Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Pat Tillman in Perspective

2004-05-26T09:08:00.000-04:00

I haven't paid much attention to the Pat Tillman situation. The pious invocations of heroism in the media have been met with sarcastic derision from some, while the casual dismissal of his sacrifice by the likes of Ted Rall have provoked cries of moral outrage from those who like their heroes unsullied by humanity. As is usual in such circumstances, both extremes amount to emotional, visceral responses that leave me bored. Neither side puts much thought into it, and neither hagiography nor demonization appeals to me because people are a mixture of saint and sinner and painting with that wide a brush almost always leaves one with a skewed image of reality. In America, hagiography (the making of saints) is an art form. We romanticize and mythologize everyone from George Washington to Michael Jackson (though that last has had his pedestal yanked out from under him recently) to our own parents. We've done it most obviously with the founding fathers, all of whom have been transformed into plaster saints by the visionless hacks of academic history, whose pallette contains only black and white and they aren't even clever enough to mix the two when they set brush to canvas. The reality of those men is, to a person of intelligence, far more interesting than the "I cannot tell a lie" variety. As it turns out - as it always turns out - Pat Tillman is much the same way.

Gwen Knapp has a report on the memorial service held for Tillman yesterday that shows a much more interesting, multidimensional person than the media has presented on either side. To begin with, how about this shocking statement from a funeral:

Tillman's youngest brother, Rich, wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar, and immediately swore into the microphone. He hadn't written anything, he said, and with the starkest honesty, he asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides.

"Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.''

What? This didn't happen for God, as well as country? A professional athlete turned soldier, and we're supposed to believe that he'd have no use for piety? Robbed of a cliche, where does that leave us?

We are so accustomed to the pairing of God and country that it just seems like one long word to us now, but Tillman apparently bucked that trend, as he bucked many others. Can you imagine the reaction of those who are so eager to make Tillman into the poster boy for godandcountry patriotism hearing that line? Or how about this tidbit:

His brother-in-law and close friend, Alex Garwood, described how Tillman handled his duties when he became godfather to Garwood's son. He came to the ceremony dressed as a woman. Not as a religious commentary. He was doing a balancing act.

"We had two godfathers, no godmother,'' Garwood explained. And what NFL player turned Army Ranger wouldn't don drag to make that math work?

A pro football player, the essence of male machismo in this nation, in a dress? You gotta love that.

Ms. Knapp asks, "Who the hell was this guy?"

From the sound of what his friends and family said, he seems like a guy I really would have enjoyed knowing. A fascinating blend of the intellectual and the physical. A guy who could stay up all night talking about the world's religions with you one night, then get up the next morning and play a game of barely controlled physical violence. Call it a contradiction if you want, that's okay. He was human. And for the first time, I find myself actually paying attention to him and caring that he died. Because being human, in the end, is a lot more interesting than being a plastic, one dimensional hero.

Carnival of the Vanities

2004-05-13T11:18:00.000-04:00

If you're here looking for the Carnival of the Vanities, please go to the new Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Well, it's not new, but for some reason the mailing list had this old blog address on it and the real thing is at the real Dispatches from the Culture Wars page. Thanks.

The World Series of Poker

2004-05-04T19:11:00.000-04:00

The World Series of Poker is going on right now at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. Most people are familiar with it from the replays on ESPN, watching Chris Moneymaker win last year. But if you're not a poker player, you probably don't realize that the event that is televised is only the last of 33 separate tournaments played over about 5 weeks. The events run the gamut of different games played, buy-in amounts, and limits, leading up to the Big One, the championship event, which is a $10,000 entry No Limit Holdem tournament. This year they are expecting something on the order of 1400-1600 players in this event, which means a prize pool well into 8 figures and a likely first place prize of at least $3 million, the richest poker tournament in history.

Part of the reason for this huge increase in popularity is the World Poker Tour on television, which has garnered huge ratings. But probably the biggest factor is the growth of online poker and the satellite tournaments they've run to put players into the WSOP final event, and the fact that last year's winner got into the tournament that way, spending $40 to win a seat, then turning it into $2.5 million by winning the whole thing. That has drawn people far and wide who think, "Hey, if he can do it, so can I". And they may well be right. I have not played in the WSOP yet, but I have a bit of history with it over the last few years.

The history of Binion's Horseshoe is an interesting one. It was started decades ago by Benny Binion, an old time gambler and Texas gangster. He turned it into one of the classic Vegas casinos, one of the original downtown gambling saloons, famous for their poker games and for taking any bet regardless of how high the amount. The WSOP began, unofficially, in 1949, when Nick (the Greek) Dandolos challenged Johnny Moss to a heads up poker match for $1 million each, winner take all. Benny Binion provided a venue for it at the Horseshoe, setting up a big tent outside for them to play in public view. The two men played for 5 straight months, stopping only to sleep and eat, until Johnny Moss finally had all the money. In 1970, Benny Binion decided to recreate the event and invited some of the best poker players in the world to take part. Johnny Moss won again, but at the time the title of World Champion was decided by a vote, not by actually winning the tournament. In 1971, it was changed to a "freezeout" format, meaning it was decided with a real elimination tournament, but Moss won yet again. It was thereafter an annual event, and it grew in popularity year by year.

Benny died in 1989 and his son Jack took over the casino. Jack was very popular with the players and employees and the WSOP continued to grow under his watch. Then a battle began for control over the operation between Jack and his sister Becky, which Becky ultimately won a few years ago. Over the last few years, as the WSOP continued to grow exponentially because of the TV exposure and all of the satellite events feeding people into the tournament, Becky proceeded to run the Horseshoe into the ground. Becky Binion Behnen is married Nick Behnen, your garden variety scumbag who is barred from operating a casino, or even working for one, in the state of Nevada. Nonetheless, he played a huge role in destroying what the Horseshoe once was. Reports of his abuse of employees and players were common, including tearing a picture of former WSOP champion Russ Hamilton off the wall with a crowbar in a fit of rage a couple years ago.

In 2001, the shit hit the fan, so to speak. The WSOP announced that they were going to withhold 3% from the prize pool to use as a "toke pool" - a fund that would be divided among the dealers and tournament staff as tips. This was a good idea, but some background is probably required for non-poker players to understand why. Big tournaments like this require a lot of people to run, obviously, and no casino has enough dealers or floor people on hand to handle such an event. So there is a pool of poker dealers and tournament staff that basically floats around the country running big poker tournaments. They have to pay their own way, though, so they have to be assured of making a certain amount of money to make it worthwhile and profitable for them. It's in everyone's best interests to have high quality dealers and staff to run things, so having a pool that would guarantee them a minimum income helps the players as well as the dealers and staff. Relying on the players who finish in the money to leave tips, which most did, was too inconsistent, and those tips are not tax deductible, so it really hurt the winners to do it.

All in all, a toke pool was a great idea for all involved and most of the major tournaments use one now for all these reasons. The problem here was that rumors were flying that Becky was planning to use some of the money to reimburse her everyday hotel staff rather than distribute it all to the dealers and staff, and they were refusing to spell out how much would go to whom (the traditional breakdown was something like 2% to the dealers, 1% to the floor staff and tournament personnel). Word got around and a lot of players were talking about it. Jeff Simpson, a casino beat writer for the Las Vegas Review Journal, did a story on it and cornered a few players at the Horseshoe to get their thoughts on it. Among those quoted was Paul Phillips, a professional poker player from Las Vegas, who told Simpson that the players had been misled on the issue and felt antagonized, which was entirely true. Paul was also at the time a regular participant in the rec.gambling.poker (RGP) usenet newsgroup, which I have long participated in as well.

The day after Simpson's article was published, Paul Phillips was pulled from a game at the Horseshoe by some of Becky's ~~goons~~ security personnel, taken to a back room, photographed and barred from the casino for daring to say what everyone knew was true. Amusingly, her head of security told the newspaper that they barred him because they wanted to "avoid controversy" at the WSOP. And this all happened on the day the tournament started! Brilliant folks, eh? Needless to say, rather than avoiding controversy, it caused more. And adding to this, it was announced that Becky would consider letting him come back if he apologized to her for what he said in the paper. All of this caused quite a furor in the poker world, particularly in the RGP newsgroup. I was one of many, many people who came to Paul's defense and strongly criticized Binion's for their actions.

Ironically, Paul was proven 100% correct by what happened in the following few weeks. Linda Johnson, the founder of Card Player magazine, met with Becky and tried to get Paul unbarred (which was successful, but when he went back they intimidated him some more and he decided it was safer to stay away) and to settle once and for all the question of where the money would be going. Becky allowed Linda to release a statement in RGP that she had approved word for word, which said that every penny of the toke pool would go to the dealers and tournament personnel. She lied. Over the course of that years World Series, Becky shorted the dealers and tournament personnel to the tune of nearly $200,000, which resulted in some of them walking out on her when the tournament ended. She fired the tournament directors and her poker room manager, who was the daughter of the tournament director, as well as a couple of others and it blew up into an even bigger controversy.

In the process of all of this, I received a nasty and incoherent e-mail from Benny Binion Behnen, Becky's son, who was the head of the poker operation at the Horseshoe. He actually challenged me to a poker match, as though that would somehow absolve them of their lies. I'm not sure what his reasoning was, but he was quite irrational. And of course, I was barred from playing at the Horseshoe as well, which was hardly a big deal. I didn't play there anyway. It had long since become a broken down wreck of a casino, filled with the stench of a billion cigarettes and who knows what else. The only reason to go there would be to play in the WSOP, which I wasn't planning to do anyway as long as these scumbags ran the place. 2002 met with more controversy yet, with Becky firing some of the dealers for staging a walkout when they were lied to yet again, and getting sued. She finally ran the place into the ground completely in 2003 and a few months ago, the IRS seized the property for back taxes. Harrah's ended up buying the name and reopening to stage this year's tournament, which has attracted record numbers so far.

Paul Phillips, by the way, has done brilliantly. In the first week of tournaments, he made it to two final tables, finishing 2nd and 4th. He is also one of the leading winners on the World Poker Tour so far, having won $1.1 million with a first place finish at the Bellagio Five Diamond classic in December and another $400,000 or so with a second place finish at the WPT event at the Bicycle casino in L.A. last year. I'm very happy that someone finally ran Becky and her thug family out of the business so that Paul could go back to the World Series, where he is surely among the favorites to win in this year's championship event. Someday soon, I hope to join him at a final table there.

This is a test

2004-05-03T13:23:00.000-04:00

Testing the w.bloggar software to see how it works with Blogspot.

Dumbing Down Education Again

2004-05-02T12:41:00.000-04:00

Is there any limit at all on how far do-gooders are willing to dumb down our educational system in the name of helping students feel good about themselves? I rarely agree with anyone from Fox News on anything, but this opinion piece by Joanne Jacobs is pretty much on the mark. First, it reports on a plan by some California schools to do away with the D grade, with anything below a C- garnering a failing grade. Good idea, I'd say, but some parents aren't too happy:

"I'd rather go to a junior college,'' said Alex Johnson, a junior at Mountain View High who is eyeing Foothill or De Anza community colleges. He says it's unfair that some teachers at his school are widening the range for an F. His dad isn't thrilled either.

"D's are the only thing keeping him from getting F's,'' Alex's dad, Doug Johnson, said. "He's an incredibly bright kid, but he couldn't care less about school.''

Well, Alex's dad, Alex is going to have to work a little harder to make sure he doesn't fail. If he's "incredibly bright", he should only have to turn off his Playstation for another hour or so a day to squeak by. I'm guessing he'll survive. But frankly, it would be amusing to see him using a similar rationalization in the real world while working a job. He's incredibly capable of doing the work, you see, but he doesn't feel like it. And how terribly unfair it is of his boss to not just let him coast along without putting any effort into his job. Another slacker is born, apparently with the full support of his father. Warms the heart, doesn't it?

We can at least take solace in the fact that his principal is a reasonably responsible adult, since his father clearly is not:

Principal Murchison said young people need to learn that sub-standard work is not OK in the real world.

"I'm fixing my kitchen right now,'' Murchison said. "I'm not going to pay a guy $5,000 for 'D work'.''

I must say, I'm a bit shocked at Mr. Murchison's response. Most public school administrators seem to be far more interested in making sure everyone passes because that's typically a major factor in the amount of state funding they receive. This is one of the major causes for the pervasive dumbing down of public school education all over the country, and at all levels. Another is the self-esteem fetish that has developed. Witness the reaction to this idea:

Instead of requiring high school students to pass a graduation exam, Delaware decided to award three levels of diplomas: basic, standard and distinguished. The levels are based on students' performance on state reading, math and writing tests given in 10th grade. Some 52 percent of students are in line for only a basic diploma, 40 percent for standard and only 8 percent for distinguished.

Now while I disagree with the basis they are using for this distinction (basing it upon a single test at a single point in their education is foolish), the reaction to it has instead focused on the mere fact that they are daring to make such distinctions between students:

"Eventually, with a good study, they will find it furthers the aura of separation of these kids when, ultimately, you want them to feel that they are just as good as their counterparts," said Hector Figueroa, education director for the Urban League...

Robert Andrzejewski, head of the Red Clay school district, said the system will not motivate students as legislators insisted it would.

"One of the worst things you can do to kids with low self-esteem, who are often of low-income anyway, is show them failure," he said. "So many of those students have experienced failure in their lives and there comes a point when they decide they have to save face for themselves, and, unfortunately, that may mean they drop out."

This, dear readers, is a recipe for inculcating mediocrity and failure among our youth. If they can't meet the standards, we'll just lower the standards so they'll feel good about themselves. Has it ever occured to these people that in the real world, there is no such desire to make sure everyone feels good about themselves despite their lack of ability or effort? Any business owner who evaluated their employees with more concern for their self-esteem than for their ability or willingness to do the job would quickly find himself out of business. So rather than preparing students for later success, the self-esteem fetishists are intent on insulating them from reality.

Allowing these people anywhere near educational policy is a huge mistake. They are clearly incapable of distinguishing what they wish to be true from what is true. Truth is that which does not change just because you want it to. And no matter how much they may desire to live in Lake Wobegon (where all the students are above average), that's still a fictional place. If you're really worried about self-esteem, then challenge the students. When they work hard to meet that challenge and succeed, their self-esteem will soar. You get self-esteem from accomplishment, not from adults lying to you and telling you you're just as good as those who work harder than you, or are more talented in that area than you are.

In my experience, the quality of education is bad enough for those who are getting good grades. I went to what was allegedly one of the best public schools in the state of Michigan. The one thing that I left with was a sense of the pervasive mediocrity that infused virtually every aspect of that school system. In 4 years of college prep work, I had a total of two really good teachers. Two teachers who actually had passion for the subject they taught and who both inspired and challenged their students. The rest appeared to be just putting in their time waiting for summer vacation. Unfortunately, even for those few really good teachers, the bulk of students generally cared only about making sure they had memorized the right things for the test, with little thought to whether they actually understood the subject. Technical proficency, not real education, was the goal in which the bulk of teachers and students were co-consipirators.

In my high school, there were only two required courses for seniors, government and economics. Government was taught by the basketball coach, economics by the baseball coach. In the government class, we watched a lot of filmstrips and movies. I recall the government teacher/jock in charge not knowing that James Madison had originally opposed a bill of rights and telling me I was wrong when I mentioned it in a class discussion. I also recall having to explain to the econ teacher what an econometric formula was. And this school had, as I recall, the third highest state test scores in the state at the time for public schools. And for crying out loud, this was 19 years ago. It's even worse today. There has to be an end somewhere. At some point, we have to stop this snowball of mediocrity and demand that the schools do their job.

Go to This Website Now

2004-04-30T12:40:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while, I come across a webpage that makes me wonder how on earth it has managed to escape my notice for so long. Today I found one only because the editor of the page left a comment in response to a post I made on The Panda's Thumb. The site in question, Butterflies and Wheels, is the work of Ophelia Benson, a historian by training, and Jeremy Stangroom, a sociologist. The moment I read there raison d'etre, I knew this was my kind of page:

Butterflies and Wheels has been established in order to oppose a number of related phenomena. These include:

1. Pseudoscience that is ideologically and politically motivated.
2. Epistemic relativism in the humanities (for example, the idea that statements are only true or false relative to particular cultures, discourses or language-games).
3. Those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents, and the general tendency to judge the veracity of claims about the world in terms of such commitments.

There are two motivations for setting up the web site. The first is the common one having to do with the thought that truth is important, and that to tell the truth about the world it is necessary to put aside whatever preconceptions (ideological, political, moral, etc.) one brings to the endeavour.

The second has to do with the tendency of the political Left (which both editors of this site consider themselves to be part of) to subjugate the rational assessment of truth-claims to the demands of a variety of pre-existing political and moral frameworks. We believe this tendency to be a mistake on practical as well as epistemological and ethical grounds. Alan Sokal expressed this concern well, when talking about his motivation for the Sokal Hoax: ‘My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. Like innumerable others from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, I call for the Left to reclaim its Enlightenment roots.’ (Reply to Social Text Editorial)

If you're not familiar with the Alan Sokal hoax, you should be, and you can read all about it on Sokal's academic page concerning the incident.

The attacks on science come not only from the Religious Right but also from some sectors of the academic left. Those who subordinate reason and logic to their political goals and insist that truth is relative to one's gender, race, sexuality or economic position are not only peddling nonsense, they're peddling dangerous nonsense.

If you are like me and you cringe every time you hear someone invoke Heisenberg's uncertainty principle or the non-locational effects in Quantum Mechanics as a justification for some fashionable hoohah like ESP or whatever crap Deepok Chopra and Shirley MacLaine are shoveling out these days, you're going to love this site.

Fisking a Horrible Pro-ID Article

2004-04-29T12:39:00.000-04:00

Anyone who has followed the evolution/creationism issue for any period of time is quite accustomed to seeing articles filled with the most basic factual errors, poor spelling and hackneyed arguments. But this article, written by someone named Brian Cherry in a webmag called the Washington Dispatch, may take the cake. It's bad enough that for a moment, one suspects that it is a parody. Alas, it's not. Mr. Cherry actually wrote it and, presumably, believes it. Unfortunately, he can't even get the most basic facts right, let alone comprehend the larger issues he discusses. Let's begin the fisking.

Who’s your daddy? It is exactly this sort of question that results in slapped faces and restraining orders if the query is made in a bar. When this question was posed to the State School Board of Ohio and framed in the context of human origins it sparked national debates and threats of lawsuits. The board was tasked with making the decision on whether or not students can be presented with an alternative to the theory of evolution. The alternative in question is the theory of intelligent design.

Mistake #1: There is no "theory of intelligent design". At this point, ID is nothing more than a technical-sounding argument from ignorance. William Dembski, the leading ID advocate, defines an argument from ignorance as one that takes the form "Not X, therefore Y". Yet even while denying, in rhetoric, that ID is based upon such an argument, he has created and developed a rather obvious one, the Explanatory Filter (EF). The EF is precisely this form of argument - "If not regularity and if not chance, therefore intelligent design". This is not a theory in a scientific sense, and there is no actual explanatory model in place for ID. There is no model of how such design took place, by whom, or when. There is no actual positive research in favor of ID, there is only sniping at evolutionary theory as an explanation so that they can repeat the argument from ignorance seen above - if evolution doesn't (yet) explain it, it must be ID. Sorry, this isn't a theory.

Despite the fact that a number of reputable scientists support this theory with credible scientific evidence, it didn’t stop proponents of evolution to immediately yell that this is a breach of contemporary view of the second amendment that separates church and state.

Uh, Brian. I'm not sure where you went to school, but did they not teach the difference between the first amendment and the second amendment? I'm guessing your own magazine contains lots of articles about the second amendment, which deals with the right to bear arms and has nothing to do with separation of church and state. Are there no editors for the Washington Dispatch?

Also, science does not deal in reputable scienTISTS, it deals in reputable science. Lots of reputable scientists have lent their name to lots of crackpot ideas, but that doesn't make the ideas they may advocate legitimate scientific explanations, or give them any explanatory power. Nor, as I said above, is there any "credible scientific evidence" for ID. They have dealt only with abstract meta-scientific claims (such as the EF), or with arguments against evolution. No ID advocate has ever even attempted to offer a real testable model from which positive evidence flows. All research merely feeds the argument from ignorance stated above.

The shrill call for a constitutional foul came forth because the theory of intelligent design concludes that we are the products of a higher intelligence. This higher intelligence is never named or given bias towards a particular religion. Supporters of intelligent design simply put forth the evidence without making a presumption on what deity is responsible. That is where the problem lies for evolutionists. Any theory that not only suggests that we are the product of a creation but can also back it up in a credible manner is a threat to them.

Really? Then please explain why such a large percentage of scientists, including evolutionary biologists, are theists? Are they threatened by their own beliefs? Evolution says nothing about the existence of any deities, any more than celestial mechanics does. But there is always a supernatural alternative to be offered to any scientific theory. ID is to evolution what the "angels push the planets around theory" is to classic planetary mechanics. It's a purely supernatural alternative to a very successful explanation.

If we are seeking scientific truth, why would people in the scientific community be afraid of an open dialogue on a theory that can be supported with at least as much evidence as evolution? When you strip away the venire of science the answer becomes clear. By definition evolution is now a religion and any idea that challenges their belief system must be eliminated.

False premise, ridiculous conclusion. If Mr. Cherry can provide us with examples of evidence for ID, as opposed to alleged examples of how evolution doesn't work as an explanation, he will be the first to do so. Hence, it is simply false and absurd to claim that ID is "supported with at least as much evidence" as evolution.

The dictionary defines religion as “A personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices”. This is not really helpful unless you also know how this same dictionary defines the word, religious. Religious is defined by Webster’s as “relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity”. It is in this meaning of the word religious that we find evolutions true self. Evolution manifests the two most important points that qualify it as a religion. These are a devotion to an ultimate reality (as well as a deity, though they wont admit it), and faith.

Oh goodie, the old "they're religious too" argument. It's quite idiotic, but that doesn't seem to stop our intrepid correspondent. Evolution is not an argument about "ultimate reality". Like all scientific theories, it is an explanation for a specific set of data. Evolution explains, successfully, the present biodiversity on earth, the geographical distribution of that diversity, the patterns of appearance in the palentological record, the nested heirarchies at both the phenotype and genotype levels, and several other facts that are well established and readily observed. It does not explain "ultimate reality", nor does it attempt to. The fact that those who work with it every day reject bad or unsupported "alternatives" to it does not mean that it's a "religion" protecting its "doctrines" or any such hoohah. If Mr. Cherry had even the slightest education in either the philosophy of science or evolutionary biology itself, he would know this.

Those who are dedicated to evolution hide their faith by pretending their belief is deeply rooted in science. When you break down the fossil evidence though, you find some interesting things.

Yes, you find lots of interesting things when studying fossils, something Mr. Cherry has obviously not done, as we shall see. This is where the real fun begins with this article. This is where the article goes from silly to outright stupidity.

Dr. Leaky started much of the uproar when he found his famous missing link, Lucy. In the end his find turned out to be a mosaic of at least two different species of extinct ape.

A brave leap in the dark, followed by a resounding thud as Mr. Cherry lands flat on his face. First, it's "Leakey", not Leaky. Second, no one in the Leakey family (which contains at least three prominent paleontologists) discovered Lucy. Lucy was discovered by Donald Johanson. And the notion that Lucy turned out to be "a mosaic of at least two different species of extinct ape" is pure fiction. Lucy is a 40% complete skeleton of an Australopithecine. No one, Mr. Cherry, has ever claimed it was a mosaic of extinct apes. Not even the dumbest young earth creationist. Congratulations, you've managed to top even Duane Gish on the nonsense scale, and on your first foray into the field. This is truly a rare achievement.

Eugene Dubois was a Dutch scientist and devotee of Charles Darwin. During a dig on the island of Java, he discovered the first fossils of a Pithecanthropus erectus. This find was later nicknamed “Java man”.

So far so good. I'm reasonably sure this is the longest passage in his entire article without an obvious factual error.

Dubois became very protective of his find and only allowed access of the bones to a very small circle of people. After several decades of stonewalling and intense pressure to compare his fossils against finds of extinct mammals that had also been unearthed in Java, Dubois finally admitted that his Pithecanthropus erectus was actually the remains of an ancient Gibbon. In the end all Dubois managed to do was conclusively prove that Gibbons exist.

Well, so much for accuracy. Not a single word of this last passage was true. The notion that Dubois hid his finds from other scientists has long been debunked. Cherry, blissfully ignorant of the actual evidence, can't even seem to copy the nonsense he so obviously stole from the creationists accurately. At issue are two entirely different finds, the Java Man remains found at one site, and the Wadjak skulls found elsewhere. Creationists like Duane Gish and Marvin Lubenow like to claim that Dubois kept the Wadjak skulls a secret because they are clearly more modern than the java man specimens. This is utter nonsense. Dubois published three separate articles on the Wadjak skulls between 1890 and 1892. They also like to claim that both finds were "at the same level", which is again complete nonsense. The Wadjak skulls were found 65 miles away and in cave deposits up in the mountains, while the java man bones were found in flood plain river deposits, obviously far lower. So we have here a distortion of a distortion - creationists make false claims about java man and Brian Cherry repeats them, but can't even get that right and makes them even less accurate in the process. Oh, by the way, Dubois also did not in fact identify java man as a gibbon later in life. He concluded that they were part of a different genus that was related to gibbons. As he noted, the brain size was far too large for a gibbon, or any anthropoid ape, and it was bipedal. By the way, this bit of silliness has been retracted even by the creationists of Answers in Genesis, who list this as one of their arguments that should not be used.

Piltdown man was a complete skull that finally proved the link between man and ape. It had characteristics of both. For fifty years this was the transitional fossil evolutionists threw in the face of anyone who doubted them. Piltdown man was their Rosetta stone.

Completely false. Piltdown man did not fit with the other hominid fossil evidence right from the start, which is exactly why scientists were troubled by it and why they started to examine it in more detail later on. The skull was too modern looking and the jaw too apelike, but this was before there was modern dating methods by which to actually test it. For 50 years, Piltdown man was not the "Rosetta stone" or any kind of triumphal find, but a puzzling anomoly that didn't fit with anything else. But let's be blunt. At this point, would any sane human being believe that Brian Cherry has actually read any of the early 20th century literature concerning Piltdown Man? I didn't think so.

Well it was until somebody took a close look at it and discovered it was the skull of a modern human with an ape’s jaw attached to it. The pranksters had also stained it to make it look old. The crime here is not the prank but the failure of evolutionists to put their discoveries under the standards of scrutiny that they demand from any competing theory. It took fifty years to discover their ultimate evidence was a clumsy fraud.

Again, because there were not originally any solid techniques with which to date the fossil itself. Remember, this was discovered around 1910. It was not until 1949 when scientists, using a recently developed flourine test, could determine definitively that the skull was of recent origin. And anthropologists were in fact quite happy to know it because the specimen simply didn't fit with the rest of the evidence. These are things you learn, Mr. Cherry, when you read something other than creationist webpages.

The entire theory was eventually dealt a sharp blow when the Neandertal man, the only fossil of an ape/human ancestor that was recent enough to extract DNA from came back as not even remotely human.

Wow, it just gets worse. First, no one EVER claimed that Homo neanderthalensis was "an ape/human ancestor". Second, the claim that Neanderthal is "not even remotely human" is, to be blunt, complete garbage. The mtDNA tests determined that the Neanderthals were not direct ancestors to Homo sapiens - that's us, Brian - but were instead an evolutionary cousin, a side branch that died out, either through extinction of interbreeding. But not only are they "remotely human", they ARE human. That's what the "Homo" means at the beginning of their Linnean classification. They are full fledged members of the genus Homo. They always were and they always will be, and the mtDNA studies didn't change that one bit. All they did was settle the previously unanswered question of whether they were directly ancestral to Homo sapiens or part of another lineage within the same genus.

Once the Neandertal was conclusively and scientifically proved to be a species other then human in 1997, the theory of evolution had to be adjusted. The Neandertal’s were a branch from a common ancestor we have. Just like monkeys. Who is this common ancestor? Nobody knows. Where is the fossil? There isn’t one. How do they know there is a common ancestor then? Because they believe that someday someone will find the evidence they are looking for.

I think I just heard another thud. Sorry Brian, we do know the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. It's called Homo erectus. In fact, contrary to your claim that "there isn't one", we have dozens of specimens of Homo erectus.

Evolution, by definition, is a religion. In science fraud is common and hoaxes are just an unfortunate part of the territory.

Common? Is that why you could come up with exactly ONE example of a fraud or hoax for this breathless article, Brian? Nebraska man was simply a misclassification of a weathered tooth given to H.F. Osborn. When scientists went to the site and did an actual dig 2 years later, they found related remains and immediately withdrew the mistaken classification. The only example of a fraud or hoax is Piltdown man, and you've completely distorted the truth about that one as well. And Piltdown man was discovered to be a hoax by scientists in the process of doing science - rechecking the data, using new and more accurate techniques to examine the evidence, and publishing the results. And on the basis of this one distorted claim, you've determined that fraud is common? I'll take ridiculous non sequiturs for $1000, Alex.

The rest of the article is just more conclusionary nonsense based on all of the factual and logical errors he makes above. The punchline to this joke is that the Washington Dispatch bills itself as "an objective source for social and political commentary", yet they published this commentary that is filled with claims that are outright false. Are there no editors at this magazine? Not even to check spelling (the word is veneer, not venire)?

Follow up: Mr. Cherry saw fit to reply to me by e-mail and I just have to put the text of this bizarre, off-point screed that he sent me. Is there anything funnier than when a hack like this guy tries to rescue his credibility with an incoherent rant packed full of misspellings, punctuation errors, random capitalization, ostensible answers to arguments that were never made, and no answers to the arguments that actually were made? This e-mail is being reproduced word for word and letter for letter. To wit:

I read your blog and found it quite funny. You praise science for discovering the wood stain on Piltdown mans, despite the fact it took decades. I have a handy man that could have spotted that in 30 seconds. As far as the rest, just because your progaganda and faith dont support the truth of Dubois and the rest of the evidence doesnt make your version true. Of course like any other religion you are hoping the more often you say things the truer they become.

Your "Transitional fossils" are only evidence if you work backwards from the belief of evolution. No soft tissue samples and no DNA. By your methods you would take the innards of a pig (which are the closest to human in all of the animal world) and declare it a human ancestor before seeing the skelaton or any other part of the pig. Also under your methods the Thylacine would be classified as a dog, if all we had was the skelaton. You start at the conclusion and make the evidence fit your pre determined notion. In other words, everything you wrote was self serving and all your evidence is open to multiple interpretations. You simply choose to call your interpretation a fact.

My article was not written for you and thankfully it has reached its target audience. You are the defender of your religious belief so I dont expect an open mind out of you. Had you actually done your research on ID with an open mind, and put your evidence to the same standard you demand from any other theory you would have more questions about evolution then beligerant rhetoric. Im sure your closed mind and inability to question what your teachers have told you will serve you well in whatever micro managed cubicle or factory line your life takes you. Those who emply such positions hate people with probbing minds. You will fit right in.

Bravissimo, Mr. Cherry. You've outdone yourself. On top of the innumerable factual errors you made in your original article (none of which you bothered to address here, unsurprisingly), you've added more. There was no "wood stain" used on the Piltdown man skull. It was treated first with Chromic acid and then with a solution containing iron and possibly manganese, to try and replicate the absorption of those chemicals from a gravel quarry. It also may have been boiled in an iron sulphate solution. But again, this was 1910. There was no means of detecting those things in the early 20th century. By the 1940s, there were and scientists used them. None of which changes the fact that you were flat wrong when you claimed that this was the "Rosetta stone" and the "ultimate evidence" from anthropology. Every single claim you have made about Piltdown man was false, just like every single claim you made about Java man was false, and every single claim you made about Lucy was false, including even the basics of who discovered it. Not one of the factual criticisms that I offered have you bothered to respond to. And I do love that little dig at my "factory life" at the end. It would, however, be a lot more compelling and amusing if you hadn't misspelled half the words. Where on earth did you learn to write and how did you manage to get the Washington Dispatch to emply (sic) you? Probbing (sic) minds want to know, including those who aren't beligerant (sic). Cherry's response also makes one wonder who on earth the article was written for. Apparently for half wits too ignorant to see beneath the venire (sic) of his progaganda (sic).

The Search for Noah's Ark

2004-04-28T12:39:00.000-04:00

Yet again, some intrepid explorers are preparing to trudge up Mt. Ararat to find Noah's Ark:

A joint U.S.-Turkish team of 10 explorers plans to make the arduous trek up Turkey’s tallest mountain, at 17,820 feet (5,430 meters), from July 15 to Aug. 15, subject to the approval of the Turkish government, said Daniel P. McGivern, president of Shamrock—The Trinity Corp. of Honolulu, Hawaii.

The goal: to enter what they believe to be a mammoth structure some 45 feet high, 75 feet wide and up to 450 feet long (14 by 23 by 138 meters) that was exposed in part by last summer’s heat wave in Europe.

I'll make a prediction right now. They won't reach this "object", if it actually exists, but they'll come back with an amazing story (involving Satan or storms or terrorists, or all three) of why they couldn't, and far off pictures that some true believer might interpret as something looking vaguely like a wooden structure of some type. My favorite part of the article is this:

“We are not excavating it. We are not taking any artifacts. We’re going to photograph it and, God willing, you’re all going to see it,” McGivern said.

There are two things that strike me about that phrase. First, the "God willing" part. This gives them a perfect excuse when they don't find it for why it really is there even though they didn't - God was playing hide and seek with it. Second, why wouldn't you bring back artifacts? Is it because, as my friend Jon Woolf pointed out to me, artifacts (i.e. wood samples) are subject to a wide range of scientific tests for authenticity? Photos, on the other hand, are either easily faked, in the age of Photoshop, or sufficently vague that the true believers will continue to buy books and videos on how this is the Real Noah's Ark_tm but you just couldn't reach it because of {fill in the blank}. Anyone wanna take me up on the bet?

Can we get rid of this stupid phrase?

2004-04-27T12:37:00.000-04:00

Is there a more meaningless cliche than "fabric of our nation"? I can't think of one. It's a perfect little piece of empty rhetoric, repeated ad nauseum without anyone bothering to ask what on earth it means. It just seems to be a phrase that people trot out when they're against something but they can't come up with a tangible, concrete reason why they're against it. So they say that it "destroys the fabric of our nation" and everyone who agrees with them nods in agreement, not having a clue what it actually means but knowing it sounds good. The perfectly pointless rhetorical flourish.

This phrase tends to be used more often by conservatives and the list of things that have been accused of "destroying" this fabric is long - flag burning, abortion, separation of church and state, drugs, divorce, moral relativism, and of course, gay marriage. Sometimes these things are said not to destroy the fabric but merely to "stain" the fabric. You know, you'd think with a nearly $2 trillion budget, we could afford to Scotchguard the fabric of the nation.

The Religious Fringe, Part 1: Embassy of Heaven

2004-04-26T12:36:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start another new feature here, only because this subject fascinates me so much. It will be a series of posts on the subject of fringe religious groups, particularly those in the loonier groups of the religious right wing in the United States. I make no pretense of being fair minded in their regard, I think those who populate such organizations are generally in need of serious psychological help. But still, I'm quite fascinated by the various strains of the fundamentalist mindset in its crazier manifestations. I also make no pretense that such people or groups in any way represent all Christians, or even all fundamentalists. I know far too many brilliant and well educated Christians to put them in the same barrel with the nuts I intend to shine a light on during this series. I do not draw the line between myself and Christians, I draw the line between me and the reasonable Christians and the whackos on the lunatic fringe; I also put the loonies on the non-Christian fringes, like the idiots who tried to get the UN to ban religion worldwide, in the same package. As Eric Hoffer put it, "Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet."

The first group I'd like to look at is the Embassy of Heaven Church. I found this group by way of another right wing whacko, Kent Hovind, a creationist con man from Pensacola who is, yet again, in trouble with the government for not paying taxes. Hovind's attorney in this matter is Glen Stoll of Remedies at Law, who also represents the Embassy of Heaven cult. What Hovind shares with the Embassy of Heaven cult is the idea that because they claim to be God's ministers, they are therefore exempt from essentially all manmade laws

The Embassy of Heaven goes so far as to claim that they are citizens of the "Kingdom of God" and that their church is the official embassy from that Kingdom to the earthly governments. They believe that since they are citizens of Heaven and not citizens of the United States, they are exempt from any legal requirements imposed on them by the local, state or federal governments. They even go so far as to issue their own driver's licenses, license plates and passports, which they amusingly present at airports thinking that they are going to be allowed on a plane with them. The three or four hundred Embassy of Heaven members nationwide who have attempted to drive their cars with Embassy license plates, using Embassy driver's licenses, and without car insurance, have often found themselves being arrested. They then refuse to recognize the authority of the courts over them, refuse to post bail or enter a plea, and the courts typically hold them for a few weeks before deciding it's not really worth it, then they let them go. Needless to say, the cult members take this as proof that the world is evil for persecuting them and they have a webpage devoted to jailings of their members around the country.

One of the church members arrested who is listed on that page, John Joe Gray, is now in the 6th year of a standoff with the police in Texas inside his apparently heavily armed compound. Among those in the camp are Gray's daughter and her two children, over whom she does not have custody. The father of the children has begged the FBI, the Texas state police, the local sherrif, the US Marshalls, and anyone else who will listen to do something to get his children back, to at least serve the court order on the family, they have done nothing. Gray has repeatedly threatened the police with violence if they try to come near the compound and the authorities, apparently afraid of another Waco situation, have twiddled their thumbs since 1998.

To give you an idea of just how thwacked this group is, some members of the group, tired of being perpetually hassled by the police, suggested that perhaps they should ask the Supreme Court for an injunction against any action against the cult's members unless they constitute an immediate threat to someone else's life or property. No way, says their leader, who calls himself Paul Revere:

The only function such a document would serve is to pray to Antichrist for relief...

What the Church is really struggling over is authority. We want to have a standing in Christ. We don't want a standing recognized by the world, for what communion has the Kingdom of Light with the Kingdom of Darkness?

The officials of the Church will come into authority because they are acting in His name, in a righteous manner. Everyone will notice who the real Authority is. The real question is, "Who sits on the highest throne?"

We, as Christians, have been given the highest Authority, and we need to act in a Christian manner as we carry out His commands. We must joyfully accept the plundering of our property and meekly suffer, rather than retaliate...

The unbelievers need to take the initiative in making a place for God's elect, lest they be destroyed in their way. We are not called to "plea bargain" with the unbelievers, but to rule the earth and make them His footstool.

Wow. Here's probably my favorite argument they make. Try to top the incomparable idiocy of this reasoning for why the state can't write them tickets while using the roads and highways:

They cannot overcome the fact that we are not using the highways in their state. We are using the highways in the Kingdom of Heaven. Most people do not realize that the same stretch of concrete has multiple jurisdictions. State of Washington claims certain highways as their highways. But the Kingdom of Heaven claims these same highways for their purposes. And no one can deny that claim...

There are many jurisdictions claiming authority over the same highways. For instance, the United States Army has military highways for purposes of defense. The United States Postal Service has post roads for purposes of delivering mail. The state has "highways in this state" for purposes of regulating its drivers, and the Embassy of Heaven has "highways in the Kingdom of Heaven" for purposes of proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom to all nations. All these authorities have "concurrent jurisdiction" over the same physical highways. But those of us claiming the Kingdom of Heaven highways have the paramount claim to the highways because our Father created them and His son commanded us to use them. (See Matthew 28:18-20)

The state and its political subdivisions are stewards for the maintenance of the highways. That does not mean they own the highways. Specific government entities are charged with the maintenance and construction of the highways. To identify the custodian of these highways, they are designated State Highway 22 or County Road 208. It may appear that the state or county owns the highways, but they are merely stewards.

There is one form of stewardship we do not recognize. That is when the state takes dominion over the highways, treating them as their own. They start regulating who can and who cannot use the highways through their licensing programs. They not only regulate their own people, but they regulate anybody who uses "their" highways. When these stewards claim the highways as their own, they have become wicked husbandmen. (See Matthew 21:33-46)

When the sheriff in Washington wondered where the designations were for the Kingdom of Heaven highways, he was expecting that we would have markers on the side of the road. We don't need road signs. Our highways have already been published in the Bible under the Great Commission. Christ said, "Go to all nations." And His command to "Go to all nations," means that all the highways and byways and paths leading up to everybody's doorstep are designated as Kingdom of Heaven highways. Wherever we go, we are on the Kingdom highways.

If we faithfully stay off the highways in the state and remain on the highways in the Kingdom, there is no way we can trespass upon the state. We cannot commit traffic crimes against the state because we are not using their highways. Some jurisdictions are beginning to understand this and are dismissing charges against our ambassadors.

State motor vehicle statutes mean absolutely nothing to us because they only apply to those using highways in the state. They do not write statutes for those using highways in the Kingdom of Heaven. That is outside their jurisdiction. State law enforcement must come onto the highways in the Kingdom of Heaven in order to stop us. And if they cite us with violations of their statutes, they are trespassing. They do not supervise the Kingdom of Heaven highways.

There is no way to reason with such people. There is no way point in even attempting it. This is fanaticism on such a level that using logic to speak to someone who could believe something this stupid is as futile as trying to teach a card trick to a dog.

Backpeddling Racists

2004-04-25T12:35:00.000-04:00

John Scalzi, a blogger you really should be reading, has a post on his blog that is both amusing and appalling. It's about the appearance of a racist on his site in the comments, but even more about his ham-handed backtracking he tried to do. It began with this post, wherein he critiques an anti-immigration book. In that post, he included a picture of his adorable daughter Athena, who is partially hispanic, with the caption, "Behold! The Unassimilated Hispanic Menace!". The Drudge Report put up a link to the post and along comes an asshole named Mike, who leaves the following comment:

"Cute little wetback girl. I wonder if she'll grow up to do donkey shows like her whore mother."

To which John Scalzi replied:

"Probably not, Mark. She's not your sister.

Further note to the folks who wish to display their flagrant and abject racist stupidity: Try to have a little more creativity about it, please? If you're going to be a flagrant racist asshole, you need to stand out from all the other flagrant racist assholes out there. Try to exhibit a little style. I know, it'll be difficult, given the general inability of your neurons to fire on a regular pattern. But do make the effort, why don't you."

At which point the asshole in question tried to backtrack:

"Sorry. Didn't realize she was your daughter. My apologies.

I'm outta here! Best wishes!"

But of course, it goes without saying that when his obviously ridiculous apology was not accepted, he was not in fact "outta there", but stuck around to display his racism and stupidity over and over again. All of which reminded me of a story that took place some 17 or 18 years ago, when I was in college with another backpeddling racist.

I was in college and working for a summer at a butcher shop in the back of a large grocery store. One night I'm working with a guy that I didn't know well at all, he was pretty new. He was your basic frat guy/yuppie larvae type, but he seemed okay up to this point. I don't recall his name, so let's call him Flip (in college I used to joke that every frat guy was either Rip, Skip, Flip, Kip or Chip). It was a slow night and we were kind of standing around making small talk, talking about the basketball team and whatnot, when this couple rounds the corner of the first aisle and walks past the meat counter. The man was black and the woman was white, which caused Flip to, well, flip. When the couple got past the meat counter and turned up another aisle, Flip turns to me and says, "Man, that burns me up."

Rather dumbfounded, I said, "What burns you up?"

"That", he said while gesturing toward the aisle the couple had gone down, "Salt and pepper."

Pausing for a moment, I said, "Why does that burn you up?"

He said, "It's just wrong. They're gonna have mutt kids."

At this point, I decided to drop a little bomb on him. I said, "You know, I have a sister who is married to a black man and I have a niece and nephew who are 'mutts'. And they aren't worth any less just because some racist asshole who looks like Hitler's wet dream says so."

At which point, he starts to say, "Oh, I didn't mean...."

I cut him off immediately, saying, "Oh, yes you did. You did mean it. You just didn't know that I wasn't 'safe' to spew your hatred too because I'm a white guy like you and we're all supposed to think alike. In the future, you might want to leave me out of your racist games. I don't play by the rules."

I'm torn on this one. Like Scalzi's racist interloper, mine was just your everyday type of racist. Not a virulent racist who joins the KKK, just the run of the mill kind of racist who thinks that everyone thinks like them. On the one hand, it's amusing to watch them try and backpeddle when they get caught, because this kind of racist is also a social coward. For them, racism is a way of fitting in, a way of bonding with "their people", so when it backfires they backpeddle like an NFL defensive back. On the other hand, the fact that they CAN safely say such things in most cases without running into trouble suggests that they may well be right in their assumption that most people who look like them probably think like them too.

Gambling is Illegal (wink, wink)

2004-04-22T12:34:00.001-04:00

From the files of our intrepid vice police comes this story about Baltimore Ravens fullback Corey Fuller. His house in Tallahassee, Florida was raided by 20 - TWENTY - law enforcement officers on Tuesday night. Was he hiding stolen goods? Peddling crack? Storing bodies in his crawlspace? Nope. What was this obvious threat to society doing? Well, he was playing poker with his friends. And for this horrible crime against humanity, he now faces up to 5 years in prison and a $5000 fine.

Color me pissed, and not just because I participate in weekly poker games of this sort (though presumably for lower limits). Under Florida state law, you are allowed to gamble up to 10 dollars on a hand of cards. Other states have similar laws with varying limits and regulations on what you can and can't do. I think it's obviously time for the Florida police to have their budget cut and to lay off a whole lot of officers, if they are so bored that this is what they spend their time doing, preventing friends from getting together and having fun without any harm to anyone else.

It's time to end this hypocrisy that gambling is illegal. It's bullshit and everyone knows it. In my state, we have 19 casinos that operate legally. We have numerous horse racing tracks with legal betting. The state government runs a dozen different types of lotteries. Even the churches get into the act, with charity Vegas nights and weekly bingo games. But I can't get together with my buddies and play a friendly poker game without the threat of a bunch of jackbooted thugs in police uniforms busting into my house.

So what's the difference between our poker games and the casinos and lotteries and horse racing? The government doesn't get a cut, that's the difference. It's all about the government inserting itself, and shaking us down financially, in every conceivable area of our lives. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Sure, as long as they get their cut of the action. Next we'll be hearing about them raiding a 9 year old's lemonade stand to make sure their payroll taxes are up to date, or demanding that we file I-9 documents before we hire the neighbor kid to cut our lawn for $15. And the incredible thing to me is that Americans take it lying down, without a fuss.

It's time we got the government out of the business of regulating consensual and victimless crimes. All it does is corrupt our law enforcement institutions and cost us untold billions of dollars to imprison those who should not be imprisoned, destroying families in the process. The government's purpose for existing is to protect us from one another, not to stamp out the possibility of having fun. I've had it up to my eyelids with a government that thinks it's our nanny and not our servant.

In Memoriam: John Maynard Smith

2004-04-22T12:34:00.000-04:00

John Maynard Smith, the venerable and brilliant old biologist, has died at the age of 84. A protege of J.B.S. Haldane, Smith was an enormous influence over two entire generations of evolutionary biologists. He also published many popular books for non-scientists on evolutionary theory. Science, and the larger human community, has lost a giant.

Book Bytes #2: Mencken on Men and Women

2004-04-19T12:32:00.000-04:00

For my second Book Bytes entry, I'm going to continue the male/female theme, but from a more personal level than a political one. This will not be one continuous passage, however, but bits and pieces of various essays that Mencken wrote over many years, and from his 1918 book In Defense of Women. I don't think anyone ever accused Mencken of being a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but he did have a shrewd eye for human interaction. He observed, for instance, that though it is commonly thought that women were more compassionate and sympathetic than men, they could also be more ruthless and manipulative than men, while men were often far more prone to sentimentality. We are a curious thing, we humans. Anyway, here are the words of HL Mencken - brilliantly phrased, provocative, and sometimes enraging.

~ begin excerpts ~

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank...

This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist, if she be skillful enough to arise out of mere imitation into genuine self-expression, never takes her heroes quite seriously. From the day of George Sand to the day of Selma Lagerlof she has always got into her character study a touch of superior aloofness, of ill-concealed derision. I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.

That is should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. One finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted feminists, approaching the fact as obvious; practically all of them think it necessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to establish what should be an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman, W. L. George, one of the most sharp-witted of the faculty, wastes a whole book up on the demonstration, and then, with a great air of uttering something new, gives it the humourless title of " The Intelligence of Women. " The intelligence of women, forsooth! As well devote a laborious time to the sagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!

Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true fundamentals of intelligence--in so far as they reveal a capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of delusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth--to that extent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. "Human creatures," says George, borrowing from Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you a man with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to down right homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the male, the hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.

It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talent in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour--that complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is that this complex is impossible without the feminine contribution that it is a product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius we see the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish, and shave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief mental equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligent than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately, and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market, and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But these empty talents, of course, are not really signs of a profound intelligence; they are, in fact, merely superficial accomplishments, and their acquirement puts little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning how to catch a penny or scratch a match. The whole bag of tricks of the average business man, or even of the average professional man, is inordinately childish. It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than intakes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish. No observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men--I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures--without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense. The late Charles Francis Adams, a grandson of one American President and a great-grandson of another, after a long lifetime in intimate association with some of the chief business "geniuses" of that paradise of traders and usurers, the United States, reported in his old age that he had never heard a single one of them say anything worth hearing. These were vigorous and masculine men, and in a man's world they were successful men, but intellectually they were all blank cartridges...

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour--all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac long ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play the violin...

~ end excerpts ~

My Favorite Things: Sportswriter

2004-04-15T12:30:00.000-04:00

The third entry on my "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things" list is my favorite sportswriter. That honor goes to the legendary Sports Guy, Bill Simmons. The Sports Guy writes for espn.com, as well as for the Jimmy Kimmel show, and he's the funniest sportswriter this side of Bill Scheft. But whereas Scheft writes great one liners about sports, The Sports Guy writes great columns about sports, about his obsession with sports (especially his beloved Boston teams), and about his life. If you've been a longtime reader of his columns, you know all the telltale elements that he uses so skillfully in his storytelling:

The cast of characters: his Dad, who sounds so much like my dad that I think he's got cameras in my parents' house sometimes; his friends - Bish, Sully, J-Bug, Joe House and the other quintessential Bah-ston nicknames; his dog, Dooze; and of course the ever-patient Sports Gal.

The pop culture references: woven throughout his columns are certain recurring references to objects of American popular culture that are Dennis Miller-worthy in that they are both obscure and perfectly on point when he throws them in. These include the movie Hoosiers, TV show The White Shadow, and the king of all obscure movie references, Gymkata. As one of the 14 people who has seen this movie, let me describe it for you...

begin pointless but amusing digression...

The movie stars champion gymnast Kurt Thomas as...champion gymnast Jonathan Cabot. Ah, but he's not just a gymnast, he's also the son of a former secret government operative. And his government calls on him to infiltrate the tiny, yet savage, country of Parmistan, ruled by The Khan, who periodically holds a brutal challenge called only The Game. And naturally, along the way he has to rescue a girl, and he uncovers the hidden barbarism of The Khan, including his Village of Crazies. If this all sounds a lot like Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon, well, it is. It's also the kind of movie that has characters with names like Hao and Thorg.

The galactic horribleness of this movie can be summed up in one scene, where our gymnast hero is being pursued by bad guys through a suitably Eastern European looking village. He's running, he's kicking ass, then he's running some more, with dozens of bad guys in pursuit, when suddenly, and inexplicably, he comes across - no, I'm not making this up - a pommel horse. Yes, a concrete pommel horse in the middle of the city square. Because god knows, ancient towns are littered with monuments to gymnastics equipment. Our intrepid hero begins to do a perfect pommel horse spin thingy, complete with scissors kick that knocks out all the bad guys, who for some reason keep running directly at the pommel horse. This is the point at which the movie really loses its credibility. Not because of the pommel horse or the moronic behavior of the bad guys, but because he ended up getting a 5.4 from the Parmistani judge and he deserved much higher.

end pointless but amusing digression

The recurring themes: The Sports Guy has one theme that he uses quite often, which is the running diary. He'll take an event, say the NBA draft or Wrestlemania, and keep a running diary of his thoughts as it goes along. The results are hilarious, especially if it involves one of the many fantasy sports leagues he belongs to and the drafts that they hold for players. As an example, his column on last fall's NBA fantasy draft includes these gems:

4:28: You know how every fantasy draft gets ruined by the cell-phone guy babbling with his partner who didn't show up? And you're rooting for him to choke to death on a Cheeto by Round 8? Well, in our league, Anthony is Cheeto Choker and Joe House is Cell Phone Buddy. Somehow, they won last year's title, although they lost money in the long run (because the winnings were less than Anthony's phone bill for the draft).

Here's my point: This year, House showed up in person. On the bright side, we don't have to endure their annoying cell phone calls. On the flip side, we have to listen to them bitch at one another in person. They're like an old married couple. They just took Jermaine O'Neal eighth (as a forward). And neither seems happy about it.

"Somebody's sleeping on the sofa tonight," I joke. Everyone in the room hates me, and we're not even out of Round 1 yet...

4:33: Kicking off the second round, the Petes take Gilbert Arenas, launching a barrage of "Is this the fourth round already?" jokes. Those never get old...

5:04: I'm starting to like our team. Pining for Michael Redd, we catch a break when Jason Richardson and GP go in front of us. Suddenly I find myself saying, "You know, if Vince comes through this year, we might be in the running." Of course, Lenny Wilkens said these same words last year, and he's mowing his lawn right now...

5:15: Wow, I'm liking our team more and more by the minute. I am now convinced that Vince could average 30 a game. Time to mess with Jon, who has the terrified look of a guy who can't stop himself from picking Lamar Odom. I run through all the standard lines, including "Jon, Lamar Odom's on the phone ... he says he really wants to be on your team," and "Jon, it's Lamar Odom again ... he says he hasn't smoked pot in almost four months, and he just wants another chance."

Finally, Jon whines, "Don't do this to me!"

5:15: Jon takes Odom. Huge laughs. Dad pats me on the shoulder. He's like a proud father. Literally.

5:15: A giggling Lee asks everyone who has ever had Lamar Odom to raise their hands. Six of us oblige. Then he asks how many of us would do it again. None of us raise our hands. Somebody else mentions how Odom is one puff away from his third strike (and a one-year suspension). And somebody else mentions, "Is there an easier place in the country to buy drugs than Miami?"

Needless to say, Jon looks like he's trying to swallow his own tongue...

5:40: Well, it's time. Eighth round ... we need a forward ... we need a token Celtic ... and I need a good plot twist for this column. Dad and I look at each other. After two decades of drafting together, we could practically do this telepathically.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" I ask him.

Dad suppresses a smile. "It's the right round for him."

"We'll take Vin Baker," I tell the crowd.

For about 1.2 seconds, it's one of the most heartwarming stories in the history of fantasy sports. Nobody was a bigger Baker critic than me. I wrote entire columns about the guy. He drove me insane. He was the centerpiece of the worst trade in Boston sports history. When I was debating whether or not to move to Los Angeles last year, the thought of watching Baker at the Fleet Center actually made the "Reasons to Leave" section of my "Pro-Con" list (no joke).

As it turned out, Vin says he was drunk every night. Not just some nights ... every night. Now he's sober. And skinny. His legs have some hop again. His deadly fadeaway has magically reappeared from thin air. He isn't just a different guy, he's another guy. The Boston crowd cheers his every move. You can't possibly not root for the guy. Anyway, he needed to be on our team, for the purposes of closure more than anything. And for 1.2 seconds, it feels really good.

And just as Dad and I are slapping hands ...

"Vin and Tonic is off the board!" a delighted George screams.

"Just think," Dave adds, "when he falls off the wagon, it will be like a Double Whammy for you."

"Yeah," House chimes in. "You'll have your NBA season and your fantasy season ruined at the same time!"

Another of The Sports Guy's inventions for which our culture owes him greatly is the Unintentional Comedy Scale, a means of rating those moments that crack you up when they aren't supposed to. In this column, he lists most of the great moments in Unintentional Comedy, going from a low of 65, which includes things like Tim Robbins' horrible pitching in Bull Durham, to Dave Wannstadt's mustache (73), every Val Kilmer scene in "Top Gun." (75), Rudi Huxtable's fu manchu (76 - and ouch), Ray Lewis' Super Bowl XXXV pre-game dance (81), David Hasslehoff running in slow motion (82 - and I think it should be higher), All existing video of "The Magic Hour" (83 - and this is WAY too low. That might be the most painfully funny thing in the history of television), the awkward beach hug between Apollo and Rocky in "Rocky 3" (86), The time Ted Kennedy called McGwire and Sosa, "Mike McGwire and Sammy Sooser" (90), Gymkata, of course (94), Sean Connery hollering, "You the man now, dog!" in "Finding Forrester." (95), Mike Tyson saying, "I guess I'll fade into Bolivian" after the Lewis fight (96), and of course, the only events, to this point, that score a perfect 100 on the Unintentional Comedy Scale:

100: Every Dikembe Mutombo interview ... Ozzy Osbourne performing household tasks ... Rickey Henderson's Hall Of Fame induction speech (when it happens) ... David from "Real World New Orleans" singing "Come On Be My Baby Tonight" ... Corey Feldman's performance in "Blown Away" ... Corey Haim's "E! True Hollywood Story" ... the wedding video of Liza Minnelli and David Getz ... Dontae Jones high-fiving Henry Louis Gates during pregame warmups of a Celtics home game.

Another thing that Simmons does really well is reflect on the role of sports in the lives of young men, as he tells you stories from his own life and how sports has provided a bond between his father and him. In this column, for example, he looks back on his childhood and his good fortune at being able to watch Larry Bird in his prime:

When Larry Bird joined the Celtics in 1979, I was just nine years old, dreaming about playing for the hometown team some day. My Dad and I attended just about every game at the Boston Garden. The place was dead. Bird came in and transformed everything, like Swayze waltzing into the Double Deuce and cleaning house in "Road House." He wasn't just great, he changed the way his teammates played. He brought everyone to a higher place. Of the 50 happiest moments of my life, Bird and the Garden were involved in at least a dozen of them...

Ever since I was little, I loved basketball more than just about anything. Randomly, inexplicably, coincidentally, the greatest team basketball player of my lifetime landed on my team, in my formative years, and I had the privilege of watching him, day in and day out, for 13 years. His work ethic and his competitiveness rubbed off on his teammates. He always rose to the occasion when it mattered. His passing was contagious. When you watched him long enough, you started to see the angles he was seeing; instead of reacting to what just happened, you reacted to the play as it was happening. There's McHale cutting to the basket, I see him, get him the ball, there it is ... LAYUP! Bird gave that to us.

So that's what I grew up watching -- basketball played the right way. People looking for the open man. People making the extra pass. People giving their best and rising to the occasion in big moments. Even years later, I can rattle off the classic Bird moments like I'm rattling off moments of my own life. Like the time he sprung for 60 against Atlanta, when the Hawks were high-fiving on the bench. Or the time he dropped 42 on Doctor J in two-and-half quarters, frustrating Doc to the point that they swapped punches at midcourt. Or the famous shootout with Dominique in the '88 playoffs, when they combined for 34 points in the final quarter. I have a hundred of them.

Maybe this strikes me more because The Sports Guy and I are about the same age, and I grew up watching Magic Johnson. And I don't mean just on TV. I grew up in Lansing, on Foster Street, a block from Foster Park, where all the older kids would play their pickup basketball games. Those games would include my older brothers and lots of kids from the neighborhood, but they also included three future NBA players - Magic Johnson, Jay Vincent and Sam Vincent. At 8 years old, I got to watch these guys play, sitting at the edge of the court and chasing down the ball for them when it got kicked off the asphalt court. And when he went to Michigan State, I got to watch Magic play at Jenison Fieldhouse, the old barn that the Spartans played at in those days. Some of my best memories of childhood are going there, how the bleachers would bounce up and down with the cheering crowd, how loud it was. The incredible excitement that Magic brought to the game.

I still have the scrapbook that I made after they won the championship in 1979. I was 11 years old at the time. I'm one of the few people who actually remembers the other starters on that team (Greg Kelser, Jay Vincent, Mike Brkovich and Terry Donnelly) and the sixth man (Ron Charles). I remember every moment of that NCAA final, Bird and Magic battling it out, both putting on amazing performances. Even at 11, I could sense that this wasn't just a basketball game, this was something special.

Other recurring themes for The Sports Guy include rules, as in the rules of sports. When is it acceptable to change your favorite team? And the famous "rules for women watching sports with their boyfriend/husband", which contains some real gems:

1. No PDA. If you're allowed to watch with your boyfriend and his buddies, don't rub his head, don't kiss his neck, don't scratch his back, don't cuddle ... don't do any of that stuff...

2. There isn't a single acceptable situation for the question "Is this game almost over yet?" Not one...

6. Don't belittle our gambling or fantasy football. Comments like "You have a bookie?," or "I can't believe you guys pick players and pretend you're the coach," or, my personal favorite, "You guys need to get a life" are all guaranteed to make us hate you.

7. We're easily bribable, so bring something ... even if it's a bag of chips. If you cook something, even better (Rice Krispies Treats are always a winner)...

9. Know your stuff. The moment you say something like, "Wait, I thought Drew Bledsoe was on the Patriots," you might as well pull a bag over your head. If you're clueless, keep it to rudimentary observations like "That was an unbelievable catch" or "This announcer is annoying." Never say, "Jon Gruden's so cute. He looks just like my old high school boyfriend!" Save that for the next "American Idol."

To make a long post even longer, the bottom line is that The Sports Guy is the best sportswriter working today. I can't even think of a close second. And it's just a bonus that he loves poker and is a Rounders fan. Just read 50 ways to love the NBA draft and the following diary of the 2002 NBA draft. If that doesn't hook you as a permanent Sports Guy fan, you're either one of those people who considers themselves far too sophisticated to enjoy something so banal and pedestrian as competitive sports, or you're so constipated that you've got the Jon Gruden Face going on.

Book Bytes #1: Robert Hughes on American Culture

2004-04-14T12:31:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start a new category - Book Bytes. I'm one of those people who reads books with a highlighter or pen and I note passages that I find particularly meaningful/moving/well-written/enraging. I'm also one of those people who returns to books over and over, finding some bit of insight in them the 2nd or 3rd time that I missed the first, or reminding myself of a brilliant idea I'd seen the first time and forgotten. Sometimes the book bytes will be just isolated quotes, sometimes longer passages, and they will probably tend to come in groups, as I read or reread a book. Your comments are encouraged, as I hope they provoke as much thought in you as they obviously did in me if I saw fit to quote them.

The first book from which I will share some excerpts is Culture of Complaint, by Robert Hughes. Hughes is an Australian art critic and in this book he takes dead aim at what he calls America's "twin fetishes of victimhood and redemption". He takes equal delight in skewering Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson on the one hand, and Andrea Dworkin and the therapy cult on the other. This passage is from the book's introductory chapter:

~begin excerpt~

What Herod saw (Ed note: he is referring to a fictional Herod in a W.H. Auden piece) was America in the late 80s and early 90s. A polity obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its political language corroded by fake pity and euphemism. Like late Rome, unlike the early republic, in its long imperial reach, in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives. A culture which has replaced gladiatorial games, as a means of pacifying the mob, with hi-tech wars on television that cause immense slaughter and yet leave the Mesopotamian satraps in full power over their wretched subjects.

Unlike Caligula, the emperor does not appoint his horse counsul; he puts him in charge of the environment, or appoints him to the Supreme Court. Mainly it is women who object, for due to the prevalance of mystery-religions the men are off in the woods, affirming their manhood by sniffing one another's armpits and listening to third-rate poets rant about the moist, hairy satyr that lives inside each one of them. Those who crave the returns of the Delphic sibyl get Shirley MacLaine, and a 35,000-year-old Cro Magnon warrior named Ramtha takes up residence inside a blonde housewife on the West Coast, generating millions upon millions of cult dollars in seminars, tapes and books.

Meanwhile, artists vacillate between a largely self-indulgent expressiveness and a mainly impotent politicization, and the contest between education and TV - between argument and conviction by spectacle - has been won by television, a medium now more debased in America than ever before. Even its popular arts, once the wonder and delight of the world, have decayed; there was a time, within the memory of some of us, when American popular music was full of exaltation and pain and wit, and appealed to grown-ups. Today, instead of the raw intensity of Muddy Waters or the virile inventiveness of Duke Ellington, we have Michael Jackson, and from George Gershwin and Cole Porter we are down to illiterate spectaculars about cats or the fall of Saigon. The great American form of rock'n'roll has become over-technologized and run through the corporate grinder, until it is 95 percent synthetic...

And then, because the arts confront the sensitive citizen with the difference between good artists, mediocre ones and absolute duffers, and since there are always more of the last two than the first, the arts too must be politicized; so we cobble up critical systems to show that although we know what we meant by the quality of the environment, the idea of "quality" in aesthetic experience is little more than a paternalist fiction designed to make life hard for black, female and homosexual artists, who must henceforth be judged on their ethnicity, gender and medical condition rather than the merits of their work.

As a maudlin reaction against excellence spreads to the arts, the idea of aesthetic discrimination is tarred with the brush of racial or gender discrimination. Few take a stand on this, or point out that in matters of art "elitism" does not mean social injustice or even inaccessibility. The self is now the sacred cow of American culture, self-esteem is sacrosanct, and so we labor to turns arts education into a system in whch no-one can fail. In the same spirit, tennis could be shorn of its elitist overtones: you just get rid of the net.

Since our new-found sensitivity decrees that only the victim shall be the hero, the white American males starts bawling for victim status too. Hence the rise of cult therapies which teach that we are all the victims of our parents: that whatever our folly, venality, or outright thuggishness, we are not to be blamed for it, since we come from "dysfunctional families" - and, as John Bradshaw, Melody Beattie and other gurus of the twelve-step program are quick to point out on no evidence whatsoever, 96 percent of American families are dysfunctional. We have been given improper role models, or starved of affection, or beaten, or perhaps subjected to the goatish lusts of Papa; and if we don't think we have, it is only because we have repressed the memory and are therefore in even more urgent need of the quack's latest book.

The number of Americans who were abused as children and hence absolved from all blame for anything they might now do is more or less equal to the number who, a few years ago, had once been Cleopatra or Henry VIII. Thus the ether is now jammed with confessional shows in which a parade of citizens and their role-models, from Latoya Jackson to Roseanne Barr, rise to denounce the sins of their parents, real or imagined. Not to be aware of a miserable childhood is prima facie evidence, in the eyes of Recovery, of "denial" - the assumption being that everyone had one, and is thus a potential source of revenue.The cult of the abused Inner Child has a very important use in modern America: it tells you that personal grievance transcends political utterance, and that th eupward production curve of maudlin narcissism need not intersect with the descending spiral of cultural triviality. Thus the pursuit of the Inner Child has taken over just at the moment when Americans ought to be figuring out where their Inner Adult is, and how that disregarded oldster got buried under the rubble of pop psychology and specious short-term gratification. We imagine a Tahiti inside ourselves, and seek its prelapsarian inhabitant: everyone his own Noble Savage.

~end excerpt~

Fisking Phyllis Schlaffly

2004-04-12T12:29:00.000-04:00

The only two sure things in life are death and taxes, the old saying goes. I think by now we can safely add a third certainty - reading a Phyllis Schlafly column will leave you baffled that someone could write such nonsense with a straight face. Her latest column, about the Supreme Court's current pledge of allegiance case, is a potpourri of stupidity from beginning to end. To wit:

A lower federal court threw out Newdow's suit because he does not have custody of his daughter. The Supreme Court could follow suit, or the justices could decide, once and for all, if the words "under God" are enough to change the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance from a patriotic oath into a prayer.

Wrong, Phyllis. The case has nothing to do with whether the pledge is transformed into a "prayer" by the addition of the words "under God". The question is whether it constitutes an endorsement of religion. There are lots of things that the government could mandate that would violate the establishment clause without being prayers.

Before going insane, Friedrich Nietzsche declared, "God is dead." Atheists want the Supreme Court to make it official.

Wrong again, Phyllis. The absence of government endorsement for the existence of God does not equate to a positive statement that "God is dead". Prior to Congress adding the words "under God" to the pledge in 1954, was the pledge declaring God to be dead? Of course not. And removing those words now wouldn't make that declaration either. This is a statement that could be made only by an idiot or a demagogue. Take your pick which I think Phyllis is.

The Supreme Court in 1962 banned prayer from public schools, and now schools are awash in drugs, sex, and violence.

Ah, I love this argument. It's moronic both in premise and conclusion. The premise is flatly false. The Supreme Court did not ban prayer from public schools in 1962. The Supreme Court banned mandatory, government-sponsored prayers in public schools in 1962. Every teacher and every student is entirely free to pray in school so long as they don't disrupt class time to do so. Millions of teachers and students pray in school every day. It is also entirely legal for student bible studies and prayer clubs to use school facilities before and after school to pray to their heart's content, and there are thousands of such clubs around the country. If Phyllis really thinks that the Supreme Court banned prayer from public schools in 1962, I imagine she has a hard time explaining why so many people DO pray in schools on a daily basis.

It's equally stupid to claim that taking mandatory, government-sponsored prayer out of schools led to the schools being "awash in drugs, sex and violence". There is no correlation between violent societies and mandatory religious rituals performed in schools. In fact, the only correlation there is in the western world between religious belief and violent societies is a negative one for Schlafly's purposes. The US is a far more religious nation than any nation in Europe with the exception of Ireland - a far higher percentage believe in God, believe in heaven and hell, and attend church, according to every survey ever done - yet the US has 2-3 times as much violence as any European nation. If you're going to make these quick easy causal statements, you'd be more justified in claiming that religious belief leads to violence (a claim I would also say is false, by the way).

The courageous Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore was even removed from office for displaying the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama State Courthouse.

Wrong again, Phyllis. Are you going for some kind of world record for making false statements? Roy Moore was not removed from office for displaying the ten commandments. Roy Moore was removed from office for publicly refusing to comply with a federal court order in a case that he knew he was going to lose - he'd already lost the same case over a much smaller display when he was a lowly district court judge. Public officials that refuse to follow legal court orders get removed from office, regardless of whether you think he was right or not.

But wait! She actually gets one thing right in this screed! She is correct to point out that the Solicitor General's defense of the pledge as currently written is fundamentally wrong:

Or maybe the court will duck the dilemma by declaring that "under God" has no religious meaning, a ruling that would outrage Americans who are quite sure that God is alive and well.

Of course, she's not smart enough to see that by admitting that the phrase "under God" is an explicitly religious statement, she is making Newdow's case for him. The government has no business, under the first amendment, endorsing specifically religious statements like that. And she's also wrong that this will outrage Americans who support the pledge. I don't think the religious right rank and file cares what the court says about it, as long as the words stay there. Whatever basis is offered for the decision, as long as the decision is viewed as a defeat for atheists (never mind that briefs on behalf of Newdow have been filed by numerous religious organizations, that interrupts a perfectly inspiring good-vs-evil story), Schlafly's followers will cheer it. She ends with this bizarre statement:

God is not so easily defeated in America.

Ah, yes. You see, this case isn't about belief in God, or beliefs about God, or the right to have government endorsement of belief in God, a defeat would be a defeat for God himself! That strikes me as rather odd, though, since logically that would mean that all those other decisions that Phyllis so gleefully rants against were also defeats for God. For an omnipotent being, he sure does get his butt kicked in court a lot.

Praising Bill Wallo

2004-04-10T12:28:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I took Bill Wallo to task for a post on his blog referring to theistic evolutionists as "useful idiots". Having spent a fair bit of time reading his blog, however, I should, in the interests of fairness, point out that Walloworld is well worth reading. He's a very bright guy, and though a relatively conservative Christian, tends to take a more reasonable view on most of the hot button issues for the religious right.

For example, on Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, and on the subject of religious symbols in state buildings and America's religious history in general, Bill takes a very nuanced and reasonable position. And on the subject of the ban on religious symbols in French schools, I am in 100% agreement with him, as I've ranted about many times on this page. I also agree with his position on the death penalty completely. I don't have a moral problem with putting someone guilty of murder or even rape to death, but I don't think our system is nearly good enough to risk the false convictions for such a final penalty. All in all, I think Bill Wallo's page is very much worth reading despite our disagreements on other things.

More Dissembling from ID Advocates

2004-04-09T12:27:00.000-04:00

This is a repost of a comment I left on The Panda's Thumb in a thread concerning Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost and the Leiter/VanDyke situation.

Joe Carter wrote:

"I don’t really know since I’m not a defender of ID theory but a defender of the idea that the theory should be given a chance. If it doesn’t work, then fine, we’ll move on."

There are three problems with this claim. First, it's false. Anyone who goes to his blog archive labelled "intelligent design" can see that Joe IS a defender of ID.

Second, if there is no model to test and no means of testing if it there was one - and Joe has been challenged repeatedly to come up with one, and so have the leading ID advocates, and have all failed to do so - then it is pointless to claim that the theory should be "given a chance". If it can't be tested, it's not a theory at all. And if it can't be tested, there's no way of determining if it "works" or not.

Third, I think scientists are more than happy to "give ID a chance". All its proponents have to do is offer up a genuine model with explanatory power, derive testable hypotheses from it, and propose tests. Scientists will be glad to run the tests and see what happens. The problem, as noted above, is that there are none to run. When asked to provide a means of testing it, the only thing they can come up with is a test for evolution so they can use the false dichotomy (either evolution or ID) to argue for a god of the gaps solution.

Despite this complete lack of real science at its core, the ID advocates still insist on pushing ID into classrooms, where even one of their own, Bruce Gordon, admits it has no place being:

design-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world...

This also despite the fact that they claim over and over again that they don't push legislation to get their views into classrooms. Here's Phillip Johnson in an interview in 2001:

We definitely arent looking for some legislation to support our views, or anything like that. What our adversaries would like to say is - these people want to impose their views through the law - No, that's what they do. We're against that in principle and we dont need that.

And here is Bill Dembski claiming the same thing:

Instead of pressing their case by lobbying for fair treatment acts in state legislatures (i.e., acts that oblige public schools in a given state to teach both creation and evolution in their science curricula), design theorists are much more concerned with bringing about an intellectual revolution starting from the top down. Their method is debate and persuasion. They aim to convince the intellectual elite and let the school curricula take care of themselves.

Incredible that they don't lobby for inclusion in school curricula because they're "against that in principle", yet they can always be found lobbying for and testifying for inclusion of ID in public school science classrooms in front of school boards, state legislatures, state boards of education and even at the federal level with the infamous (and mythical) Santorum amendment. But they don't do that, remember - "that's what they do", says Phil Johnson. That's what creationists do, says Bill Dembski. ID advocates don't do that. And the fact that you see them doing that all over the country is apparently irrelevant.

What's Wrong with America?

2004-04-08T12:27:00.000-04:00

I'd like this to be an ongoing discussion between me and the readers of this page. It was motivated by a conversation with my brother, beginning with some shocking statistics. Did you know that the United States locks up 4 times as many of its citizens than any other western nation per capita? Did you know that despite this, the US is the most violent western nation by far? Murders per capita are 2.5 times higher than any other nation, rapes nearly 3 times higher.

What I'd like to figure out is, why? What is it about American culture that breeds this sort of thing in numbers so disproportionate to the rest of the civilized world? Some of the commonly heard and easy answers are obviously false. For example, it's obvious that "getting tough on crime" isn't the answer to a high crime rate - we lock up 4 times as many as any other nation and we STILL have far more crime. So too, the commonly heard answer from the religious right, that things went to hell when we "took God out of schools" or some such rot. The US has a far higher rate of religious belief and church attendance than any other western nation and that's not close either, so obviously there is no correlation there. Nor do I think the answer is gun control. Many other nations have just as much gun ownership per capita as the US, like Canada and Switzerland, with nothing close to the rates of violent crime that we have here.

So I'm looking for answers and I'm asking my readers to join in this discussion and maybe we can all learn some things and generate some ideas. A couple of preliminary possibilities:

1. The US is the most income-stratified nation as well, with the largest gap between rich and poor of any nation. Could this be part of it?

2. The US does not have the kind of continuous, homogenous culture that so many other western nations have. We're a melting pot of different cultural traditions, without the commonalities to bind us all together.

3. Most other cultures put far more emphasis on families, in my experience. I have friends from other cultures who are astonished by how uncohesive our families are. They wouldn't dream of putting an elderly parent in a nursing home, and it's normal in other cultures to have 3 generations under the same roof. We see it in the US, but primarily among immigrant families, at least in my experience.

Okay, everyone. Your turn. Any ideas out there for what creates this toxic culture in America that results in so much suffering when, the truth is, we have everything going for us and it shouldn't be this way?

More Nonsense on the Understanding Evolution Site

2004-04-07T00:26:00.000-04:00

The ID crowd just continues to push this ridiculous argument that the Understanding Evolution website, by pointing out that evolution is not necessarily in conflict with religion and that many Christians and other types of theists accept evolution without giving up their faith, violates the establishment clause. The latest is from our old friend Francis Beckwith. This argument has been completely shredded by Timothy Sandefur, in a piece that Beckwith has no doubt seen. Yet he continues to push this, on his blog and in print. I'm sure he made a few bucks with the article in the American Spectator, but I still think it's kind of silly to keep pushing an argument this silly.

In fact, I think it's time for a challenge. Frank, I know you read this blog. If you really think you have an argument here, take it to court. If you really think this is a violation of the establishment clause, file a suit. John West is making the same argument and the DI has lots and lots of money to cover the legal fees. You and David Dewolf can design the legal strategy. I predict that you won't do it, because you know that this argument would be greeted with exactly the kind of response it is due, primarily laughter. I think you know how bad this argument is, but continue to push it, and ignore the criticisms that have been made of it, because it suits the DI's public relations agenda.

Ashcroft's Anti-Porn Crusade

2004-04-07T00:25:00.000-04:00

The Baltimore Sun's article on the Bush administration's anti-pornography efforts begins with this:

Lam Nguyen's job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other "computer forensic specialists" like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department's operation to rid the world of porn.

And ends with this:

Nguyen, father of a 2-year-old girl, and his co-workers spend their days scouring the Internet for the most obscene material, following leads sent in by citizens and tracking pornographers operating under different names. The job wears on them all, day after day, so much so that the obscenity division has recently set up in-house counseling for them to talk about what they're seeing and how it is affecting them.

"This stuff isn't the easiest to deal with," Nguyen said recently while at his computer. "But I think we're going after the bad guys and we're making a difference, and that's what makes it worthwhile."

I find the idea of people whose sole job it is to watch dirty movies, looking for something to prosecute, quite amusing. It reminds me of the old blind Supreme Court Justice Harlan, sitting in a room with the other justices watching XXX rated movies to determine if they were obscene or not. Since he could not see what was going on, he would repeatedly ask his clerk to describe what they were doing on the screen and, upon being told, would exclaim, "You don't say!". At the same time, I am appalled by the fact that our government has nothing better to do than to protect consenting adults from watching other consenting adults do things that are entirely legal in the United States.

The Baltimore Sun was, of course, the home of H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, who would be savaging the John Ashcrofts of the world were he alive today. This is, after all, the man who defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Imagine what he would say upon reading this in his beloved Sun:

In a speech in 2002, Ashcroft made it clear that the Justice Department intends to try. He said pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," and has "strewn its victims from coast to coast."

"Invades our homes"? Against our will? Is there someone going into your house, putting a gun to your head and making you download porn from the internet or order pay-per-view movies on cable or satellite TV? Yes, I know it's easy to come across porn on the internet, entirely too easy for kids in my view, but it's not difficult to block it either. If I had children, I would absolutely install the parental control software to prevent them from being able to view such material. But that's entirely the point - you have the choice. We all have the choice. And a huge percentage of adult Americans choose to view pornography in one form or another, to the tune of around $10 billion a year.

I've always found it ironic that conservatives preach about the free market so much, but don't trust people to make their own purchase choices. Capitalism requires consumers making their own choices, demand leading to supply. But as soon as the demand is for something they don't like, they want to bring down the power of the state to destroy this free market. Add to this the additional irony of hearing conservatives preach about "smaller government" while spending millions and millions of our tax dollars to fund additional FBI agents, postal inspectors, prosecutors and investigators to run sting operations and bring court cases against adults for selling products to adults depicting entirely legal acts that they watch in the privacy of their own home. But hey, why let consistency and rationality interrupt a perfectly good moral crusade?

Evangelical Outpost Joins the Fun

2004-04-07T00:24:00.000-04:00

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has jumped into the Leiter/VanDyke fray, in a post filled with misconceptions and illogical statements. He begins:

For a legal scholar and professor of philosophy, Brian Leiter has a remarkably poor grasp of basic logic. For the past week Leiter has been bashing a defender of Intelligent Design theory using his typical rhetorical style of bullying and bluster. Instead of thinking up creative new ad hominem attacks, though, he should be paying closer attention to his reasoning.

At the risk of being pedantic, I have to point out this very common mistake in claiming the ad hominem logical fallacy. An ad hominem, contrary to how seemingly everyone conceives of it, is not merely an insult. Calling someone a jerk is not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is a logical fallacy, so there must be a mistake in reasoning in the formulation. The logical fallacy in an ad hominem attack is in responding to a substantive claim by referring to an irrelevant personal trait of the person making the argument. For example, if I said, "Joe Carter shouldn't be listened to when he talks about ad hominems, look at the way he dresses", that would be an ad hominem. I would be rejecting his arguments based upon an irrelevant personal trait. While Leiter is often rude and harsh in his attacks on people, those are not ad hominems. They may be insulting, but that doesn't make it ad hominem.

Joe quotes this passage from Brian:

The difficulty, however, is that science did not "a priori pick a naturalistic methodology"; it adopted, based on evidence and experience (i.e., a posteriori), the methods that worked: it turns out that if you make predictions, test the predictions against experience, refine the hypotheses on which the predictions are based, test them again, and so on, you figure out how to predict and control the world around you. This is what the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and a few other ancient events apparently not covered in Mr. VanDyke's education, were about: the a posteriori discovery of the most effective ways to predict and control the world. This, of course, distinguishes the naturalistic worldview of science from the supernatural view of religion, which is genuinely a priori.

And begins his response:

There are numerous problems with Leiter’s reasoning but I will point out just three. The first is that his methodology would lead to conclusions that Leiter himself woudl presumably reject. Take for example the “anthropic principle.” We could predict, post hoc, what type of universe would be required to produce human life, but we'd be unable to test the theory (we aren't able to repeat the Big Bang).

Does Joe really think that if we can't repeat an event, we can't test explanations for that event? This would rule out whole fields of science, including the one he mentioned. Big bang cosmology is entirely testable, and has been tested, without having to repeat the big bang itself. Testability requires making predictions about the nature of new evidence, not repeating the event itself. It would also, by the way, rule out the entire field of forensic science, which is used to convict people and even put them to death on a daily basis in this country. By Joe's reasoning, you would have to actually recreate the murder in order to test forensic explanations for the murder. But that's not how it's done, of course. You test the forensic explanation by making predictions. If the bullet came from gun X, then we make predictions Y and Z. If Y and Z are confirmed, the explanation is validated.

He continues:

We could, however, determine the likelihood that the event could have occurred by pure chance. Since the probability of such a series of events occurring by coincidence would be close to zero, we would be lead, by evidence and experience, to the conclusion that the universe was “designed.” (To conclude otherwise would require taking an a priori prejudice against supernaturalism.)

I'll take issue with Joe's claim that we can determine the likelihood of the big bang, or the so-called anthropic coincidences, occuring by "pure chance", and I'll challenge him to produce such a calculation. We hear this argument over and over again, but it's never accompanied by an actual probability equation. If you think we can calculate the probability of either of those two things, let's see the probability equation.

It should also be noted here that even if such a probability equation were possible, it wouldn't tell us anything meaningful about whether the event could have occured naturally or supernaturally. The perfect illustration of this is Marshall Berman's example of the rock in the backyard:

Go outside and pick up a small rock. The probability of that rock being on that spot on the earth *by chance alone* is roughly the area of the stone divided by the surface area of the earth, or about one chance in 10 to the 18th power (one followed by 18 zeros). If picking up the stone took one second, the probability of such an event occurring at this precise moment over the lifetime of the universe is now even smaller by another factor 10 to the 18th power! This simple event is so incredibly unlikely (essentially zero probability) that one wonders how it could be accomplished!

Joe continues:

The second reason is that the “what works” approach gives us no reason to believe that our conclusions are true. I may believe, for example, that my dryer contains a black hole that causes socks to disappear. Every time I put a load of clothes in the machine I find that I'm missing a sock. The more I repeat this experiment the more socks I lose, thereby providing sufficient evidence to confirm my theory.

Joe seems to be confusing facts with explanations. Socks disappearing from your dryer would be a fact; the "black hole hypothesis" would be a potential explanation for that fact to be tested. The continued occurence of the fact does not test the potential explanation. Doing laundry would not constitute "repeating the experiment", since doing laundry does not test the explanation at all. In other words, this is an absolutely absurd analogy for how science tests a hypothesis.

The black hole hypothesis could of course be tested in other ways, as black holes have predictable effects. If there was a black hole in your dryer, it would have a quite noticable effect on gravitational pull around the dryer. It would also not be able to distinguish between socks and other types of clothing, since black holes are not conscious entities and would simply obey the laws of physics. Now, Joe might invoke a violation of the laws of physics here and say that this is a magic black hole that only makes socks disappear and doesn't have any other predictable effects. But in doing so, Joe would demostrate for us exactly why science rules out supernatural explanations, because once you allow them, all bets are off - there is absolutely no way to discern true supernatural explanations from false ones. Can you propose a means of distinguishing the "magic black hole" hypothesis from the "malevolent demons" hypothesis or the "mischievous leprauchans" hypothesis? Of course not. In other words, Joe's analogy is a really good argument against his thesis.

Leiter, of course, would claim that we should use Occam’s razor and exclude the necessity of the black hole to explain the missing socks. But this would require us to take an a priori position in favor of the principle of parsimony in order to preserve methodological naturalism. My theory would work well enough that I would have no reason to test it further and while it might not be "true", the a posteriori examination of the evidence makes it a plausible explanation. After all, naturalistic methodology doesn’t require us to take a priori assumptions about truth.

Leiter would not have to invoke Occam's Razor to distinguish between two explanations here, because Joe's hypothetical explanation hasn't been tested at all, and if it was tested by making predictions about the effects of a black hole, it would be falsified. Joe is pretending that he has two equally plausible explanations that explain the exact same things equally well, when in fact he doesn't have such an explanation at all. He has one very bad analogy that, if made more analogous, would fail miserably as a theory.

The third reason Leiter's argument fails is that he has no justification for excluding other theories or methods that don’t rely on methodological naturalism. Just because a method works doesn’t mean it is infallible. The method provided us with Newtonian physics, a hypothesis that “worked” well enough…until it didn’t. Do we regard the theory as having always been an implausible scientific hypothesis just because it was replaced by another? Of course not. The same applies to methods. Just because methodological naturalism “works” (at least sometimes) does not mean that it is the only valid method or that it cannot be replaced. Besides, you can’t (without resorting to an a priori assumption) exclude other methods as invalid without allowing them to be tested.

This would be a serious objection if, and only if, there was some means of testing those "other methods", in this case the ID explanation. And if Joe can come up with a testable hypothesis that flows from ID, or a way to falsify ID, he'll be the first to do it.

Leiter’s reasoning shows that his bias against intelligent design theory is not rooted in science but in prejudice. By acknowledging that science does not require an a priori submission to naturalism he inadvertenly undercuts his own argument. He can’t claim that methodological naturalism is the “most effective ways to predict and control the world” while refusing to allow other methods to be tested.

Again, Leiter is not ruling out ID without allowing it to be tested. He's challenging the ID advocates to put forth a real model with testable hypotheses that flow logically from it and propose a means of testing those hypotheses. But they haven't done that, and I don't think they can. It's not by accident that all of their publishing efforts to this point have been trying to poke holes in evolution. The entire ID argument up to this point comes down to one big God of the Gaps argument - "Evolution can't explain X, therefore God (sorry, the unnamed - wink, wink - intelligent designer that we know nothing about) must have done it". There are no testable hypotheses that flow from that. So it simply isn't a question of anyone "ruling out" ID without testing it, it's a question of there not being any means of testing it. And if the ID advocates think that's false, all they have to do is actually publish some means of doing so, as we have been challenging them to do since at least 1997's NTSE conference. That deafening silence you've been hearing in that regard is quite telling, don't you think?

Bill Wallo Joins Rusty's Offensive Screed

2004-04-06T00:23:00.000-04:00

I'm very disappointed to see Bill Wallo join Rusty in insulting all of his fellow Christians who are theistic evolutionists. He, too, cites John West's NRO article, particularly the section wherein the Understanding Evolution website points out that evolution is not necessarily incompatible with Christianity, then says:

As West notes, the use of these religious "useful idiots" is part of a concerted strategy by NCSE (and other similarly situated groups) to "defuse skepticism of neo-Darwinism."

This is truly astonishing to me. Does Wallo really think that Howard Van Till, Ken Miller, Glenn Morton, Charles Austerberry, Keith Miller, Davis Young, Wes Elsberry, Rob Pennock, and millions of other theists and Christians who accept evolution are all idiots who are too dull to realize that they're being "used" by those big bad evil atheists like Genie Scott? I dare say that these men know far more about evolution than Bill Wallo will ever know in his lifetime, yet he casually dismisses them as easily manipulated idiots, along with, quite literally, millions of his fellow Christians. Is it possible that he doesn't realize how incredibly offensive and insulting that is? Is it possible that he doesn't realize how irrational it is?

He continues:

Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the NCSE, is a signator on the "Humanist Manifesto III," which proclaims that "humans are . . . the result of unguided evolutionary change." Clearly, she, and many others within NCSE, have no faith in a Divine Being of any sort whatsoever.

And he's right, Genie is not a theist. But so what? Others in the NCSE are. Wes Elsberry is a Christian. Josephine Borgeson is a Christian, and the author of the congregational study guides for the PBS evolution series. Phil Spieth is a Christian. All of these are NCSE staff members. Evolution advocates come from a wide spectrum of different beliefs - atheist, agnostic, deist, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim. Creationists and ID advocates are almost uniformly evangelical Christian, with a Moonie thrown in. Yet the IDCs are absolutely frantic to tie evolution to one single position on religious matters, and they are apparently shameless enough to do so with a straight face.

Follow up: I received an e-mail from Bill Wallo in which he said that he did not really intend to portray theistic evolutionists as "idiots", but merely as "apologists for naturalistic evolutionists". He also said that he was feeling "confrontational" when he wrote that and that he intended to incite more comments from readers with this inflammatory remark. While Bill has always been a fairly reasonable guy in our discussions, even when I think he's wrong, I just have a hard time believing that he could write what he wrote and think that it was NOT insulting and offensive to his fellow Christians who accept evolution.

Leiter v VanDyke Redux

2004-04-06T00:22:00.000-04:00

Brian Leiter has replied to VanDyke's latest response, posted on Ex Parte and as a comment here, and it is a devestating reply, to be sure. I was hoping Brian would get around to doing this, mostly because I've been too busy to do it myself. The misuse, probably born of misunderstanding and trusting Beckwith's portrayal, of Laudan, Kuhn and other philosophers of science and their positions on methodological naturalism, fairly screamed out from VanDyke's reply and Leiter corrects the misconceptions very well.

VanDyke gets himself into particular trouble, I think, with this smug citation of Laudan:

“If [Leiter] had even perused Dr. Beckwith's book he would have come in modest contact with some of the leading lights in this literature including Larry Laudan, a philosopher of science who is currently on the faculty at the University of Texas and whose greatness Leiter himself extols..."

This is a brave leap in the dark, ending with a resounding thud as he lands. Leiter is infinitely better equipped to discuss Laudan's contributions to philosophy of science and the demarcation problem than VanDyke, not only because he's actually read Laudan's work on the subject (VanDyke clearly has not) but because Laudan's office is right down the hall from Leiter's office at UT. As Leiter notes:

My colleague Larry Laudan is, needless to say, well beyond being amazed anymore by the gross misrepresentations of his views--and of issues in the philosophy of science--in law reviews and by proponents of ID. (Didn’t it occur to VanDyke that I might walk down the hall and point out his nonsense to Laudan? He just rolled his eyes and chuckled).

While I still tend to think that Leiter's rhetoric is a bit overly harsh, I think he's absolutely right when he says that this is all an example of a guy (VanDyke) who simply got in way over his head, pontificating on a subject he knew virtually nothing about, and his reputation took a justifiable beating as a result. It's time for him to just take his lumps and decide that should he venture into such territory again, he'll be better prepared to defend his views than he was in this case. Unfortunately, I think, based upon his reaction so far, that rather than doing that, he's going to continue to filter this through his perceptions of persecution by the "Darwinian establishment" and continue to strike the martyr pose. And as Leiter correctly notes, this is hardly an auspicious beginning for a prospective scholar.

Another Rejoinder to Rusty

2004-04-05T00:20:00.000-04:00

This is becoming a regular series, isn't it? It wasn't intended as such. Rusty's latest salvo deals with a couple of questions. It started with his post concerning the Understanding Evolution website, and one section of that site in particular, which advised teachers on how to answer the common misconception that evolution is inherently anti-religious or anti-Christian. Here is the section in its entirety:

Misconception: “Evolution and religion are incompatible.”

Response: Religion and science (evolution) are very different things. In science (as in science class), only natural causes are used to explain natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs that are beyond the natural world.

The misconception that one has to choose between science and religion is divisive. Most Christian and Jewish religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. In fact, many religious people, including theologians, feel that a deeper understanding of nature actually enriches their faith. Moreover, in the scientific community there are thousands of scientists who are devoutly religious and also accept evolution.

This elicited the following response from Rusty:

You've gotta wonder if the evidence for evolution is so truly convincing (as most evolutionists will claim), then why bother with getting religious endorsement?

I explained to him, as did someone else in the comments section on his site, what should have been incredibly obvious to anyone reading the quote in context (which I suspect he had not done when he posted his initial post on the subject, as he was originally quoting John West's absurd article on the NRO on the subject), which is that the section he quoted was not intended to provide religious endorsement or evidence for evolution, it was intended only to answer the common misconception that evolution is anti-religious. Of course, even without seeing the original context, the very fact that the first line says, "Misconception: Evolution and religion are incompatible.” followed by "Response" might have been a major clue, wouldn't you think? Anyway, here is his latest paraphrase of what his objection was:

All I really wanted to know was, if the empirical data for evolution is so convincing and if MN is not a worldview, then why do the NCSE and the Understanding Evolution websites even bother to address the religious aspect? Why do they imply religious endorsement? Why do they state that an evolutionary understanding of the natural realm can enrich one's faith?

Well let's see, Rusty. Maybe it's because people like you continually claim that the opposite is true. Here's the irony here. Phil Johnson, William Dembski, and Rusty, as well as nearly all ID advocates, make the claim that evolution assumes philosophical naturalism, aka materialism, and hence is anti-religious and anti-Christian, and that therefore one cannot honestly accept evolution AND be a Christian. Rusty has been making that claim for months, and quoting the others repeatedly to support it, so this really isn't open for dispute. Indeed, this is the primary objection of virtually everyone who doubts evolution, virtually every creationist/ID advocate in the world shares a similar religious viewpoint. Teachers inevitably have to deal with these religious objections when they teach evolution, and this is primarily the result of leaders like Johnson and Dembski continually repeating those religious objections and claiming that evolution is inherently atheistic. So we have this mantra - "evolution is incompatible with religious belief" - being repeated over and over and over again, by the leaders of the ID movement, by creationists everywhere, by ministers in the churches, by Rusty of course, and thereafter by students across the country when evolution is taught.

So along comes a website by prominent scientists and scholars that helps teachers understand evolution and teach it more effectively. That website points out that this mantra is not necessarily true, and points to the fact that millions of Christians do accept evolution, including the governing bodies of every single mainline Christian denomination, and what happens? The ID crowd loses its freaking minds! The Discovery Institute writes a positively moronic article in the National Review (who seem to be making moronic articles on this subject a habit lately) claiming that this violates the Establishment clause (I would LOVE to see West take that argument into court. He wouldn't go to court with that legal argument in a million years and he knows it). And Rusty comes along and says, "I don't understand why they would bother answering this argument we've been repeated a million times a day. It must be because the evidence for evolution is so weak." I'll take non sequiturs for $1000, Alex.

The other issue with Rusty and I at this point is the offensive portrayal of theistic evolutionists offered by he and Dembski. Here is what Rusty quotes from Dembski:

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Darwinian establishment views theistic evolution as a weak-kneed sycophant that desperately wants the respectability that comes with being a full-blooded Darwinist but refuses to follow the logic of Darwinism through to the end. It takes courage to give up the comforting belief that life on earth has a purpose. It takes courage to live without the consolation of afterlife. Theistic evolutionists lack the stomach to face the ultimate meaninglessness of life, and it is this failure of courage that makes them contemptible in the eyes of full-blooded Darwinists.

Now Rusty claims that Dembski doesn't really think they're cowards, he just says that "full-blooded Darwinists" think that TEs are cowards. I say this is nonsense, for several reasons. First, because Dembski doesn't quote any of those "full-blooded Darwinists" to make his point. He is simply inventing a straw man "Darwinist" and putting his own words in his mouth. Second, the wording of the passage itself says that TEs are cowards, and it is this cowardice that allegedly makes Darwinists "hold them in contempt". Third, a look at the entire context shows that this is in fact Dembski's view. Here is the entire passage:

Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution. As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism. What theistic evolution does is take the Darwinian picture of the biological world and baptize it, identifying this picture with the way God created life. When boiled down to its scientific content, theistic evolution is no different from atheistic evolution, accepting as it does only purposeless, naturalistic, material processes for the origin and development of life.

As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is an oxymoron, something like "purposeful purposelessness." If God purposely created life through the means proposed by Darwin, then God's purpose was to make it seem as though life was created without any purpose. According to the Darwinian picture, the natural world provides no clue that a purposeful God created life. For all we can tell, our appearance on planet earth is an accident. If it were all to happen again, we wouldn't be here. No, the heavens do not declare the glory of God, and no, God's invisible attributes are not clearly seen from God's creation. This is the upshot of theistic evolution as the design theorists construe it.

Design theorists find the "theism" in theistic evolution superfluous. Theistic evolution at best includes God as an unnecessary rider in an otherwise purely naturalistic account of life. As such, theistic evolution violates Occam's razor. Occam's razor is a regulative principle for how scientists are supposed to do their science. According to this principle, superfluous entities are to be rigorously excised from science. Thus, since God is an unnecessary rider in our understanding of the natural world, theistic evolution ought to dispense with all talk of God outright and get rid of the useless adjective "theistic."

It's for failing to take Occam's razor seriously that the Darwinist establishment despises (yes I say despises) theistic evolution. They view theistic evolution as a weak-kneed sycophant, who desperately wants the respectability that comes with being a full-blooded Darwinist, but refuses to follow the logic of Darwinism through to the end. It takes courage to give up the comforting belief that life on earth has a purpose. It takes courage to live without the consolation of an afterlife. Theistic evolutionists lack the stomach to face the ultimate meaninglessness of life, and it is this failure of courage that makes them contemptible in the eyes of full-blooded Darwinists (Richard Dawkins is a case in point).

Clearly, this is Dembski's view himself. And he's not the only who makes it. The vitriol aimed at TEs by ID advocates and creationists is easy to find. Here's Phil Johnson claiming that TEs are motivated to placate the scientific establishment and therefore they serve as unwitting dupes of atheists (they can't have a sincere view, you see, there must be some shallow ulterior motive):

"If theistic evolutionists broadcast the message that evolution as they understand it is harmless to theistic religion, they are misleading their constituents unless they add a clear warning that the version of evolution advocated by the entire body of mainstream science is something else altogether. That warning is never clearly delivered, however, because the main point of theistic evolution is to preserve peace with the mainstream scientific community. The theistic evolutionists therefore unwittingly serve the purposes of the scientific naturalists, by helping persuade the religious community to lower its guard against the incursion of naturalism."

And here is yet another quote from Johnson saying much the same thing:

"To know that Darwinism is true (as a general explanation of the history of life), one has to know that no alternative to naturalistic evolution is possible. To know that is to assume that God does not or cannot create. To infer that mutation and selection did the creating because nothing else was available, and then to bring God back into the picture as the omnipotent being who chose to create by mutation and selection, is to indulge in self-contradiction. That is why Darwin and his successors have always felt that theistic evolutionists were missing the point, although they have often tolerated them as useful allies."

Is there any way for a TE to take that other than insulting? And yes, Rusty, that IS how they take it. Here's Howard Van Till's response to the exact same passage that Rusty quoted from Dembski:

"I'm inclined to reply: "Not to put too fine a point on it"? Given that a typical dictionary definition of sycophant is a self-seeking, servile flatterer; a fawning parasite, I can scarcely imagine needing to resort to criticism any more caustic than that...

The words are his own; he neither quotes from a named person nor provides any particular source that employs a comparably insulting tone of voice. Is there such a thing as a "Darwinian establishment" view? If so, is this the tone of voice "they" would use? Is Dembski being fair to presume that "they" would express themselves in this insulting manner? Is Dembski not responsible for the words of contempt that he places in the mouths of others?"

And here is Glenn Morton's response to the above quote from Phillip Johnson:

Here Johnson seems to imply that our only purpose in life is to salve the mainstream scientific community, and he claims in this that we are witless to know that we are being used. Good grief, we do have a bit of smarts, not that one would ever guess from this bit of polemical rhetoric...Johnson treats us as the lap dogs of the evolutionists conjuring up the picture of us panting our tongues as our masters pat us on the head!

To all of this insult, Rusty adds his own:

Yet, one wonders what thoughts the likes of Eugenie Scott, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, et. al., are having as they smirk behind Miller’s back.

Somehow he just doesn't get why this is insulting. It seems incredibly obvious to me and, I would hope, to any other reasonably ethical person who might read it. Here is how he defends it at this point:

Do I know for a fact that Scott, Dennett, Dawkins, or et. al., smirk behind Miller's back? Of course not. That wasn't the point of the passage. I was illustrating the point of my series of posts, which dealt with the logical inconsistency between MN and morality.

Here's what Rusty doesn't get. The issue is not whether he "knows for a fact" that Genie Scott smirks behind Ken Miller's back. The issue is that he doesn't have any factual basis whatsoever to make that claim. He doesn't know either of them. He is smearing Genie, just like Dembski and Johnson do with similar claims above, by claiming that she laughs behind the back of her Christian friends and considers them unwitting dupes too dumb to understand that they're really supporting atheism, which would make her a contemptible human being, in my view, if it was true. And he is smearing Ken Miller, just like Dembski and Johnson do repeatedly, by implying that he is a pathetic "useful idiot" being used by his atheistic friends and he's too dumb to know it. Well I've got news for Rusty, and for Johnson and Dembski...Ken Miller is smarter than all of you (and me) put together. And I've got further news for them - Genie Scott is a really great person. She's funny and charming and very, very smart.

But again, Rusty just doesn't seem to understand that what he has said, and continues to defend, is insulting. He also doesn't understand that it's all the more insulting because he has no basis whatsoever for it. This isn't a case of "I can't prove it for a fact, but I've still got a good reason to believe it." This is a case of "I have no knowledge whatsoever that could possibly justify this claim and I'm slandering people I don't know without anything to back it up other than my own prejudice against them." The fact that Rusty just doesn't get why this is offensive is shown by this statement he makes:

Ed clearly took offense at that post because he personally knows Ken Miller and Eugenie Scott. I've re-read the post several times and can find no reason for the type of reaction that Ed came back with. However, since it is clear that Ed is still offended by my post I offer my apology for insulting his friends.

There's a politician's apology if ever I've seen one: "I didn't do anything wrong, but if you think I did I'll offer an obviously insincere apology." And this from someone who claims that us non-Christians have a problem with ethics! He also suggests that I forward what he wrote on to Genie and Ken, and if they are "truly offended", then he'll apologize. But given the obvious lack of sincerity of the non-apologetic apology above, that's obviously a waste of time. Offering two or three empty apologies is no more compelling than offering one. Rusty, if you don't understand why what you and Dembski and Johnson (and all of that ilk) say about theistic evolutionists is offensive and insulting to them - and you obviously don't - then you probably won't ever get it. But I would suggest that you've pretty much submarined any chance of being taken seriously in the future when taking a moral position, or advocating the ten commandments (one of which tends to frown on bearing false witness).

Fear and Clothing in Las Vegas

2004-04-05T00:19:00.000-04:00

I told this story during a real poker game the other day and thought someone might find it amusing to write about it here. The story took place on my first trip to Vegas, about 10 years ago. We were staying at Treasure Island and back then, Treasure Island had a poker room, which is now gone. One night I'm playing a little 7 card stud game and into the game comes Jane, and this is her story. In order for you to understand the story, I have to paint a mental picture of Jane.

Jane was about 60 years old, I'd guess, with a gleaming white afro. On this particular day, she was wearing a pair of skintight Gloria Vanderbilt jeans with an electric neon blue short-sleeved v-neck sweater tucked into the Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and, of course, a gold lame` pipe belt and gold lame` pumps. She had the entire Liberace starter kit on her fingers, and enough gold chains around her neck to give Mr. T a sore back. And it probably goes without saying that peering out from behind her rhinestone-rimmed glasses was eyeshadow that matched the blue of the sweater. In short, Jane was exactly what you expect to see on your first trip to Vegas. Oh, and one more thing about Jane.....Jane was a bitch.

Nothing was ever right for Jane. The lights were too bright, the chairs uncomfortable. Everyone in the poker room, from the attendant who showed her to her seat to the chip runner who brought her chips to every dealer who sat down for their 30 minute rotation at that table to the cocktail waitresses who brought her drinks that had to be just so, was treated rudely and it was obvious that they were used to being treated rudely by her. They all greeted her with that highly contrived mock-politeness that just barely masks utter contempt, all while exchanging quick glances and eye rolls with each other at every opportunity.

This was a 7 card stud game and there was a 50 cent ante for each player every hand. At the start of each hand, Jane would put out a blue ($1) chip and the dealer, while collecting the antes, would take it and give her a 50 cent piece in return. Then on the next hand, Jane would ante another blue chip and the dealer would again give her a 50 cent piece. She didn't want to ante the 50 cent pieces, you see, because that was "bad luck". This would go on hand after hand until Jane had a sizable stack of 50 cent pieces in front of her, which she would then ask the dealers to change into blue chips so the whole process could begin anew. And God forbid anyone should suggest to her that this was annoying behavior.

This game had been going on for several hours, with Jane repeating this behavior over and over again, each dealer politely doing her bidding with an eyeroll and a slight sigh of exasperation. All the while, of course, Jane kept up a steady stream of bitching about everything. She didn't like how this dealer collected chips, or how that player slow rolled their cards. And of course, that drink just isn't right. It never is, I imagine. At some point, Jane decided that she needed her 50 cent pieces changed in for blue chips in the middle of a hand that she wasn't even involved in because she was going to take a break and wanted to leave immediately. The dealer correctly told her that she would have to wait until that hand was over, he wasn't going to delay the other players to exchange her chips in a hand she had folded out of.

Needless to say, Jane was not happy. And when Jane isn't happy, no one's happy. She began to berate this dealer, following up the inevitable "do you know who I am?" by telling him that she was the worst dealer she'd ever seen. He replied, in a thick Iranian accent, "I won't sleep tonight." At this point, I'd had about as much as I could stand. I was at the other end of the table from Jane, so as loudly as I could without yelling, I said, "You know, I'm starting to wonder if Eva Braun really died in that bunker with Hitler." Jane was flustered by this, seemingly in shock that anyone would dare to speak that way to someone of her stature. She began to sputter, "Why...I...I've never been treated so rudely in my entire life." To which I replied, "Stick around, lady, it's gonna get worse." Jane got up and stormed away from the table, and as she stopped to tell the floorman that she would never step foot in that place again, the table spontaneously started applauding me. And I've loved Vegas ever since.

More Martyr Syndrome on Display

2004-04-03T00:15:00.001-05:00

See Feddie's screed on Southern Appeal about how horribly those anti-gay marriage folks are being treated. I'll paraphrase his argument:

The bible says gay people are abominable. Therefore gay marriage is abominable and I want to use the law to impose those views on everyone else. And if you try to stop me - if you even point out that I'm trying to impose my religious views through the law on others - then you are persecuting me. But that's okay because that means I'm just like Jesus.

I suggest that we immediately start a National Association for the Advancement of White Christian Law Clerks to end this horrible persecution. When they came for the White Christian Lawyers, I said nothing because I wasn't a White Christian Lawyer.....when they came for me, there was no one left to speak. (/sarcasm off)

Replying to Rusty Again

2004-04-03T00:15:00.000-05:00

I've been having a bit of an exchange with Rusty in the comments on his blog. Because those comments only allow 1000 words, I'm posting this here. You can see the beginning of the exchange in this post and the comments that follow it. The argument concerns two things. First, Rusty quotes this passage from the Understanding Evolution website:

Misconception: “Evolution and religion are incompatible.”

Response: Religion and science (evolution) are very different things. In science (as in science class), only natural causes are used to explain natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs that are beyond the natural world.

The misconception that one has to choose between science and religion is divisive. Most Christian and Jewish religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. In fact, many religious people, including theologians, feel that a deeper understanding of nature actually enriches their faith. Moreover, in the scientific community there are thousands of scientists who are devoutly religious and also accept evolution.

And he responds with this question:

You've gotta wonder if the evidence for evolution is so truly convincing (as most evolutionists will claim), then why bother with getting religious endorsement?

I had responded to that with this:

Your original question has nothing whatsoever to do with the website you're pulling it from, and I'm surprised that you could characterize what you've quoted so inaccurately. The site is for teachers and the section in question advises teachers on how to handle situations. They aren't making the argument that some religious groups accept evolution and therefore evolution is true. They aren't even implying that. They are simply saying that there is no reason to presume that evolution is incompatible with religious belief.

To which Rusty replied this morning:

Ed, I quoted nothing inaccurately (last time I checked, whatever was between the " " marks or indented was what was on the website I pulled it from). Nowhere have I stated that the NCSE is making the argument that because some religious groups accept evo then it must be true. I have stated that it's odd that the NCSE attempts to grab support and justification from religious groups.

But of course this is exactly what he was implying. This was the reply I tried to leave, but was too long:

It's not that you've quoted the text inaccurately, it's that what you quoted does not support your contention. You said, "You've gotta wonder if the evidence for evolution is so truly convincing (as most evolutionists will claim), then why bother with getting religious endorsement?" This is obviously implying that the NCSE is getting religious endorsement in order to shore up the "evidence for evolution", or lack thereof in your formulation. But what you quoted was the statement that evolution is not necessarily incompatible with religious views. That has nothing whatsoever to do with the evidence for evolution, it has to do with what that section of the website had to do with, which was helping teachers answer questions they are likely to get. In particular, answering the misconception that evolution and religion must be in conflict. You further say:

BTW, it is not "patently false" to claim that if you believe in the Christian God then you can't accept evolution. There are plenty of Christians, myself included, who believe in the Christian God and do not accept evolution. Why don't the NCSE or "Understanding Evo" websites address that aspect?

But they DID address that aspect. They addressed it by pointing out that while some Christians obviously do believe that, many others, including all of the mainline denominational authorities, do not consider them to be incompatible. They addressed it by saying, "It's not necessarily true". Do you really think that because the NCSE doesn't agree with the limitations you place on the beliefs of others (claiming that you can't be a Christian and accept evolution without being either a coward or an unwitting dupe of the atheists who laugh behind their backs), that they are therefore acting unconstitutionally? As I said, this is simply a trivial and silly argument. For more thrashing of this ridiculous establishment clause argument, see Tim Sandefur's post on The Panda's Thumb. Jason Rosenhouse also hammers it, with responses from Frank Beckwith here.

I had also said this in a previous comment:

You've been claiming for weeks that evolution is incompatible with supernaturalism as well, indeed that those who think they are compatible are "cowardly".

And Rusty responded:

Note that in a previous post I quoted Dembski who, in a later post, clarified that he was referring to adherents of AN that view TEs as cowardly.

Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. Here is the full quote from Dembski:

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Darwinian establishment views theistic evolution as a weak-kneed sycophant that desperately wants the respectability that comes with being a full-blooded Darwinist but refuses to follow the logic of Darwinism through to the end. It takes courage to give up the comforting belief that life on earth has a purpose. It takes courage to live without the consolation of afterlife. Theistic evolutionists lack the stomach to face the ultimate meaninglessness of life, and it is this failure of courage that makes them contemptible in the eyes of full-blooded Darwinists.

Clearly Dembski is arguing that Theistic Evolutionists (TEs) are too cowardly to "face the ultimate meaninglessness of life", and it is that cowardice that allegedly leads "full-blooded Darwinists" to hold them in hypothetical contempt. And here is the quote from you, Rusty, implying that TEs are really unwitting dupes of those big bad atheists who pretend to be their friends but cackle behind their back:

Yet, one wonders what thoughts the likes of Eugenie Scott, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, et. al., are having as they smirk behind Miller’s back.

The problem with both claims, yours and Dembski's, is that you have absolutely no factual basis for making them. You don't know Ken Miller or Genie Scott; I do. And you're wrong. It's really that simple. Genie Scott does not laugh or smirk behind Ken's back because he's a Christian. She truly believes that evolution is compatible with a wide range of religious and non-religious worldviews because, like all scientific theories, it is not a worldview itself, it is an explanation for a discrete set of phenomena. And Ken Miller does not remain a Christian because he's "too cowardly" to "face the ultimate meaninglessness of life" that evolution allegedly leads to. Ken Miller believes passionately that his work as a scientist feeds and informs his faith as a Christian. And he's hardly alone in this belief, it is shared by a brilliant group of people represented by the likes of Howard Van Till, Glenn Morton, Keith Miller, Wes Elsberry and many others. I am priveleged to be able to work with many of these people and to have them as friends.

I do not, as a non-Christian, smirk behind their backs and I do not consider them the least bit cowardly. I consider them brilliant and engaging and, on the whole, delightful and profound people that have enriched my life and informed my own beliefs on this and many other subjects. Ironically, and predictably, the only ones smirking at them are their fellow Christians, in this case you and Bill Dembski, as you flippantly proclaim them to be cowards and dupes whose friends laugh behind their backs. I believe psychologists would call this projection. I also think it's a case of bearing false witness. At the very least, bearing witness that you have no basis for believing is true other than your own desire that it be true. I think that false witness becomes doubly obvious when you pretend that Dembski was really talking about atheists thinking that they are cowards when his own words prove otherwise.

Faith in Action

2004-04-01T00:13:00.000-05:00

Why am I not surprised this took place in Texas? A woman in Tyler, Texas stoned her two sons to death and says that she was reading between the lines:

A housewife said the first sign that God wanted her to kill her three boys came Mother's Day weekend when she saw her 14-month-old playing with a toy spear.

Deanna Laney said she resisted at first, but the signs kept coming. The baby came to her with a rock, and later in the day squeezed a frog, and she believed God was suggesting that she should either stab, stone or strangle her children.

A sobbing Laney recounted in a videotape played at her capital murder trial Wednesday how she smashed her sons' skulls with rocks to prove her faith to God.

"I was telling him no, and each time it was getting worse and worse, the way that it would have to be done," Laney said. "I thought it was the Lord saying to me, 'You're just going to have to step out in faith. This is faith. You can't see why. You just got to.'"

Just like the airline pilot interpreted was reading the signs allegedly telling him to proselytize over the speakers on his plane:

A minor problem with the plane's braking system had developed during final checks before takeoff, he said, a problem that might have grounded the aircraft, on which every seat was taken, in part because another American flight from Los Angeles to New York had been canceled that morning. But after a simple maneuver involving a power source, the braking problem inexplicably "disappeared," Findiesen said, and the plane was cleared for departure, and that's when he knew he had to use the P.A. system to talk about his Christian faith.

And just like the woman in Virginia who keeps going back to the same used car lot telling them that God has been giving her signs that they're supposed to give her a new car:

Cole testified she knew she had been ordered to stay away from the dealership, at 14655 Jefferson Davis Highway, after being convicted of trespassing there in May and September 2003. But she kept returning because God - through the Bible - had told her to do so, and God's authority, she said, is higher than man's laws.

"To take a stand that I feel that God is telling me to take, I have to accept whatever comes from that,'' Cole said, referring to a likely jail sentence.

All these people talking to God and interpreting mundane events as signs that they're supposed to do something. It's time for a wake up call, folks. It's time for everyone to realize something:

If you think that God is telling you to kill someone, you're insane. If you think that God is telling you to do something bizarre and illegal, you're insane. Period. That goes for the woman in Texas. It goes for the woman in Virginia. It goes for Osama Bin Laden, who also claims that God tells him to kill. And yes, it goes for Moses and Abraham in the bible too. It's true no matter what you call God, it's true today, it's true yesterday, and it was true 3500 years ago too.

And here's the kicker - to those people and their apologists, I'm blaspheming God when I say this. The people who claim that God tells them to murder innocent people, they're not blaspheming. The one who calls them insane is blaspheming. Such is what passes for reasoning among extremists.

The Passion of the ID Advocate

2004-03-30T00:12:00.000-05:00

John Baez from UCal-Riverside, in addition to his many contributions to the field of mathematical physics, has given to us the enormously useful Crackpot Index. His index, which awards varying point values based upon the attributes of the claims being made, gives a fairly reliable indication of whether what is being offered is a genuinely useful new idea in science and what is simply crank science.

14. 10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.

The ID crowd LOVES to invent new phrases - irreducible complexity, complex specified information, etc.. They are notoriously ill-defined, and the definitions seem to shift like the sands of the desert over time. The most recent is "ontogenetic depth", which is, as PZ Myers points out in an earlier post, extraordinarily vague.

19. 10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".

As one review of an ID book said:

Thomas Woodward reveals in Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design that we stand at the threshold of another revolutionary paradigm shift.

And here is Woodward himself, reviewing Behe's book:

This three-way test (dubbed "the Explanatory Filter") became the centerpiece of the conference as Behe and his colleagues reviewed new evidence that points to design. Some observers say that the design movement may be embarking upon the first stage of a transitional process in science, which philosophers call a "paradigm shift."

22. 20 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to Newton or claim that classical mechanics is fundamentally misguided (without good evidence).

On the back of William Dembski's book Intelligent Design is the following blurb from ID-sympathetic philosopher Rob Koons:

"William Dembski is the Isaac Newton of information theory, and since this is the Age of Information, that makes Dembski one of the most important thinkers of our time."

And never mind that Dembski has not published a single paper on information theory in the scientific literature, or that his views seem to be shared by virtually no one in the field of information theory. Hyperbole is its own reward.

25. 20 points for each use of the phrase "hidebound reactionary".

Dembski, quoted in the Dallas Observer:

"My commitment is to see intelligent design flourish as a scientific research program. To do that, I need a new generation of scholars willing to consider this, because the older generation is largely hidebound."

26. 20 points for each use of the phrase "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".

I'd say this is close enough, Dembski in reference to my friend and colleague Rob Pennock:

Pennock, who casts himself as the defender of scientific correctness....

Or how about this one, from Ohio's pro-ID school board member James Turner:

Unfortunately, the reaction to this suggestion from some in the science community has been to scream "heresy." Certain self-appointed guardians of "elite" science fear that any departure from the road of strict naturalistic orthodoxy will inevitably lead us back to a time when the Christian creation story defined origins science in many states. This fear is, of course, irrational in today's world, but it nevertheless drives unnecessarily extreme positions about the content of Ohio's science standards.

31. 40 points for comparing those who argue against your ideas to Nazis, stormtroopers, or brownshirts.

How many examples would you like for this one? How about Jonathan Wells:

Another interesting aspect of the press conference was a statement by Ken Miller, featured on the evening news, to the effect that ID advocates are trying to present their views to the public "without the approval of science." Afterwards, in private, Steve Meyer kept repeating Miller's pompous declaration with a heavy German accent, sounding for all the world like Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's propaganda chief.

How about references to communists? Here's Wells again:

But I see the situation as analogous to the last years of Soviet communism. A small, powerful elite controls all the official information outlets while the evidence against the official position swells quietly, like a wave building offshore. Someday soon, to the surprise of many people in academia and the media, the wave will break. I predict that the Darwinist establishment will come apart at the seams, just as the Soviet Empire did in 1990.

How about Dembski:

Dembski, whose recent book, "The Design Inference," presents in great detail how the Intelligent Design argument satisfies logic and probability, likes to compare the movement's influence on science to the freedom and democracy movements and their effect on Eastern Europe. Criticism of Darwinism now threatens the hegemony of Darwinism, he says, just as the move toward freedom upset the Soviet empire.

Can't leave out Phillip Johnson, from Darwin on Trial:

Darwinian evolution with its blind watchmaker thesis makes me think of a great battleship on the ocean of reality. Its sides are heavily armored with philosophical barriers to criticism, and its decks are stacked with big rhetorical guns ready to intimidate any would-be attackers. In appearance, it is as impregnable as the Soviet Union seemed to be only a few years ago.

John Calvert of IDNet goes for the rare double axel of evil:

The precise same thing is happening in our country with regard to the issue of what causes life and its diversity. That is essentially a historical question. If the history is driven by a Naturalistic agenda that censors one of the two competing hypotheses we will be engaging in the same sort of propaganda that characterized Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.

All of this brings us to:

32. 40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.

For this, we can turn to Dembski and I think we can award 80 points for this one, since he hits the conspiracy to prevent his work from getting published AND calling his oppressors commies:

In the current intellectual climate it is impossible to get a paper published in the peer-reviewed biological literature that explicitly affirms intelligent design or explicitly denies Darwinian and other forms of naturalistic evolution. Doubting Darwinian orthodoxy is comparable to opposing the party line of a Stalinist regime. What would you do if you were in Stalin's Russia and wanted to argue that Lysenko was wrong? You might point to paradoxes and tensions in Lysenko's theory of genetics, but you could not say that Lysenko was fundamentally wrong or offer an alternative that clearly contradicted Lysenko. That's the situation we're in.

33. 40 points for comparing yourself to Galileo, suggesting that a modern-day Inquisition is hard at work on your case, and so on.

Phillip Johnson, in his last column in Touchstone magazine:

I have turned to the Galileo episode not to compete with historians in assessing the blame for the tragedy, but because the elements of that conflict are present again in the hot argument between the Intelligent Design movement in biology and Darwinism. Today the scientific profession has firmly grasped the authority once possessed by the Catholic Church and contested by Galileo, the power to judge which claims have the status of knowledge and which do not. Like the Church of Galileo’s day, the Church of Science can tolerate almost any concept if it remains no more than a hypothesis or metaphor, provisionally adopted as an aid to understanding and not advocated as literally true.

34. 40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated, present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.)

All one has to do to see this kind of fantasizing is go to the latest issue of World magazine, which contains leading ID advocates engaging in "fanciful" discussion of the inevitable triumph of ID in 2025, overthrowing all of mainstream science and it's "materialistic orthodoxy" and, of course, returning the world into the hands of the One True God. I could post a couple dozen quotes from it, but read it for yourself. It's all one long fantasy about the ascendance of ID and how they beat back the heathen hordes of Darwinian stormtroopers, to mix a few metaphors.

35. 50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.

Since the first moment when ID made its first big public splash, at the Naturalism, Theism and the Scientific Enterprise conference in 1997, scientists and philosophers have been challenging Dembski, Behe and their colleagues to provide testable hypotheses that flow from the ID model. None has been forthcoming. They have written voluminously against the ability of evolution to explain this or that feature or phenomenon, e.g. Behe's Darwin's Black Box. They have tried to convince everyone that evolution is built upon a foundation of lies, e.g. Wells' Icons of Evolution (though I think that book said far more about Wells' honesty than those he intended to criticize). They have written lots of anachronistic probabilistic arguments, e.g. Dembske's The Design Inference. What they have not done, in any setting, is offer up a testable hypothesis that flows from their premise, propose a means of testing it in the real world, and do the actual science. Time and again, we have been told that it's "on the way". Dembski seems to forever be promising that it will be in his next book. Alas, like Estragon and Vladimir in Beckett's play, we are perpetually waiting for an arrival that never comes.

The reality is that every crackpot idea in the history of science has been defended on this very same basis. Every crank believes passionately that they are Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of orthodoxy, oppressed by the High Priesthood of Science, so jealous to protect their domain against revolutionary ideas. For every instance where someone has been initially ridiculed and then vindicated, Alfred Wegener for example, there are a thousand who thrashed and wailed against the alleged censorship of their ideas and then faded into history because, in the end, their ideas simply didn't help us understand the world any better. ID advocates seem to strike the martyr pose as a reflex reaction, as a leg responds automatically to the strike of the doctor's rubber hammer. But in so doing, they show the essential emptiness of their enterprise. Crying censorship may be good public relations, in that it elicits sympathy from those who want so desperately for ID to be true. But it's lousy science, and it only damages credibility with the educated and the rational.

My Favorite Things: Humorous Author

2004-03-29T00:12:00.000-05:00

I posted on who I thought was the funniest comedian a few days ago, now it's time for who I think is the funniest writer of our day. The award goes to Joe Queenan. Queenan is a freelance writer who has written in dozens and dozens of magazines as diverse as Spy and Forbes. He has also authored several books, including Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search for Sainthood, and the funniest of them all: Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon. This last book is simply one of the funniest books ever written. I'm going to post some excerpts from the first chapter of this book and hope to avoid any copyright problems. If any lawyers are reading, just think "fair use".

Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon is basically Joe Queenan's trip through the worst of American popular culture. He goes on a journey to experience the worst music, the worst books, the worst restaurants, the worst movies, and anything else he can think of. Needless to say, most of those horrible things are wildly popular in the US. In this respect, this book resembles, at least in tone, Paul Fussell's BAD, another terrific book. Queenan's journey begins, predictably and horribly enough, with the musical Cats:

Cats was very, very, very bad. Cats was a lot worse than I'd expected. I'd seen Phantom years ago, and knew all I needed to know about Starlight Express and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so I was not a complete stranger to the fiendishly vapid world of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But nothing I'd ever read or heard about the show could have prepared me for the epic suckiness of Cats. Put it this way: Phantom sucked. But Cats really sucked.

One of the things that fascinated me about Cats was the way I'd managed to keep it from penetrating my consciousness for the previous fourteen years. Yes, I'd been walking past the Winter Garden Theatre at 50th and Broadway since 1982 without once even dreaming of venturing inside; and yes, I'd heard the song "Memory"; and yes, I'd heard about all the Tonys Cats had won; and yes, I'd seen all those garish subway posters; and yes, I'd been jostled by those armies of tourists streaming out of the theater at rush hour as I myself tried to hustle through midtown. But all those years that Cats had been playing, I'd somehow avoided even finding out what the show was about. Wandering past the Winter Garden all those years was like wandering past those dimly lit S&M bars in Greenwich Village: I really didn't need to know the details.

Now my blissful ignorance had been shattered. So without any further ado, let me share the wealth. For the benefit of the two or three other people in this society who don't know what Cats is about, here's the answer: It's about a bunch of cats. The cats jump around in a postnuclear junkyard for some two and a half hours, bumping and grinding to that curiously Mesozoic pop music for which Andrew Lloyd Webber is famous--the kind of full-tilt truckin' that sounds like the theme from "The Mod Squad." There's an Elvis impersonator cat, and a cat that looks like Cyndi Lauper, and a cat that looks like Phyllis Diller. All the other cast members look like Jon Bon Jovi with two weeks of facial growth.

Sure, Cats is allegedly based upon the works of T. S. Eliot, but from what I could tell, the show had about as much to do with the author of "The Waste Land" as those old Steve Reeves movies had to do with Euripides. Cats is what Grease would look like if all the cast members dressed up like KISS. To give you an idea of how bad Cats is, think of a musical where you're actually glad to hear "Memory" reprised a third time because all the other songs are so awful. Think of a musical where the songs are so bad that "Memory" starts to sound like "Ol' Man River" by comparison. That's how bad Cats is.

Ah, but this is just the jumping off point for his journey. There are larger fish to fry:

I came home from Cats feeling totally dejected. In the back of my mind, I'd expected the show to fall into that vast category occupied by everything from bingo to Benny Hill. You know: so bad, it's good. But Cats was just plain bad. Really bad. About as bad as bad could get. Revisiting the horror in my mind later that evening, I consoled myself with the assurance that surely this would be the lowest point of my adventure, that nothing I subsequently experienced could possibly be in even the same league as Cats.

Then I cued up the Michael Bolton record.

So much for that theory.

For years, I'd been vaguely aware of Michael Bolton's existence, just as I'd been vaguely aware that there was an ebola virus plague in Africa. Horrible tragedies, yes, but they had nothing to do with me. All that changed when I purchased a copy of The Classics. When you work up the gumption to put a record like The Classics on your CD player, it's not much different from deliberately inoculating yourself with rabies. With his heart-on-my-sleeve appeals to every emotion no decent human being should even dream of possessing, Michael Bolton is the only person in history who has figured out a way to make "Yesterday" sound worse than the original. He's Mandy Patinkin squared. His sacrilegious version of Sam Cooke's "Bring It on Home to Me" is a premeditated act of cultural ghoulism, a crime of musical genocide tantamount to a Jerry Vale rerecording of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" And having to sit there, and listen while this Kmart Joe Cocker mutilates "You Send Me" is like sitting through a performance of King Lear with Don Knotts in the title role. Which leads to the inevitable question: If it's a crime to deface the Statue of Liberty or to spraypaint swastikas on Mount Rushmore or to burn the American flag, why isn't it a crime for Michael Bolton to butcher Irving Berlin's "White Christmas"?

From horrible music to horrible movies:

In the days and weeks that followed, I gradually realized that mainstream American culture was infinitely more idiotic than I had ever suspected. Take movies. Over the years, I'd come to believe that a special ring of hell had been reserved for Lome Michaels for promoting the careers of Joe Piscopo, James Belushi, and others of their ilk. But nothing those dimwits had done on film had even vaguely prepared me for the prepaleolithic world of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. The whole time I was watching Billy Madison and Tommy Boy I kept saying to myself, "I know that these people are alumni of `Saturday Night Live,' so I know that if I sit here long enough, they will eventually do or say something that will make me laugh. Heck, they're pros."

Oh, foolish, foolish man! Hours and hours later, I was still in my chair, comatose, watching these Gen-X Ostrogoths ruin my day, my week, my civilization. Here's Sandler setting a bag of poop on fire. Here's Farley getting covered in cow shit. And here's Bo Derek, co-starring. What a sad commentary on our society that we have produced movies so bad that you feel sorry Bo Derek has to be in them. Which just goes to show: No matter how famous you are when you're young, if you don't play your cards right, you're eventually going to end up in a movie with Adam Sandler.

Was all this a surprise to me? Yes, I can truly say that the scale of horrendousness proudly displayed in these motion pictures was awe-inspiring. Sure, I'd known that these movies were out there, but not until I'd actually sat all the way through a couple of them did I have any idea how satanically cretinous they were. Until I saw Billy Madison and Tommy Boy, I'd always thought that the three scariest words in the English language were "Starring Dan Aykroyd." Now I knew better. Being introduced to Joe Piscopo and Dan Aykroyd and only later learning of the existence of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley is like going to school and learning about the Black Plague, only to find out many years later that there's something called the Blacker Plague.

And I don't even want to talk about Pauly Shore.

The whole experience leads Queenan to coin a new concept and a new phrase:

Gradually, my passion for peerlessly disorienting experiences caused me to experience a strange new emotion. Technically speaking, there is no English phrase or idiom to describe the feeling to which I refer, so here I will take the liberty of coining the term scheissenbedauern. This word, which literally means "shit regret," describes the disappointment one feels when exposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one had hoped it would be. A perfect example is Neil Diamond's recent album, Tennessee Moon.

"Hollywood don't do what it once could do," Neil sings on the title track, so he packs up his "dusty bags," grabs "an old guitar," and hits "that Blue Highway," rambling back to that "old Tennessee Moon" where he once "fell in love to an old Hank Williams song." Yes, when Neil hears that "lonesome whistle moan," he says, "So long, Big City," because he's "longing for those country roads," and knows it's time to "take a swing down south" to "see if that "girl Annie still remembers me."

Let us ignore for a moment the implausible elements in this song, most importantly the fact that Neil Diamond hails from Flatbush. Let us also ignore the fact that The Country Record has been a cliche since Dylan recorded Nashville Skyline, that the record contains the obligatory phoned-in Waylon Jennings duet, and that Neil Diamond, a man who makes Burl Ives sound like Joey Ramone, does not come across in an entirely convincing fashion on the John Lee Hooker-type track where he sings "I'm gonna be rockin' tonight." This is a line that reminds me of the time Senator Al D'Amato got dressed up as "a narc" and went up to Harlem to register a "bust." Man, did some shit go down that day!

Despite this abundant evidence of dire lameness, Tennessee Moon did not even approach Michael Bolton's The Classics for sheer acreage of horseshit per square foot if only because Neil Diamond at his worst still sounds better than Michael Bolton at his best. The reason? At least Neil wrote the atrocious songs that he was slaughtering.

Yet, much to my consternation, I found this terribly disappointing. At a certain level, I had now begun to hope that everything I encountered would suck in a megasucky way, and was honestly disappointed when some proved merely cruddy. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, I wanted to gaze directly into the abyss, to stare at the horror. But as the days passed, as I ventured deeper and deeper into the heartland of hootiness, I grew crestfallen at the failure of certain monstrously popular cultural figures to achieve the bathetic levels I craved. Dean Koontz's Intensity was sadistic, depraved, and revolting, but the book could not hold a candle to The Horse Whisperer's Mephistophelian inaneness. Slam Dunk Ernest, a direct-to-video film about a lovable moron, was predictably idiotic, but because it had one good joke (Ernest, the unlikely basketball hero, changes his name to Ernest Abdul Mustafa), it could not rival the horrors of Billy Madison and Tommy Boy.

An interesting concept, this shit regret, but he had to apply it to one of the most popular singers in America:

Garth Brooks--Glen Campbell under an assumed name--was a perfect example of the scheissenbedauern phenomenon. Every Garth Brooks song I encountered was a redneck anthem about truckers, drivin' rain, country fairs, burning bridges, that damn old rodeo, ashes on the water. In the typical Brooks song, "Mama's in the graveyard, Papa's in the pen," there's a fire burning bright, "this old highway is like a woman sometimes," and some old cowboy's "heading back from somewhere he never should have been."

Garth is always sayin' a little prayer tonight, payin' his dues, shipping his saddle to Dad. But Jehoshaphat, he wouldn't trade a single day, because love is like a highway, it's one big party, and let's face it: He drew a bull no man could ride. So all that's left to do is whisper a prayer in the fury of the storm and hope you don't miss The Dance.

It goes without saying that folks call Garth a maverick, heck, there "must be rebel blood running through (his) veins." But sometimes you've just got to go against the grain, "buck the system," even though "the deck is stacked against you." In short, Brooks's music was the musical equivalent of a Pat Buchanan stump speech, market-researched baloney where the lyrics were so generic you started to suspect he was using Microsoft's Drugstore Cowboy for Windows 95 (not available in a Macintosh format) to write them.

But even though songs like "We Shall Be Free" blatantly ripped off Sly & the Family Stone--fulfilling the dictum that black music is always ten years ahead of the curve, and country and western twenty years behind it--and even though Brooks recycled more riffs than Ray Davies, and even though Brooks was so bland he made Gordon Lightfoot sound like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, these records didn't actually make you puke. This was about the highest tribute I could pay to most contemporary country-and-western music.

On the other hand, it didn't make me do anything. Somebody once said that when you turn on the radio, Genesis is what comes out. That's exactly the way I felt about Garth Brooks.

So, all right, he chomped, but he didn't chomp royal. He chomped in the same off-the-shelf way most millionaires in hyperthyroid cowboy hats chomped. But he didn't bite the big one. And for some reason, this bothered me. When I went slumming like this, I wanted to cruise the bad slums. I wanted to hit Watts, the South Bronx, North Philly. From the cultural slumming point of view, Garth Brooks was little more than a slightly rundown neighborhood in Yonkers.

The rest of the book has each chapter devoted to a different aspect of popular culture, and there are some surprises along the way. He wades through the musical morass by going to see Barry Manilow (he liked him) and John Tesh (he accused him of "defiling the temple" of Carnegie Hall). He ultimately decides that Billy Joel is the single most loathsome singer-songwriter in history, which I disagree with entirely, but it's still hilarious to hear him rip Joel to shreds. On the subject of movies, he decides that Cannonball Run II is the single worst movie ever made, but he considers this a compliment. And he's right, that was truly an audaciously bad movie that was fun to watch because they KNEW how bad it was when they were making it.

Needless to say, Queenan's journey into the pop culture abyss ends, like so many singing careers, in Branson, Missouri. I highly recommend this book, and virtually everything else that Queenan writes. He's everything P.J. O'Rourke wishes he could be.

Interesting Debate on the Pledge Case

2004-03-29T00:11:00.000-05:00

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has an interesting debate on the subject of the pledge of allegiance and the case before the Supreme Court right now. The participants are Douglas Laycock and Jay Sekulow, names familiar to anyone who follows constitutional law and religious liberty cases. Laycock, from the University of Texas Law School, is perhaps the most respected academic voice on religious freedom matters in the nation. He is no firebreathing anti-religious liberal, having been the primary author of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that was passed in 1993 (and later overturned by the Supreme Court). Sekulow is the Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, Pat Robertson's answer to the ACLU, and has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court on religious liberty and the establishment clause.

One of the striking things about Sekulow, in my view, is how different he is when he's speaking in that type of forum than when he's appearing on the 700 Club or the many other Christian TV and radio shows he appears on. When speaking in a legal context, he is bright, engaging and reasonable, even when I think he's wrong. When he's appearing before conservative Christian audiences, he engages in the simplistic and overheated rhetoric of demagogues with little regard for the truth. The most blatant example I can think of is a good decade ago, watching him go on the 700 Club after the Lamb's Chapel decision. He had argued the Lamb's Chapel case before the Supreme Court and was justifiably happy that the decision came down 9-0 in his favor (as was I, it was an easy case and the decision was a correct one). But he tried to portray the decision as a victory over the ACLU, which was utter nonsense. The ACLU had in fact been on his side in the case and filed an amicus brief on behalf of Lamb's Chapel. But that didn't fit into the product they were selling to the flock, which was in essence, "We're standing up to the ACLU Goliath and we're winning, send us money so we can keep winning", so reality was conveniently reversed to fit the marketing campaign.

Anyway, in this forum he's pretty reasonable, I think. And he said something that is a bit of a surprise to me and I'd like to find out if this is true or not. He said:

Let's talk about the more recent history, and that is, what happened in 1954? Now, of course, the issue upon which certiorari is granted – and I am frequently reminded of that both when I'm watching arguments and when I argue them myself – is not the congressional action here, which is interesting. The United States asked for review of the 1954 congressional act amending the Pledge of Allegiance. The Supreme Court denied review there. They granted the school district's policy for review, which is a policy that said the school day will start with a patriotic expression. The Pledge of Allegiance would meet that patriotic expression.

If this is true, it changes the calculus for this case a bit. If the 1954 Congressional action which put the words "under God" into the pledge was under review, as I thought it was, then a simple application of the Lemon test would seem to throw it out, with little argument on the other side. Congress made absolutely clear that their intent was to advance religious faith in schoolchildren, which is a clear violation of the Lemon test prong that a law must have a clear secular purpose. But if what is up for review is the school board's policy rather than the Congressional action on those words, the basis for argument is considerably different. I guess I'm going to need to go look at the oral argument and see on what basis it was actually argued. In the meantime, enjoy the debate linked above.

March Madness, Baby!

2004-03-27T00:08:00.000-05:00

This is my favorite time of the year. The beginning of springtime, with the temperatures going up and the birds chirping and the longer days, coincides with the one sporting event I really go crazy for - the NCAA basketball tournament. I'm a huge college basketball fan, one of those people who knows the names of the top players in the current high school sophomore class and who is recruiting them.

My favorite team is the Duke Blue Devils, which I know is cliche` (they're like the New York Yankees of college basketball), but I'm anything but a bandwagon fan. I became a Duke fan in my early high school days when I saw the legendary Al Maguire do a report on the Cameron Crazies, Duke's fanatically devoted student fans who have a long history of disrupting opposing teams who play Duke at home. I began following them at the time, before they really started winning, just because I thought that was exactly what college sports should be about.

But even more than being a Duke fan, I'm a college basketball fan in general. Duke is in the elite 8 right now, down to the last 8 teams in the hunt for a national championship. Tomorrow they play for a shot at the 10th final four since Coach K got there 23 years ago. But even if they lose, I'll be glued to the final four next weekend. You just can't top this event. It's the best thing in sports.

Of course, there are a few of those dreaded North Carolina Tar Heel fans in the blogosphere, like Kyle Still. But Kyle is a very bright guy who has recently finished his thesis on the 9th amendment and the right to privacy, so I overlook that one stunning failure of his character and promote his site anyway. :)

My Favorite Things: Comedian

2004-03-26T00:07:00.000-05:00

As a former stand up comic, I get asked a lot who my favorite comedians are. I tend to like dark, edgy humor more than anything else, and if it's got a real identifiable view of the world attached to it, so much the better. I think the best comic working today is Doug Stanhope. Whether you agree with his views or not, he has them, and he's not afraid to give them to you in the most pointed way imaginable.

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, there was a huge comedy boom. Every network and cable channel seemingly had their own stand up show - Evening at the Improv, Comedy on the Road, the Half Hour Comedy Hour, Caroline's Comedy Hour, Comic Strip Live, the Sunday Comics, Stand Up Spotlight, and more. Every guy who owned a seedy bar or a bowling alley was opening a comedy club in the back. But about 10 years ago, the boom ended and they all went back to karaoke or midget tossing. The bad thing about the comedy boom was that, because all the shows were on networks or basic cable, the range of comedy that you heard was very narrow. Even while the ranks of comedians were exploding, the art was becoming more and more homogenized and middle of the road. The clubs gave them freedom, but most comics were so intent on getting on TV either for a comedy special or a sitcom (or both) that they played it safe. So comedians who work outside of that box always catch my attention.

Doug Stanhope definitely works outside the box. This is the guy who, 3 months after 9/11, was going on stage and opening with.

"Pardon me for not wearing my NYPD hat here today in honor of the fallen heroes, but you know I wasn't walking around 2 years ago with a plunger hanging out of my ass to honor that same force."

Ouch. That's brutal. But it's also funny and, undoubtedly, offensive to some. He combines an absolutely fearless "I'll say whatever I want to say" attitude with a highly perceptive eye for detail and social psychology. For instance, on his webpage, he recalls the hecklers who got thrown out of his show in Youngstown, Ohio:

I remember middle-age business guy with his two associates, he was a stereotype movie heckler whose entire life can be read in a glance from across the room. This isn't your first Holiday Inn by any means, is it, my friend? Your position has allowed you to travel the entire midwest circuit all in a newish Ford Taurus provided by the company. Perhaps a cellular provider or an Orkin distributor. You take off your wedding ring when you hit town, more to impress the guys you work with than for any real hope of landing some action.

I can almost see you lean into your cohorts and say with a wink "Watch this!" before bleating out an inane cliche to the comic on stage and then another wink to your friends as they wish they had stayed in the room. You were a high-yeild asshole in your fraternity days but you traded that in for a life of wrinkle-free khakis and spread sheets. But now and again you can show you've still got it by being a smart-alec at a karaoke night in a Fort Wayne Marriott or by demanding that they take a little something off the bill since the restaurant was out of rice pudding.

You too will have to be walked out in a shuffle, the doormen now more like sanitarium orderlies than bouncers. You will show your Holiday Inn Priorities Club Card in protest and be dumbstruck that it does you no good.

Don't feel badly. I envy you. I wish it were me being walked out ahead of schedule. In this drop-ceiling convention room, stacking chairs and folding banquet tables on a stage where so many Shriners have auctioned fruit cakes for burn victims. I wish it was me they were taking out.

They say this is a mob town but I can't imagine what is here that the mob would want any peice of. Like seeing gang insignia in a men's room and wondering what self-respecting street outfit would claim a IHOP shitter as it's "turf".

Whoever said "You can't go home again" surely came from someplace great. But I come from a place like Youngstown and always seem to wind up back in those places despite my best intentions.

Yes, he's rude. Yes, he's crude. Yes, he's bitter. But damn, is he funny.

WHEW!

2004-03-25T00:06:00.000-05:00

I have been so unbelievably swamped with everything going on at The Panda's Thumb, the new group science blog, that I haven't posted anything here. I'm not letting this blog go by the wayside, I promise. Things have absolutely exploded with the new blog though. We got mentioned by a couple big blogs yesterday and were absolutely overrun with visits. At 5:15, Wes Elsberry sent an e-mail out saying, "Hey, we're at 700 hits on our second day. This is incredible." Well within 2 hours, we had tripled that and it hasn't stopped since. On our third day of operation, we're at nearly 7000 hits and climbing. Yesterday it was the 15th most referred to blog in the world, according to Blogdex. The response has been absolutely mindblowing.

I want to say thanks to the brilliant cast of contributors we put together in such a short time, and to the bloggers who have relentlessly referred readers to us over the last couple days. I expect things to settle down a bit and I'll get back to regularly posting here in the next day or two. In the meantime, go over to The Panda's Thumb, order a Burgess Shale Ale or a Protostome Pilsner, and enjoy the conversation.

A New Group Blog is Born

2004-03-23T00:05:00.000-05:00

Announcing the formation of a new group blog, The Panda's Thumb. Like a father with a new baby, I'm excited about this project and I'm telling everyone about it.

The Panda's Thumb is a group blog that will focus primarily on explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution lobby, and defending the integrity of science education in America and around the world. The list of contributing authors is long and distinguished, representing a variety of scientific disciplines as well as a variety of academic and business backgrounds. The list includes recognized scholars in biochemistry, genetics, marine biology, immunology, molecular biology and more, as well as one businessman who uses evolutionary algorythms to model the world's financial markets. It's an extraordinary pool of knowledge and brilliance, and I expect to add a few more people to the author's roll in the next couple of weeks.

My thanks goes out to the many brilliant men and women who have volunteered their time and their energies not only to this project, but to the larger project of defending the integrity of science education.

The Panda's Thumb is a brand new project. I've spent most of today tweaking the templates and setting up the page. But keep your eye on that page over the next few weeks and I promise that you will learn a great deal about this very important issue. It is my goal to make The Panda's Thumb the most read science blog in the world, and to do for science what the Volokh Conspiracy does for law, which is bring together some of the finest minds in the field to share their expertise on an area where the public is often confused and misled.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony

2004-03-22T00:04:00.000-05:00

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies were last night and I got to watch the immortal Bob Seger get inducted. I generally have little use for Kid Rock, who gave the induction speech for Seger, but he was actually funny. and dead on accurate when he said that Seger had paid more dues than the entire current Top 40 artists combined. I watched the ceremony with my brother, with whom I share, along with our father, a single favorite rock and roll album of all time - Bob Seger Live Bullet.

When I was a kid growing up, that album was on in our house every single day, and I'm not exaggerating. I know every single scratch, every beat, every scream from the crowd. Live Bullet is the definitive live rock album, better even than Frampton Comes Alive. The other live albums that were on all the time in our house were George Benson's Weekend in LA (we were a very diverse musical household) and REO Speedwagon's You Get What You Play For. Anyone who came of age in the 1980s probably doesn't know that REO Speedwagon, before they started making hits out of squishy, milktoast puss-rock, could rip the freaking roof off an arena. But as far as Bob Seger is concerned, I can't possibly overstate what a huge part of my childhood his music was.

It was gratifying to see Seger finally get the recognition he deserves. Even without the 50 million albums he's sold in a 40 year career, the immortal road song Turn The Page alone would justify a spot in the hall. Kid Rock put the perfect exclamation point on his induction speech when, stealing Seger's message about Detroit music fans to the Cobo Hall audience during Live Bullet, he said, "I was reading Rolling Stone where they said that Bob Seger deserves to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I thought to myself shit, I've known that for 10 years." Perfect.

And in a related note, last night's induction ceremony also showed that after 25 years of making music, Prince can still burn up a stage with the best of them. The man may be weird as the day is long, but he is James Brown and Jimi Hendrix rolled into one. Which brings me to the observation that I think pop culture is primed for a funk revival. Earth, Wind and Fire recently tore it up on the Grammy awards, along with the legendary George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. Prince showed last night that he's still got the ideal mix of funk and rock. I think it's time for funk to make a comeback. Phoenix horns, are you listening? I wanna hear big bass lines and see guys twirling their trumpets again.

Plant People are People Too

2004-03-22T00:03:00.000-05:00

When we talk about evolution, we almost always talk about animals or microbes, with only a rare mention of plants. The reality, though, is that evolution is a powerful theory in explaining the natural history of flora as well as fauna. The study of plants is called botany. Last summer, the Botanical Society of America released a statement about the importance and validity of evolution that is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand this issue. One of the great things about this statement is that it emphasizes the usefulness of evolutionary theory, the fact that plant biologists use the theory not only to explain the origin of floral variety, but to solve a variety of problems in the field. It says:

The fairness argument implies that creationism is a scientifically valid alternative to evolution, and that is not true. Science is not about fairness, and all explanations are not equal. Some scientific explanations are highly speculative with little in the way of supporting evidence, and they will stand or fall based upon rigorous testing. The history of science is littered with discarded explanations, e.g., inheritance of acquired characters, but these weren’t discarded because of public opinion or general popularity; each one earned that distinction by being scientifically falsified. Scientists may jump on a “band wagon” for some new explanation, particularly if it has tremendous explanatory power, something that makes sense out of previously unexplained phenomena. But for an explanation to become a mainstream component of a theory, it must be tested and found useful in doing science.

To make progress, to learn more about botanical organisms, hypotheses, the subcomponents of theories, are tested by attempting to falsify logically derived predictions. This is why scientists use and teach evolution; evolution offers testable explanations of observed biological phenomena. Evolution continues to be of paramount usefulness, and so, based on simple pragmatism, scientists use this theory to improve our understanding of the biology of organisms. Over and over again, evolutionary theory has generated predictions that have proven to be true. Any hypothesis that doesn’t prove true is discarded in favor of a new one, and so the component hypotheses of evolutionary theory change as knowledge and understanding grow. Phylogenetic hypotheses, patterns of ancestral relatedness, based on one set of data, for example, base sequences in DNA, are generated, and when the results make logical sense out of formerly disparate observations, confidence in the truth of the hypothesis increases. The theory of evolution so permeates botany that frequently it is not mentioned explicitly, but the overwhelming majority of published studies are based upon evolutionary hypotheses, each of which constitutes a test of an hypothesis. Evolution has been very successful as a scientific explanation because it has been useful in advancing our understanding of organisms and applying that knowledge to the solution of many human problems, e.g., host-pathogen interactions, origin of crop plants, herbicide resistance, disease susceptibility of crops, and invasive plants.

This is a very important thing to keep in mind, both the premise that explanations in science must be testable and falsifiable, and the conclusion that evolutionary theory is successful because it is used every day to solve problems. They go on to give a very good example, and to point out the disparity between the usefulness of evolution and the allegedly competing theories of creationism and ID:

For example, plant biologists have long been interested in the origins of crop plants. Wheat is an ancient crop of the Middle East. Three species exist both as wild and domesticated wheats, einkorn, emmer, and breadwheat. Archeological studies have demonstrated that einkorn is the most ancient and breadwheat appeared most recently. To plant biologists this suggested that somehow einkorn gave rise to emmer, and emmer gave rise to breadwheat (an hypothesis). Further evidence was obtained from chromosome numbers that showed einkorn with 14, emmer with 28, and breadwheat with 42. Further, the chromosomes in einkorn consisted of two sets of 7 chromosomes, designated AA. Emmer had 14 chromosomes similar in shape and size, but 14 more, so they were designated AABB. Breadwheat had chromosomes similar to emmer, but 14 more, so they were designated AABBCC. To plant biologists familiar with mechanisms of speciation, these data, the chromosome numbers and sets, suggested that the emmer and breadwheat species arose via hybridization and polyploidy (an hypothesis). The Middle Eastern flora was studied to find native grasses with a chromosome number of 14, and several goatgrasses were discovered that could be the predicted parents, the sources of the BB and CC chromosomes. To test these hypotheses, plant biologists crossed einkorn and emmer wheats with goatgrasses, which produced sterile hybrids. These were treated to produce a spontaneous doubling of the chromosome number, and as predicted, the correct crosses artificially produced both the emmer and breadwheat species. No one saw the evolution of these wheat species, but logical predictions about what happened were tested by recreating likely circumstances. Grasses are wind-pollinated, so cross-pollination between wild and cultivated grasses happens all the time. Frosts and other natural events are known to cause a doubling of chromosomes. And the hypothesized sequence of speciation matches their observed appearance in the archeological record. Farmers would notice and keep new wheats, and the chromosome doubling and hybrid vigor made both emmer and breadwheat larger, more vigorous wheats. Lastly, a genetic change in breadwheat from the wild goatgrass chromosomes allowed for the chaff to be removed from the grain without heating, so glutin was not denatured, and a sourdough (yeast infected) culture of the sticky breadwheat flour would inflate (rise) from the trapped carbon dioxide.

The actual work was done by many plant biologists over many years, little by little, gathering data and testing ideas, until these evolutionary events were understood as generally described above. The hypothesized speciation events were actually recreated, an accomplishment that allows plant biologists to breed new varieties of emmer and bread wheats. Using this speciation mechanism, plant biologists hybridized wheat and rye, producing a new, vigorous, high protein cereal grain, Triticale.

What would the creationist paradigm have done? No telling. Perhaps nothing, because observing three wheat species specially created to feed humans would not have generated any questions that needed answering. No predictions are made, so there is no reason or direction for seeking further knowledge. This demonstrates the scientific uselessness of creationism. While creationism explains everything, it offers no understanding beyond, “that’s the way it was created.” No testable predictions can be derived from the creationist explanation. Creationism has not made a single contribution to agriculture, medicine, conservation, forestry, pathology, or any other applied area of biology. Creationism has yielded no classifications, no biogeographies, no underlying mechanisms, no unifying concepts with which to study organisms or life.

Thanks to Paul Myers for the heads up on this one.

Watching C-SPAN

2004-03-21T00:03:00.000-05:00

Is there anything scarier than watching C-Span when they have live call-in shows? There are apparently a lot of insane people sitting in their apartments with C-Span on speed dial, just praying for an opportunity to spew their personal pet peeves at the world for 30 seconds. There appears to be some sort of time warp between the people in the studio and the people on the phone. They've got a columnist on this morning talking about railway safety, but Ernie from West Virginia, who has been trying to get through since Thursday, doesn't care. He has something to say in response to Mildred from Oregon, who called in last week to talk about orgies at the UN building (during a discussion of diversity on college campuses, I'm sure), and nothing is going to stop him from saying it.

This morning they had on David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, and they were talking about the war in Iraq. Some good ol' boy from who knows where, who had probably been on hold since 1986, called in to rant about Mel Gibson's movie and "Jew-controlled Hollywood". I wish I was making this up. I wish this was a Saturday Night Live parody. But it's not. This is America, where these people are eligible to vote. Frightening.

Two New Blogs to Read

2004-03-20T00:02:00.000-05:00

The first is Stranger Fruit, a blog by John Lynch, a professor at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University. Looks like it will be a very valuable resource for information about evolution.

The second is the Evolution Blog. This blog is actually older than mine, but I just found it. It's written by Jason Rosenhouse, a professor of mathematics at James Madison University. So he's immediately one of my favorites both because of his defense of evolution and for teaching at a university named for my favorite founding father. His articles have appeared frequently in Skeptic and Free Inquiry, and he has written extensively on evolution and ID, including one article entitled "How Anti-evolutionists Abuse Mathematics". Definitely worth checking out.

Leiter Gets the Jomo Challenge

2004-03-19T11:59:00.000-05:00

Well this was predictable. Say something in defense of evolution and one thing you can count on is ~~Batman~~ ~~The Lone Ranger~~ ~~The Cisco Kid~~ ~~Inspector Cluseau~~ Joseph Mastrapaolo and his faithful assistant ~~Tonto~~ ~~Cato~~ ~~Poncho~~ ~~Robin~~ Karl Priest showing up to issue the "Life Science Challenge". Brian Leiter is the latest.

The Life Science Challenge is basically a $10,000 bet on whether you can prove in a court of law that creationism is religion and evolution is science. Never mind that this challenge has actually been answered in court twice, McLean v Arkansas and Edwards v Aguillard, and the ruling came down in our favor both times. We wouldn't want something like reality to interrupt their perfectly good idiotic screed, would we?

I've already shredded the JoMo challenge here, here, here, and here. JoMo and Priest are sort of the court jesters of creationism and they're taken about that seriously. Congratulations Brian, you've now been added to their dreaded "Debate Dodgers List". You're in good company though. We're thinking about having a JoMo Debate Dodgers Convention in Dayton, Tennessee.

Scalia Refuses to Recuse

2004-03-19T00:01:00.000-05:00

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has issued a memorandum in which he answers the request that he recuse himself from an upcoming case involving claims of executive privelege for Vice President Dick Cheney as it regards meetings he held in formulating the administration's energy policy, because he went on a duck hunting trip with Cheney. Not surprisingly, Scalia has denied the request and will not recuse himself from the case. My take? I tend to agree with him. He is right to point out that recusal is different on the Supreme Court than it is on a court of appeals. If a judge on a court of appeals recuses himself, another judge from the court takes his place; that doesn't happen on the Supreme Court because all judges preside over all cases. Hence, a recusal means only 8 judges hear a case and that increases the chance of leaving the legal question unresolved. As he points out, the court traditionally has held that even in cases where a relative of one of the justices was a partner in a firm with business before the court, justices need not recuse themselves. Certainly the "appearance of impropriety" is higher in those cases than in this case.

I have no doubt that Scalia will rule in favor of Cheney in this case, but I would say that whether he had gone duck hunting with Cheney or not. It is consistent with his previously held positions that he would grant a good deal of leeway to the executive branch in such matters. If he votes in Cheney's favor it will be because of his legal position on such questions, not because he and Cheney are friends. It's time to let this tempest in a teapot blow over.

Another Great Blog to Read

2004-03-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

Via Brian Leiter, the wonderful Strange Doctrines blog by Tadlow Windsor II (read the "about me" link for an explanation). Evolution, constitutional law, culture war stuff - it's like reading me! He also provided Brian with this quote from Bertrand Russell that is absolutely perfect:

"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

Bravissimo!

Moron of the Day Award

2004-03-18T11:58:00.000-05:00

Goes to Rhea County, Tennessee:

Rhea County commissioners unanimously voted to ask state lawmakers to introduce legislation amending Tennessee's criminal code so the county can charge homosexuals with crimes against nature.

"We need to keep them out of here," said Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the motion.

County Attorney Gary Fritts also was asked by Fugate to find the best way to enact a local law banning homosexuals from living in Rhea County.

And irony of ironies, these same people celebrate the trial that made a laughingstock of them:

Rhea County, about 30 miles north of Chattanooga, is among the most conservative in Tennessee. It holds an annual festival commemorating the 1925 trial that convicted John T. Scopes on charges of teaching evolution...

Brilliant. Perhaps they should pass a law preventing sub-literate bigots from living in that county. Or at the very least, prevent them from being elected to public office, for crying out loud.

A New Blog Arrives

2004-03-17T11:57:00.000-05:00

Please welcome Reed Cartwright's De Rerum Natura to the blogosphere. Reed is currently finishing his PhD in genetics at the University of Georgia and is involved with the Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education. A few weeks ago I cited his analysis of the proposed Georgia science standards, which have thankfully been changed.

You may recall that Georgia Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox, in one of the most flagrant displays of idiocy I've seen from a public official in a long time, called a press conference to announce that they were leaving the word "evolution" out of the new proposed science standards but leaving the concept there under a different name. Her reason for this was that the word 'evolution' causes too much controversy. Right. And naturally, the best way to avoid controversy is to call a freaking press conference to announce that you're avoiding controversy. As it turns out, she was lying through her teeth. It wasn't just the word that was taken out of the new standards, it was virtually the entire concept of biological evolution. Thanks in large part to Reed's analysis of the proposed standards, the people of Georgia found out that Cox had in fact gutted the AAAS standards on biology of most of its substantive content. The president of the AAAS protested this, teacher's groups and parents in Georgia stood up to her, and Cox rather quickly restored the full AAAS standards. One can only think that her political career took a severe blow, and one can only think this is a good thing.

Having Reed in the blog world means competition for good posts. I notice that he beat me to a post on the Discovery Institute's misleading press release about a letter from the Department of Education concerning the Santorum amendment. It's pretty typical misrepresentation of reality from the DI. I may still have more to add to that story in the next few days. Anyway, please welcome Reed and go read his blog as often as possible. It's good to have another voice for quality science education.

Brief Follow-up on the Leiter/VanDyke Situation

2004-03-17T11:54:00.000-05:00

After reading this, I just have to ask....where's my hate mail?

By the way, the Discovery Institute copied Hunter Baker's article on their website today with no mention of the replies that were made to it. They also listed Hunter Baker as a "freelance writer in Texas". Not as the grad assistant of the person whose book was reviewed in the article under dispute, just a freelance writer. And remember folks, the Discovery Institute says that believing in ID is the key to good ethics. Another irony meter bites the dust.

Does ID=Creationism?

2004-03-16T11:54:00.001-05:00

One of the main arguments that Lawrence VanDyke makes, both in his Harvard Law Review book note and in the ongoing exchange over Brian Leiter's criticism of that note, is that ID is not creationist. His evidence for this is that the two largest Young Earth Creationist (YEC) organizations have said they don't consider ID to be creationism because they won't take a position on the age of the earth or a literal biblical interpretation. But then those organizations don't think Old Earth Creationists like Hugh Ross, who completely rejects evolution, to be creationist either. This strikes me as a very weak argument. Remember that these are the same people who would argue that anyone who isn't a YEC is not a "real Christian" either. Their perspective on who belongs and who doesn't is a trifle narrow.

At some point soon I will be posting a much longer and more detailed message comparing ID and creationism, but for now I want to just throw this one quote out there. It comes from none other than William Dembski. Dembski has been giving a series of lectures at Fellowship Baptist Church in Waco, Texas the past few Sundays, all of which have been taped. In a Q & A session after one of those lectures just a couple weeks ago, this is what Dembski had to say:

"I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed."

He continued,

"And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done -- and he's not getting it."

2nd Response to Van Dyke

2004-03-16T11:54:00.000-05:00

Lawrence VanDyke has posted a response to me on the Exparte blog, the blog of the Harvard Federalist Society. I will reply to that as well as a comment he made to my first post on this subject.

VanDyke's response begins with Adam White saying:

Lawrence VanDyke continues to defend himself against the vicious attacks of Professor Brian Leiter and others. He posts this reply to Ed Brayton regarding Leiter's attack.

For the record, I don't think my posts on this situation can fairly be portrayed as a vicious attack. Professor Leiter's reply, I suppose, might be called such. While I agree with him on the substantive issues, I think he would do better to restrain his rhetoric and be a bit more collegial. It only distracts from the substantive issues. I understand his frustration, believe me. You get tired of hearing the same tired nonsense over and over again, and I often have to reign in my sarcasm, occasionally failing to do so.

Having said that, however, I think the reaction from Hunter Baker and VanDyke, striking the martyr pose and accusing Leiter of threatening both VanDyke's career and academic freedom, is hysterically overblown. Academic freedom does not insulate one's published writings from criticism, no matter how sharply worded that criticism is. Still, I think even the informal charge of academic fraud is over the line. I think Mr. VanDyke is guilty of wishful thinking, of badly misreading (as opposed to intentionally misrepresenting) several sources, and of swallowing a lot of nonsense that would not stand up to scrutiny. I don't think he's guilty of academic fraud, which is a serious accusation that shouldn't be thrown around casually even in an informal context. Now, to the substance of the dispute....

VanDyke's response begins:

Mr. Brayton – most of your response argues that the links I provided in support of my claim regarding peer-reviewed articles don’t in fact support that claim. Whether you are right or wrong, you seem to acknowledge that what I was trying to support was a claim about peer-reviewed articles “in support of ID.” Otherwise why even argue the point – Meyers has already alleged that Axe is a “closet” ID supporter. But later on you seem to revert to arguing that I somehow was intentionally trying to misrepresent something with my ellipses. I wasn’t.

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that the ellipses was not intention. The ellipses only replaced 4 words, for crying out loud, so there was no reason to use them in the first place, multiple times, especially when those 4 words were absolutely crucial to the claim that Leiter made. In a reply of probably several thousand words, you felt the need to take out 4 words to save space and then just happened to give an answer that, in reality, only answered your modified version of his position, not the position he actually took? That does strain credulity a bit, but I suppose I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that. But the reality remains that Leiter's claim remains true and your links did not answer that claim substantively.

The sources I to which I linked say that there are peer-reviewed articles “in support of ID,” not just peer-reviewed articles by ID proponents. You are grasping at straws if you are trying to show I was trying to misrepresent Leiter.

Actually, the sources you quote don't really say that at all. In both links, Dembski certainly implies that those articles support ID, at least in his introduction to them. He says that they show that "intelligent design research is in fact now part of the mainstream peer-reviewed scientific literature." But when he introduces the actual articles he is citing, he doesn't try to claim that they "support ID", because he knows that they don't. He has been caught at this game before, as I mentioned in my previous response. More than once, the DI has been caught presenting lists of references that, by implication, allegedly support ID only to have it pointed out that those citations do not, in fact, support ID. So then they backpeddle and say, "Okay, so they don't really support ID, but they do dissent from Darwinism." But then it gets pointed out that they really don't dissent from Darwinism, they merely pose non-adaptationist or non-selective mechanisms, all of which are also well within the purview of evolutionary theory. But none of that stops them from making the same claim all over again to a different audience. They consistently misrepresent the work of scientists and they consistently get caught at it. THAT, I would suggest, is academic fraud. And a careful reading of the links you gave would have shown that none of the sources that Dembski cites actually supports ID or challenges Leiter's position on that question.

However, regarding your claims that the articles themselves don’t support ID, I can’t argue that directly with you. I’m not a scientist. But I am quite confident that the scientists at Discovery Institute would argue (and have argued) vehemently that those articles do indeed support ID.

As I noted above, they actually don't argue vehemently that those articles do indeed support ID, they only imply it, because they know that they can't support that claim. That's why they often phrase it as "these references challenge Darwinism" (though in fact they don't). Nor do I think one has to be a scientist in order to analyze the meaning of articles. The man whose claims you cited, Bill Dembski, is not a scientist either, his degrees are in mathematics, philosophy and theology. Perhaps that explains why he so often gets it wrong when he implies that an article supports ID, but in his case I am far more inclined to blame it on dishonesty than ignorance. He has had the truth pointed out to him too many times, and he is not a stupid man by any means. But he is guilty either of being extremely sloppy or of being dishonest, and since his sloppiness always just happens to coincide with a misrepresentation that supports his position, I think dishonesty is the more reasonable, if less charitable, conclusion.

I am not a scientist either, merely an educated amateur, but I know that a paper that shows that you have to change 20% of the amino acids in an enzyme before function is impaired does not, by any sane criteria, show "extreme sensitivity to perturbation". That is an outright misrepresentation of the article, there are no two ways about it.

Which brings us back to the real issue. The issue isn’t really about the peer reviewed articles. I didn’t bring them up in my Note; Leiter did in his attack. You have already admitted they are a weak argument. The real questions still are: First, did I commit “scholarly fraud” as Leiter blatantly accused me of? Second, did Leiter have “factual errors” and “misleading innuendo” in his attack (since he accuses me of this, by his definition his post was “scholarly fraud” if he engaged in such in the very post he attacked me with)?

While I'm sure that is your real issue, it's not mine. I've already stated that I think that charge, even while he probably intended it in an informal manner rather than a formal one, was unnecessary and overly combative. I'll leave you and Leiter to handle the "I know you are but what am I" exchange, I'm addressing the substantive issues, the question of whether ID is a legitimate challenge to evolution and whether it has any place in a science classroom. That was the substance of Beckwith's book, the substance of your endorsement of it, and that is what interests me.

I'm also just intensely fascinated, as an observer, at the kneejerk reaction from ID advocates, immediately claiming persecution whenever anyone disputes them or disparages their work. As any historian of science will tell you, this is one of the hallmarks of crank science. Every obscure crank in the history of science has claimed to be the victim of a hidebound and dogmatic scientific establishment that fears his Truth_tm and will stop at nothing to destroy him in order to preserve their favored position in academia and society. As I said before, this makes for good public relations but very poor science. If Dembski and his colleagues really have a scientific model that can withstand scrutiny, then let them put it out before the scientific community, open it up for peer review, suggest hypotheses that can be tested, and get on with the business of testing them. The fact that they have not done so speaks volumes, I think.

Finally, I’ve already admitted that I made a mistake in my first post here at Ex Parte by supporting my “more than two scientists” point using NCSE’s “Steve” site...

But in doing so, you misread it again. You said:

About the "Project Steve," I see what Mr. Brayton is saying. I assumed that because the site parodied supporters of "ID" as "Steve" that when it referred to "Steve" it was referring to ID supporters. I see now my misreading.

But that's just another way of misreading the article. It did not "parody supporters of ID as Steve". The Steves in question are some 400+ scientists named Steve (after Steve Gould) who do NOT support ID. So you didn't see your misreading, you merely substituted misreading #2 for misreading #1. At the very least, this is extraordinarily sloppy citing, especially for a Harvard law student. I suspect, and would hope, that such shoddy citing on a paper at that school would bring down the wrath of your professors and the very poor grade such work demands. And this has been fairly consistent. You cited Dembski's citation of allegedly peer-reviewed journal articles that support ID without bothering to read them and see if that citation was correct. You cited a list of 100 ID supporters without bothering to read the statement to which they agreed, which does not in any way question evolution or support ID. In short, you've kind of swallowed whole the rhetoric of the ID movement without taking the time to do any research on the subject, or even, it seems, to read over the text of the sources you yourself cited. And in doing so, you've opened yourself up to being accused of sloppiness and lack of rigor, at best, and dishonesty at worst. Either way, I think it's fair to expect more than this from a student at one of the finest academic institutions in the world and I certainly think it's fair to point out those shortcomings, especially in light of your desire to cast yourself as the victim of a monolithic orthodoxy.

Scientists Respond to ID

2004-03-16T11:53:00.000-05:00

Here is an excellent example of a scientist taking on the claims of an ID advocate and pretty much leveling them. The University of Rochester biologist Allen Orr takes on Dembski's No Free Lunch, a book that attempts two basic tasks - to apply the No Free Lunch theorems to biological evolution, and to shore up Behe's Irreducible Complexity (IC) idea. Orr points out that Dembski is misapplying the NFL theorems and that Behe's best examples of IC - the flagellum and the blood clotting cascade - have in fact been shown to be quite reducible, and that there are very plausible evolutionary pathways for the evolution of those systems. Orr's critique is, I think you will agree, a fairly devestating one.

Dembski then responded to this review with an essay that is stunning in its total lack of engagement of any of the actual arguments that Orr made. His numerous arguments against Dembski's misapplication of the NFL theorems aren't even mentioned, much less refuted. And on the subject of Behe's IC idea, he takes the position that all Orr has done is show how such systems COULD have been made, not that they WERE made that way. Orr's reply to this is absolutely on the mark:

Dembski’s response is to point out that I have merely shown that IC systems can conceivably be built by Darwinism (a point he does not deny), not that such systems were built by Darwinism or even that they were probably built by Darwinism. I am accused, in other words, of having low standards: “Orr, along with much of the Darwinian community, is satisfied with a very undemanding form of possibility, namely, conceivability.” The problem with this is simple. It was Behe who posed the problem in terms of conceivability versus inconceivability. Behe said that Darwinism could not possibly produce IC systems. Behe spoke of “unbridgeable chasms.” Behe asked, “What type of biological system could not be formed by ‘numerous, successive, slight modifications’?” and then answered, “A system that is irreducibly complex.” The discussion has, in other words, taken the following form:
BEHE: Darwinism can’t possibly produce IC systems.
ORR: Darwinism can produce IC systems. Here’s how . . .
DEMBSKI: Orr has merely shown that a Darwinian explanation is possible. What a risibly low standard!

As I keep saying, when you look at the actual work being done, you cannot escape the conclusion that there simply is no there there. To paraphrase Clara Peller, "Where's the science?"

Response to Lawrence Van Dyke

2004-03-15T11:50:00.000-05:00

Lawrence VanDyke has left a comment below, which I would like to bring up here to address in more detail. Lawrence wrote:

I left out the "in support of ID" because I assumed that much was obvious in context. You make it sound like I was trying to make Leiter say ID proponents haven't published any articles in peer reviewed journals at all. If I were trying to say that, my response to Leiter's statement would have been much simpler and I wouldn't have bothered to address Pharyngula's post. Nice try.

But the two links you provided don't address what Brian said. They do not provide a single example of an article published in a peer-reviewed journal. In the first link, Dembski is responding to a letter that my friend Genie Scott sent to the Texas Board of Education. In the process, he misrepresents what Genie said, but that is another story for another day. At any rate, there is not a single example in Dembski's response of an article published by an advocate of ID in a peer-reviewed journal in support of ID. He only cites two articles therein. The first is from two mathematicians who do not support ID, who wrote an article that also does not support ID, in a mathematics journal. But since it does cite a statistical concept that Dembski uses in one of his books, he lists it. The second is Denton, Marshall and Legge's article in Nature which is merely a reference to another article they published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology about "evolution by natural law". This in now way supports ID, and Dembski is careful not to claim that it does, he merely says that ID is broad enough that it might incorporate this. But in fact, that's not the case at all. The article in question does not posit any sort of controlling intelligence that designed any natural systems.

On the basis of these two articles, neither of which addresses Leiter's claim at all, Dembski claims that "intelligent design research is in fact now part of the mainstream peer-reviewed scientific literature." That's a rather large leap, isn't it?

He also cites his own book, The Design Inference, which he says was peer-reviewed in order to get in to the monograph series of which it was a part. But nothing in that book actually supports the claim that ID is a viable alternative to evolution. TDI merely lays down the groundwork of his statistical theory that he bases his later claims on. There's lots of mathematics in it, but virtually no science. Even if his "explanatory filter", in the abstract, passes through peer review in a statistics or philosophy context (and in fact there are very good reasons to reject that as well), it still wasn't applied to living systems in that book to support the contention that living systems, either in general or in particular, must have been designed by some intelligent force. At any rate, it does not engage Leiter's demand, which was for articles in peer-reviewed journals, presumably scientific journals.

The second link that you provided was also from Dembski, citing the same 2 articles discussed above, plus the Axe article that Paul Myers answered quite well. Not only does the Axe article not support ID, but Dembski clearly distorts the conclusion of the article. Here is Dembski's description of the article:

This work shows that certain enzymes are extremely sensitive to perturbation. Perturbation in this case does not simply diminish existing function or alter function, but removes all possibility of function.

But the article shows anything but "extreme sensitivity to perturbation". It shows that you have to change out 20% of the amino acids in a given enzyme before function is impaired. There is absolutely nothing in that article that provides any support whatsoever for ID and it is simply dishonest for Dembski to continue to claim that it does.

The only other article that Dembski cites on this page is Loennig and Saedler's article on transposable elements. Notice that Dembski doesn't say that this article supports ID. He says that it is "non-Darwinian", which is a term he often uses. What it really means is "non-selective", but non-selective mechanisms are not in any way a problem for evolutionary theory. It's this little shell game that Dembski and other ID advocates like to play. They label an idea as "non-Darwinian", which simply means "non-selective" or "non-adaptationist" and then imply that since ID is also "non-Darwinian", all "non-Darwinian" ideas are a part of ID. Clearly a very silly argument, don't you think?

This is nothing new for Dembski or the Discovery Institute. In 2002, they provided a list of 44 citations to the Ohio state school board that allegedly showed problems with evolution or support for ID. But when the authors of all of those 44 papers were contacted, every single one of them said that the Discovery Institute was distorting their work, that nothing they had written provided any reason to doubt evolution or to support ID. But even after being shown the statements from every single author whose work they cited saying otherwise, the DI's Stephen Meyer still wrote an op-ed piece a month later claiming that those citations "raise significant challenges to key tenets of Darwinian evolution" - never mind that the authors of those articles themselves said that the articles did no such thing.

Their ability to distort citations seems to be matched quite well by yours. You claimed that the NCSE "grudgingly admitted that 1% of scientists doubt evolution", but the link you provided to the NCSE said the exact opposite of what you claimed. But it's nice to know that you went to the trouble of qualifying the manner in which they admitted what they didn't admit.

As far as your claim to have addressed Paul Myers' criticism of the Axe paper, here is what you wrote in that regard:

Meyers’s exhibit number one to refute Axe’s peer-reviewed journal article - get this: Axe is a “closet” Intelligent Designer! Wow, that’s a shocker. We were all expecting the naturalistic evolutionists to write peer-reviewed articles supporting design theory! Not only is this ridiculous genetic fallacy, it isn’t very smart genetic fallacy. Meyer next does some hand-waving, pronounces the claim that the paper speaks “significant[ly]” to ID “ludicrous” (I guess we’re just supposed to trust him on this), and ignores the other three journal articles.

If you think this in any way refutes what Paul wrote, I can't imagine how you managed to get into law school. One would think, based on what you wrote, that Paul tried to "refute Axe's peer-reviewed journal article" by saying, "he's an ID supporter, so he must be wrong." But that isn't even close to the truth. First, Paul did not attempt to "refute Axe's peer-reviewed journal article." In fact, he specifically accepts the data that Axe provides, saying,

It's not a bad paper. It says something about the range of tolerance for change in proteins, and that even portions of the sequence remote from the active site contribute to the integrity of the enzyme; nothing surprising or unexpected, even to us evolutionists, but it is good to see the data documenting it.

Second, he did not use the fact that Axe is Dembski's friend and an ID supporter to argue in any way against the conclusions that Axe drew in his paper. What he did argue against was Dembski citing this paper as one that supports ID when it does nothing of the sort. He also points out, as I did above, that Dembski completely misrepresents the conclusions of the paper, pretending that it showed "extreme sensitivity to perturbation" when in point of fact it showed 20% resistence to perturbation. You did not address a single argument that Paul makes for why it is dishonest to cite the Axe paper as an example of a peer-reviewed article supporting ID. Yet you want to claim that your non-answer to Paul proves that your ellipses didn't make it appear that you answered the claim that Bryan made by changing the substance of that claim. Sorry, but I think I've shown pretty conclusively that this argument just doesn't fly, especially in light of your complete distortion of what the NCSE "grudgingly admitted".

Look, I frankly think that ID critics should stop bringing up the fact that no pro-ID article has ever been published in a peer-reviewed science journal. I think this claim, while true at this point, is fairly meaningless, and at some point they'll probably manage to get one through. There are, after all, hundreds and hundreds of obscure science journals and peer review is hardly a guarantee of scholarly rigor. What really matters is not whether they've ever managed to get a single article published or not, but whether they've managed to actually develop a testable, falsifiable model that explains the data well. And on that point, ID can only be described as an utter failure at this point. If you can name a single testable hypothesis that flows from the ID "theory", you'll be the first one to manage it. And until they have produced that, they simply are not doing science, they're just promising that sometime in the future they will be doing science.

Brian Leiter vs National Review

2004-03-15T11:47:00.000-05:00

One of the best blogs to read on both legal issues and evolution is that of Brian Leiter, director of the Law and Philosophy Program at the University of Texas Law School. He writes fairly extensively on evolution and the ongoing controversy of Intelligent Design. Recently, he took to task a young Harvard law student named Lawrence VanDyke, who had written a positive review of a pro-ID book in the Harvard Law Review. Leiter wrote a rather scathing review of VanDyke's book note on his blog. The book in question was Darwinism and Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design by Frances Beckwith, a fellow with the Discovery Institute, who argues that ID could be included in a public school science curriculum and still pass constitutional muster. That remains to be seen, of course, and I suspect that both Beckwith and Leiter would be involved fairly deeply in any court fight over that issue.

That court fight may be coming soon, as recent events in Ohio and Montana may either provide the test case that has been inevitably brewing for the last several years. Such a case is inevitable, of course. Attempts by creationists to gain equal time in public school science classrooms were pretty much wiped out in 1987 by the Edwards v Aguillard decision, which essentially made federal the district court decision in Mclean v Arkansas in 1981. But since then, they have regrouped and put that old wine into the new skin of "intelligent design theory", which is not a theory at all. They have been frantically busy lately pushing ID in states and local school boards for years now, hoping to get a bill passed and fight it out in court. They are hoping, of course, that since they've left out all the overt "Godtalk", this will now pass an establishment clause test.

If and when such a case takes place, it will likely be something of a repeat of the McLean case, which was undoubtedly one of the most fascinating court cases of the 20th century. Dozens of prominent scientists, philosophers and legal scholars, including Landon Gilkey, Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Ruse, Brent Dalrymple, George Marsden and Francisco Ayala, were asked to testify in that case and their collective testimony comprises one of the best introductions to the history and philosophy of science and the vacancy of creationist responses to it that one could hope for. A few friends of mine, including Wes Ellsberry, Don Frack and Troy Britain, have been collecting and digitizing the testimonial transcripts (which has been a long and difficult process, believe me), making them available to the world. I would wager that both Beckwith and Leiter would both be involved in the sequel to this trial when it happens, as advisers to the two sides and perhaps as witnesses or litigants as well. But I digress...

Leiter's response to Van Dyke's glowing review of Beckwith's book was strongly worded, to be sure. He began by saying,

The lavish praise is only possible because the book note is riddled with factual errors and misleading innuendo from start to finish. Law professors have long had doubts about the intellectual integrity of student-edited law reviews; incidents like this suggest, if anything, that our doubts have been understated.

The author of this incompetent book note...is one Lawrence VanDyke, a student editor of the Review. Mr. VanDyke may yet have a fine career as a lawyer, but I trust he has no intention of entering law teaching: scholarly fraud is, I fear, an inauspicious beginning for an aspiring law teacher. And let none of the many law professors who are readers of this site be mistaken: Mr. VanDyke has perpetrated (intentionally or otherwise) a scholarly fraud, one that may have political and pedagogical consequences.

Mr. VanDyke's book note reads like a press release from the Discovery [sic] Institute--the Seattle-based public relations arm of the creationist movement--and not like a scholarly review of a book.

Pretty harsh, I think we can all agree, but right on the money. After this introduction, Leiter goes on to take the book review claim by claim and pretty much take it apart. But now along comes Hunter Baker writing in the National Review Online and he's not at all happy with Leiter's criticism of the Harvard student's review:

VanDyke found Beckwith's arguments convincing and said so in his book note.

Such a sin could not go unpunished or unpublicized by those who hold to the inerrancy of the Darwinian scriptures. The Book of Scopes, 2:12-14 reads, "Thou shalt not admit that any explanation of origins outside the neo-Darwinian synthesis may have merit. Verily, thou must proclaim that any alternate explanation is of the same religious origin as witch burning and will be struck down by the Establishment Clause before ever being discussed in a public school."

He goes on to accuse Leiter of threatening the career of VanDyke, saying,

One doesn't need to work very hard to read between the lines. Leiter seems to be threatening VanDyke's career if he should dare to set foot in the academy. The tone of his post makes clear that he means this student editor of the Harvard Law Review harm. Leiter's statement is the equivalent of an academic temper tantrum and is likely to backfire. The attack by a high-powered academic on an intellectually open law student is not the stuff of which great reputations are made. Leiter's peers, some of whom may actually have believed all the hype about academic freedom, will probably wonder just how this sort of proposed blacklisting squares with long-cherished ideals.

He does at least admit that this is "reading between the lines", but it's a rather fanciful reading. Leiter has responded, quite reasonably:

The italicized portion is alluding not to consequences for Mr. VanDyke (what would "pedagogical" or "political" consequences be for him?)--I would have thought that obvious--but to the consequences for public school education and battles over science education by handing the ID scam artists a new weapon in their arsenal: a favorable review of one of their key texts in the Harvard Law Review. Already, as this site reports, this public relations victory is being exploited by the proponents of pseudo-science. Thousands of hours were spent by dozens of Texans like me this past summer and fall defeating the efforts of the ID scam artists to destroy science education in Texas; in a great victory, the Texas State Board of Education rebuffed Beckwith & co., sizing them up for the proponents of pseudo-science that they are. If the reader detects I'm a bit irritated with Mr. VanDyke, perhaps it is because I'd rather not spend significant portions of my time defending the integrity of science education for my children. Mr. VanDyke has made my job and the job of all those who want high standards in education a bit harder.

Mr. VanDyke has injected himself in to a serious political debate by misrepresenting in a prestigious, professional publication the state of the relevant science and empirical evidence. Mr. VanDyke must own his words and own the consequences of those words: he is a professional, publishing in a professional journal. Those consequences include the likelihood that the vast majority of educated readers, knowledgeable about the relevant science, will be astonished that the Harvard Law Review could publish such slipshod work and will likely take a dim view of Mr. VanDyke's scholarly competence. They are correct, in my view, to draw those conclusions.

He also responds to the charge that he is somehow impinging on VanDyke's academic freedom:

Academic freedom protects the right of Beckwith et al. to cast their lot with pseudo-science; it protects my right to call them on it. It also protects my right to express the view that pseudo-science and scholarly incompetence are, as I put it, "an inauspicious beginning for an aspiring law teacher." Although I'm amused by how much power NRO thinks I have, the fact is I have an impact on hiring at Texas, and that's about it, except to the extent I am asked to evaluate candidates in legal philosophy by other law schools.

But as the NRO article notes:

For his part, VanDyke is not backtracking. He defends the substance of his book note and charges that Leiter's attack represents "an effort to make sure all students recognize that if they step outside the bounds of Leiter's orthodoxy, their careers will be in serious jeopardy." He adds, "This is pretty amazing considering my book note actually talks about the 'hostility and censorship of the evolutionary establishment.' If anything, Mr. Leiter acts as if it his goal to prove me correct."

This is pretty standard stuff for ID proponents, who seem to strike the martyr pose - Help, help, I'm being repressed by the big bad Darwinian Orthodoxy! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! - as reflexively as a baby sucks a nipple. But there's something really important missing in this little Don Quixote story - substance. Leiter's original response to VanDyke's book review contained an almost line by line dismantling of the claims it contained. Not only does the NRO article fail to mention any of the substantive criticisms that Leiter offers, it doesn't even link to them on Leiter's blog. Not a single word in Baker's article disputes the substance of Leiter's review. Not a single word from either Beckwith or VanDyke quoted by Baker even attempts to discuss any of the substantive criticisms that he made. Were his criticisms wrong? If they are, none of the principles involved in this attempts to make a case for it, yet they reflexively jump immediately to the cry of repression from the Darwinian Establishment.

Another person, using just the name Greg, also reacted negatively to Leiter's post, but he at least attempted to argue with the substance of Leiter's criticisms. He did so quite badly, however, and Leiter pretty much shreds his arguments. Paul Myers joins in on the fun and points out that the citations that he gives for allegedly pro-ID articles in the scientific literature have been completely distorted by the ID crowd. As a side note, it was pretty amusing to read Greg claiming to have gone to the scientific literature and found material that supports ID and getting haughty with Leiter for his supposed laziness in not doing the same "in-depth research":

Actually, in looking for that citation, I found some more examples:

D.D. Axe, "Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors," Journal of Molecular Biology, 301 (2000): 585?595. This work shows that certain enzymes are extremely sensitive to perturbation. Perturbation in this case does not simply diminish existing function or alter function, but removes all possibility of function. This implies that neo-Darwinian theory has no purchase on these systems. Moreover, the probabilities implicit in such extreme-functional-sensitivity analyses are precisely those needed for a design inference. W.-E. Loennig & H. Saedler, "Chromosome Rearrangements and Transposable Elements," Annual Review of Genetics, 36 (2002): 389-410. This article examines the role of transposons in the abrupt origin of new species and the possibility of an partly predetermined generation of biodiversity and new species. The authors' approach is non-Darwinian, and they cite favorably on the work of Michael Behe and William Dembski. D.K.Y. Chiu & T.H. Lui, "Integrated Use of Multiple Interdependent Patterns for Biomolecular Sequence Analysis," International Journal of Fuzzy Systems, 4(3) (September 2002): 766-775. M.J. Denton & J.C. Marshall, "The Laws of Form Revisited," Nature, 410 (22 March 2001): 417; M.J. Denton, J.C. Marshall & M. Legge, (2002) "The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law," Journal of Theoretical Biology 219 (2002): 325-342.

No doubt this is simply the tip of the iceberg. If I, as a non-scientist, could find this in 15 minutes, imagine what Leiter could have done with an hour of fact-checking.

This might be something other than pathetic if the entire passage hadn't been copied word for word from Dembski's website.

Leiter is correct when he says that ID proponents are peddling nonsense. He is correct when he says that VanDyke's book note in the Harvard Law Review was based on ignorance of the subject matter and read more like a fawning press release from the Discovery Institute than like a serious book review. Leiter is correct that the Discovery Institute is little more than "the public relations arm of the creationist movement", repackaging the same old nonsense in fancy-sounding terminology, distorting the scientific literature to make it appear as supporting them, and failing to publish anything like a testable model that explains the evidence. Striking the martyr pose is good public relations because it distracts attention from the real issues. When you don't have any actual science to offer, you claim to be oppressed by the "establishment" that is afraid of your Truth_tm. But the scientific world doesn't work that way. Scientists tend to be sticklers for substance over hand-waving. If you have a real model that explains the evidence, by all means offer it up and let's debate it. But since they don't have that, they are left with casting themselves in the role of the oppressed in the hope that no one will notice that they didn't actually address any of the substantive criticisms, that after all the frantic hand waving, there simply is no there there.

Moderate Muslims

2004-03-15T11:46:00.000-05:00

One of the things I find disturbing lately is how many Americans have lumped all Muslims together into one monolithic group labeled "terrorists". You hear a lot of tsk tsking over this from those of us who are inclined to try not to demonize an entire group based on the most extreme among them, but I think that masks an even more important point. Lumping all Muslims together as terrorists is not merely unfair to the vast majority of Muslims in the world, it also undermines what could be our most powerful tool in fighting terrorism in the Islamic world. The battle is not Islam vs The West. The battle is between Reactionary, Fanatical Islamic Theocrats and everyone else, including - perhaps especially - moderate and reasonable Muslims. There is no enemy quite so hated as the enemy within, and that is how the Bin Ladens of the world view the moderate majority within Islam, as compromisers with, and appeasers of, the Great Satan.

So who are those moderate Muslims? Muqtedar Khan, the director of International Studies at Adrian College here in Michigan, is a scholar at the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. He has an article on this very subject and it's very much worth reading. He points out first that it is a mistake to use the terms Muslim and Arab interchangably. After all, there are 1 billion muslims in the world and only about 200 million Arabs. He also points out the differences in the moderate and extremist traditions within Islam itself, which is obviously important for understanding the distinction within its context rather than simply imposing those labels from the outside. And the distinction that he points to is, I think, equivalent to the distinction I've always made that within each religion there comes a battle between modernists and anti-modernists, between engagement and war. Or within the Islamic tradition specifically, between Ijtihad and Jihad. He writes,

I believe that moderate Muslims are different from militant Muslims even though both of them advocate the establishment of societies whose organizing principle is Islam. The difference between moderate and militant Muslims is in their methodological orientation and in the primordial normative preferences which shape their interpretation of Islam.

For moderate Muslims Ijtihad is the preferred method of choice for social and political change and military Jihad the last option. For militant Muslims, military Jihad is the first option and Ijtihad is not an option at all.

Ijtihad narrowly understood is a juristic tool that allows independent reasoning to articulate Islamic law on issues where textual sources are silent. The unstated assumption being when texts have spoken reason must be silent. But increasingly moderate Muslim intellectuals see Ijtihad as the spirit of Islamic thought that is necessary for the vitality of Islamic ideas and Islamic civilization. Without Ijtihad, Islamic thought and Islamic civilization fall into decay.

For moderate Muslims, Ijtihad is a way of life, which simultaneously allows Islam to reign supreme in the heart and the mind to experience unfettered freedom of thought. A moderate Muslim is therefore one who cherishes freedom of thought while recognizing the existential necessity of faith. She aspires for change, but through the power of mind and not through planting mines.

Moderate Muslims aspire for a society – a city of virtue -- that will treat all people with dignity and respect. There will be no room for political or normative intimidation. Individuals will aspire to live an ethical life because they recognize its desirability. Communities will compete in doing good and politics will seek to encourage good and forbid evil. They believe that the internalization of the message of Islam can bring about the social transformation necessary for the establishment of the virtuous city. The only arena in which Moderate Muslims permit excess is in idealism.

That this is largely a battle between modernists and anti-modernists (reactionaries) within Islam is also supported by Louay Safi in a National Press Club interview:

Louay Safi, a founding member and director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington and president of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, cited a long-running debate within his religion between "traditionalists" and "reformists" over "how to adapt Islam to modern society and how to adapt modern society to Islam."

Related to this, a growing number of Muslims who moved to the West have been seeking "how to reconcile the Muslim identity to the American identity, to the European identity," he said.

Safi said that Muslims moving to the United States, including many who came as students, "saw they can live their Islamic values in this country, and they can participate fully in the American society." The sort of democracy they experienced, "where you can have a voice in public policy, [and] where you can hold public officials accountable," often differed from the "fake democracy" back home, where ruling elites retained power through rigged elections, he said.

In other words, moderate Islam is a combination of Islam and the Enlightenment ideals of freedom of conscience. It is important to remember that when Christianity was the same age as Islam is today, the Reformation and the Enlightenment were still centuries in the future, and Christianity had every bit as bloody a history as Islam has had in terms of conquering lands. Today, Christianity is a very different thing than it was in the 13th or 14th century, and that is due largely to its mixing with the ideas of the Enlightenment. In fact, Safi specifically invokes this period in time and the importance of Islam engaging it, and points to American Muslims as the forefront of that engagement:

European modern history started with the European Renaissance that took place in southern Europe at the frontier of cultural exchange between Islam and the West. It was the contrast between the self and the other that brought about the first signs of cultural change. For many of us, European Renaissance is the metaphor, a frame of reference, that guide our discussion and tickle our imagination...

Faced with oppression, lack of opportunity for creativity and growth, many Muslims found their ways to the West, seeking the opportunity to grow: academically, spiritually, economically, politically, and socially.

Muslim presence is the US as a growing and vibrant community is quite recent, and it is still too early to tell the direction to which this almost unprecedented experimentation is going. But regardless of that direction, the US provides a free, relatively speaking, environment for Islam to interact with modern society...

Muslims can provide an alternative model of society in which religion is reconciled with the modern society. In so doing, Muslim can provide new vision of how Islam can be lived in modern society to the full extent, and how religion can be reconciled with social living without relapsing into the medieval way of life.

As religious traditions mix with modernist ideas, those traditions moderate. But in the process, this will inevitably provoke a furious reaction from the extremists. It did so within Christianity and it is doing so within Islam today. The modernists will win eventually, but in the meantime there will be a good deal of bloodshed. And during this process of upheaval, it is important to remember that the Bin Ladens of the world view their moderate and reasonable Muslim brethren as at least as bad as, if not worse than, the American infidels. And it is important to note that moderate Muslims like Khan, even while disagreeing with much of what America and the West is doing in response to the threat of Islamic Radicalism, are striking back at the extremists. In an open letter to Osama Bin Laden, Khan wrote:

You and those like you are dedicated to killing and bringing misery to people wherever they are. God blessed you with the capacity to lead and also endowed you with enormous resources. You could have used your influence in Afghanistan to develop it, to bring it out of poverty and underdevelopment and show the world what Islam can do for those who believe in it. You chose to provoke and bring war to a people who had already been devastated by wars...

Before we rush to condemn America we must remember that even today millions of poor and miserable people all across the world are lining up outside US embassies eager to come to America, not just to live here but to become an American. No Muslim country today, can claim that people of other nations and other faiths see it as a promise of hope, equality, dignity and prosperity.

Yes, we American Muslims will continue to challenge the Bush administrations’ proposal to wage war against Iraq. We think a regime change in Washington is as necessary as a regime change in Baghdad, but that is an intramural affair. Once the war is declared, make no mistake Mr. Saddam Hussain and Mr. Bin Laden, We are with America. We will fight with America and we will fight for America. We have a covenant with this nation, we see it as a divine commitment and we will not disobey the Quran (9:4) – we will fulfill our obligations as citizens to the land that opened its doors to us and promised us equality and dignity even though we have a different faith. I am sure Mr. Bin Laden, you can neither understand nor appreciate this willingness to accept and welcome the other.

Sure at this moment out of anger, frustration and fear, some in America have momentarily forgotten their own values. I am confident that, God willing, this moment of shock and insecurity will pass and America will once again become the beacon of freedom, tolerance and acceptance that it was before September 11th. On that day Mr. Binladen, you not only killed 3000 innocent Americans, many of whom were also Muslims, but you signed the death warrants of many innocent people who will die in this war on terror and many more who will live but will suffer the consequences, the pain and the misery of war. Before September 11th, the US was giving aid to Afghanistan and was content to wait for the Iraqi people to free themselves and the rest of the world from their dictator. On that day you changed the rules of the game and Muslims in many places are suffering as a direct consequence.

You can find Khan's syndicated columns on the web. While I disagree with him on many things, he represents a movement that is active in fighting against reactionary Islam from within. We need to build bridges and strengthen ties with these voices of reason within Islam, both in the US and abroad, and the last thing we should be doing is alienating those within Islam who are on our side. As Safi said,

"The Muslim American has become the target in many ways," Safi said. "By becoming suspect, our ability to play the [bridge-building] role has been reduced" which he said is unfortunate because "they are the best ambassador[s] of this country to the Muslim world."

Safi said the growth of terrorism is "really a direct result of authoritarian regimes that stifle debate in their countries, that have been using iron fist policies to silence opposition." Such policies had the effect of "silencing moderate voices, and the only voices that we can hear today on this side of the ocean are the voices of those who can make noise through violent actions," Safi said.

But, he argued, the larger Muslim community is definitely more interested in having a good relationship with the developed world as a means to better their conditions. "I think we have to take this opportunity to shift our support from supporting dictators and authoritarian regimes to supporting democratic movements including those who see Islam as the foundation for reform," he said.

Safi said it would be hard to imagine a shift toward democracy in the Muslim world without Islam playing the leading role. "Turkey can probably give us some clues as how a positive Islamic reform can bring about true democracy without resorting to violence," he said.

Folks, we are not going to drag a billion Muslims into the modern world. That can only be done by Muslims themselves. And there are many powerful voices within Islam to do that. There are hundreds of prominent voices within Islam speaking out on this, not just Safi and Khan. Mahdi Bray, Husain Haqqani, Azizah al-Hibri, Chandra Muzaffar, Tarik Ramadan, Maulana Waheeduddin Khan and many others are standing up within Islam to condemn the forces of reaction and to build bridges between moderate Muslims and the west. If we fail to meet them halfway across that bridge, we do so at our own peril.

Jack Balkin, Stand-Up Comic

2004-03-12T11:44:00.000-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, are you ready for your headliner? You've seen him on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and on the HBO special of his sold out tour with Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds, The Barristers of Comedy. Please welcome, from Yale University, Professor Jack Balkin:

Because the Federal Marriage Amendment seems not to have taken off, the Administration is offering this carefully worded substitute, the Protection of Democracy Amendment:

Democracy in the United States shall consist only of the union of one Republican candidate and one Presidency. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that Presidential status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon non-Republican persons or groups.

Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan explained that the new amendment will ensure that "the wrong sort of people don't hold power in our freedom loving democracy." When asked to specify who the "wrong sort of people" were, he replied, "I didn't say that."

Attorney General John Ashcroft stated that the Administration had tried unsuccessfully to convince the courts that only Republicans could be members of the federal government on the basis of Article IV, section 4, the so-called Republican Government Clause, which states that "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union, a republican form of government." "As I've said to the courts over and over," Ashcroft explained, " what part of the word "republican" don't you understand?"

Hilarious. Go read the rest of it. And while you're there, take a look at this post analyzing the new Iraqi Constitution:

Article 23.

The enumeration of the foregoing rights must not be interpreted to mean that they are the only rights enjoyed by the Iraqi people.

Well, you might as well just invite Bill Brennan and his crazy liberal brethren to set up shop in Iraq. But wait, it gets worse:

They enjoy all the rights that befit a free people possessed of their human dignity, including the rights stipulated in international treaties and agreements, other instruments of international law that Iraq has signed and to which it has acceded, and others that are deemed binding upon it, and in the law of nations. Non-Iraqis within Iraq shall enjoy all human rights not inconsistent with their status as non-citizens.

What? Incorporate international human rights law into the Constitution? Where's the National Review crowd when you need them?

We hope you enjoyed the show. Jack will be selling his new CD, Sewer? I Hardly Know Her, in the lobby as you leave. If you've doubled your two drink minimum, please drive home really fast so the cops will have less time to notice you, and don't forget to tip your waitresses, they all have drug habits to support just like the rest of us. Thanks for coming to the Comedy Outhouse and don't forget to reserve your seats for next week's special show featuring Pauly Shore and Carrot Top.

Answer Creationist Feedback

2004-03-12T11:42:00.000-05:00

Rob McEwen has left a comment on a post that has slipped way down the page, and as it's worth responding to and fisking in some detail, I thought I'd bring it up top to answer it.

Pre-script: Turns out this guy left this same comment, word for word and breathless exclamation point for breathless exclamation point, on Paul Myers' blog. Hilarious.

In his comment, Rob pretty much pulls out the first 3 chapters of what I facetiously refer to as the Creationist Jokebook. This consists of a laundry list of arguments that anyone who has followed this dispute for any period of time has heard over and over again. It is generally made up of out-of-context quotations, half-truths, distortions and sometimes outright lies, which get passed around from creationist to creationist, each quoting the other, as more pamphlets get written and more webpages get put up. Each new person who finds one of those pages thinks that he has stumbled upon incontrovertible proof that scientists are lying to us, but they never bother to actually research it for themselves to see if what they're being told is true or not. And typically they do what Rob has done, which is copy them pretty much verbatim, usually with lots of EMPHASIS with all caps and lots of exclamation points to give the proper "oh my god, we've been lied to!" attitude. I know this because I used to be one of those people. In my late teen years, I read all of the creationist pamphlets and books from the ICR and I'd throw that material out at people too. After all, these were Real Scientists and they told me that the Real Evidence proves that God created everything just a few thousand years ago, unlike what those infernal atheistic humanist pagan infidel scientists want you to believe. But as time went on, and I learned more, I found that the ones who weren't presenting the evidence honestly were the creationists that I was relying upon. In most cases, they probably aren't really lying, just fooling themselves because of an a priori attachment to a faith that they will allow nothing to question. But the result is the same. Now, on to the specific issues raised in Rob's feedback comment.

Darwinistic Evolution is scientifically impossible!

I don't mean to start this out rudely, and I really will try to reign in my sarcasm on this post, but I just got a chuckle out of this. The word "Darwinistic" just sounds like such a Bushism, doesn't it? On a slightly deeper level, perhaps it's worth noting that one of the best clues one can get for whether someone actually understands the material they're discussing or if they're just cribbing from someone else who claims to is to watch their use of language. They almost always will use words and phrases that don't really make much sense, but that sound technical and sophisticated because they have a lot of syllables. The key is not the use of big words or technical words, but whether they're used correctly or not. And in this case, there simply is no such word as "Darwinistic" and the phrase "Darwinistic evolution" is fairly meaningless.

(1) The random assimilation of the first single-celled organism is mathematically impossible. The simplest known single-celled organism has about 200 proteins. Due to know necessities, scientists can scale this back (in theory) to a bare MINIMUM of about 100 proteins. The chances of just A SINGLE protein coming together by chance is roughly 1 over 10 to the 60th power. To put this in perspective:

(number of atoms in the universe)
X
(number of seconds universe existed)
X
(number of metabolic processes in a cell per second)

...is a number with about ONLY 125 zeros.

To get 100 of these proteins to come together in the simplest single-celled organism imaginable would need the following chances:

at best, one over 10 to the 600th power!

I presume he means 1 x 10⁶⁰⁰ and not 1/10⁶⁰⁰. This is what we refer to as the Argument from Really Big Numbers, or as Tim Sandefur calls it, the Argument from Wow. It's a very common argument, repeated even by creationist scientists like John Baumgardner who should know better. There are a lot of variations on this, Baumgardner's version goes like this:

A protein molecule is like a long chain of Legos of 20 different types that folds into a complex 3D structure. For a chain with 300 such Lego-like pieces, there are 10 to the 390th power possible configurations. Studies indicate, however, that for a given biological functionality only one out of every 10 to the 195th power of these possibilities has any level of that functionality. Are there enough generations in the history of life on earth to search through the possibilities and have any reasonable shot at finding a viable candidate? The quick answer is an emphatic no! If one compares with an estimate for the maximum number of molecules that could possibly existed in all the history of the cosmos, assuming every atom in the cosmos interacts with another atom once every femtosecond (a thousand million million times per second) for a span of 30 billion years,one would require 10 to the 82nd power such universes to have enough rolls of the die!

Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Makes you say "Wow! That's a Really Big Number!", doesn't it? Well it shouldn't. Why? Because it presumes pure randomness, which does not apply when we're talking about the combining of amino acids to form a protein, and because it misunderstands basic probability. My friend Marshall Berman, who worked with Baumgardner at Los Alamos labs, shows the problems with this kind of reasoning:

Mark Twain said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Baumgardner purports to calculate the probability of life arising due to random interactions over the life of the universe. If true, Baumgardner would turn the scientific world upside down. But it is not true. Baumgardner uses statistics and probability theory improperly. He assumes randomness that doesn't exist. Indeed, by assuming randomness for non-random processes, one can show that almost any event is extremely improbable.

Let's run a scientific experiment. Go outside and pick up a small rock. The probability of that rock being on that spot on the earth *by chance alone* is roughly the area of the stone divided by the surface area of the earth, or about one chance in 10 to the 18th power (one followed by 18 zeros). If picking up the stone took one second, the probability of such an event occurring at this precise moment over the lifetime of the universe is now even smaller by another factor 10 to the 18th power! This simple event is so incredibly unlikely (essentially zero probability) that one wonders how it could be accomplished!

How can such an "unlikely" event occur? The problem is our initial false assumption of randomness. The rock and you arrived at that spot at that time by mechanistic processes.

Ian Musgrave also has an excellent response to creationist probability arguments in the Talk.Origins Archive.

(2) Mutations have NEVER produced additional DNA structures. NEVER! Even as scientists study mutations in fruit flies or viruses... the mutations sometime just scramble existing DNA... but MORE OFTEN, they DELETE DNA structures. Certainly, "survival of the fittest" is a means by which nature purges the gene pool of bad mutations, but NO evolution occurs here. (This alone is a DEATH BLOW to Evolution.) I repeat... not a SINGLE scientist in the entire world has EVER recorded a mutation which produced additional DNA structures or material.... but DELETIONS are recorded ALL THE TIME!!!

One of the things that I find myself saying quite often to creationists is that the number of exclamation points one puts at the end of a sentence has no more bearing on the truth of that sentence than the volume of someone's voice has to the truth of what they're saying. Grand rhetorical declarations of "death blows" don't lend any more credibility to a claim, and in fact tend to reduce it. And in this claim we have yet another fancy-sounding but superfluous phrase - "additional DNA structures". What on earth does that mean? Is he claiming that no mutation has ever resulted in a higher number of base pairs in a genome? A higher number of chromosomes? A higher number of nucleotide sequences? Frankly, I doubt if he knows what he means by it because he is likely just copying it from somewhere else. Regardless, it's flat wrong. We observe increases in the size of the genome from mutations all the time. All he has to do is look up "gene duplication" or "polyploidy" in a good science book and he will see lots and lots of examples. The argument also presumes, of course, that "additional DNA structures" are required in order for a new trait to emerge, but that isn't true. We have also observed how a simple reorganization of the genome through frame shift mutations can result in new traits emerging that didn't exist previously. Rearrange a few amino acids and entirely new protein functions can result. The nylon-eating bacteria is a textbook example of this.

(3) As a result, when evolutionists say that mutations combined with natural selection only requires a great deal of time to produce Evolution... this is like a storekeeper who loses a little bit of money on each sale and then says, "don't worry, I'll make it up on volume".

Quasi-clever, but it's merely a rhetorical conclusion based upon the two false statements that were debunked above.

(4) Because the process of Evolution depends on mutations adding DNA and being "selected" through survival of the fittest... it is, by definition, a very, very slow process. Too many mutations in one generation and who is that creature going to mate with? (not to mention, this usually produces a "miscarriage"). As a result of this process being SO slow, the fossil record should have so many imperceptible different variations on each species that paleontologists should have extreme difficulty even classifying ANY newly dug up fossil ("this is 40% the way from creature A to creature B", for example). Instead, in the fossil record, we find fully formed types with little to no variation in between these forms.

First, it doesn't rely on mutations "adding DNA", that was already shown to be false above in this post. Second, this prediction of what we should find is a non sequitur. The speed of evolution has nothing to do with the rate or probability of fossilization. It also ignores the fact that speciation will almost always take place in peripheral isolates (smaller subsets of a population that have been reproductively isolated from the bulk of the species), which reduces the chance of fossilization considerably. But even with all of those caveats and corrections, his claim is simply false. The fossil record falls into the only pattern that it could fall into for evolution to be validated. Let me copy what I wrote a couple of months ago in response to a similar claim:

If evolution is true, and each of these major animal groups split off from the previous one, then what would we expect? Well, we would expect that since each of these new groups split off from an already existing one, the order of appearance within those groups should be as conspicuous as the order of appearance in general. If the first amphibians split off from fish, then the first amphibians could only be slightly different than fish; if birds evolved from reptiles, then the first birds must have been very similar to reptiles; and so forth. And what does the fossil record show? Precisely that. The first amphibians to appear are the most fish-like, so much so that they retained internal gills and were still primarily aquatic. Over time, amphibians become more and more diversified and less fish-like, with later forms being successively more terrestrial and less aquatic. The first birds to appear are so reptile-like that they would be classified as theropod dinosaurs if not for the feathers. We now have multiple feathered theropod species to bridge the gap, and they all appear very early and share most of their traits with reptiles, not with modern birds. Over time, they diversified and became less reptile-like. The same can be said of the first mammals, which are so identical to the therapsid reptiles that they evolved from that where exactly you draw the line between the two groups is largely academic. And just like the other lineages, they start out with only one or two species that looks just like their presumed ancestor, then over time new branches appear that are successively less like those ancestors and more like modern mammals. This is exactly what evolution would predict. Indeed, if it wasn't that way, evolution would be falsified. If modern birds appeared all at once in the fossil record, with entirely avian skeletal structure and feathers and fully adapted for powered flight, there would be no way to link them to reptiles, and the same is true of every other major animal group. But they don't appear that way, and the order in which they do appear is precisely what evolution predicts.

(5) The whole dating process is deceptive. The geologists use the fossils found nearby to date their rocks. The paleontologists use the nearby rocks to date their fossils. Circular reasoning! Also, carbon dating only goes back a couple of thousand years. Radiometric dating is a joke because it DEPENDS on several factors being a certain way and these factors are conveniently assumed and are NOT provable or testable.

Not a single one of these 3 statements is true. Geologists do not use fossils found "nearby" to date their rocks, and paleontologists do not use the rocks "nearby" to date their fossils. It is true that index fossils are used to approximate the age of a sedimentary unit while in the field, but that's based upon a mountain of geological data and is entirely testable. The principle of superposition can be checked against radiometric dates and when they are, the two always match up (the lower strata show dates far older than the upper strata) except in those rare circumstances in which a fault thrust or overthrust has taken place (and those instances are easily discernable because they leave behind a great deal of evidence of the event).

Second, carbon dating is good to about 50,000 years, with more recent technological advances perhaps pushing that to 70,000+ years, not "a couple of thousand years" as Rob claims. And carbon dating isn't used to determine the age of the earth or of fossils, so it's pretty much irrelevant to the discussion.

Third, his claim about the assumptions of radiometric dating is simply false. Every "assumption" can and has been tested, including the consistency of decay rates under every conceivable condition.

As a paranthetical aside, I'm not sure I'll ever understand what drives people to make such bold and dogmatic assertions about issues that they simply have no understanding of. Is it ego? I just don't get it. I mean, I suppose I did the same thing, and on the same issue, when I was a teenager. But I grew out of it.

I'm going to have to split the next one into multiple parts, it contains so many different claims.

(6) Regarding dating, many, many things are found in the "wrong" layers all the time.

For example? What is a "thing" found in the wrong layer? If you're referring to silly claims like a spark plug being found in 50 million year old rock or the Meiner footprint, please do some research before you throw them out. They've all been debunked, most of them by creationists themselves. Only outright frauds like Kent Hovind and Carl Baugh continue to use such material.

Also, Charles Lyell's geological layers are almost always in the wrong order or have missing layers.

I didn't realize the layers belonged to Lyell. Odd, since he's been dead for a century and a half. This is truly a bizarre statement all the way around. In what specific place do we find geological layers "in the wrong order" other than the obvious few places where thrusting has occured? And again, before you start throwing out claims like the allegedly fake fault thrust at Glacier National Park, do some research first. It will likely save you a bit of embarrassment.

As far as missing layers are concerned, why is this a problem? Deposition doesn't take place at all places on the earth at all times. If there were NOT "missing layers", then virtually everything we know about geology would be wrong because there has to be room for erosion to take place, right?

The geological record we have is better explained by a flood (as in Noah) rather than millions of years and with an Ice Age. A world-wide & roughly year-long flood would "lay down" sedimentary layers in a very inconsistent way... many strong tendencies, but with a lot of inconsistencies. Millions of years, on the other hand, would be MUCH more uniform. The geological evidence, therefore, points more to a flood.

This is simply gibberish. Flood geology fails entirely to explain the geological record. Let's just take the Grand Canyon, which preserves most of the earth's history all in one big geologic column. Please explain how a global flood could, in one year, lay down alternating layers of sandstone, shale and limestone, each of which requires an entirely different depositional environement when a flood only affords a single depositional environment. 2/3 of the way up the canyon we find tracks and burrows and nesting sites in a desert sandstone formation left by terrestrial animals. Did they manage to tread water for 6 months, live without food and sleep, and avoid drowning in the raging waters that were depositing sediments at several feet per hour beneath them so they could wait for a desert environment to bust out in the middle of this global flood? Sorry, this is just a silly claim.

Also, the EXCELLENT PRESERVATION of so many fossils is better explained by a huge flood.

This might be true if all fossils were found in flood deposits, but they're not. In fact most fossils are found in deposits that could not possibly have formed during a flood.

Ironically, the largest major dinosaur parks across the world claim that their dinosaurs died in a catastrophic flood.

More silliness. I suspect he is referring to Jack Horner's discovery of a dinosaur boneyard in Montana where a huge herd of Maiasaurs was killed by a volcanic eruption and then washed out by a resulting flood from a dammed up lake being breeched and deposited into a pit. But this is a local event that explains the data locally. Globally, there is not only no evidence that dinosaurs were killed in a great flood, there is powerful evidence against it. The existence of dinosaur nesting sites alone, many of which have also been found by Horner, disproves this ridiculous claim. Such sites are found in numerous strata of different ages throughout the triassic, jurassic and cretaceous, all of which were allegedly laid down during the flood. How on earth did dinosaurs manage to build nesting sites to tend to their young in the middle of a global flood?

(7) As a result of these things, the science of evolution has degenerated into a pseudo-science. Unlike REAL science, it fails to make risky predictions.

Refer to my earlier statement about predictions on the patterns found in the fossil record. If that pattern did not show what it shows, evolution would be falsified. If the patterns of life did not show nested heirarchies, evolution would be falsified. Find a single mammalian fossil in precambrian rock, and evolution is falsified. But none of those things are found.

Now I'm sure Rob really believes that the claims he made here are true. I once believed them too. But I really do recommend doing some serious research, and that means more than just copying from creationist webpages. Most of the arguments that he has made here would be laughed out of class even by smarter and better educated creationists like Kurt Wise or Art Chadwick. They tend to cringe when they see such absurdities get repeated over and over again. There's a reason for that.

Barnett, Bork and Unenumerated Rights

2004-03-11T11:40:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Rowe, this month's guest blogger on Tim Sandefur's Freespace Blog, is in the middle of reading Randy Barnett's Restoring the Lost Constitution, and he's blogging about it. I have not read the book yet, but Barnett is probably my favorite constitutional scholar. The other day I mentioned the absurdity of the Boston Globe putting Barnett and Bork together in the category of those who advocate "original intent", and Rowe's post shows some of the reasons why it's so ridiculous. For instance,

Three, one of the most powerful arguments against a Bill of Rights at the time of the American Founding was that the Founders were fearful that someone might interpret its inclusion exactly as Robert Bork does: that once a list is enumerated, those are the only rights that the people have against the state, all others are “surrendered to the government.”

And further,

Four, that—again contra Robert Bork—neither the 9th Amendment, nor the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment are either “dead letters” or “essentially incomprehensible, thus void”—that the Framers intended both of these provisions to be used to secure unenumerated “natural rights” or “liberty rights.” To guard against the very reasonable fear mentioned above, Madison proposed the 9th Amendment.

Read the whole thing, and read Barnett's book as well. I think he is dead on in his position that the constitution establishes a presumption of liberty that requires the government to justify any limitations placed upon the individual.

Scalia and "Invented Rights"

2004-03-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave a speech at a conference in New Orleans yesterday. Among other things, he said the following:

"It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution," Scalia said at a conference Uptown on the merit selection of judges.

"So we now have a constitutional right to abortion, something that had been criminal for 200 years," he said. "We have a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, something else that had been criminal for 200 years."

Now the article doesn't give the context for those comments. It's possible that what he said was more nuanced than an isolated quote can show. But if he's making the simple argument that any ruling that establishes that people have the right to do what law has long forbidden, that's a ridiculous argument. Brown v Board of Education overturned a long tradition of anti-black laws, including an established Supreme Court precedent in Plessy v Ferguson. Would Scalia argue that forced segregation should have been maintained simply because it had been that way for centuries? One would hope not.

Likewise the laws against interracial marriage that the Supreme Court overturned in 1967 in Loving v Virginia. Nowhere in the constitution was there any mention of such laws, which had a very long history. At the time of the founding of the US, most of the states had laws against interracial marriage or interracial fornication. Surely Scalia would be consistent and say that this decision is another example of judges being "entirely liberated from the text of the constitution" and that it was wrongly decided. Surely Scalia would have agreed with the Dred Scott decision, which was decided largely on the same basis he is arguing - that laws against slavery had a long history in America and were in place at the time of the constitution, so obviously the constitution did not provide any protection to slaves whatsoever.

I plan to write another essay soon on the issue of Scalia and majoritarianism.

The Meaning of Life is That It Ends

2004-03-11T00:41:00.000-05:00

To those of you who come here to read my views on science and religion and politics, this post will probably come as something of a shock. But in the process of dealing with a very painful situation, my thoughts have turned inward. That turning inward is fueled also by the fact that next week will be the 7th anniversary of my mother's death. And it is that story that I feel compelled to tell.

My mother had quite a life. She gave birth to her first child, my brother Jack, at the age of 16. Jack's birthday would forever be a bittersweet day for her, however, because her father died in a car accident on his way to the hospital to see his first grandson born. My mother had 5 children by the age of 23, four with her first husband and one with my father. I was number 6, but I would come along many years later. She never graduated from high school, but somehow managed to build a career that ultimately led to a high administrative position with Michigan State University.

When she was 29, she became pregnant with me. She loved to tell the story of how she thought I was a case of the flu. She hadn't been feeling well and went to see our family doctor. He informed her that she would be getting over that case of the flu in about 7 months. She was stunned, and she went to my father's office in tears, thinking he would be upset. Alas, he was thrilled by it and it became a big turning point for him as well, but that is another story for another day. My parents divorced when I was 8, but it was the most amazing divorce you ever saw. They divorced better than most people marry and remained friends until the day she died. She married a third time a couple years later, to my stepfather Bill, and they remained married until she died. That poor man didn't know what he was getting into, talk about marrying a whole family!

About 11 years ago, my mother's health was getting very bad and she went into the Mayo clinic for a full evaluation to find out what was going on. After it was done, they flew back to Michigan and met with the whole family to give us the news. She had been diagnosed with an extremely rare condition called Alpha One syndrome. There is a protein in your lungs whose function is to clean the lungs out, and this cleaning process goes on all day every day, but her body did not produce that protein. And after smoking for 27 years, without even that normal process of cleaning going on, she was reduced to about 25% total lung capacity. She would have to have a transplant, but we were fortunate that she lived only about 45 minutes from the University of Michigan Hospital, one of the premier transplant centers in the world. One of the things that makes UofM Medical Center so incredible (and I say that as a diehard MSU guy) is that the transplant unit there really is a community. The whole family (all 248 of us) went down and met with former transplant patients and their families, as well as others who were on the list. All of the transplant patients knew each other, as much by their number as their name - single lung transplant #34, heart/lung transplant #8, and so forth. Those who had received transplants and their families would return there once a month to meet with and encourage the people still on the waiting list and their families, give them tips on how to handle the stress and the physical recovery after the surgery, and so forth. Everyone swapped phone numbers and they really did reach out to each other. It kind of formed one big family. One woman in particular, Mary, was like the center of this whole transplant universe. She had both a heart and a lung transplanted, and she was an absolute dynamo. She worked tirelessly to promote organ donation, running in 5 and 10k races to show what transplant patients could do and how much the donation of an organ can do for someone. One of the most incredible and inspiring people I've ever met.

Anyway, my mom went on the transplant list. She had some things going for her. She was only in her mid-50s, which was fairly young for a transplant and was in otherwise good health. Those things are important in terms of whether you get picked. There's a huge shortage of donated organs, you see, and the doctors are forced to ration them out by such factors as who is likely to get the most use of it. Still it took 3 years to get a lung, during which time we had a couple of close calls. She got pneumonia about 2 years in and came very, very close to dying. She recovered from that, but still had to wait another year to get picked. I'll never forget that phone call. It's hard to believe it was 8 years ago. I was at work and one of my employees took the call and transferred it to me. I picked up the phone to hear my stepfather say, "Get to Ann Arbor as fast as you can, they have a lung for your mom." I made the normally 2 hour long drive to Ann Arbor from where I was in a time that would make Dale Earnhardt jealous, even in the middle of what was a horrible late winter storm. In fact, about an hour after I got there, my older sister and her husband were in a car accident just outside of Ann Arbor and were taken to the same hospital my mother was in. Thankfully, they were both okay, just a few bruises, but I spent half the time while my mom was in surgery running back and forth between the 4th floor and the emergency room in a bit of a panic. Later that night, I drove to Detroit to pick up my brother Jack, who had flown in from Colorado. The whole family was together for the first time in many years. God, what a joyous occasion it was.

She came through the surgery perfectly. The tragic death of one organ donor, through the brilliance and dedication of those doctors and nurses, saved 4 lives that day - two single lung transplants, a heart transplant, and a liver transplant. The most difficult problem for lung transplant patients is not so much the surgery itself as the recovery from it. They have to split your rib cage and the physical trauma on the body is horrendous. It takes a long time and a great deal of physical therapy to recover from it. Unfortunately, about 3 months after the surgery, my mother slipped and fell and blew a couple of disks in her back badly, which prevented her from doing the physical therapy required to complete the recovery. From that point on, she got worse and worse. A few months later, she began to experience rejection, which is pretty normal. About half of all transplant patients go into rejection. Of that half, about half make it and half don't, and they don't really know why that is. But because her body had never recovered from the physical trauma of the surgery, she just didn't have the resources to fight the rejection. Ultimately, she just gave up, and who can blame her? In the last couple of months, I talked to her many times about it and she would say, "I just wish I could go to sleep and have it all be over with." Well, that's what ended up happening.

At one point she went back into UofM hospital for a minor surgical procedure to install a stent in the new lung to hold a valve open, in the hope that it might help. I had to leave the state for a conference during that time, so before I left I went to visit her and she expressed again that she was just so tired. I told her how much I loved her and I encouraged her to go down and have this procedure done, maybe it would help her feel better so she'll want to keep fighting. And if it didn't, that was okay. The next day I left for my conference and on the second day I was there I was paged by the hotel operator. My stepfather's voice on the other end of the phone again, but this time the tone was more ominous. "Can you get back here any time soon? Things didn't go well with the surgery." I didn't even wait to call my boss, I grabbed my things from the hotel room and hit the road as quickly as I could. When I got there, my stepfather told me all that had happened. She had gone into cardiac arrest while in the recovery room, still under anesthesia. They had managed to save her but she was on a ventilator and she had been down for nearly 9 minutes by the time they got her revived, meaning she would be severely brain damaged and would probably never come off the vent. We waited for the whole family to arrive and Dr. White, the head of the transplant unit and the man who performed the transplant, came in to talk with us and answer our questions. What he told us was that basically there was no hope for a recovery, that they could probably keep her alive indefinitely, but she will never be able to live without the ventilator and the other machines, nor would she be the same person she was before because of the brain damage.

My mother had a living will and it made very clear that she did not want to live under those circumstances. The ultimate decision was up to Bill, but he wanted the family to make it together. We sat together in a private waiting room. We hugged and we cried and we agreed. It was time to let her go. The next morning, we all met in her room. The doctors had upped the dosage of morphine and who knows what else to make sure that she would go peacefully. Gathered around her bed, holding hands, were all of her children, including a few "strays" that she had raised as her own, her husband and her two best friends. There were 2 doctors and 2 nurses there as well, and they shut off all of the machines except for the heart monitor. As we stood there holding hands, tears running down our faces (as they do mine again today as I recall this), we watched the monitor slowly count down....67....48....30....18....5....goodbye, Mom. I love you. It was the most profound experience imaginable. Even the doctors and nurses, who must be accustomed to such things, were wiping tears from their eyes. Bless every single one of them. Not only were they brilliant at their jobs, they showed such incredible humanity to us throughout the entire 4 year ordeal.

The story doesn't end there. A short time after my mother found out she needed a transplant, she and I had a long talk and she asked me if, when the time came, I would give the eulogy at her funeral. At that time, I had just decided to get out of stand up comedy, and I remember joking with her, saying, "Mom, I don't do stand up anymore. I don't need the stage time that bad." (insert rimshot) She laughed. I told her that I would be honored to do that. But here I was, face to face with actually having to DO it and not knowing what I would say. That night, as I lay in bed in the hotel that we were all staying at, I thought and cried and thought some more. Suddenly, at about 4 am, I got this thought....how many times had I heard someone say, or even said myself, "When I die, don't be sad. Don't mourn my death, celebrate my life. Tell funny stories about me and laugh." We've all heard it, we've all said it, but who actually does it? Me, damn it. The next morning I gathered all of my brothers and sisters together and I said, "I want to hear every funny story of us growing up. I was too young to remember a lot of them, I know, so you guys have to fill me in. I want every stupid thing we ever did to stress her out, every boneheaded thing we ever did that made her say 'what the hell were you thinking?'. All of it." And we sat and we laughed and we told stories and we pointed at each other and we got red in the face with embarrassment at the things we did. And from that flowed this eulogy, it just poured out of me as I typed. And 3 days later, at a funeral home in Lansing, Michigan, we had 200 people, on the most somber and mournful of occasions, laughing. I'm sure there were some there who thought it irreverent and inappropriate, as I told stories about me sleepwalking when I was 6 years old and peeing on the living room rug, of my two older brothers and the mischief they caused on a daily basis growing up. I don't care. We were celebrating her life, not merely mourning her death. And somewhere, if she's still there, I know she was smiling.

With any death, there is a normal process of grieving that one must go through. At some point you will face it, if you haven't already, and my only advice is to allow yourself to experience it all - anger, sadness, bitterness, understanding, peace. None of those feelings are "wrong", just don't linger on any of them for too long except the last one. I knew when I wrote the eulogy for my mother that I would have to address the religious questions delicately. I don't have any idea what happens to us when we die, if anything. I'd like to believe that we go on, that we will be reunited after death, but I know that what I'd like to think isn't necessarily the truth. So what I said then is what I will say now. There is one form of immortality that I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, does exist. Each of us lives on in the lives of those we touched while we are alive.

The night before the funeral, there was a viewing. I was there along with most of the family to greet all of her friends and colleagues who came to give us their condolences and their kindness. There were small children there, my nieces and nephews, running around and making noise, relatively oblivious to the somberness of the situation, focused with great commitment on the task of being small children. My mother's best friend, Denise, whispered to me, "I hope no one is offended by all of the kids being so noisy." I just laughed and said, "Denise, do you think a woman who had some 20 grandchildren would be comfortable in a room that wasn't filled with a child's laughter? If it was quiet and morose in here, she'd get up and leave." But I know that in the lives of every one of those grandchildren, all now well into their pre-teen or teenage years and some even adulthood, she lives on. They will think of her when they go fishing, remembering how grandma took them fishing at the cottage and taught them how to put the worm on the hook. They will think of her when they make the pies she taught them to make in her kitchen. They will think of her, as I do now, in times of great difficulty and they will remember the lessons she taught us all about perseverence and, more than anything, about the importance of family. She lost both parents and her only brother when she was barely an adult and she said many times that the reason she had so many children was so that we would never be alone. She succeeded. Thanks, Mom. You did good.

ACLU Defends Deviants

2004-03-10T11:39:00.000-05:00

I guess those who wondered just how far the depravity of the ACLU would go have their answer. We should have known that the slippery slope that the ACLU was on due to defending the rights of the KKK and NAMBLA would eventually lead to them defending even the likes of Jerry Falwell. Now remember, this is the same moron who, after the WTC bombings, said:

The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this. And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen."

With his partner-in-stupidity, Pat Robertson, replying "I totally concur." Of course, Robertson then claimed a few days later that he considered Falwell's comments "totally inappropriate." Oh hell, what's the difference, right? Hilarious.

But yes Jerry, even a deviant like you gets defended by the ACLU when the legal issue is important.

Flag Burning Again? Oi

2004-03-10T11:38:00.000-05:00

The Senate is once again holding hearings on a constitutional amendment banning flag burning. It's nice to know that in an age of 500 BILLION dollar deficits and terrorism around the world, this is what our elected leaders are wasting their time on. But of course, it's an election year and these kinds of issues help them display their shallow version of patriotism. So they'll posture and preen and gesture and whoop and it will be a grand show for the world to see. At what point do Americans grow up and drop this silly notion that patriotism is wrapped up in a colored piece of cloth? Probably never, I know. How about a constitutional amendment banning demagogues like Orrin Hatch from being elected the Grand Poobah of the Elks Lodge, much less Senator?

Libertarian Purity Test

2004-03-09T11:37:00.000-05:00

From Brian Caplan, the Libertarian Purity Test. I scored 35, which makes me solidly libertarian, but I tend to agree with Tim Sandefur (who scored 96, making him a hardcore libertarian) that the test tends to assume that only anarcho-capitalists are "true" libertarians.

Joe Carter is compiling the results from bloggers, as is Tim Lambert.

The Blogosphere on Judicial Activism

2004-03-09T11:33:00.000-05:00

The blogs interested in legal issues seem to be once again debating an issue, this time "judicial activism". As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the Boston Globe had a Sunday article on it quoting one blogger, Randy Barnett, and it seems to be spreading throughout the blogosphere. Barnett, of Boston University, has posted a brief tidbit on the article here.

Jack Balkin of Yale Law School has been taking on Jonah Goldberg and Stuart Buck on the issue.

Charles Petit, an intellectual property attorney, has one here.

And, as usual, Larry Solum of UCSD has come through with a terrific summation of the arguments that cuts through the political doubletalk.

The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is the essential truth of the argument I've been making on this blog for weeks now - that when politicians claim "judicial activism", they are saying nothing meaningful at all. All they are really saying is "we disagree with the decision". The bottom line, I think, is what Balkin said in his response to Buck:

The truth of the matter is, whether people like it our not, we have a two track system for changing constitutional meanings. Article V amendments, and Article III interpretations. Liberal judges and conservative judges alike engage in constitutional change through judicial interpretation. Although some judges say they are only following precedent or only following original understanding, that's just simply not true. They are using the modalities of precedent or history or text or structure in order to argue for their preferred vision of constitutional norms. (See my previous post on Scalia's jurisprudence for my discussion of how he selectively invokes original meaning and precedent to get where he wants to go).

The fact is, we are all living constitutionalists now; but only some of us are honest about it.

Which means that when someone declares "judicial activism", 9 times out of 10 they're just being disingenuous

The Truth About "Judicial Activism"

2004-03-08T20:49:00.000-05:00

The Boston Globe had an article written by Dave Denison about judicial activism on Sunday. The results were mixed. On the one hand, Denison does a fine job of illustrating what I have said previously (here and here, among other essays), that claims of "judicial activism" rarely have any objective meaning and are really just a cover for disagreement with the substance of a decision. President Bush darkly warned of those "activist judges" who rule "without regard for the will of the people" in the State of the Union speech, while Pat Buchanan decries the "judicial dictatorship" that we allegedly live under. But these are little more than buzzphrases used by political partisans and they drastically oversimplify serious questions of constitutional interpretation. As the Globe points out,

Indeed, the charge of judicial activism has become a "ubiquitous epithet" and unhelpful "scare phrase," Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman recently noted in The Washington Post. Constitutional law scholars across the political spectrum tend to cringe at the way the phrase is used in public debate.

"It's almost embarrassing for anyone who is a serious thinker about the Constitution to bandy it about," says Harvard University constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who has spoken out in defense of the SJC ruling.

"Most people who use the term don't provide a coherent definition of it. It typically means judicial opinions with which they disagree," says Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Boston University who considers himself a libertarian and a defender of "original intent" in Constitutional matters.

The article also points to at least the beginning of an attempt to give a more thoughtful meaning to the term and the concept:

In an article last spring in the magazine Legal Affairs, University of Chicago law professor Cass R. Sunstein offered a neutral definition of judicial activism. "A decision that is activist is not necessarily wrong," he wrote. "No one thinks that a court should uphold all actions of the other branches and so a court that is activist, in this sense, might be something to celebrate." By extension, a court that is "restrained" -- one that seldom strikes down laws or reverses bad precedents -- may be falling down on the job.

For terms like "judicial activism" and "judicial restraint" to have useful meaning, Sunstein argued, they must be modified. "A court that wrongly invalidates statutes might be said to show unjustified activism," he wrote, while one that frequently makes political decisions not remotely tethered to the Constitution might be held guilty of illegitimate activism. Furthermore, a court that wrongly upholds statutes might be said to show unjustified restraint, while a court that frequently fails to uphold clear Constitutional principles is guilty of illegitimate restraint. (The thrust of Sunstein's article was that the Rehnquist Court is acting with "illegitimate activism" -- as did the Warren Court on some occasions.)

Of course, Sunstein concedes, such terms do not eliminate the hard work of evaluating the merits of court decisions.

But the article stumbles badly when it tries to lump Randy Barnett and Robert Bork into a single category as those who advocate the doctrine of "original intent" as the primary means of constitutional interpretation:

Some originalists, or "strict constructionists," such as Robert Bork and Barnett (who makes the case in his new book, "Restoring the Lost Constitution"), believe the courts must base decisions on specific language in the Constitution and interpret it purely as it was meant at the time it was written.

I suspect that makes Barnett cringe, as well it should. Barnett's "originalism" and Bork's "originalism" are about as different as night and day, as Jonathan Rowe, Tim Sandefur's guest blogger for this month, points out in a brilliant post a couple days ago, and in this follow up post. Rowe writes:

Barnett’s originalism, as opposed to Bork’s, is far more in line with the ideals—that is, the original principles—that this nation was founded on. As Tim and others have reminded us at great length, this nation was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. In other words, on “natural right.” Yet, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Bork explicitly rejects the Declaration and in fact reacts to it as Dracula does to a cross. An originalist rejecting the original principles of natural right that this nation was founded on. Huh? Some originalist.

Bork is actually part of a school of “originalists” who believe in using the formalism of the Constitution not necessarily to secure the Declaration’s natural rights, but often to subvert them. As Thomas West describes this ideology, this form of “constitutionalism requires fidelity to the Constitution, to the institutions and mores created by the Constitution, and a willingness to turn away from the principles of the Declaration, so that they can be kept in check.”

These “originalists” reject that the “natural law” encapsulated in the Declaration is part and parcel of the “organic law” of this nation and that federal courts may properly apply or invoke it.

And as I have noted before, Bork also voids entire sections of the constitution, particularly the 9th amendment, as though the founders put them in there for no reason whatsoever. Bork is a fake originalist. Barnett is a genuine one. I'd be very curious to hear what Barnett thinks about this comparison and hope he writes something on the Volokh Conspiracy blog about it.

Philly Cheesesteak and the Nature of Evil

2004-03-08T11:32:00.000-05:00

Paul Myers has a wonderful post about his experience, as a Philadelphia native, eating a cheesesteak sandwich in Minnesota. It contains this paragraph:

You know, I don't think evil is loud or vicious or fiery or alarming. True evil is bland. It's tedium and boredom and mindrotting monotony. It's the sanctimonious certainty that something is good because it offends the smallest number of people. It's insipid. It sneaks in and tries to make you settle for the lowest common denominator, and strives to just generally lower your standards for everything. This sandwich was evil. Cthulhu-level evil.

One of the great things about blogs is that at least once a day I read something that makes me think, "Damn, I wish I'd written that."

Silly Arguments Against Gay Marriage

2004-03-07T20:50:00.000-05:00

Ryan Boots, of the Soundfury blog, has decided to vent his spleen about gay marriage. Basically, he doesn't like it one bit. And typical of those who oppose gay marriage, his arguments against it run the gamut from the outright false to the profoundly silly. He begins by saying:

I am weary of having of having to defend the institution. Marriage existed before any of the institutions we know today were created.

I'm always amazed that people think that they're defending the institution of marriage by preventing some people from participating in that institution. If marriage is such a good thing for straight couples, why on earth would it be a bad thing for gay couples? But wait, he's just getting warmed up. Unfortunately, it appears that he is arguing on pure emotion rather than reason. To wit:

I’m sick of being compelled to explain why two gay men getting hitched will impact “my marriage”. Okay, fine, let me get crass: TWO GUYS HAVING SEX MEANS NOTHING TO ME AND MY WIFE. There, are you happy I said it?

Is someone compelling you to explain why gay marraige impacts your marriage? I mean, it's a logical question. It's a question that certainly should be answered because it's irrational to argue that allowing gays to marry is going to hurt "marriage" unless you can show that it's going marriageS. Marriage is not an abstraction that can be separated from specific marriages. But he at least admits here that what a gay couple does together has no bearing on his marriage. But he still wants to maintain that allowing them to marry will somehow hurt his marriage. His reason is rather odd, though:

So how does a gay marriage impact me and my wife? Because it not only advances the prima facie falsehood that they are equal, but I am compelled to see the two as equivalent.

You'll be compelled to change your mind if the law no longer agrees with you on a matter that only involves other people and not you? How odd. I'm beginning to wonder if Ryan knows what the word "compelled" means. Does he think that people are going to break down his door and force him to sign a confession that he thinks gay marriages are equal to his? Ryan, you aren't compelled to think anything. After gay marriage goes through, you are still entirely free to go right on believing that gay marriages are totally different from your marriage, that it's not a real, sacred, Godly marriage. You can think that all day long, every day, for the rest of your life. You will not be compelled to think anything. You just won't be allowed to have your thoughts written into the law in order to prevent other people from doing what has no bearing on your life whatsoever.

He continues:

But why would I be required to respect their union?

As we've already established, you wouldn't be required to respect anything. You can go on disrespecting gay marriage all you want. You can write letters to the editor complaining about it, you can rant and rave about it, you can call your representatives in Congress and urge them to do something about it. You will still be entirely free to think and express whatever you like on the subject.

What makes marriage meaningful is its use as a form of social currency. When two people are married, it is a public confession of the most private relationship; furthermore, it is a mandatory, compulsory public endorsement thereof. In other words, when two people marry (apparently I’m not to use “man and woman” anymore), no matter how badly anybody (even their closest friends and family!) would dispute it, they have promised their affections to one another, and society is required to honor it.

What a bizarre statement. Its use as social currency is what gives marriage meaning? You mean you got married for "social currency" and if other relationships you don't approve of are given the same "social currency", that takes meaning away from your marriage? You'll stop loving your wife as much because your "social currency" has somehow been diminished? That doesn't speak highly of your marriage, Ryan, if its meaning is based on the degree of "social currency" it gives you and not on mutual love and commitment between you and your wife.

And the only thing that "society" is required to honor about a marriage is the legal incidents of it. In the case of any individual marriage, any individual person, or group of people, is still entirely free to disapprove of it and even to mock it. If you don't believe me, ask Liza Minelli and David Gest. Or Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. Was society "required to honor" those marriages? Of course not. They were objects of ridicule for those marriages. The legal system had to honor the marriage contract, of course, but society wasn't "required to honor" anything.

He continues:

I would go so far as to say it is a form of global social currency. While there can be certain disagreements as to the process or exercise involved in defining a wedding across cultural and national boundaries, there’s no significant international disagreement of what the word “marriage” means—yet.

There's not? There are cultures in which polygamy is the norm. There are cultures where marriages are still arranged and have nothing to do with love and commitment, but only economic necessity. Would you recognize that as a marriage equivalent to yours? Well, since you think that your marriage only has meaning because of the "social currency" it gives you, perhaps you would. Do you "respect" the marriage of Osama Bin Laden's father to his 37th wife as equal to your marriage? How about his 38th? I'd call that "significant international disagreement". Especially since you seem to contradict it below when you write:

Which brings me to the fact that no one dares to mention: we discriminate against who can marry and who can’t, and have since before recorded history. We recognize that it would be destructive to the social fabric to allow one to marry anybody they chose. As badly as gays want me to believe that the rationale for gay marriage doesn’t permit polygamy, today’s polygamists say otherwise.

So on the one hand you claim that there's no "significant disagreement" between countries on the reality of marriage, but then you say that polygamy is totally different from monogamous marriages. But many other nations allow and even encourage polygamy. So would that constitute a "significant disagreement"? And why hasn't polygamy been "destructive to the social fabric" in those other nations?

One thing that is staggeringly clear in reading conservative attacks on gay marriage is that the more you press them, the more vague and undefined the arguments become. They can't say whose marriage will be affected, but somehow it will undermine "the institution of marriage". Or it will "damage the social fabric". Well I'm sorry, but "social fabric" is a meaningless phrase. They never actually tell you what this metaphor is supposed to mean. What specifically will be damaged, other than your desire not to allow others to do what they want to do? Marriages do not exist without married people. "Society" does not exist in the abstract without individual people. If it isn't going to hurt you, or someone else, it isn't going to hurt "society". And if it isn't going to hurt any specific marriage, it isn't going to hurt marriage in the abstract. And the mere fact that those who oppose gay marriage can only speak in broad and increasingly vague abstractions rather than detailing what specifically will be hurt indicates that they don't have anything more specific than that to argue.

Follow up: Tim Sandefur adds a couple of excellent examples to my argument that legal recognition has nothing to do with what someone is "compelled" to believe about it:

How does legally recognizing a private contractual arrangement “advance” the proposition that such arrangements are “equal”? How does it “compel” anyone to see such arrangements as “equal” to any other arrangements? I hate and detest the Costco corporation. I seriously consider it akin to the mafia; it is an institution which uses legalized plunder to enrich itself by stealing the most precious possessions of Americans everywhere, and I have repeatedly urged people to boycott it. Yet it is a legal corporation. So am I required to accept it as “equal” to other companies? Of course not. The legality of its corporate existence is nothing more than a formality which entitles it to certain legal benefits (limited liability and so forth), and is totally irrelevant to its moral worth.

What about the legality of publications we disagree with, or even despise? I think it is really disgusting that people would still openly advocate communism. It’s morally contemptible. Yet people have the legal right to do so. Does the legality of the publication of communist propaganda by the Daily Worker or whatnot prove that I must accept it as “equal” to the publications of libertarians whom I consider morally praiseworthy? Am I compelled to see the two as equivalent? Of course not. The legality of these publications has nothing to do with whether they are respectable.

Thanks for the atta boy, Tim, and nice work as usual.

Gay Marriage = Civil War? Frightening

2004-03-06T11:49:00.000-05:00

I came across this blog while following links and all I can say is "wow". Ironically, it has the fluffy name "Sunny Days in Heaven" while its author seems to be advocating a civil war to stop the advance of civil rights for homosexuals. In a post yesterday on this blog, the author is discussing a National Review Online article that criticized right wing radio talk show host Dennis Prager for comparing the battle over same sex marriage with the battle against Islamic terrorism because both are vital for "the survival of civilization". Jonah Goldberg, writing on the NRO blog, took Prager to task for this comparison, saying that advocates of same sex marriage are not blowing up buildings or hijacking planes and that Prager is mistaking a metaphorical war with a literal one in comparing the two. Seems perfectly reasonable, right? Not to Mark Butterworth. In a bizarrely argued post, he says that we're headed for a literal civil war and he seems to be all for it, shaking his head at those "faint-hearted pundits" sitting in Georgetown congratulating themselves on their tolerance, who don't understand what really has to happen here:

Ideas are matters of life and death. The NRO neocons seem to think that no matter what happens, they can just keep tut tutting and writing columns wishing things were different.

It was often insisted upon that Christians revered life and thus condemned those few lone wolves who were going around trying to murder abortionists. Yet, as much as I deplore violence, I never could quite join the vehement chorus of horror that formed everytime an abortionist was killed.

And he finishes with:

The day is coming when this nation shall again convulse in spilt blood. To deny it is folly and ignorance. In fact, if this nation does not go to war with itself, it shall not survive as a nation. It shall go the way of Italy after the fall of Rome, and become balkanized.

The only other alternative to that disintegration is totalitarianism which is a possibility.

Well isn't that fun? Either we form a totalitarian government where we can stop those damn gay people from getting married, or we'll have to go to war and start killing people. The most frightening thing about this whacko is that he's not alone. There are lots and lots of people just like him who would not only contemplate violence, but commit it, in order to insure that their theocratic views will be imposed on us all.

A Biblical Marriage Amendment

2004-03-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

Since most of the opposition to gay marriage seems to be coming from fundamentalist Christians who claim that gay marriage is opposed to God's word, maybe it's time to write a constitutional amendment based on the biblical model of marriage. If we're going to turn to God's word for our laws, we can't pick and choose, can we? So here is my proposed constitutional amendment:

Neither this constitution, nor the constitution of any state, nor any state or federal law, may lawfully change the definitions and standards of marrage laid out in the bible as the legal definition in these United States. Specifically, those standards are as follows:

A. No marriage shall be considered legally valid unless the bride is a virgin on her wedding day. If she is not, the penalty shall be death by stoning. Deut 22:13-21.

13. If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, 14. And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: 15. Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth [the tokens of] the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: 16. And the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; 17. And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech [against her], saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these [are the tokens of] my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. 18. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; 19. And they shall amerce him in an hundred [shekels] of silver, and give [them] unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. 20. But if this thing be true, [and the tokens of] virginity be not found for the damsel: 21. Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.

B. No marriage shall be considered legally valid if it is between a believer and an unbeliever. 2Cor 6:14.

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

C. Because all marriages will be holy and sacred under the decrees of this amendment, divorce will be illegal under all circumstances. Matthew 19:7-9.

7. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? 8. He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. 9. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except [it be] for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

D. Should any marriage man die without first having a child with his wife, the man's brother shall be required to marry her and impregnate her. If he fails to do so, he shall be publicly cursed for his failure to do his duty. Deut 25:5-10.

5. If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her. 6. And it shall be, [that] the firstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother [which is] dead, that his name be not put out of Israel. 7. And if the man like not to take his brother's wife, then let his brother's wife go up to the gate unto the elders, and say, My husband's brother refuseth to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel, he will not perform the duty of my husband's brother. 8. Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak unto him: and [if] he stand [to it], and say, I like not to take her; 9. Then shall his brother's wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother's house. 10. And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that hath his shoe loosed.

E. Marriage shall be defined as the union of a man and a woman or women, not including whatever concubines he possesses. II Sam 5:13.

And David took [him] more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem, after he was come from Hebron: and there were yet sons and daughters born to David.

F. Any soldier of the United States serving during wartime who finds a beautiful virgin woman among the enemy may bring her home with him from the war and, after giving her some time to grieve the fact that the soldier killed her family, he shall marry her. But first he must shave her head, cut her nails and change her clothes. Deut 21:10-13.

10. When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, 11. And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; 12. Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; 13. And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.

Since Pat Robertson and CBN declared that gay marriage was "a major setback for the biblical concept of marriage in the U.S.", I'm sure this amendment will satisfy them. By all means, we must return to the biblical concept of marriage. Any objections?

Blackmun's Papers and the Supreme Court

2004-03-05T20:48:00.000-05:00

The late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun left all of his papers to the Library of Congress, as is customary, and asked that they be relased on the 5th anniversary of his death on March 4, 1999. That release was made this week. For avid court watchers like me, this is an opportunity to get a glimpse behind the scenes on the internal working of the court, especially on the interplay of the personalities of the justices. Blackmun was apparently quite the packrat, keeping virtually every scrap of paper that ever crossed his desk and taking voluminous notes on every meeting and conference in his 24 years on the court. I have yet to see any of the original material, but the news reports have some very interesting insights.

Some snippets from the Washington Post article on his papers:

On his infamous decision in Roe v Wade:

Blackmun was convinced that Roe was doomed when a court majority led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist appeared ready to effectively overrule Roe and had a draft opinion already in hand. The day was saved, from Blackmun's point of view, by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David H. Souter, who worked successfully behind the scenes to help persuade an anguished Justice Anthony M. Kennedy to abandon the Rehnquist majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Blackmun retained the note Kennedy sent him to tell him he was switching.

The files provide a striking self-portrait of Blackmun, the author of the 1973 Roe decision, who was at first oblivious to its potential controversy ("I didn't appreciate it," he said) and then watched as "the roof fell in." The justice was hounded by it for years, buried in mail pro and con, picketed at a speech, wishing it would recede but simultaneously defending the decision from successive challenges. In the end, Blackmun remained defiantly proud of his achievement but aware, as he said, that "I'll carry it to my grave."

On the tendency of judges to become very independent after being appointed to the highest court:

The behind-the-scenes account also recalls the lessons learned by presidents since the beginning of the republic: that justices appointed to life terms can and will do as they please, no matter what they did before. Newly independent, constantly reminded by colleagues (according to Blackmun) of the institutional power of precedent, exposed to the persuasive power of more experienced justices, they go where they will.

When he was named to the court in 1970, Blackmun himself was perceived as a cautious appointee; he ended as an unabashed crusader, a frequent ally of liberals William J. Brennan Jr. and Marshall, given to passionate dissent when the court tilted against him. O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter, who prevented the overturning of Roe, were all Republican appointees.

On the sometimes back and forth decision making process on the court:

Kennedy's vote-switching was not unusual for a justice. The Blackmun materials underscore the fluidity of the court's decision-making process. In 1992, for example, Kennedy wrote a draft opinion for a majority in Lee v. Weisman upholding clergy-led graduation prayers in public schools. Then he circulated a note saying his draft looked wrong and joined the other side with Blackmun, who, as the senior justice, then assigned Kennedy to write the decision declaring the practice unconstitutional.

On Chief Justice Warren Burger:

The materials supplement existing accounts of the breach over the years between Blackmun and his boyhood friend, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, as well as the doubts and discontent among some other justices over Burger's management of the court and his intellectual competence. "The chief obviously cannot control the conference . . . all talking at once," Blackmun wrote one day during the justices' closed conference.

Linda Greenhouse, one of two reporters given advanced access to the Blackmun papers, has a fascinating article on the relationship of Blackmun and Burger, who grew up together in Minnesota.

And this rather amusing note:

Blackmun recounted how, when the justices watched films to determine if they were pornographic, Justice John M. Harlan, who was nearly blind, kept asking his clerk, "What are they doing now?" Upon being told, Harlan would exclaim, "You don't say."

The New York Times had an article up on the papers yesterday, which contains a few interesting tidbits as well. On betting pools:

WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST Justice Blackmun's files validated the chief justice's reputation as a recreational gambler and lover of games. He set up an elaborate betting pool for the 1992 presidential election, inviting his colleagues to forecast the state-by-state results and awarding extra points for those who made unpopular but successful choices.

"Sandra proved to be positively prescient," Chief Justice Rehnquist announced the day after the election, reporting that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had won $18.30 and that Justice Blackmun, the only other winner, was ahead by $1.70. "John and I have lost $6.30," he said, referring to Justice Stevens.

On his close friendship with Justice David Souter:

In early 1994, they shared a lunch-hour expedition to the Freer Gallery of Art. Their frequent lunch dates usually meant that Justice Souter would bring a container of yogurt to Justice Blackmun's chambers. Over the summers, he sent Justice Blackmun postcards from the New Hampshire mountains. One year he sent something else: a commercial photograph of two fishermen, one in an inflatable rowboat and the other in hip boots, casting a line. "Row vs. Wade: The Great Western Fishing Controversy," the caption read. "For your collection," Justice Souter wrote.

On Scalia and their shared hatred for the abuse of the English language:

ANTONIN SCALIA The two justices, ideological opposites, shared a passion for policing abuses of the language. They kept an Enemies List: the words "parameter" and "viable" were on it. In 1991, Justice Scalia invited Justice Blackmun to join the Chancellor's English Society.

"The mission of the Society is to identify and stamp out illiteracies and barbaric neologism in legal writing — or at least commiserate about them. I am the only other member," he wrote.

I think this illustrates perfectly why I find Scalia to be such a fascinating person despite our obvious ideological differences. Just a delightful phrase and accompanying sense of humor.

I can't wait for more of this sort of thing to be reported on. The interaction of these brilliant men and women in what is, in my opinion, really the last place in government where true intellectuals get to participate, is very fascinating to me.

Basketball Corruption

2004-03-05T20:47:00.000-05:00

I'm a huge college basketball fan, as some of you may know. It's the only sport I really watch religiously. In fact, the most holy of holidays - March Madness, Baby - are almost upon us, praise be to Alaa Abdelnaby (and if you get that obscure reference, you're either a major Duke fan like me or you have way too much time on your hands). Anyway, the University of Georgia last year fired one of the true scumbags of college coaching, Jim Harrick, due to all sorts of NCAA violations like paying players and fixing grades. Harrick has achieved the rare career trifecta of leaving 3 different schools in disgrace after violating multiple NCAA and university rules (Jerry Tarkanian was even worse, but he only managed to do that to two schools). One of the classes that many of his players took to keep their grades up was "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball", a class taught by his son, Jim Harrick Jr. Yesterday, the University released the final exam for that class. It includes such mindbenders as "How many goals are there on a basketball court" and "What conference does the Georgia basketball team play in". Oh, and did I mention that these are multiple choice questions? To give you some idea of the possible choices, check out this one:

11. What is the name of the exam which all high school seniors in the State of Georgia must pass?

A) Eye Exam; B) How Do The Grits Taste Exam; C) Bug Control Exam; D) Georgia Exit Exam.

My personal favorite is number 8:

How many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a Basketball Game?

If someone misses that question, shouldn't we be able to, at the very least, revoke their right to vote?

Rusty and the "Evolutionary Paradigm"

2004-03-05T11:47:00.000-05:00

Once more into the breach, dear friends. Rusty has posted a reply to me on the subject of evolution and morality, but the issue is really whether evolution equates with atheism or not. I'm getting a bit tired of hashing and rehashing this with both he and Ilona, primarily because they keep moving the goalposts. To wit, Rusty says:

It’s interesting to note his response to my rhetorical request, “I would ask Ed to give me a list of those people who hold to the evolutionary paradigm who also believe that the supernatural exists in the form of some sort of deity that interacts with the natural order. I suspect that the list will be extremely short.” As I expected, he lists some prominent theistic evolutionists (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one) with Ken Miller leading the pack. What I didn’t expect was that he would list statements by various Christian denominations that supposedly declare that God as creator is compatible with evolution. That was a nice touch but it still doesn’t address the logical implications of the evolutionary paradigm.

Well yes, Rusty, I listed some prominent theistic evolutionists. After all, that is exactly what you asked me to list, wasn't it? You asked for a list of people who accept evolution and accept that God interacts with the natural order, and that is what I gave you, and it includes not only all of those scientists I listed (and remember, those are just the ones I have been personally involved with in one way or another) but every mainline Christian denomination. And your response is that this "doesn't address the logical implications of the evolutionary paradigm." I'm tempted to respond with "Well, duh". It wasn't meant to address that, it was meant to address the question you asked me. Silly me, actually answering the question I was asked. Whether you think those people are being correct or consistent or not has no bearing on the challenge you made, which I answered completely and with a far larger and more compelling list than I'm sure you figured on. But let's move on to the rest of your screed...

First off I must confess that I was leading Ed a bit with my “extremely short” qualification to the request I made. It is a subjective qualification and although he seems to think he listed quite a few scientists “off the top” of his head, what I would now compare it to is the list of scientists who believe the evolutionary paradigm as well as not believing in a supernatural being that interacts with the natural order. Now let’s be real… in the context of that comparison, the original list is extremely short. Regardless, all he has done is list additional people who are just as logically inconsistent as he is with regards to the evolutionary paradigm. An argument from popular opinion carries no weight in this matter.

Holy contradictions, Batman. First you make an argument based on the comparative popularity of evolutionary atheism as opposed to evolutionary theism, then you follow that up immediately with "an argument from popular opinion carries no weight in this matter". Then why on earth did you just imply that it did? First, let's see if this is in fact an "extremely short list". Tim Radford, writing in the Guardian, cites the following figures:

In the US, according to a survey published in Nature in 1997, four out of 10 scientists believe in God. Just over 45% said they did not believe, and 14.5% described themselves as doubters or agnostics. This ratio of believers to non-believers had not changed in 80 years.

Herein lies the real problem. Rusty keeps using the phrase "evolutionary paradigm". Near as I can figure, this means "evolution plus atheism". But the "evolutionary paradigm" is not equivalent to "evolutionary theory". Evolutionary theory says nothing about ultimate origins and it says nothing about the existence of God, it simply says that modern life forms on earth are derived from a common ancestor through descent with modification. That's all it says. But Rusty attacks the "evolutionary paradigm" as though doing so somehow disproves evolutionary theory.

Evolutionary theory is no more tied to metaphysical naturalism or atheism than is meteorology or medical science. If Rusty was consistent, he would rail against the "meteorological paradigm" that assumes that weather has natural causes and rules out the role of God, attested to numerous times in the bible, a priori. Obviously those thousands of meteorologists who believe in God are blind to the inconsistency of attributing the weather to purely natural causes when their bible says otherwise. They are obviously not being logically consistent with the implications of the meteorological paradigm.

Rusty continues:

Ed is being a bit disingenuous here, whether intentional or not though I do not know, for theistic evolutionists do not believe that God interacts with the natural order in regards to evolution.

No Rusty, the one being disingenuous here is you. You didn't ask me for a list of those who believe that God interacts with the natural order in regards to evolution. You said:

I would ask Ed to give me a list of those people who hold to the evolutionary paradigm who also believe that the supernatural exists in the form of some sort of deity that interacts with the natural order.

Now you want to move the goalpost and change the question, and declare me "disingenuous" because I didn't answer the question you didn't ask. And frankly, this silly game is getting tiresome.

Rusty then quotes Ken Miller and says:

Yet, one wonders what thoughts the likes of Eugenie Scott, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, et. al., are having as they smirk behind Miller’s back.

He then goes on to quote Phillip Johnson and William Dembski on what those "hard core naturalists" in the "Darwinian establishment" really think. And Dembski points out that those foolish theistic evolutionists are just too cowardly to go all the way to being "full-blooded Darwinists":

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Darwinian establishment views theistic evolution as a weak-kneed sycophant that desperately wants the respectability that comes with being a full-blooded Darwinist but refuses to follow the logic of Darwinism through to the end. It takes courage to give up the comforting belief that life on earth has a purpose. It takes courage to live without the consolation of afterlife. Theistic evolutionists lack the stomach to face the ultimate meaninglessness of life, and it is this failure of courage that makes them contemptible in the eyes of full-blooded Darwinists.

[sarcasm]Yep, they're all cowards, Bill. Fools who are deaf to the sound of those evil atheists laughing at them behind their back, naive fellow travelers - oh hell, let's go all the way and call them "useful idiots" and make the communist metaphor complete - who are just too cowardly to face up to life without God. They're not like you, Bill, bravely standing up for God in the face of the "Darwinian Establishment" who relentlessly refuses to accept your brilliant ID model despite the fact that you can't produce a single testable hypothesis that flows from it. Truly, you're a martyr.[/sarcasm]

You know, my level of irritation is beginning to rise, particularly when I read this kind of presumptuous bullshit. I don't know Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins, but I do know Genie Scott. And I can assure you that she is not "smirking" behind Ken Miller's back. She and Ken are friends and colleagues and she has the utmost respect for him both as a scientist and as a person. What Genie Scott recognizes, and you do not, is that evolution, like all scientific theories, is nothing more than an explanation of a specific set of natural phenomena. It does not address any overarching philosophical issue, any more than seismology does, and thus one can be an atheist, a Christian, a buddhist or a satanist for that matter, and still accept that evolution is a valid explanation for the data. But of course Rusty knows better. He knows that those big bad evil atheists laugh behind the backs of those unwitting dupes like Ken Miller, who foolishly run labs where evolution is tested and observed every day and then actually believe evolution without realizing it's all part of the evil atheistic plan. I'm sorry to be so blunt Rusty, but you're just plain full of shit on this one. When the Christian physicist and ID critic Howard Van Till joined us for dinner at Rob Pennock's house, we didn't laugh at his silly theistic beliefs when he walked out the door. And believe me, I would love to see that conversation when you tell Howard that he's being inconsistent because he's "blinded to the obvious implications of the evolutionary paradigm."

Science and Naturalism

2004-03-05T08:45:00.000-05:00

In the conversations with Ilona, one point has come up repeatedly and I wanted to address it in more detail. This is the question of the role of naturalism in science. Ilona, and Rusty as well, fail to understand the distinction between methodological naturalism(MN) and philosophical naturalism(PN). This is not surprising, because the literature of IDCs and mainstream creationists ignores the distinction completely. Phillip Johnson, in particular, is maddening in his tendency to equate the two. But there is a very big difference between the two. Science employs MN despite the fact that a large portion of the scientific community does believe in the supernatural in the form of a personal Deity. So why would a scientist who believes in the supernatural pretend as though it doesn't exist for purposes of scientific investigation? Because he has to. To do otherwise would be to eliminate the ability of scientists to distinguish valid explanations from invalid ones, as Arthur Strahler explained in his book Science and Earth History:

Supernatural forces, if they exist, cannot be observed, measured, or recorded by the procedures of science - that's simply what the word "supernatural" means. There can be no limit to the kinds and shapes of supernatural forces and forms the human mind is capable of conjuring up from "nowhere." Scientists therefore have no alternative but to ignore "claims" of the existence of supernatural forces and causes. This exclusion is a basic position that must be stoutly adhered to by scientists or their entire system of processing information will collapse. To put it another way, if science must include a supernatural realm, it will be forced into a game where there are no rules. Without rules, no scientific observation, explanation, or prediction can enjoy a high probability of being a correct picture of the real world.

There are supernatural alternatives to every scientific theory, and there are simply no limits on how fanciful they might be. It's possible that the planets are not kept in their orbits by gravitational pull at all, but by angels moving them around in a preset motion that just happens to mimic the calculations and predictions of physicists. You can't disprove it so it might be true, right? Ah, but that's exactly the point. What could possibly disprove that explanation? No matter what we observed, it could always be attributed to the movement of angels acting in accordance with the will of God. And this is exactly why such supernatural explanations are not allowed in science, because they are not falsifiable. And if they are not falsifiable, then there is no way to determine whether they are true or not.

Another reason why scientists must assume a natural explanation is that that assumption has always been found to be true in every case where it replaced a supernatural explanation. Before science, mankind assumed supernatural explanations for virtually everything - bad weather, good weather, good crops, bad crops, floods, earthquakes, sickness, won or lost battles. Now we know that all of those things, and much more, have natural causes. The natural models allow us to predict when a storm is going to hit, when an earthquake is likely to occur. If creationist logic was applied in any of those situations, they would point to the fact that they aren't 100% perfect models and say, "Ah ha. Meteorologists and seismologists only believe this imperfect model because of their commitment to atheistic materialism. They rule out the role of God in bringing disasters and earthquakes, which the bible speaks of numerous times, a priori because they want to deny their reliance on God so they can go on sinning. You can't replicate earthquakes or floods in the lab, which just goes to prove that only God is powerful enough to create earthquakes and floods."

The same is true in medicine, of course. Until the last few hundred years, virtually everyone just assumed that sickness and disease was sent by God as punishment or by Satan to destroy God's creation. Had we stuck with the supernatural explanation, we would never have advanced beyond blood letting or exorcisms to get the evil spirits out. But we didn't stop with the supernatural explanations, we kept searching for natural ones and that search paid off in a million ways in our life everyday, most obviously in the fact that we have more days to live. Is medical science perfect? Of course not. There are thousands of unanswered questions where research continues. But would creationists argue that we should scrap the germ theory of disease because it has unanswered questions? Would they make the same argument they do with regard to evolution, that doctors are just blinded by their commitment to atheistic naturalism and they can't see the obvious flaws in their theory? Of course not.

There are at least as many verses in the bible to the effect that God sends sickness, disease, plagues, storms and earthquakes as there are verses that imply fiat creation, but you rarely hear fundamentalists quoting those verses against the "atheistic assumptions" of meteorology, seismology or medical science and their "imperfect models" that aren't infallible in so many obvious areas. Other than the occasional Pat Robertson rant about how we're getting more earthquakes or hurricanes now because we've "turned away from God", we don't typically see this kind of argument made. But it's the same type of reasoning that creationists use when attacking evolution - that it's not perfect, there are gaps in the knowledge, that scientists are "ruling out God" a priori because of their commitment to atheistic materialism, etc.

The fact is that science operates on the assumption that there is a natural explanation for a given set of phenomena because A) they must do so in order to have a way to test the explanation; and B) because historically, in every single instance where there was a supernatural explanation that was assumed to be true, we have eventually found a perfectly good natural explanation. That does not mean that there is no God or there is no supernatural, it just means that we have to do scientific research with the assumption that there is a natural explanation and that the supernatural is not going to mess up the results of our work.

2nd Response to Rusty on Morality

2004-03-04T20:41:00.000-05:00

Rusty from New Covenant has replied to my post replying to his post in response to comments at the end of my post. Did you follow that? Drugs help, I promise. The upshot of the whole thing, and the issue under dispute, is that Rusty thinks it's "inconsistent" for anyone who accepts evolution to be true to take any moral position on any question. He manages to reach this conclusion through one major misunderstanding (the same one that Ilona has in her responses to me over the last few days) and one major non-axiomatic assumptions. Let's get right to the fisking:

He begins:

Ed over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars responded to my comments regarding the inconsistency evidenced whenever someone who holds to the evolutionary paradigm makes use of morality as a basis for their argument.

And here we run right smack into that first big misunderstanding. Evolution is not a "paradigm". I had explained that in the post Rusty is replying to when I said:

He thinks evolution is a "worldview", a term we hear a lot but which simply doesn't apply here.

Evolution is the theory that modern life on earth is derived from a common ancestor through descent with modification. It explains the facts of biodiversity, biostratigraphy, comparative anatomy, and so forth. That's it. …It neither prescribes nor proscribes human behavior; at best it might help DEscribe some aspects of human behavior, but even there I think it's easy to substitute wishful thinking or assumption for a well thought out explanation. It doesn't tell us whether there is a god or not, it doesn't tell us what, if anything, will happen to us when we die. Nor does it attempt to. Thus Rusty is simply wrong when he declares that I am "inconsistent" because I accept evolution and also take moral positions, any more than I'm being inconsistent in accepting evolution and taking a position on what type of offense is most effective in basketball - the subjects just aren't related.

To which Rusty replies:

Ed is just flat out wrong.

I would ask Ed to give me a list of those people who hold to the evolutionary paradigm who also believe that the supernatural exists in the form of some sort of deity that interacts with the natural order. I suspect that the list will be extremely short.

Well first, I don't know anyone who "holds to the evolutionary paradigm" because there is no such thing. But if you want a list of people who accept evolution as the true explanation for the natural history of life on earth and also believe that there is a God who interacts with human beings, you're going to lose that bet. In fact, I bet I can name more theistic scientists in the relevant fields who accept evolution than you can name theistic scientists in the relevant fields who reject it. To begin with, here's a list just off the top of my head of evolution advocates who are also theists (not deists like me, but theists who believe in a personal god who interacts with people, just as you requested): Ken Miller, Glenn Morton, Kevin O'Brien, Steve Schimmrich, Keith Miller, Richard Weins, Glen Kuban, Howard Van Till, Davis Young, Terry Gray, John Burgeson, Henry Neufeld, Barry Lynn, George Murphy, Charles Austerberry. And these are just ones that I either know personally or have personally interacted with in the context of the creationism/evolution dispute. We can add to that most of the membership of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of some 2000 Christian scientists who are primarily theistic evolutionists, not creationists. We can also add numerous Christian organizations and their membership to the list.

For example, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church - USA passed a resolution in 2002 that declared:

The 214th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA):

1. Reaffirms that God is Creator, in accordance with the witness of Scripture and The Reformed Confessions.

2. Reaffirms that there is no contradiction between an evolutionary theory of human origins and the doctrine of God as Creator.

3. Encourages State Boards of Education across the nation to establish standards for science education in public schools based on the most reliable content of scientific knowledge as determined by the scientific community.

Likewise, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church declared in 1982 that,

Whereas, the state legislatures of several states have recently passed so called "balanced treatment" laws requiring the teaching of "Creation-science" whenever evolutionary models are taught; and

Whereas, in many other states political pressures are developing for such "balanced treatment" laws; and

Whereas, the terms "Creationism" and "Creation-science" as understood in these laws do not refer simply to the affirmation that God created the Earth and Heavens and everything in them, but specify certain methods and timing of the creative acts, and impose limits on these acts which are neither scriptural nor accepted by many Christians; and

Whereas, the dogma of "Creationism" and "Creation-science" as understood in the above contexts has been discredited by scientific and theologic studies and rejected in the statements of many church leaders

The Lexington Alliance of Religious Leaders, a group of 78 Kentucky ministers and religious leaders:

As religious leaders we share a deep faith in the God who created heaven and earth and all that is in them, and take with utmost seriousness the Biblical witness to this God who is our Creator. However, we find no incompatibility between the God of creation and a theory of evolution which uses universally verifiable data to explain the probable process by which life developed into its present form.

The United Church Board for Homeland Ministries:

We acknowledge modern evolutionary theory as the best present-day scientific explanation of the existence of life on earth; such a conviction is in no way at odds with our belief in a Creator God, or in the revelation and presence of that God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in 1982:

Affirms that, despite efforts to establish "creationism" or "creation-science" as a valid science, it is teaching based upon a particular religious dogma as agreed by the court (McLean vs Arkansas Board of Education); Affirms that, the imposition of a fundamentalist viewpoint about the interpretation of Biblical literature -- where every word is taken with uniform literalness and becomes an absolute authority on all matters, whether moral, religious, political, historical or scientific -- is in conflict with the perspective on Biblical interpretation characteristically maintained by Biblical scholars and theological schools in the mainstream of Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and Judaism. Such scholars find that the scientific theory of evolution does not conflict with their interpretation of the origins of life found in Biblical literature.

All of these statements and more were published in a book called Voices for Evolution by the National Center for Science Education and are available, along with numerous others, here on their website. And those are just a portion of the statements from Christian organizations in the US (I left out similar statements from the Roman Catholic Church and the United Methodist Church as well as a couple of others). It does not include the many foreign Christian organizations or the numerous Jewish organizations who hold similar positions on evolution. Suffice to say that Rusty is 100% wrong to declare that the list of people who accept evolution and theistic involvement in the world is "extremely short".

Rusty continues:

To hide behind the argument that evolution only attempts to explain the facts of the natural realm is to miss the point entirely, for to hold to the evolutionary paradigm is to accept the worldview (and it is a worldview) that nature is all there is.

As the above proves beyond a doubt, this is nonsense. It also ignores the difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical or metaphysical naturalism, which I've explained numerous times and which Rusty seems to want to pretend doesn't exist. This isn't "hiding behind" anything, it's just the truth. Perhaps Rusty can explain why evolution relies on "naturalism" in a manner distinct from how the germ theory of disease or the kinetic theory of gasses relies on "naturalism". The problem Rusty has, just like Ilona has, is that he doesn't really want to argue against evolution, per se, he wants to argue against the combination of evolution and atheism, which he seems to want to call the "evolutionary paradigm". But there is no intrinsic tie between the two ideas. Some who accept evolution are atheists; some who accept evolution are Christians, Jews, deists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and so forth. If he wants to criticize Richard Dawkins for combining evolution and atheism without making a distinction between the science and the philosophical inferences he draws from them, I'll gladly join him. I've made the same criticism of Dawkins many times. But the inferences that Dawkins draws from evolution that support his philosophical position of atheism are no different from the inferences that Ken Miller draws from evolution that support his philosophical position of Christian theism. In both cases, the inferences are separate from the scientific theory of evolution and which inference, if either, is true has no bearing on the validity of evolution itself.

Rusty continues:

Therefore, if one believes that nature is all there is and if modern life on earth is derived from a common ancestor through descent with modification, then everything in this universe must also be derived from determinism and chance. Methodological Naturalism not only implies, but vehemently proclaims, that there is no need for a God.

No, methodological naturalism does NOT proclaim that. Metaphysical or philosophical naturalism does. Methodological naturalism only says that when performing scientific studies, one must assume that nothing supernatural is going to skew the results and that only natural explanations are testable and falsifiable. Methodological naturalism is shared by tens of thousands of Christian scientists in every field of science, but they obviously reject metaphysical naturalism or they wouldn't be Christians in the first place.

Rusty continues:

Consistent evolutionists, such as Daniel Dennett and William Provine, take the implications of this worldview to their logical conclusion by advocating moral relativism or, worse yet, that true morality is an illusion and merely the product of evolutionary processes. Provine has said,

...modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society... The individual human becomes an ethical person by means of two primary mechanisms: heredity and environmental influences.

First, Dennett and Provine are consistent atheists, not consistent "evolutionists". And notice that Provine only says "modern science implies...", not "evolution means...". They are using an inference FROM evolution as part of their atheistic worldview. That does not mean that evolution is intrinsically a part of the atheistic worldview. I accept evolution and I don't have an "atheistic worldview". Neither do all of those people and Christian organizations I listed above. That fact alone proves that there is no intrinsic, necessary connection between evolution and atheism.

Rusty continues:

For an evolutionist to not accept this is to be inconsistent with the philosophical and logical implications of the worldview that drives their evolutionary paradigm.

I'm sorry, at some point I just start chuckling that the same mistaken assumption keeps getting repeated over and over again. There is no "evolutionary paradigm". There is perhaps an atheistic paradigm that uses inferences drawn from evolution. But there are also lots of non-atheistic paradigms or worldviews that use inferences drawn from evolution. That simple fact shows Rusty's assumption to be utter nonsense.

Now on to the moral question, which Rusty begins with this false claim:

Ed makes the argument that we are the ones who determine our moral direction, and not some divine being.

No, Ed didn't make that argument. Ed made the argument that IF there is no god who gives us a set of moral rules, we still MUST develop some sense of morality on our own. We still have to do all of the things I listed, even if there is no god. Surely Rusty wouldn't dispute that, or dispute the fact that merely because one claims "god says so" that does not mean that god, in fact, said so. Indeed, he quotes Phillip Johnson in his reply as saying, "a supposed command of God can hardly provide a basis for morality unless God really exists. The commands of an imaginary deity are merely human commands dressed up as divine law." And that is identical to what I said. The argument from morality isn't an argument for why such a god does exist, but for why such a god should exist, and Rusty proceeds from the assumption that when he says "God says so", it's true. Well that's not an assumption that I share. I made no claim of a "higher principle" or of some received wisdom. I didn't say "God says so". But since I don't accept that Rusty can legitimately say "God says so" either, I don't see his moral statements as any better grounded or objective than mine are. In fact, they may well be less so, since if "God said so", he could also say the opposite. In fact the bible is full of such inconsistencies, such as God commanding that thou shalt not kill but then ordering the slaughter of entire cultures, man, woman and child...except the virgin females, which he often reserved as the spoils of war, which would be a clear violation of human rights in today's world with our moral relativism and all. How ironic. Divine command is no more objective a basis for morality than was the Nuremberg defense. It merely declares that you do what you're told and that whatever you're told is objectively moral, even if you're told the opposite tomorrow of what you're told today.

Sorry Rusty, I can't say "God said so" when I come to a moral judgement. And you can say "God said so" until you're blue in the face, but that doesn't make it true, nor does it make it any more objective or firmly grounded than my statement.

3rd Response to Ilona

2004-03-04T19:45:00.000-05:00

Ilona has responded to my latest response in two places. First, in a comment in response to that post, and second in a post on her own blog. Rather than posting response and counter-response as in past entries, I'm going to try and just subdivide this into the issues under dispute so that they'll be easier to follow.

Issue 1: Is she conflating evolution with atheism/materialism and presuming they are essentially synonymous?

I said in my first response to her that she is doing that. Her reply then:

I have to think about this. Perhaps I do think that way...never looked at it from that perspective.

Well now it appears she's thought about it and is adamant that she is not in fact doing that:

In the stubbornness section, I would place some of your comments that evolution and atheism are mixed up in the oppositions mind. I believe this is a red herring that has worked well in past arguments and you keep hoping for someone to take the bait once again.

That is not what is being argued, by me anyway. Not in this series of posts.

But is that true? Let's take a look at her own words. The first problem is that she seems to be contradicting herself. Immediately after claiming that she doesn't equate atheism with materialism, she then says that materialism comes from evolution AND that evolution comes from materialism:

First, I do not mistake atheists with those who hold evolutionary theory as correct.

However, if evolutionary theory is not rooted in materialist philosophy, what is it based in? Or perhaps we look at it another way: where does the idea of materialist or physicalist philosophy come from, if not the theory of evolution? Am I wrong to see the two as inter-related?

How could it be any more obvious that she thinks that evolution and materialism/atheism are intrinsically linked and inseparable? But as I've explained over and over again, that is simply false. Some evolution advocates are materialists or atheists; some are not. Evolution is absolutely silent on the subject, as are all scientific theories. Some people, like Richard Dawkins, draw atheistic inferences evolution, while others, like Ken Miller, draw theistic inferences from evolution. Neither of those inferences or the philosophical/religious position they are used to support are intrinsically tied to evolution. Period. It simply can't be any clearer than that. I leave it to my readers to decide for themselves whether Ilona is or is not conflating evolution with atheism, and to decide whether this is a valid equation or not.

Issue 2: Is she claiming that historical sciences are not "real science" because the events are not replicable and therefore you can't use experimentation to prove the theories

Again, let's look at her own words. It started with her making this statement:

What is offered by Ed is more along the lines of historical hypothesis and theory.... which is an art and is more honestly represented than the "science" of evolutionary theory.

Obviously she was making the argument that "historical hypothesis and theory" are art and not science. And when I said that I use the term "evolution" to mean that all life forms share a common ancestor, she replied,

Yet, in Ed's use of the word, where is the replication?

Then later she says:

Science uses replicable experimentation in testing theory and then designating facts.

So she clearly is arguing that because we can't replicate common descent, it's not a science it's an art. She repeated this today:

I said that historical -especially in the time of the ancient history- is an art using conjecture and evidence together to arrive at theories. I compared the construction of the volutionary theory to this.

But then when I challenged her to "name a single philosopher of science who says that experimentation is the only way to test a hypothesis or that the fields I mentioned are not "real science"?", she replied:

Would this be pertinent , since this is your conclusion of my view and not what I said?

Well yes, it is pertinent because that is what you've been arguing, as your own words above clearly show.

The truth is that I don't think Ilona really has any coherent conception of either how science works or what she intends to argue. She has repeatedly made statements, then when it's disproven she claims not to have said, then maybe she did say it, then she didn't say it again, ad nauseum. On top of which, she seems not to understand the meaning of certain logical fallacies either. I made the statement that I think she has a very shallow understanding of the scientific method. This she complains is an "ad hominem". Sorry, but it is not. The logical fallacy known as ad hominen does not mean "he made an argument that I take offense to". An ad hominem is using an irrelevant personal attack to argue against the truth of a claim being made. For example, if I said, "She can't be right about evolution because she is a horrible dresser", that would be an ad hominem. Pointing out that her understanding of the scientific method is shallow and on about an 8th grade level is not an ad hominem. She may not like that I said it, but it's an entirely true statement. I posted numerous instances above of complete misunderstandings of how science operates. There are many more. I'll give another example. I had made this statement:

"the ID crowd has yet to produce anything like a testable hypothesis.... and "the model offered by YECs has been falsified over and over again and fails to explain the data entirely"

To which she replied:

Wait. Does evolution "explain the data entirely", has it ever "been falsified"?

Obviously, she does not understand the distinction between being falsified and being falsifiable. One of the bedrock principles of science is that a hypothesis must be falsified, and I pointed out that ID is not falsifiable. And she asks whether evolution has been falsified? Of course not. But it is falsifiable. Any number of observations could prove evolution wrong. Find a single mammalian fossil in precambrian rock and evolution is dead in the water. But that observation has not been made.

Ilona, I know that you don't like it when I say that you don't understand the scientific method, but the truth is that you don't. You've repeatedly made silly and contradictory statements about it. You can't seem to settle on what science requires in terms of replicability, claiming in one place that the event itself has to be replicable, in other places that the experiments have to be replicable. Both of those answers are wrong, of course. Where there are experiments that can be done, then yes the experiments must be replicable. But where a hypothesis is being tested by some means other than experimentation, you obviously can't repeat the experiment that didn't take place. It's the observations that must be replicable and the data that must be available to all to see. When you say things like, "And how does science explain facts except by proving their validity through the scientific method?", you are showing that you really do not understand what science attempts to do at all. Science does "prove the validity" of facts. It tests the validity of theories that explain facts. That doesn't mean explains what the facts are, it means explain why the facts are the way they are. Why do apples fall to the ground? The theory of gravity explains that. Science doesn't test the fact that apples fall to the ground, it tests the explanation for why apples fall to the ground. We observe a given geological formation that has a given set of traits. The observations of those traits are facts. A hypothesis is created to explain why it has those traits, how those traits came about, and the hypothesis is then tested for validity. You have consistently conflated fact and theory, which is very common, but it really does show a basic lack of understanding of how those terms are used in science and how scientists go about testing ideas. I'm sorry if that offends you, but it's true. I've given you links to resources that explain the distinctions, but you don't seem to be too interested in them.

You continually misunderstand the most basic of principles. When I point out that nothing in science is ever considered "proven", that all theories are considered open to disproof and continually tested, you reply

Now we are in a universe where nothing is ever proven ...... a state of mind familiar to the philosopher, aka syncreticism. Evolution of the mind, I suppose we could call it.

No, that's not what I said. I didn't say "nothing is ever proven", I said that in science nothing is ever considered proven. In mathematics and formal logic, things are proven all the time, but only because the premises are controlled. You jump from that very simple and obvious statement to some overarching philosophical issue that simply does not apply because I didn't say anything like what you thought I said. And again, if you had a basic understanding of the scientific method, you wouldn't make such errors, you would have understood the original statement.

The Importance of Family

2004-03-04T13:44:00.000-05:00

My oldest and dearest friend, Rick, recently got the most unexpected news. Rick has never really had a family like the rest of us have. His biological father left his mother when she was pregnant with him and he has never met him (they now live in the same city and Rick knows where he lives, but has no interest in seeing him. I can't blame him.) and his mother died when he was only 4. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who he grew up calling mom and dad. His grandma/mom died when he was around 11 or 12 and his grandfather was in poor health. He went to live with an aunt and moved to the town I lived in. We met in high school and became close friends and eventually he ended up coming to live with my family. So when I say that Rick is like a brother to me, it means a bit more than that we are just close. From that extremely dysfunctional background, somehow he emerged as an incredible person. He's a guy who would literally give you the shirt off his back and he has two beautiful children. All of that is background so you understand the importance of what happened...

A few weeks ago, Rick sent me an e-mail at about 5 am in the morning, which I got the next day of course. He had been up until 5 in the morning because he had been talking to his sister. His real sister. It turns out that his mother had a baby girl when Rick was 2 years old, but put her up for adoption. That was 35 years ago and Rick never knew he had a sister out there somewhere. Like so many people who were adopted out, his sister wanted to find out about her birth parents and she went so far as to hire a private investigator to find her. The PI didn't find her mother, obviously, but did find Rick. When Rick sent me that e-mail, it was after spending nearly 12 hours on the phone with the sister he never knew he had, who lives in Georgia. Rick and his family had a vacation planned at Disney World for 10 days in the middle of February, so they took a couple days out of that and drove up to meet her and her family.

I can't begin to tell you how happy he is, or how happy I am for him. I come from a huge and strange family and I probably take that for granted a bit. But for Rick, who never had a "real" family, this discovery has filled a huge hole in his life. To talk to him on the phone and hear his voice crack when he told me that she was already calling him "big brother" is to come face to face with the true importance of family in our lives.