“Gold of the gaps”, the Discovery Institute, and Intelligent Design

This from Matt Young on pandasthumb:

Gold of the gaps

Does gold have a purpose? asks an unnamed author in Evolution News & Science Today. The author goes on to observe that there is more gold on earth than astrophysicists can account for and also that gold has risen to the surface of the earth faster than might be expected. They go on to note the “availability of many essential elements at the surface of the earth …” and also discuss the use of gold in medicine. They are somewhat breathless at the discovery that the body can metabolize gold:

Gold nanoparticles, which are supposed to be stable in biological environments, can be degraded inside cells, [boldface in original]

even though, as they note, gold salts have been used for decades in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

At any rate, the article stresses the “mystery of biological gold” and claims several hints why gold may have a purpose: its abundance and seemingly unlikely transport to the surface of the earth, the ability of cells to “metabolize” [sic] gold, the fact that gold persists in the body, and the usefulness of gold for therapeutics. The conclusion of the article is

Darwin does devolve. Sometimes. So what?

“[T]here is in fact nothing that can alleviate that fatal flaw in Darwinism” says Professor Behe, stating the book’s central claim in the mendaciously mislabelled creationist web journal Evolution News.

The claim is clickbait, the book title misleading, and the argument long since rebutted. The historical roots of the argument show the close links between what now calls itself Intelligent Design, and biblically inspired “creation science”. The issues are important because the Intelligent Design movement gives a veneer of intellectual respectability to the denial of scientific reality.

Brag time: My “Slam Dunk to Creationists” attacked by Discovery Institute

The Discovery Institute, self appointed spokesman for Intelligent Design theory (i.e. cryptocreationist obscurantism) has singled out my piece in The Conversation, How to slam dunk creationists when it comes to the theory of evolution.

Slam Dunk image plagiarised from Discovery Institute. Provenance unknown

My piece argues that we should be talking about the evidence, not about the meaning of words. In particular, I take exception to the National Academy of Sciences definition of a theory as “supported by a vast body of evidence”, on the grounds that calling something a theory tells us nothing about how well supported it is. The Discovery Institute uses fancy layout to quotemine what I said, so that my criticism of the National Academy is made to look like approval, before taking exception to the National Academy of Sciences definition of a theory as “supported by a vast body of evidence”, on the grounds that calling something a theory tells us nothing about how well supported it is.

In passing, the DI also tells us that “Sahelanthropus … is thought by some to just be a female gorilla.” Eat your heart out, Smithsonian.

I’m honoured by such well-informed and well thought out attention. And while the DI’s article is unsigned, connoisseurs of Creationism will understand my additional delight at having Casey Luskin and Douglas Axe listed among my accusers. With enemies like this, who needs friends?

At the time of writing, my piece has attracted 78,000 hits [update: 95,000 hits] and been featured by Newsweek, Business Insider, The Raw Story, RealClearScience, and others. My thanks to Jane Wright, at The Conversation, whose skilful editing helped make all this possible.

[The read count by end 2017 was >307,000, with ~250,000 additional hits via Yahoo! News. The article was also translated into Arabic by the Iraqi Translation Project]

Casey Luskin leaves Discovery Institute; I will miss him

Casey Luskin has just announced his departure from the Discovery Institute, in order to further his studies. We will miss the enlightenment that he brings. For example, in his farewell piece, he tells us that

Evolutionary biologists are now admitting we need “post-Darwinian” models to explain the Cambrian explosion.

Casey is right; we really do need “post-Darwinian” models to explain the Cambrian explosion. Things like Mendelian inheritance, mutation, population genetics, and, in this context, palaeogeochemistry, which is why evolutionary biologists have been decidedly post-Darwinian since around 1905.

Casey does not tell us what he is going to study, but I rather hope that it will be chemistry. Then, in due course, he will be fully equipped to explain to us that Dalton couldn’t even get the structure of water right, that Faraday’s electrical theory of bonding needs to be revised in the light of quantum mechanics, that many of the postulated intermediates in chemical reactions have never even been observed, that (as predicted by Intelligent Alchemy) many of Lavoisier’s elements turn out not to be elements at all, and that our schools should allow students to evaluate for themselves the unwarranted metaphysical assumptions of chemical materialism, and the merits of the phlogiston theory.

Disclosure: unlike many far better people, I have been insulted by Casey only once, when he accused me and the British Centre for Science Education of concealing our atheism for tactical reasons. Guilty as charged; we conceal it so well that one of BCSE’s most prominent members at the time, now its official spokesman, is an Anglican priest. Devious, these evolutionists. You need to watch them.

Casey, you will be sadly missed.

Update; more here: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2016/01/luskin-i-am-lea.html The word is that he will be replaced by Ann Gauger, who knows more biochemistry and therefore has, and uses, a  much greater capacity for misunderstanding.

The evolution of creationism; Kitzmiller 10 years on

December 20^th is the tenth anniversary of the delivery of judgement in Kitzmiller v. Dover, an important anniversary for proponents of evolution science, and Nick Matzke, who coordinated the National Center for Science Education’s efforts at that trial, has celebrated it in the most appropriate possible manner. He has applied the methods of evolutionary tree building to the development of creationism itself in the intervening decade. The results are alarming.

Phylogenetic relationships among creationism bills , courtesy Nick Matzke. AFA Academic freedom Act, SEA Science Education Act, further identification by year, State, and bill number

The case arose when Tammy Kitzmiller and the other parents challenged the decision of Dover Area School District Board to introduce the Intelligent Design pseudotext Of Pandas and People to their High School, along with a statement urging students to retain an open mind about Intelligent design as an alternative to Darwin’s theory”. Since the matter has been extensively discussed by me and numerous others, I will simply say that Pandas was an incoherent attack on evolution science, full of factual and logical errors, and that the statement to be read misdescribed evolution as a theory about the origin of life, and claimed that since it was a theory it was uncertain, and, moreover, that there were gaps missing from it. Drafts subpoenaed for the trial also showed that the text had originally referred to “creation science”, being hastily modified when an earlier case established that “creation science” was simply another name for religious creationism.

The case is significant as a test of the creationist claim that Intelligent Design is not a form of religious creationism, but, on the contrary, legitimate science. Judge Jones’s magnificent rejection of this claim runs to 139 legal pages; in brief, he found that this claim was baseless, the textbook error laden, the Designer no other than Christian God (in whom, incidentally, Judge Jones believes), and the arguments offered as evidence for Design scientifically worthless. For this and other reasons, he declared ID to be “a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.” It followed, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, that it should not be taught in any publicly funded school. Strictly, Judge Jones’s ruling is only binding in the Middle Circuit of the State of Pennsylvania, but such is the force of its arguments that I do not imagine any challenge elsewhere, unless the US Supreme Court at some future time falls into the hands of creationists.

The creationist response has been to seek yet another, less easily penetrated, form of disguise for their activities. Instead of promoting clearly defined positions, which could be subjected to legal scrutiny, they now speak of teaching the controversy, and put forward so-called Academic Freedom Bills, which invite critical examination of evolution. Who, after all, is opposed to freedom? Shouldn’t students be aware of controversy? And why should evolution be shielded from critical examination? Scientifically speaking, of course, there is no controversy, and neither teachers nor students require special legislative permission before critically examining any concept. So the purpose is, clearly, to provide a figleaf for those who want to claim that the basic concepts of evolution are uncertain, or that creationism provides a worthy alternative.

We have had, in the past decade, 71 of these Academic Freedom Bills introduced, in 16 separate states, and passed into law in 3, while the strategy has evolved as the creationist community has learned from its successes and failures. Matzke’s achievement has been to map this evolution. I imagine no one better qualified. He was the lead member of the National Center for Science Education teisam at the trial. Since then, he has attained a Ph.D. at University of California Berkeley, and spent two years as a post-doc at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), housed at the University of Tennessee. He is now recognised as a rising star in his field; a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at the Australian National University and the author of some 30 scientific papers on topics related to evolution, with attention also to science education, and to the human impact on the environment.

Matzke has special expertise in molecular phylogeny, the technique by which differences in DNA are used to construct family trees. The basic principle is simple; that a mutation that became established in one species will, unless eliminated by chance, be found in its descendants. We can use such shared mutations to pick out groups of more closely related species, and the family relationships established in this way generally show excellent agreement with the relationships established long since on the basis of anatomical homologies and the fossil record.[1]

Not surprisingly, we can apply the same principle to manuscripts, and Dennis Venema, one of my favourite writers on evolution, has compared the two kinds of application in his series of articles, Genomes as Ancient Texts. But what did surprise me was to learn that the method was applied to mediaeval legal documents as early as 1827, although now texts are examined using programs and criteria of the same kind as those in use to establish DNA phylogenies (see Phylomemetics – Evolutionary Analysis beyond the Gene, free download here). Similar reasoning has been applied to languages since 1850, and both Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin drew attention to the similarities between biological and linguistic evolutionary trees.

What Matzke has now done is to apply the principle to the content of the antievolution bills discussed above. Unfortunately, the paper in which he presents his findings, in the prestigious journal Science, is behind a pay wall, although the National Center for Science Education has published a summary, and NIMBioS has put out a very informative press release, with further accounts in Scientific American podcasts, the Washington Post, and the media company Vocativ.

Anyway, here is what he says, and why it matters.

We can construct a family tree for these antiscience bills. Until around 2006, they were described as Academic Freedom Acts and discuss the teaching of evolution and the origin of life. (Logically, this is a total muddle, since biological evolution does not address the origins of life, any more than chemistry addresses the origin of atoms. Rhetorically, though, it’s a smart move. Creationists often accuse biology teachers of presenting as fact highly speculative theories regarding the origins of life, and although it is decades since biology textbooks did this, mud sticks.) In 2006, an extremely alarming development took place. Ouachita Parish, Louisiana (a Louisiana Parish is much the same thing as a County in other States) developed a policy, in what they renamed a Science Education Act, that lumped together evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning. The mention of human cloning is purely for effect; we are, and I hope we will choose to remain, a long way from being able to do any such thing, and if we do it will not be in the school science lab. However, it rightly raises alarm.

One truly insidious development is the addition of global warming to the mix. In the US, although not in the UK, the doctrinally conservatism that leaves to creationism is associated with extreme political conservatism, a deep devotion to free markets and suspicion of government, and rejection of the science of global warming, because it implies the need for government (and, worse, inter-government) action. Thus there is an excellent correlation, in the US, between evolution rejection by various faith groups and climate change rejection. Since the fall from power of Tony Abbott in Australia, the United States is I believe the only nation in which one major political party denies that global temperatures are rising, and that fossil fuel burning is responsible. Thus we have the embarrassing spectacle of scientifically illiterate congressmen holding hearings to which they invite cranks and outliers, and doing all they can to sabotage the outline climate agreement recently reached in Paris. As I have said here before, evolution denial is ridiculous but climate change denial is dangerous.

Even more worrying to me is the spread of voucher systems, under which the local government does not run the education system itself, but issues vouchers to all eligible schoolchildren, to pay for their education by non-government schools. MSNBC reports that there are hundreds of such schools teaching creationism as a taxpayer’s expense in nine States and the District of Columbia.

And worst of all is the fact that creationism happens because people want it to. Which means in turn that often there is no effective opposition, either in the community or in the classroom. According to an article in Science, Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom (2011, 331:404, paywall), timed to roughly match the 5^th anniversary of Kitzmiller, around 11% of US biology teachers actually teach creationism, 28% teach evolution according to guidelines, and the remaining 60% avoid the topic because they do not feel prepared to deal with the hostile questioning that it will evoke. Top down imposition of evolution may, alas, be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient.

Comic relief time: This work has not received universal approbation. At the mendaciously mistitled Evolution News and Views, no less a person than John G. West, political scientist, acolyte of C. S. Lewis, and Vice President of the Discovery Institute, goes to the heart of the matter:

Did Nick Matzke Misuse National Science Foundation Money Intended to Fund Science Research?

Professor West has done us all the great service of looking up the grants that funded Matzke during this work. One of them, he reveals, was earmarked for studying the phylogeny of shellfish. But creationists are not shellfish, so Nick has been very, very naughty. This is not the first time that Discovery Institute fellows have found it necessary to rebuke him. Casey Luskin has pointed out that he is known to have actually received money from the National Center for Science Education (he was employed by them at the time), so no wonder he supports evolution. And two days later David Berlinski criticised him for criticising Stephen Meyer for not using cladistics, because Berlinski thinks you shouldn’t use cladistics, because if you imagine that a cladogram is a geometrical, rather than merely a topological, representation, you can get the wrong answer. (As it happens, the only time I have met this mistake is in the pages of Of Pandas and People, which is roughly where we came in). You can find the whole shocking story here, and I hope that Nick takes these lessons to heart.

1] In the case of biological species, things can get a little more complicated, if only because we are dealing with interbreeding groups, within which genetic material is duplicated and shuffled, rather than unique copies. So species can split while still carrying more than one version of a gene. For example, the genes coding for Type A and Type B blood groups arose by mutation from a common ancestor, at some time more remote than the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and both types were present on both sides of the chimp-human split. Thus a human with blood type A will, with respect to just that single gene, be more closely related to a chimp with the homologous blood type than to a human of blood type B. For this reason, all evolutionary trees are fuzzy. There is also the matter of horizontal transfer, in both biological and meme evoultion.

Discovery Institute defends Young Earth creationists

I’ve been attacked by the Discovery Institute’s Uncommon Descent. That’s not interesting. What’s interesting is the reason; they caught me making fun of Young Earth creationism.

In my last post, I described Evolve or Die, a children’s book published in 2008 that I recently came across, as an “antidote to creationism”, and poked fun at Young Earth creationists for believing that carnivores were vegetarians, and dinosaurs coexisted with humans, in a perfect world before the Fall. This, at any rate, is what they say they believe, as perusal of the UK Creationist Christian Schools Trust policy on teaching evolution, or of the contents of Ken Ham’s  Creation Museum, will quickly verify. (For documentation of all this in earlier blog posts, see here and here and here.)

For saying this, I would expect criticism from openly creationist sources such as Answers in Genesis or Creation Ministries International. But Uncommon Descent isn’t supposed to be like that. It claims, as you can see, to serve the Intelligent Design community. This is not supposed to be creationist, and I have seen the Director of the Centre for Intelligent Design, the Discovery Institute’s UK franchise, go red in the face denying that creationism and Intelligent Design have anything to do with each other.

Others have drawn attention to the Discovery Institute’s cries of “gagging order” when Ball State University stopped the teaching of theocentric Intelligent Design as science, and their support for the Bryan University administration as merely asserting its rights when it suddenly demanded that their faculty members profess belief in a literal Adam and Eve. A double standard; demanding unconstitutional privilege for creationism in the name of academic freedom, while turning a blind eye when such freedom is trampled on by the creationists themselves.

It is worth quoting the words with which the DI’s mendaciously mistitled Evolution News and Views  defends the Bryan administration against its own faculty:

[A] private institution like Bryan with a religious or philosophical mission inevitably draws lines for its teachers. If you want to retain the mission, you can’t at the same time tell faculty that “Anything goes.” 

Remember that when next you hear the Discovery Institute argue for the “academic freedom” to teach creationism in publicly funded schools.

But their explicit defence of Young Earth creationists against their critics is something new. For the record, here’s the actual article. No author name given. Yes, that’s all of it, including what I accept as a full and fair embedded quote from what I wrote.  A pity the surrounding text is so incoherent[1], but my assertion that the DI is defending creationism is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary (if tedious) evidence:

And just to spell it out, they describe my review of a 5 year old book as part of the latest attack on the poor beleaguered creationists, because I scurrilously refer to what creationists believe, thereby unfairly accusing them of being “liberals who believe in the Hippie’s [sic] Guide to nature”. And the interesting bit is, not the boring banality and involuted illogic of Uncommon Descent, which is standard, but the fact that they think their job includes defending Young Earth creationists.

One final detail. I am not a defender of Darwin, just as when I talk about the chemical elements I am not a defender of Lavoisier, or when I invoke classical mechanics I am not a defender of Newton. Physics, chemistry, and biology are very different from what they were in the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries respectively, even if the creationists Intelligent Designers refuse to notice.

Illustration: Creation Museum tableau showing humans living peacefully before the Fall with vegetarian tyrannosaurs. Public domain photo, taken with permission to share by Anthony5429, obtained through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Creation_Museum_10.png

Technical note: I use HTML nofollow for links to DI and other creationist sites, so as not to boost their click counts and advertising revenues.

[1] They even muddle up the title of my review with that of the book I was reviewing.

What’s up at the Centre for Unintelligent Design?

T. rex had arms too short to carry food to its mouth. Intelligent design?

Is the AIDS virus intelligently designed? Casey Luskin, Program Officer of the DiscoveryInstitute’s Center for Science and Culture, certainly seems to think so. Indeed, he could hardly think otherwise, since the virus is full of what he calls Complex Specified Information. But let him speak for himself:

It seems to me to be a virus which is finely-tuned for killing humans. You might not like its function, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t designed. Same goes for guns, nuclear bombs, and genetically engineered viruses. All kill because they were intelligently designed to efficiently carry out that mission.

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 (in green) budding from cultured lymphocyte. Multiple round bumps on cell surface represent sites of assembly and budding of virions.

This is part of his more general argument, reiterated in the UK by the Discovery Institute’s local franchise, Glasgow’s Centre for Intelligent Design. Casey’s formulation runs as follows:

 We detect design by finding features in nature which contain the type of information which in our experience comes from intelligence. This is generally called complex and specified information (CSI). In our experience, CSI only comes from a goal-directed process like intelligent design. Thus, when we detect high levels of complex and specified information in nature, we can infer that intelligent design.

A powerful syllogism, which can be summarised as follows:

All complex things are either (a) biological or (b) intelligently designed. Therefore all biological things are intelligently designed.

Notice that this is a purely scientific argument, free from religious or other metaphysical overtones. Casey’s Center, like the Discovery Institute that hosts it, is concerned only with science and not at all with religion, which is why it seeks “To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” I came across these masterpieces of reasoning when revisiting the Centre for Unintelligent Design, curated by my good friend Keith Gilmour, Religious and Moral Education teacher here in Glasgow, and which houses, among other examples of lack of intelligence, correspondence with Keith from several Intelligent Design advocates.

The star-nosed mole, unintelligently and thus self-referentially selected as the mascot of the Centre for Unintelligent Design. The description of this creature’s foraging reads like an April Fool’s joke, but isn’t.

 The Centre itself is, self-referentially, unintelligently designed. In fact, the examples displayed there have little in common, except that they describe things that one could have imagined better otherwise. Some entries reflect completely unreasonable demands on Nature. Knees that wear out, for example. One could hardly expect them to last forever. Or teeth that rot; but they probably wouldn’t if we would only stick to a palaeolithic diet. Others reflect conflicts of interest between us and other organisms, such as those that cause potato blight (yes, Casey, the blight

Assorted trematode parasites, from 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

 

virus is chock-a-block with CSI), herpes, legionnaire’s disease, malaria, leprosy, tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, tapeworm, athlete’s foot, bubonic plague and countless other highly successful infections. Here, as with the AIDS virus, I have to agree with Casey rather than Keith. The designer, if such there be, has shown no lack of creative intelligence. To take another item from Keith’s list, the intelligence required to design the liver fluke, which goes through seven separate phases and three different hosts, must be very creative indeed.

Most interesting in the present context are those that make sense in terms of evolutionary history, but not otherwise. Of these the most comical (except, perhaps, to a giraffe) is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which happened to go behind the sixth gill arch in our fishy ancestors. No great harm in that. Unfortunately, in mammals the sixth gill arch gives rise to the aorta, so that the combined vagus – laryngeal nerve branch has to loop down to the level of the heart in its path from cranium back up to voice box. A distance, in the case of the giraffe, of some 20 feet, corresponding to a transmission time for a motor nerve of up to a quarter of a second. Fortunate, perhaps, that giraffes are rarely called on to sing Mozart arias. The most ambiguous is the human vermiform appendix, whose main function was at one time thought to be the provision of gainful employment for surgeons. Related to the caecum of our more herbivorous ancestors, it has shrunk to the point where it could not narrow any further without becoming prone to dangerous blockages. However, it is now known to have a function, as a refuge in case of infection for the bowel bacteria on which we depend for digestion. Typical of how a so-called vestigial organ can acquire a secondary role. No plan, just messing around, and what works, works.

Another organ that may have been on the way to becoming vestigial is T. rex’s forearms, too short even to lift food into its mouth. A very recent paper suggests why. Matching up the attachment points on T. rex’s skull to the corresponding muscles in a modern bird (you do admit, don’t you Casey, that birds are descended from dinosaurs?) gives a neck so flexible that the mouth could be used for grasping, making the hands unnecessary for this purpose. As numerous commentators have pointed out, this would have had the further advantage of protecting the tyrannosaur’s moral purity, by preventing it from masturbating.

There are more poignant examples on Keith’s list. I have a son and granddaughter strongly affected by the coeliac condition, in which malabsorption caused by sensitivity to wheat gluten can, unless the diet is modified as necessary, lead to seriously arrested physical and mental development. Such an outcome must have been commonplace during the 10,000 years or so between when wheat became a major part of our diets, and when in the 1940s the cause for the condition was understood.

Even more poignant, how animals, including us, give birth. Through the pelvic girdle, no problem, until brains evolve to the point that heads can only squeeze through with difficulty. An evolutionary process that, of course, happened to coincide with the development of bipedalism, making it impossible to expand the pelvic girdle indefinitely to cope with an enlarging skull. And so we end up with a typical evolutionary compromise; giving birth is an ordeal, but usually takes place without permanent damage. Some difficult births, however, lead to perinatal anoxia, or other forms of brain damage during delivery. To say nothing of death in childbirth, a major hazard to both mother and child until relatively recently. All of which could have been avoided by an intelligent designer simply placing the birth canal above, rather than below, the pubic bone. And anyone who quotes Genesis 3:16 as justification is a moral monster.

HIV image Photo Credit: C. Goldsmith, from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s Public Health Image Library. T. rex stamp through Sciencekids

Intelligently designed; the creationist assault on science; Conway Hall talk draft flier

I will be giving the Sunday Lecture to the Conway Hall Ethical Society at 11:00 on 16th March 2014. Attached is my draft publicity material. Comments and suggestions welcome.

“Creation science” is a 20th century heresy, albeit with far older roots. Its central claim is that beliefs compatible with biblically inspired creationism are in fact scientifically superior to mainstream views on evolution and an old earth. Its arguments for supernatural intervention range from the ludicrous to the highly sophisticated; from “Flood geology” to the origin of biological information; from Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets to seemingly scholarly works invoking cellular complexity or the so-called Cambrian Explosion. The creationists themselves are not necessarily stupid, nor ill-informed, nor (in other matters) deluded. In all cases, their deep motivation is the wish to preserve the supernatural role of God the Creator, and a particular view of the man-God relationship.

There are several interlocking organisations active in the UK to promote creationism. These include Glasgow’s own Centre for Intelligent Design (closely linked to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and its notorious Wedge Strategy), Truth in Science, and The World Around Us/The Genesis Agendum, who between them have links to Brethren churches, the Christian Schools Trust, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Ministries International.

I will be discussing the attempts by such organizations to infiltrate the educational system, the inadequacies of official attempts to prevent this, and possible countermeasures. I will also be giving my own views on why creationist arguments are appealing to those without detailed background knowledge, and how we should respond.

Paul Braterman is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at GlasgowUniversity, and former Regents Professor at the University of North Texas, where his research related to the origins of life was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Astrobiology program. He is a committee member of the British Centre for Science Education, and of the Scottish Secular Society, and has been following creationist infiltration into education in the UK for some years. He is a regular contributor to 3 Quarks Daily, and his most recent book, From Stars to Stalagmites, discusses aspects of chemistry in their historical and everyday contexts.

psbraterman@yahoo.com  https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com  @paulbraterman

Creationism As Conspiracy Theory – The Case Of The Peppered Moth

Originally posted on 3 Quarks Daily on August 12 2013; on that same day, a school board member in Nebraska used slides of Well’s Icons of Evolution to argue that the school should teach “the evidence for and against neo-Darwinian evolution;” details here and here.

 

Comparison of carbonaria and typica mounted against post-industrial treetrunk, 2006. Licenced under GFDL by

the author, Martinowski at nl.wikipedia. [Click image to enlarge.]

 

The peppered mothprovides a textbook example of industrial melanism and its reversal. Once a classroom classic, then much criticised, and finally rehabilitated through further observation, the story also shows how real science works. The response of the creationist and “Intelligent Design” community provides a textbook example of a conspiracy theory in action, with cherry-picked quotations, allegations of collusion and fraud, and refusal to acknowledge new evidence.

This moth comes in two main varieties, mottled pale (typica), and dark-coloured (carbonaria). The dark form was first noticed, as a rarety, in 1848. Then came widescale industrialisation and grime. By 1895, 98% of the peppered moths in Manchester were dark, and in 1896

Darwin’s Doubt in review; Meyer, Matzke, and some of their critics

Yesterday I wrote about Casey Luskin’s critique of Nick Matzke’s review of Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, but not everyone knows (why should they?) who Luskin is, or who said what in which way about whom. So I’ve written this brief survey of the dramatis personae, and review of reviews of reviews.

Luskin is Program Officer of the DI’s Center for Science and Culture, of which Meyer is director, Berlinksi a Senior Fellow, and Kenyon a Fellow. According to his bio on the CSC website, he ‘is co-founder of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center, a non-profit helping students to investigate evolution by starting “IDEA Clubs” on college and high school campuses across the country.’ His 5 year stint with Scripps Institute of Oceanography produced one publication; he was one of several junior authors on a study of paleaomagnetic dating of sediments, which has attracted 17 citations. So, moderately useful routine work. No life science qualifications or experience.

David Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the CSC, mathematician and philosopher, and has written serious works in his own area, including a 1972 article on the philosophy of molecular biology. As the review I cited shows, he writes powerfully and amusingly, even when (as here) he is attacking a fictional straw man.

Dean Kenyon is a CSC Fellow. He was at one time a respected biologist, but in the 1970s was converted by Morris’s Genesis Flood to Young Earth Creationism. He was co-author of Of Pandas and People.

Nick Matzke is just finishing the formalities of his PhD at Berkeley,and will be moving to a postdoc at NIMBioS at U. Tennessee Knoxville in September. Web of Knowledge lists him as author of 19 publications, with a total of 330 literature citations to date.

[Added (h/t Christine Janis): an even more thourough and, therefore, destructive review, by Aaron P. Baldwin, is here]

Stephen Meyer, Director of the CSC and Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, holds a joint degree in physics and earth science from Whitworth, a private Christian liberal arts university, and a PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, and has taught at  Palm Beach Atlantic, a faith-based liberal arts college. He is now director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and author or co-author of a number of works of fiction, including Explore Evolution, a pseudotextbook that shows that the creationists have discovered Batesian mimicry, other works of fiction including Signature in the Cell, and, of course, Darwin’s Doubt. Which is where we came in.