday. As post from a couple of years ago, I’m glad it’s getting new life over at Vibewire, since I still believe it contains some useful advice for people wanting to go up against ID proponents either online or in real life.

Here’s a little more about Vibewire:

Founded in 2000, Vibewire Youth Inc is a dynamic non-profit organisation that exists to ensure that young people are included (and able to participate) in conversations that matter.

Vibewire acknowledges that across the world young people are making important contributions as world citizens, workers, entrepreneurs, consumers and agents of change. We are dedicated to encouraging and stimulating an entrepreneurial spirit by unlocking the talents, imagination and creativity of youth as drivers of change, addressing important economic, environmental and social issues within our communities.

Our objective is to connect, create, innovate, and grow.

CONNECT: We build and facilitate connections between our members and Australia’s social, cultural and arts institutions.
CREATE: We create opportunities for young people to grapple with issues, topics and ideas that have currency or are emerging.
INNOVATE: We approach media and conversation with no preconceptions. We encourage discovery and experimentation in both form and content.
GROW: We believe that a healthy mix of experimentation and engagement will allow our members to grow in confidence and capability. And through this, Vibewire too will grow.

[...]

Vibewire boasts a community of passionate, proactive and committed changemakers. We are constantly on the look out for fresh and emerging voices, addressing the big questions of our times.

We make it our business to understand, showcase and amplify the opinions, ideas and creativity of those who live, work and create in Australia. We want to know about your perspective on arts & creativity, health, social justice, science & technology, media & politics and the environment. We want the youth perspective to have more of a presence and be better represented in modern Australian media.

Our community exists here online, but it extends to our physical environment where we actively host live events that stimulate dialogue, forge connections and incite real world action.

They also host a regular event called fastBREAK, which my friend and notable Australian skeptic Dr Rachael Dunlop participated in last week. Skeptics represent!

So, it happened again: the Discovery Institute decided to notice something I wrote about them. I’m not sure if it’s because I write for The Panda’s Thumb and they see me as the weakest, undergraduate link in its strong chain of esteemed, proper biologists, or because my criticisms of their ideas are annoying, but they seem to focus on me quite a lot. Ah well, any recognition is good recognition, right?

This week I’ll be focusing mostly in their response to me, but also on the Discovery Institute’s move into the iAge (which must be very exciting for them), as well as a curious post that highlights yet another major problem with the way the intelligent design movement operates.

———

A few days ago I published a post called ““Pro-ID”, “endorse ID” and “ID-friendly” – Holy terminological ambiguity, Batman!” (it was also cross-posted to The Panda’s Thumb), which was a response to this post by Casey Luskin on Evolution News & Views. Well, true to ENV form, I’ve received a response: not from Casey, but from the faceless main account of the blog. Clearly ol’ Casey is busy with more important things. I understand, don’t worry.

We check in on the pro-Darwin bloggers at Panda’s Thumb regularly and always look forward to another post from Jack Scanlan. You may remember he’s the one who is always threatening to read and review Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell when he finally gets some free time.

I’m flattered they remember me, but I’m more interested in what was written next:

Now Scanlan’s back again and warning that he may someday get around to reading our updated list of pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific publications:

Now, this post is not about to dissect all 50+ citations, that’s for someone else (or me, if I ever get some free time) to do at another time, but I would like to look at exactly how Casey describes the way these papers, even if they don’t mention it by name, “endorse” ID.

Scanlan has an issue with Casey Luskin’s describing the papers in question as “pro-ID” when many, instead of making a positive case for intelligent design, actually focus on Darwinism’s inadequacy in explaining crucial features of life.

But this objection makes no sense.

ID, like Darwinian theory, has a positive and a negative aspect. Saying that life’s development, from non-existent to simple to complex, is best explained as the product of either intelligent design or purposeless Darwinian churning assumes that you are making a comparison between competing hypotheses. Defending either theory, Darwin or Design, means you have to argue for your explanation and against others.

That’s what it means to saying one idea is “better” than another. How can Scanlan not understand that?

How can I not, indeed.

Putting aside that they never mentioned my other arguments, such as that the work of Michael Behe, Douglas Axe and others is not based on ID predictions, they have a little bit of point here. It may be that for “ID” (whatever they decide to define it as¹ ) to be true, “Darwinism” (whatever they decide to define it as, too² ) must be false. But just because, realistically, when you test a hypothesis it must be compared to another, it doesn’t mean that the failure of the alternative hypothesis is an automatic victory for the one you’re proposing. “Darwinism” being incompatible with the data doesn’t mean “ID” wins. It means “ID” could win, because it’s not ruled out by “Darwinism” being true, but it needs to experience positive support too.

This is noticeable in the pre-existing evolutionary biology literature. If the Discovery Institute’s model for how science progresses is true, then modern evolutionary hypotheses and broader theories should be tested, at least in part, by comparing themselves to “ID” and ruling it out, before trying to see if positive evidence exists to support them. But, demonstrably, this does not occur. Why? Because evolutionary biologists have found numerous ways in which to find positive support for their ideas³. They’re running statistical tests, finding examples of hypothetical processes in nature and in the lab at every level of biological organisation, from the ecosystem right down to the molecular world of chromosomes, and just generally being productive. They’re not content with evolution simply being “better”, they want it to be fully fleshed out and complete: the “best” it can possibly be.

Not so with ID. Researchers and writers self-identified as “pro-ID” seem happy to spend more time attacking what they see as a competing framework of thinking than developing their own framework into something that can stand on its own, without being rhetorically propped-up by unrelenting assaults on the last 150 years of biological research. They have precious little, if any, positive evidence for ID, yet they shield this fact by “competing with Darwinism”.

That’s not a good way to do science. How can the Discovery Institute not understand that?

———

Phew. That was a little heavy, so onto something slightly fatuous: wow, the Discovery Institute has an iOS app! Yep, that’s right, now you can view what is essentially the content of Evolution News & Views (plus podcasts) from your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Wow!

Not only is this app pretty to look at, it’s the smartest, easiest, and most compact way yet to keep up to date with headlines from ENV, podcasts from ID the Future, videos on evolution, ID, science more generally, academic freedom, education, faith and science and more.

Let’s say you find yourself in a friendly argument on Darwin v. Design with a new acquaintance who’s in desperate need of enlightenment. What could be more effective than to pull out your iPhone and show him with a couple of touches to the screen how very wrong he is?

Now I may have come across as a little sarcastic before (mainly because I was trying to), but if you’re a masochist like me, I actually recommend downloading it, if only because it will be guaranteed to infuriate you whenever you have the time to look at it. Plus, it’s free, so you can sleep well knowing you aren’t financially supporting the Discovery Institute.

———

Finally this week, I want to look at an interesting post by David Klinghoffer, which contains a curious example of the kind of thing plaguing the intelligent design movement: vagueness and opportunistic criticism.

When I was growing up in Southern California, pretty much my favorite field trip was to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, tomb of countless prehistoric animals that got stuck in the tar to be dug up later as fossils, for the wonderment of visiting school kids. The ongoing excavations have since been supplemented by a spiffy museum.

From the other side of a fence on Wilshire you can see the life-size models of a mammoth caught and doomed to drown in the tar as another adult and baby mammoth look on. It’s an L.A. landmark – and a nice illustration of one problem that bedevils Darwinian theory.

Commemorating “Darwin’s Legacy” for the website Skeptic.com, paleontologist and harsh intelligent-design critic Donald Prothero writes, based on his own work there, about the funny way the animals dredged up from the tar have of staying static over vast stretches of time. That is despite radically alternating environmental conditions of the kind that should stimulate some evolutionary action. The more things change the more they stay the same.

The tone of this piece is strange. As has been slowly discovered over the past two decades, intelligent design proponents do not actually believe that all of evolutionary biology is nonsense. Even young-Earth creationists must believe in some form of diversification and speciation for their post-flood model to make any sense at all (which is hard, believe me). ID proponents obviously do believe that natural selection exists and that populations of organisms can adapt to changing environments. So why is David seemingly delighting in the fact that adaptation never occurred around the La Brea Tar Pits? Surely he, if asked ahead of hearing about these findings, would have predicted some changes in the animals would have taken place to cope with environmental flux, even if he believed those changes somehow involved the action of a Designer.

It makes sense when you consider the ID movement’s modus operandi: discredit evolutionary explanations for biological phenomena whenever possible, whatever the implications. After all, the less that evolution is seen to be a valid and productive scientific theory, the more that ID will seem to be a better option. This is the two-model approach and it’s as transparent as… well, you know.

To make matters even more damning, the Discovery Institute has been recently singing the praises of epigenetics, which it claims has the potential to destroy “Darwinism” once and for all (for some reason). But epigenetics is all about heritable changes in gene expression based on nucleotide methylation and modification of histones, which don’t alter the underlying nucleotide sequences of alleles, but nonetheless (potentially) allow a phenotypic response system to environmental changes without going through a population genetic approach of mutation and fixation.

Such a dynamic response system, instead of “Darwinian” mechanisms, could have produced useful phenotypic changes in the La Brea Tar Pit animals in the face of their rapidly changing environment. So why would an ID proponent get so excited about such changes not being observed? Curious.

The answer is that people like David will latch onto anything that seemingly contradicts the “orthodoxy” of evolutionary biology, even if those things contradict each other or something else that they believe. Modern evolutionary biology being wrong is so important to them that they’ll accept almost anything for another chance to sound its death knell.

1. Intelligent design is an extremely vague concept when you get down to it. At its most basic level, it means that some intelligence acted sometime to do something – nothing is specified except for the causal agent being intelligent. As such, in what way can we say that ID is incompatible with evolutionary theory? ID could explain some features of the biological world, whilst evolution could explain others. Proponents of ID rarely try to rigorously define what it is trying to explain.
2. Is “Darwinism” strict Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms? Or is it all evolutionary mechanisms that are naturalistic? Must it claim to explain every aspect of life, or only certain things?
3. Also, “ID” isn’t well-defined enough to be ruled out.

The Pseudo Scientists – Episode 40

In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Elliot, Belinda, Richard and I discuss the oldest living thing in the world (seaweed), shrill/cute tarsiers and genomics revealing how our ancestors got it on with other human subspecies. Plus, I interview Eugenie Scott, of the National Center for Science Education, about climate change denial and evolution education (recorded at TAM 9 in Las Vegas, in July 2011).

This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is my evil counterpart from some sort of Internet cult. Freaky.

What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, and become a fan on Facebook.

Casey Luskin, intelligent design expert and apparent head writer over at Evolution News & Views, is naturally no exception, and he recently answered an objection to the claim that over 50 peer-reviewed articles support ID: namely, that the majority of the articles cited by the Discovery Institute in this list do not mention ID at all.

His answer?

The short answer is that all of the articles endorse ID arguments, in one way or another, whether or not they use the term “intelligent design.”

Now, this post is not about to dissect all 50+ citations, that’s for someone else (or me, if I ever get some free time) to do at another time, but I would like to look at exactly how Casey describes the way these papers, even if they don’t mention it by name, “endorse” ID.

I believe there’s a distinction here that isn’t being adequately recognised – one between articles that provide positive evidence for ID and articles that provide positive evidence for ideas of ID proponents. This distinction is apparent, but not noted, within Casey’s post:

For example, there are papers by biochemist Michael Behe, who is clearly pro-ID, that don’t use the term ID. But those papers argue that the complexity of biological systems is too much for Darwinian mechanisms to produce. That’s an ID argument.

But what does he mean by an “ID argument”? Does ID really predict that naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms are unable to produce the complexity of biological systems, such as bacterial flagella? I don’t think it does. Whilst Behe and friends like to claim that such an inability demonstrates that intelligent intervention was required in the production of said systems (which is a false dichotomy), ID, if true, does not necessitate that evolutionary mechanisms are powerless to produce complexity, at least not under the extremely vague definition of ID put forward by proponents. So what is the “ID argument” here? It’s not actually an argument from ID that Behe is making: it’s an argument that evolution is unable to produce complexity, which is a personal belief of Behe (and of other proponents too).

Other examples can be found in the work of protein biochemist Douglas Axe, whose anti-evolution papers are glowingly cited in the DI’s list. His paper “The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds” (published in the semi-in-house journal BIO-Complexity) is all about demonstrating that functional protein folds cannot evolve by Darwinian mechanisms, and it is cited as pro-ID because ID proponents claim that ID is required to explain the origin of protein folds. But again, ID could be true and protein folds could be accessible by Darwinian mechanisms. It’s not a positive argument for ID that Axe is making.

These examples reflect that the majority of the papers cited in the DI’s list support not ID itself but the notions of the ID movement, many of which are technically unrelated to ID as a scientific hypothesis – and by using ambiguous phrases like “pro-ID”, “endorses basic ID arguments”, “the ID paradigm” and “ID-friendly”, Casey is helping blur the line.

What would be a proper positive argument for ID? Physical evidence that beings with the capability to produce life visited our planet in the past would be one. Perhaps a message left by these beings. Perhaps a message left in the genomes of all living things. These are just examples, it’s really up to the ID community to do the hard yards and generate testable predictions and find good evidence.

So what does this all mean for the legitimacy of the 50+ citations? Well, a lot of them are simply irrelevant when you draw the distinction between papers that support ID with positive evidence and papers that merely affirm the related beliefs of ID proponents. Out go the majority of the papers by Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, William Dembski and others! However, some survive this culling. Is ID therefore a legitimate scientific enterprise, fruitfully producing publishable results and making intellectual progress? Not necessarily.

It’s ultimately the job of the biological community at large to judge whether or not these papers are any good. Peer-review is not the only hurdle to a successfully published idea – it must also survive out in the wild. Will these papers make an impact? Will they be cited numerously and, more importantly, favourably? Will they inspire other researchers to follow the exciting new ideas and concepts present in intelligent design? Many of the non-culled “pro-ID” papers have been published in small journals with low impact factors, and are therefore unlikely to be taken seriously by many biologists – but if the hypotheses contained within are strongly supported, people will eventually notice.

The onus is on the ID community to produce good papers supporting the core ideas inherent to intelligent design. If they find unambiguously positive evidence for ID, the support of the academic community will start to swing their way. The current lack of such support is a clear indication that, despite much posturing, ID research still has a long way to go.