Recently in Assault on Science Category

As I reported a month ago, the Rutherford Institute, acting on behalf of John Freshwater, appealed Judge Otho Eyster’s decision in the Court of Common Pleas to the Ohio 5^th District Court of Appeals. Eyster ruled that the Mt. Vernon Board of Education’s termination of Freshwater was justified on the evidence of the administrative hearing.

Now additional documents are becoming available. The first to be publicly available is NCSE’s amicus brief (pdf). Yet to come are an amicus brief being filed by the Dennis family and the school board’s brief. The deadline for filing is today, January 13, and I expect that final copies will be publicly available soon. When they are I’ll write a longer post summarizing them after I have a chance to read them all.

The case is not yet scheduled for oral arguments before the Court of Appeals. The Court’s schedule is published through February, 2012.

Quote mining is ubiquitous amongst the creationists, to the point that TalkOrigins maintains an extensive database of mined quotes. Now there’s a new candidate. Gary Hurd calls our attention to Rabbi Moshe Averick, who quotemines Jack Szostak, a prominent origin of life researcher (added in edit: and 2009 Nobel winner!).

What’s most fun is that Szostak’s wife, Terri-Lynn McCormick, shows up in the comments and calls Averick on his dishonesty. I’ll reproduce her whole comment here. It’s delicious!

How dare you misrepresent my husband. Your quote from the Scientific American article blatantly distorts his meaning. It is virtually impossible to imagine the cell we know now to emerging from the pre-biotic earth. He and others have, over many years, been showing incrementally how an RNA cell might have been created on early earth. There is nothing in my husband’s work that suggests otherwise. It is quite sickening that you would try to make him, a steadfast rationalist and atheist, into a propopent for I.D. You are in complete disagreement with Prof. Jack Szostak. Unfortunately for you his opinion is backed up by facts and mountains of results from peer reviewed research.

Please refrain from misrepresenting his opinions or work again. We consider it slander.

Nice!

The superintendent of schools of Hart County, a small county in the middle of Kentucky, has written to the Kentucky Board of Education, complaining about the emphasis on evolution. Specifically, Ricky Line, the superintendent, writes in a long and somewhat rambling letter,

In spite of adverse outcomes in the administrative hearing on his termination, in federal court, and in the County Court of Common pleas, John Freshwater is still pleading his case in the Christian media. On November 30, he was interviewed on David Barton’s Wallbuilders Live radio program. Ed Brayton has posted on some aspects of that interview, as has Wheat-dogg’s World.

My interest is in what Freshwater now says he was teaching about creationism and evolution in his 8^th grade science classes as contrasted with what he has claimed in the past. There was a good deal of testimony about that in the administrative hearing on his termination. His stories ranged from ‘I didn’t teach creationism’ (see his testimony here) to ‘I may have used creationist materials, but it was to illustrate bias and lack of objectivity in the interpretation of good science’ (see his testimony here). Now he has a new version: he taught “robust evolution.”

More below the fold.

This is a report by Gaythia Weis, a member of the board of Colorado Citizens for Science, about the enlightened position taken by Aims Community College, Greeley, Colorado, when confronted with a talk by a creationist and, more specifically, concern about the publicity for that talk. The talk, which was sponsored by a recognized student organization, was originally and incorrectly advertised as if it were a college-sponsored event. Briefly, Aims (and Ms. Weis) recognized that the speaker had a legal right to speak, but the college wisely dissociated itself from the speech. In short, according to Ms. Weis, the college administration “got it.” Herewith, Ms. Weis’s essay:

I’d like to encourage other Panda’s Thumb readers to tune up their eyes and ears and be watchful for the following sort of situation, in which creationists are apparently trying to insert their views into our public community college education system. Besides protecting the teaching of science, we need to be mindful of our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and religion. Still, a firm line can be drawn between the rights of a student group to meet on campus, and the presentation of that group’s views as if the viewpoint is supported by the public institution itself. The following example shows how a small bit of constructive intervention can have positive effects.

Joe Thornton is a distinguished researcher who works on reconstructing ancient biomolecules to study how they evolved into their present forms. Recently ID creationist Michael Behe has commented on Thornton’s work, interpreting it to mean that the molecules couldn’t have evolved. On Carl Zimmer’s Loom Thornton eviscerates Behe’s misintepretation. A couple of quotes to give the flavor:

Behe contends that our findings support his argument that adaptations requiring more than one mutation cannot evolve by Darwinian processes. The many errors in Behe’s Edge of Evolution – the book in which he makes this argument – have been discussed in numerous publications.

and

Behe’s discussion of our 2009 paper in Nature is a gross misreading because it ignores the importance of neutral pathways in protein evolution.

and

This brings us to Behe’s second error, which is to confuse reversal to the ancestral sequence and structure with re-acquisition of a similar function.

and

Behe’s argument has no scientific merit. It is based on a misunderstanding of the fundamental processes of molecular evolution and a failure to appreciate the nature of probability itself. There is no scientific controversy about whether natural processes can drive the evolution of complex proteins. The work of my research group should not be misintepreted by those who would like to pretend that there is.

Read the whole thing. (And don’t miss Matheson’s remarks on natural selection at the link below.)

Hat tip to Steve Matheson for calling my attention to Thornton’s piece..

As many of you know by now, about two weeks ago a movement took shape on the Internet to get the Montreal authorities to actually get involved with the prolific spammer of death threads, “David Mabus/Dennis Markuze.” Finally, last week he was arrested and charged with 16 crimes and is currently undergoing a psych evaluation for 30 days.

Tim Farley has written a wondrous account of the entire campaign. I’ll give a summary below, but you need to read the whole thing.

Like most evolution/skeptic websites, we have experienced the death threats of Mabus first hand.—I’m sure readers can find ones that have not been deleted from our archives.—I think he eventually went away after we got our filters configured in such a way that he was unable to figure out a way around them. We were still on his mailing list until earlier this year when he decided to move his operation to Twitter. It turns out that Twitter was his downfall.

Complaints about Mabus’s death threats have been lodged many times over the years, but the Montreal police never acted on them because nearly everyone he threaten lived somewhere else. However, it was on Twitter that Montrealer William Raillant-Clark discovered Mabus’s threats. And in the course of trying to do something about the appalling behavior became noticed by Mabus and started receiving death threats in turn. Unfortunately for Mabus, Raillant-Clark had brought the Montreal police into the conversation, who responded with the email address of their public relations division. Raillant-Clark’s efforts also caught the attention of Kyle VanderBeek, who started a petition for the Montreal Police to take Mabus seriously. It received over 5,000 votes, each one generating an email that was sent to the address tweeted by the department. (They eventually cried “oncle.”)

Now on Twitter, Mabus would auto-harass anyone who mentioned or was mentioned by someone he was already harassing. Thus when the Montreal Police tweeted their email address to Raillant-Clark, Mabus began automatically harassing it too.

Thus Mabus was sending death threats to a fellow Montrealer and CCing the police to his plans.

There needs to be a new FAIL smiley/icon for this.

A reader, Dan Phelps, tells me, “Looks like the ‘fiscal conservative’ school board member is going to cost his district a lot of money.” See here, and stay tuned to a local newspaper near you.

A venerable claim of creationists is that evolution somehow or other violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In its tradition of recycling old-line creationist claims, the intelligent design movement, in the person of Granville Sewell, a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso, has taken up the creationist Second Law claim. For the few here who don’t regularly read him, I have to say that Jason Rosenhouse’s takedown of Sewell’s claims (and in particular Sewell’s whining about a rejected ms.) is lovely. Highly recommended.

Mother Jones has the news in this article from June 9^th:

On Wednesday, Right Wing Watch flagged a recent interview [David] Barton gave with an evangelcial talk show, in which he argues that the Founding Fathers had explicitly rejected Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Yes, that Darwin. The one whose seminal work, On the Origin of Species, wasn’t even published until 1859. Barton declared, “As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they’d already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you’ve got to teach Creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that!” Paine died in 1809, the same year Darwin was born.

Here’s the clip:

Discuss.

As was reported on PT and elsewhere, Chris Rodda recently decided to make a pdf of her book Liars for Jesus available for download free. Just today, the National Academies Press announced that it would make available pdf’s of nearly all its books, also free for download. NAP is the publisher of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council.

Not to be outdone, I have decided to make a pdf of my book No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe available for free download here.

From here. The conclusion:

Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

This theory is gaining traction in part because of Kahan’s work at Yale. In one study, he and his colleagues packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines–“Scientific Panel Recommends Anti-Pollution Solution to Global Warming” and “Scientific Panel Recommends Nuclear Solution to Global Warming”–and then tested how citizens with different values responded. Sure enough, the latter framing made hierarchical individualists much more open to accepting the fact that humans are causing global warming. Kahan infers that the effect occurred because the science had been written into an alternative narrative that appealed to their pro-industry worldview.

You can follow the logic to its conclusion: Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a “culture war of fact.” In other words, paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values–so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

By Paul S. Braterman
British Centre for Science Education

Michael Gove, UK Education Secretary, has said in as many words that “teaching creationism is at odds with scientific fact.” This is progress. The existing curriculum guidelines stated only that creationism and ID should not be taught as science, leaving room for them to be advanced as philosophical or religious doctrines (in the UK, there is no separation of Church and State). In any case, the publicly funded “Free Schools” now being set up are not constrained by the language of the curriculum. Some half-dozen Evangelical church schools with pro-creationism policies have applied for Free School status. We hope, in the light of the Secretary’s words, that these applications will now be rejected.

More below the fold…

As predicted by Joe Meert, Florida’s legislature is once again considering antievolution legislation. This particular attempt is done as a change to a law rather than as a standalone effort.

And the strategy in this one is to label it “critical analysis”, like Ohio did in 2002.

See the Florida Citizens for Science blog for further coverage and advice on activism.

(More at the Austringer.)

Asserting that the Second Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT) means that evolution is false is a perennial favorite out of the ensemble of religious antievolution arguments. It takes a subsection of the Index to Creationist Claims to cover the various ways it most often gets presented by a religious antievolutionist. The TalkOrigins Archive has a series of longer responses to the sometimes bizarre range of 2LoT folderol coughed up by religious antievolutionists. Even “Answers in Genesis” notes that one variant, that 2LoT started with “The Fall”, is among arguments that should never be used.

So what can one make of a recent attempt to publish a batch of 2LoT religious antievolution as if it were a genuine scientific contribution? E. Granville Sewell, a mathematician at the University of Texas at El Paso and “intelligent design” creationism (IDC) advocate, submitted a manuscript to Applied Mathematical Letters (AML) titled, “A second look at the second law”. AML apparently indicated acceptance of the manuscript to Sewell, leading to gloating on an IDC blog. That in turn led to action by David vun Kannon from the “After the Bar Closes” forum, who wrote the editors at AML to point out the problem. AML responded to vun Kannon, saying that they were withdrawing the manuscript.

More below the fold.

According to NCSE, in honor of Darwin Day, 2011, the documentary movie Kansas vs. Darwin is available free on the web through March 14 – that is, for the 30 days following Darwin’s birthday.

Thanks to Karen Spivey for the tip!

In a response to publication of the Cheng, et al paper in PNAS which demonstrated an evolutionary pathway to the antifreeze gene that protects fish from freezing in Antarctic water (see also my post on it), Casey Luskin, attack gerbil of the Disco ‘Tute, invokes Stephen Jay Gould’s infamous “just so” phrase. Luskin then kindly outlines the three steps in constructing a “just so” story to account for biological phenomena. Here I’ll walk through Casey’s steps for a parallel case to show just how specious his claim is. The parallel case is accounting for how a particular boulder, indicated below by the red arrow, got to where it was in a landslide (image used by permission of Air-and-Space Museum).

Georgia Purdom is a functionary–a “scientist”–at Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis. She has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the Ohio State University and was for a time on the faculty at Mt. Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio. (Interestingly, she left MVNU after 6 years, about the time when tenure decisions are made in most institutions. I know nothing specific, but it’s always fun to speculate.) In a recent blog post commenting on the Freshwater affair she wrote this:

I teach Sunday school for first through third grade, and over the next few weeks we’ll be discussing dinosaurs, radiometric dating methods, natural selection, and mutations. I teach them that what they learn in public school in regard to historical science concerning these ideas is not the truth.

That’s child abuse of a very high order, worse even than Freshwater’s because the children are so much younger. Those kids are screwed.

I’ve created a new web site, arkencounterwatch.com, to track the progress and construction of Answers in Genesis’s latest assault on common sense and good taste, the Ark Encounter theme park. I’ll aggregate news stories, blog posts, and other coverage on one site where visitors can survey reactions from the media, the public, and other sources.

Anyone coming across information related to Ark Encounter can forward it to me for posting, skip (AT) penguinsites (DOT) com.

Also on the site is a modest challenge. Mr. Ham, why not spend that hundred million plus proving what you’ve so adamantly insisted all these years: prove the Ark is physically possible. If you can build the vessel using the same methods Noah is supposed to have used, load it up with approximately the same number of animals, and eight people can successfully care for them on the water for the same length of time the flood was supposed to have taken I’ll be the first to start tithing to your museum.

And we’ll even grant you success even in calmer waters than must have existed if the catastrophic flood really happened. On the other hand, if the eight people die from suffocation under massive piles of every kind of animal poop imaginable, they will be honored martyrs for the cause, no matter how bad they smell at their funerals.