The Panda's Thumb

Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus

2012-02-08T21:51:38Z

Today a paper came out that should get special attention from evolutionary biologists, evolution educators, and creationism fighters. It is:

Cook, L. M.; Grant, B. S.; Saccheri, I. J.; Mallet, J. (2012). “Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus.” Biology Letters, Published online before print February 8, 2012. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2011.1136. Abstract at Journal, Supplementary Online Material.

Abstract

Colour variation in the peppered moth Biston betularia was long accepted to be under strong natural selection. Melanics were believed to be fitter than pale morphs because of lower predation at daytime resting sites on dark, sooty bark. Melanics became common during the industrial revolution, but since 1970 there has been a rapid reversal, assumed to have been caused by predators selecting against melanics resting on today’s less sooty bark. Recently, these classical explanations of melanism were attacked, and there has been general scepticism about birds as selective agents. Experiments and observations were accordingly carried out by Michael Majerus to address perceived weaknesses of earlier work. Unfortunately, he did not live to publish the results, which are analysed and presented here by the authors. Majerus released 4864 moths in his six-year experiment, the largest ever attempted for any similar study. There was strong differential bird predation against melanic peppered moths. Daily selection against melanics (s ≃ 0.1) was sufficient in magnitude and direction to explain the recent rapid decline of melanism in post-industrial Britain. These data provide the most direct evidence yet to implicate camouflage and bird predation as the overriding explanation for the rise and fall of melanism in moths.

As long-time readers of Panda’s Thumb know, I’ve had an axe to grind about the peppered moth case since the beginning of my serious involvement with creationism-fighting. Back in 2002 I wrote a long review of Jonathan Wells’s creationism/ID book Icons of Evolution for Talkorigins.org. Wells’s strategy was very clever; rather than attacking the science of evolution head-on, he attacked high school biology textbooks. He engaged in a delicate dance of selective citation and quote-mining so as to make it appear that the criticisms of standard textbook examples used to introduce various evolutionary concepts were coming from scientists.

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Since everyone, including scientists and science journalists, “knows” that introductory textbooks have problems, more than a few people reacted to Wells’s book with the defensive reaction “well, sure, textbooks have problems, but the science of evolution is well-supported”. However, this was giving away the game, because (a) Wells’s attacks, read carefully, were actually aimed at the credibility of the science of evolutionary biology and evolutionary biologists, and (b) his attacks were tenditious, question-begging, and most importantly based on an amazingly selective and misleading review of the evidence and the scientific community on each question.

One Wells chapter that was particularly annoying was on peppered moths. Everyone remembers something vague from high school biology about moths sitting on tree trunks and birds eating the ones that were the wrong color. In 1998, a leading peppered moth researcher, Michael Majerus from Cambridge, published a book called Melanism which included two long chapters reviewing scientific study of the peppered moth from the initial studies by Bernard Kettlewell in the 1950s through Majerus’s own work. One message of the chapters was that textbook accounts were oversimplified and that the full story was much more interesting. For example, Majerus presented field observations which indicated that peppered moths rest not just on tree trunks but also on tree branches. But the other message of the chapters was that Kettlewell’s basic hypothesis – that bird predation on moths had caused the shift in peppered moth color from light to dark and back again, through differential predation based on camouflage – was correct and confirmed by the work that had happened since Kettlewell’s initial studies, despite various criticisms of the details of some of his experiments.

The story of what happened after Majerus’s book came out is complex and bizarre and is briefly reviewed in Supplement 1 of Cook et al., entitled “A brief history of the peppered moth debacle.” The short version is that Jerry Coyne wrote a prominent review of the book in Nature, which concluded – somehow – that the peppered moth research was all highly questionable. Coyne was and is a prominent and respected evolutionary biologist, and his debunkings of pop-ev psych, creationism, etc. are often of high quality – but there is no way to avoid the conclusion that Coyne must have had an off-day, and his review of Majerus was uncareful and made many mistakes. For example, Coyne wrote:

Criticisms of this story have circulated in samizdat for several years, but Majerus summarizes them for the first time in print in an absorbing two-chapter critique (coincidentally, a similar analysis [Sargent et al., Evol. Biol. 30, 299-322; 1998] has just appeared). Majerus notes that the most serious problem is that B. betularia probably does not rest on tree trunks – exactly two moths have been seen in such a position in more than 40 years of intensive search. The natural resting spots are, in fact, a mystery. This alone invalidates Kettlewell’s release-recapture experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks, where they are highly visible to bird predators.

The only problems with this are that:

(a) Majerus himself, right there in Melanism, presented data showing that moths rested on trunks or trunk/branch joints in 32/47 moths Majerus had personally observed undisturbed in the wild, and 136/203 moths observed resting near light traps. Furthermore, Majerus’s photographs contained several unstaged photos, taken by him, of moths discovered in various natural positions, including on tree trunks.

(b) Birds that hunt on tree trunks are not somehow magically blocked from hunting on tree branches, and lichens are known to grow not just on tree trunks, but also on tree branches. Air pollution and soot, which darken trees both by killing lichens and by physically blackening surfaces (many critiques of the peppered moth example ignore that both processes happen), also manage to get to both places. (An aside – people forget what air pollution was like in 1950s England and before. Think Dickens. Black soot would fall out of the sky. That’s where the term “fallout” comes from, I believe. Sometimes the audience at the back of an opera house could not see the stage at the front. The death rate would spike on bad air days. Etc. This was not a subtle environmental change.)

(c) Not all of Kettlewell’s experiments relied solely on placing moths only on tree trunks. In fact it was Kettlewell himself who first noted in the 1950s that the moths also like branches, some of his experiments let the moths find their own resting spots.

(d) Sargent et al.’s review, which clearly influenced Coyne more than Majerus’s actual book, was on the phenomenon of melanism in moths in general – which likely does have diverse causes – and many of its criticisms did not apply to the specific case of the peppered moth. And as it turned out, Sargent and his coauthors had some very weird Lamarkian and anti-Modern-Synthesis views that have been aired in other venues.

Coyne added a few other choice quotes which rang around the world:

Depressingly, Majerus shows that this classic example is in bad shape, and, while not yet ready for the glue factory, needs serious attention.

[…]

Majerus concludes, reasonably, that all we can deduce from this story is that it is a case of rapid evolution, probably involving pollution and bird predation. I would, however, replace “probably” with “perhaps”. B. betularia shows the footprint of natural selection, but we have not yet seen the feet. Majerus finds some solace in his analysis, claiming that the true story is likely to be more complex and therefore more interesting, but one senses that he is making a virtue of necessity. My own reaction resembles the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve.

[…]

What can one make of all this? Majerus concludes with the usual call for more research, but several lessons are already at hand. First, for the time being we must discard Biston as a well-understood example of natural selection in action, although it is clearly a case of evolution.

Majerus and other peppered moth researchers were dismayed by Coyne’s review, and said so in various fora, but none of this attracted anything like the attention that Coyne’s review received, particularly when it was amplified by journalists and creationists. By the early 2000s, Wells and other creationists, and even some benighted journalists such as Judith Hooper, were alleging not just that the Kettlewell work was mistaken, but that it was fraud. Soon the peppered moth was disappearing from textbooks. The whole phenomenon was bizarre if one paid attention to the actual research literature by the actual people who had done fieldwork and experiments by peppered moths, e.g. Majerus himself, Cook, Bruce Grant, etc. Cook et al. write:

The attacks on the classic peppered moth story were promulgated almost entirely by people who never studied the peppered moth themselves. It is notable that no new fieldwork had ever been done that disproved the classical explanation.

There is more that could be said about the details of the criticisms leveled against Kettlewell and the peppered moth work over the years, but this would take a published article to sort out. It suffices to say that many of the criticisms contradicted other criticisms, most or all “alternative explanations”, even on the rare occasions when a critic bothered to propose one, could not explain how peppered moth color changed from light to dark and then back to light again, and many of the criticisms were obviously armchair “in the bad way” of assuming things that would be obviously wrong to anyone who went out to the field and looked at the relevant forests a bit. (I realized this when I looked at the forests around Cambridge – forests of relatively small and short British hardwoods are rather different than forests on the West Coast of the U.S. Trunk versus canopy is a huge difference in a redwood forest, but literally a matter of an arms length and a second or two of flying for a moth or bird in an English forest.)

All in all, I feel that my assessment of the peppered moth work as of 2002 was right on, and has been confirmed by subsequent developments.

However, a fantastic feature of science is that even overwrought and unreasonable criticisms can benefit knowledge and science in the end, because they aggravate scientists enough to spur them to gather more data. To this end, Majerus conducted experiments and observations on peppered moths for seven summers from 2001-2007, and did it while deliberately avoiding the criticisms that had been leveled at previous experiments – Majerus’s moths were at low density, in natural resting positions, etc. And the result? The selection coefficient against dark moths was statistically significant and approximately 0.1. This is a huge value (huge in that much smaller selection coefficients can easily be relevant in population genetics), of the same order of magnitude and direction estimated in previous work, and sufficient and adequate to explain the change in frequency of the dark morph of the peppered moth, which dropped from 12% to 1% over the course of the study, continuing the trend which had been observed ever since the clean-air laws went into effect in the 1950s. As an aside, we are very lucky that Majerus did this work when he did, since (as the classical explanation predicted), the dark morph is now almost extinct.

Majerus’s data were in by 2007 and he released the results in various talks and in an online article on his website, and reviewed the work in a 2008 article in Evolution: Education and Outreach. Jerry Coyne, to his great credit, went on the air with Majerus in a radio interview and announced that Majerus’s new work had convinced him.

The only step left would have been for Majerus to formally publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal, but Majerus unexpectedly and shockingly died of a rare illness in 2009. Such an event causes chaos for a researcher’s family and laboratory, and I was beginning to worry that Majerus’s final experiment would never be published, and thus we would be subjected to endless cycles of rehashing of the same old half-baked arguments from creationists and the like for decades to come, each time someone rediscovered the charges of scandal and fraud from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Fortunately, however, a group of Majerus’s former colleagues assembled his results and methods and conducted a new statistical analysis, which resulted in the Cook et al. paper.

Whether or not this means that peppered moths will go back into the textbooks is, perhaps, not the most important question. The most important question is getting the science correct and then conforming our beliefs and confidence to whatever the best evidence says. And the science is continuing – researchers have recently identified (van’t Hof et al. 2011) the region of the moth genome responsible for producing the melanism trait, and presumably it is just a matter of time before we know the mutation(s) responsible for producing the trait. Interestingly, Majerus (1998) argued that the evidence argued for a single origin of melanism in British peppered moths. In this he was disagreeing with Kettlewell, who argued that melanism was a “recurring necessity” that had come and gone with climate change and the like (e.g., cryptic moths in general tend to be darker in wetter regions, probably because water darkens surfaces and cloud cover reduces the amount of light on surfaces). Hopefully soon, molecular work will reveal whether or not Majerus was as correct about this as he was about other things. (Note: van’t Hof et al. 2011 already conclude this based on the linkage disequilibrium pattern they observe in the moth chromosomes, but I believe they haven’t drilled down to the specific mutation in the sequence which is responsible.)

But I have to confess that I have a soft spot for the moths and for their place it textbooks. It is true, as is often said, that we now have many good examples of natural selection in action. So we don’t need the moths. However, that argument only has a point if you have some residual reason to doubt the quality of the evidence in the peppered moth case, probably because you “heard somewhere” that it was in doubt. Hopefully a careful review of the published research, and not second-hand armchair sources, would convince any reasonable observer that the science is perfectly decent in the case of the peppered moth. Once that conclusion is accepted, the peppered moth story lends itself to classroom use for many reasons: the evolutionary change is obvious and visual. The mechanism of bird predation, and the resulting adaptation of camouflage, is easy to understand and gives students a crucial link between the statistical action of natural selection, and the production of adaptations that “seem designed” to naive observers. And the change was the unintentional byproduct of human activity – air pollution, and furthermore the change back was due to legislation which reduced air pollution. And the change in the peppered moths back to their original peppered state was an evolutionary prediction made by Kettlewell and subsequent researchers, and which was dramatically confirmed.

Finally, the whole snafu over the peppered moth science, and the subsequent resolution of the controversy, first by review of already published work by moth researchers, and confirmed by the additional research by Majerus, is itself an excellent example of how science can succeed even in spite of the mistakes all humans and scientists make, and in spite of the difficulties imposed by inadequate journalism, pseudoscientific propaganda like creationism, etc. Since the oversimplification of the peppered moth story in textbooks originally led to some of the backlash, surely it would be fitting to make the practice of science, in all its complexity, accessible to students today, in the form of the peppered moth example along with the history of the rise, and fall, and rise of the peppered moth.

The best take on the alleged Siberian mammoth sighting

2012-02-08T20:42:31Z

…is probably this one.

Freshwater: The role of the appeals court

2012-02-07T19:13:59Z

Given some dispute and confusion in comments earlier, I asked Ken Lane, an attorney friend of mine who has considerable prosecutorial and civil law experience, especially in legal issues associated with local governments and administrative agencies, to write a paragraph or two on the role of appellate courts in cases like Freshwater’s appeal of his termination by the Mt. Vernon City Schools Board of Education. His excellent and helpful response is below the fold.

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The Ohio Supreme Court website states:

The courts of appeals are established by Article IV, Section 1, of the Ohio Constitution and their jurisdiction is outlined in Article IV, Section 3. As the intermediate level appellate courts, their primary function is to hear appeals from the common pleas, municipal and county courts. Each case is heard and decided by a three-judge panel.

The state is divided into 12 appellate districts, each of which is served by a court of appeals. The number of judges in each district depends on a variety of factors, including the district’s population and the court’s caseload. Each district has a minimum of four appellate judges. Appeals court judges are elected to six-year terms in even-numbered years. They must have been admitted to the practice of law in Ohio six years preceding commencement of the term.

In addition to their appellate jurisdiction, the courts of appeals have original jurisdiction, as does the Supreme Court, to hear applications for writs of habeas corpus, mandamus, procedendo, prohibition and quo warranto. The 10^th District Court of Appeals in Franklin County also hears appeals from the Ohio Court of Claims.

The Freshwater case was appealed to the Fifth District Court of Appeals, which is based in Canton, and covers 17 counties, including Knox County. The clerk of the Knox County Court of Common Pleas also serves as clerk of the court of appeals for all cases originating in Knox County. The case transcript and briefs are filed in Knox County, and shipped to Canton when the court of appeals is ready to review the case.

In most instances, the court of appeals is the first appeal of right, meaning they must accept every case appealed to it. By way of contrast, the Ohio Supreme Court hears some appeals of right involving a substantial constitutional question, but generally hears discretionary appeals which it deems to be of public or great general interest.

Teacher termination cases are confusing because the common pleas court acts as the first layer of appeal, and the court of appeals acts as a second layer of appeal. The Ohio Supreme Court then acts as a third layer of appeal. This additional layer of appeal is unusual when viewed through the lens of most civil and criminal actions, but is not at all unusual when viewed through the lens of administrative appeals. As the name implies, administrative appeals come from administrative agencies, e.g. state departments and agencies, cities, villages, townships, and zoning boards.

In teacher termination cases, the court of common pleas can hear additional testimony, but is not required to do so. The court of appeals is restricted to reviewing the record, which consists of the common pleas court judgment entry, the actions of the school board, and the transcript of proceedings. The transcript of proceedings in the Freshwater case was over 6,000 pages. Transcripts in most cases are well under 200 pages, and some are only 20 to 30 pages.

Judge Eyster has publically stated he read every word of the transcript. The court of appeals almost certainly will not, nor will they scour the record looking for errors. The appellant’s [Freshwater’s] attorney must provide the court of appeals with specific errors committed by the school board, supported by specific portions of the transcript which demonstrate the error took place. Appellant’s attorney must then provide a statute, rule, or case in support of their position. Appellee’s [Board of Education’s] attorney then provides the court with argument as to why no error took place, and why counsel for appellant’s argument is erroneous, and is not supported by the statute, rule, or case cited. The court of appeals can also allow amicus curiae briefs to be filed, which urge the court to either affirm or reverse the decision of the court from which the appeal originated.

In most cases, the court of appeals would review the briefs of appellant and appellee, and set the matter for oral argument. In the Freshwater case, the court allowed two amicus curiae briefs to be filed, and the case was placed on the court’s accelerated calendar, so no oral arguments will be heard.

The court of appeals can (among more subtle subsets of these options):

- Determine no error occurred and affirm Judge Eyster’s decision.
- Determine an error occurred, but it was harmless error, and affirm Judge Eyster’s decision.
- Determine an error occurred and reverse Judge Eyster’s decision.

The clerk of courts shipped the case transcript and briefs to Canton on February 2, 2012. Even though the case is on the court’s accelerated calendar, I would not expect a decision before early April. A day or two after the case is decided, it will be available online.

Toxomerus marginatus

2012-02-06T18:00:00Z

Photograph by Kurt Andreas.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.

Toxomerus marginatus – hoverfly. See also here.

Carnival of Evolution

2012-02-05T21:11:37Z

The Proceedings of the 44^th Carnival of Evolution are up on Atavism. The Proceedings include

Session 1. Symposium on the evolution of novelty

Session 2. Evolutionary ecology and life history evolution

Session 3. Philosophy and evolution

Session 4a. Experimental Evolution

Session 4b. Timing and tempo of evolution

Session 5. Outreach and anti-creationism

and a Poster session.

Freshwater: Appeal goes to the court

2012-02-03T17:46:55Z

I’ve learned that leave has been granted for acceptance of the amicus briefs from the Dennis family and NCSE. The briefs in the case are now complete (see NCSE’s compilation). I’m told that Freshwater requested an expedited hearing, meaning that only the initially submitted briefs–plaintiff’s, defendant’s, and the two amicus briefs–will be in play. The case has been submitted to the appeals court where it will be heard by a three judge panel. They may or may not schedule oral arguments. If they do, I’ll try to be there.

If You Use Verizon FIOS, Do Me A Favor

2012-02-03T06:50:14Z

Since January 10, 2012, I’ve been unable to connect to my email or any of the web applications serving Antievolution.org, Austringer.net, and TalkDesign.org from my Verizon FIOS residential internet service account. The servers hosting those are on a Verizon FIOS Business service account.

This isn’t a problem with the servers. I’m able to access everything fine via my smartphone or from other ISPs.

This isn’t a problem just at my house. My parents’ ISP is Verizon FIOS, and they’ve been unable to access the Austringer blog since January 10^th, too.

This limits my efficiency on dealing with things if my home internet doesn’t actually get me to the sites I do system administration on and the email where various lists are handled. I’m using AnonymoX just to be able to hit various sites in my browser, which is a real pain.

The favor: If you have Verizon FIOS, try pulling up the Austringer blog. If you have the same problem, your browser will timeout rather than display anything. Please leave a comment saying whether you were successful or unsuccessful in getting the blog. If you are unsuccessful, I’d really appreciate it if you could enter a ticket with Verizon technical support. Reference ticket numbers TXP08R8CY and FLCP08R8EN if you put in your own ticket. I’ve had tickets in since January 10^th, but no solution has turned up, and a high-level Verizon network person tonight seemed to be on the verge of cancelling the tickets that are currently active without fixing the problem.

Bisgrove Postdoctoral Scholars at ASU

2012-02-01T05:12:55Z

Science Foundation Arizona is sponsoring a postdoctoral scholar program at Arizona State University that offers a really sweet deal:

Bisgrove Scholars will receive an annual stipend of $60,000, benefits and an additional $20,000 per year for research expenses. The Bisgrove appointment is renewable on a year-to-year basis for a maximum initial term of two years, contingent upon the availability of funds.

This program is only open to individuals who have no prior post-doctoral experience and obtain a PhD prior to appointment, i.e. doctoral students in their last year of studies. So while you may be now eating ramen every night in the lab while trying to finish up the last experiment you need to graduate, this time next year, you could be eating ramen sprinkled with gold dust and angel tears, while trying to finish up the last experiment you need for a grant proposal. (Did I mention that rent is cheap here?)

Another qualification is that your research has to fit with the Science Foundation Arizona’s mission: “Areas include, diagnosis and prevention of disease, sustainable energy and the environment, and information and communications technologies at the human interface.”

You will also need to specify possible mentors for your research project. (Hey, I’m available!)

For instructions on how to apply, see http://graduate.asu.edu/bisgrove.

Applications due Feb 15^th.

Ark Park Still in Kentucky Budget

2012-01-30T21:31:35Z

The governor of Kentucky plans budget cuts of $350 million over two years, including $50 million from public education and substantial cuts to higher education – but has managed to find $11 million to build an interchange to a phantasmical Ark Park, according to LEO Weekly, a Louisville alternative newspaper. Presumably the interchange, which will connect to a 1-mile road between Interstate 75 and a town of 3500, will go to roughly the same place as the Bridge to Nowhere or one of its brethren.

The governor, Steve Beshear, reportedly understands that his state “struggles due to the lack of an educated labor force” and admits that his proposed budget “is inadequate for the future needs of our people.” Maybe he should read a recent editorial in Science magazine and ponder whether the poor performance of US students in science and mathematics can be traced to politicians who cut education budgets and pander to anti-scientific crackpots.

Alces alces

2012-01-30T18:00:00Z

Photograph by Arthur Rosen.

Alces alces – moose, Denali National Park, Alaska.

Blush

2012-01-26T21:00:49Z

Press release: Genetic data expert to bolster ASU’s high-throughput DNA analytics

Unfortunately, they forgot to mention my collaborator, Prof. Steve Steve.

PS, we are still looking for a postdoc and students.

Bushtit -- Psaltriparus minimus -- nest

2012-01-23T18:00:00Z

Nest of bushtit – Psaltriparus minimus – Walden Ponds, Boulder, Colorado. The nest to the upper right may be an oriole’s nest. Identifications courtesy of Wild Bird Center, Boulder.

Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program

2012-01-20T19:05:31Z

Do you know of any graduating or recently graduated baccalaurate students who are considering graduate school? Do they come from disadvantaged backgrounds or belong to underrepresented groups in biomedical sciences? If so, then ASU has a program built for them: ASU PREP.

PREP scholars spend 75% of their time working as technicians on a research project under the direction of an experienced ASU faculty mentor, in a laboratory with PhD graduate students and/or postdoctoral fellows. The program director and faculty advisory committee help scholars identify the research area and mentor that best matches the interests and goals of each scholar. Scholars receive a salary of $21,000 per year. Scholars participate in a one to two year program, dependent on each individualized development plan.

Applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents that have completed their undergraduate degree from an accredited U.S. college or university within the last three years. Applicants must intend to apply to a Ph.D. graduate program within two years. Individuals who contribute to the diversity of the graduate student community and to the biomedical or behavioral sciences, at ASU and nationally, are strongly encouraged to apply.

Application deadline is March 30, 2012

See http://graduate.asu.edu/prep for full details and application instructions.

Freshwater: The main briefs in the appeal

2012-01-20T18:27:14Z

Update: The Dennis family’s amicus brief is now up on NCSE.com.

The two main briefs in John Freshwater’s appeal of the Knox County Court of Common Pleas’ decision to uphold Freshwater’s termination by the Mt. Vernon Board of Education are now up on NCSE’s site. The two amicus briefs, from NCSE and the Dennis family, have not yet been accepted by the court. NCSE’s brief is on the site linked above; the Dennis’ brief is not yet available online, though I’ve read a copy.

I’ll briefly (!) summarize what I see as the core arguments of the briefs here, and go into more detail below the fold.

Freshwater’s appeal brief: Basically argues that (a) Freshwater only taught “alternative scientific theories”, (b) there are good pedagogical reasons to do so, and (c) he has free speech and academic freedom rights to do so. Also argues that the moves against Freshwater are motivated by religious animus, though it’s silent about specifically who feels that animus.

Board’s response brief: Argues that because student attendance is required and the public school has an interest in protecting itself against the consequences of illegal actions by teachers, Freshwater, as an agent and employee of the public school, does not have unfettered free speech or academic freedom rights. Also argues that the Common Pleas court did not abuse its discretion when it elected to not hold public hearings in view of the extensive record generated by the administrative hearing.

NCSE amicus brief: Puts Freshwater’s behavior in the context of the history of attempts to teach creationism in the public schools, and argues that his teaching was both pedagogically and scientifically unsound.

Dennis family brief: Reviews Freshwater’s impermissible injection of religion into his teaching, and disputes his de-emphasis of the Tesla coil incident, pointing out the inconsistencies in Freshwater’s stories about the incident.

The case is not yet scheduled for oral arguments. I’m told that Freshwater requested an expedited hearing, which I understand means that there will be no back-and-forth, no rebuttals and rejoinders, in the paperwork. What’s there now is what the appeals court will use to make its decision.

Some remarks and elaborations below the fold

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Freshwater’s brief claims that teaching about “alternative scientific theories” is pedagogically appropriate and he has free speech and academic freedom rights to do so. As I wrote earlier,

Throughout this argument, the brief refers to multiple “theories”-it refers to “popular alternative theories” (p. v); “various alternative theories” (p. 10); “competing theories” (twice on p. 10); “alternative theories” (p. 12, p. 14); “alternative origins of life theories” (p. 14); and “widely-accepted theories on the origins of life” (referred to as consistent with “the views of multiple world religions” on p. 14). All the references are attempts to represent Freshwater’s presentation of creationist materials as “a permissible and valuable pedagogical exercise” (p. 15) in a [public] middle school science classroom.

Of course, Freshwater did not in fact teach about “alternative scientific theories,” and no evidence was ever introduced to suggest that he did. His handouts, videos, and remarks were from creationist web sites, and were not evidence in support of “alternative scientific theories” but rather embodied the traditional creationist “two models” approach pioneered by the Institute for Creation Research and now most strongly advocated by Answers in Genesis. Knock down evolution and creationism wins by default.

Freshwater’s brief argues that he is permitted to teach about alternative scientific theories in public schools, and the brief claims that’s all Freshwater did. This is a new claim in the Freshwater saga: previously in both public statements and sworn testimony Freshwater has denied teaching creationism or intelligent design. (See also here for a summary of an interview of Freshwater on Fox News; the original clip is apparently no longer available on the web.) So like Freshwater’s mutually contradictory stories about whether he used the Tesla coil to make an “X” on Zach Dennis’ arm or no mark at all (summarized here), Freshwater’s story has…erm…evolved. Apparently he (or more likely, his Rutherford Institute handlers) have implicitly conceded that they cannot rebut the testimony and evidence about Freshwater’s use of creationist handouts and videos and are now attempting to alter the interpretation of that behavior.

This new Freshwater claim made its first appearance to my knowledge in a recent radio interview Freshwater did with David Barton, the notorious quote faker, where Freshwater claimed that he taught “robust evolution.” By that, Freshwater explained, he meant that

I showed what was the evidence for evolution, I showed evidence that was opposed to evolution. I showed all sides. … You need to study it all, especially in a public school. You need to see all the evidence. And there’s some great evidence for, and there’s some great evidence that goes against it. And I think the kids need to see all evidence rather than indoctrinating them only on one side or the other.

He taught the evidence for evolution? One wonders how much comparative genomics and molecular genetics Freshwater, with his Associate’s degree in Wildlife and Recreation and his Bachelor’s degree in education, taught in his 8^th grade class. Did he mention the phylogenetics of pseudogenes or that of endogenous retroviruses? I’m fully aware that undergraduate degrees are not the sole determinant of one’s knowledge, but Freshwater has given us no evidence at all that he actually knows much about the evidence for evolution or that he’s competent to assess what “great evidence” is.

Freshwater further argued in his appeals court brief that he has a First Amendment free speech right to teach those alternative theories. This is again a new claim for Freshwater, and reflects the current generation of creationist tactics in state legislatures (see here for an early (1999) account of that tactic, and here for the Disco ‘Tute’s “Free Speech on Evolution Campaign.”)

Board’s response brief

As noted above, Freshwater’s brief claims that he was only teaching “alternative scientific theories.” That, of course, is knee-deep horse manure: Freshwater used a range of creationist materials in an attempt to cast doubt on various scientific findings and science’s strongly corroborated theories–common descent, evolution by natural selection, the reliability of physics in radiometric dating, the reliability of geology in its finding of an old earth, and so on. Further, he argued that he had both the free speech right and the academic freedom to do so.

The Board’s brief rebuts both the free speech and academic freedom claims, citing case law to show that the courts, including the Supreme Court, have consistently ruled that when public school teachers are operating in their role as teachers they do not have the right to teach any damn fool notion they please. The Board’s brief argues that the school has a clear interest in what speech teachers utter in their classrooms, and that the Board can regulate that speech so as to not bring the Board into legal jeopardy. The brief argues that “The Board’s decision [to terminate Freshwater] was appropriately affirmed by the trial court because it has a right to control its own speech. The Board exercised control of its speech by preventing [Freshwater] from continuing to improperly teach religion in class.” The argument is that a teacher is an agent of the Board, and that improper behavior–e.g. impermissible speech–by a teacher exposes the Board to legal jeopardy. It therefore has the right to govern that speech. Freshwater’s injection of creationism into his class was “…made pursuant to his duties as an employee,” and was not made in his capacity as a private individual, which would be protected speech. The Board “…took legitimate and appropriate steps to ensure that one of its teachers did not distort its teaching of science to impressionable eight graders by endorsing Christian religious beliefs” (p. 13).

Further, the Board’s brief argues that the Court of Common Pleas did not abuse its discretion when it denied Freshwater’s request for a public hearing in that court, arguing that the extensive administrative hearing record (38 days of hearings, more than 80 witnesses generating 6,344 pages of transcript, and 350 exhibits) was sufficient basis for the Common Pleas judge to choose not to hold additional hearings and make his decision on the basis of his review of that record.

NCSE’s amicus brief puts Freshwater’s approach into the context of the history of attempts to attack the teaching of evolution. NCSE’s brief reviews the history of creationist attempts to subvert the teaching of science, and identifies Freshwater’s approach as being in the “third generation” of such attempts, the two-prong ‘teach the controversy and push intelligent design’ generation. The entire brief is well worth reading for its succinct review of the history of the issue.

Dennis family’s amicus brief reviews the evidence bearing on Freshwater’s injection of religion into his classroom and his teaching of science, and argues that the minimization of the Tesla coil incident in his appeals brief is inappropriate. It also points out the inconsistencies in Freshwater’s sworn statements about that incident, which are similar to his inconsistency in his statements about whether he taught creationism, sometimes denying it (e.g. in sworn testimony in the administrative hearing) and sometimes affirming it (e.g., in his radio interview on Nov 30, 2011). As noted above, the same sort of inconsistencies are found in his varying claims about whether he taught creationism and intelligent design.

Evolutionary Genetics at my High School

2012-01-19T21:25:08Z

My high school, Athens Academy in Athens, GA, is currently offering an Evolutionary Genetics course to 11^th graders (16–17 year olds). They are mostly using an curriculum from the University of Georgia funded through a grant for K-12 evolutionary education development.

Take that creationists.