Creationism

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula, who is actually featured in the dishonest Ben Stein intelligent design propaganda movie “Expelled,” was denied admittance to a screening and asked to leave the premises. His guest, however, was permitted to attend, and was apparently, quite astonishingly, unrecognized–Richard Dawkins. (Myers provides a few more details here.) The New York Times contacted “Expelled” producer Mark Mathis about it, and he claimed that Dawkins was intentionally allowed in and insinuating that Myers would cause trouble at the screening. (Anyone who has met Myers in person knows this is ridiculous.) Here’s video of P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins describing their respective experiences. Jeffrey Overstreet gives what appears to be the spin that will be used to respond to this event, based on the clearly mistaken description of Myers’ removal from student Stuart Blessman: I just happened to be standing directly in line behind Dawkins’ academic colleague. Management of the movie theatre saw a man apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in. Management then approached the man, asked him if he had a ticket, and when he confirmed that he didn’t, they then escorted him off the premises. Nowhere was one of the film’s producers to be found, and the man certainly didn’t identify himself. If a producer had been nearby, it’s possible that he would have been admitted, but the theatre’s management didn’t want to take any chances.Myers points out: ...

The March 2008 issue of Fortean Times has an interesting article by Rupert Sheldrake titled “Richard Dawkins calls.” In it, he describes his meeting with Dawkins for the filming of a segment originally planned to be part of Enemies of Reason, broadcast in August 2007. Apparently very little was filmed and nothing was used of the meeting. Sheldrake was to be interviewed as a defender of scientific evidence for telepathy, which Sheldrake has studied with empirical research, and written and published papers about. (Sheldrake is perhaps best known for his theory of morphogenetic fields, which he wrote about in his book A New Science of Life, which a reviewer for Nature called “the best candidate for burning there has been in years.” He believes that the more an idea is used, the easier it becomes for others to think of–along the lines of the “hundredth monkey” phenomenon which was a myth originated by Lyall Watson and promulgated by Ken Keyes, Jr., and debunked by philosopher Ron Amundson.) According to Sheldrake, he was promised that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil? was” and that “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry." But when the meeting occurred, it quickly came to an end because, according to Sheldrake, Dawkins said “I don’t want to discuss evidence. … There isn’t time. … It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” (A charitable and likely accurate reading of what “that” refers to is specifically evidence for telepathy, though Sheldrake seems to suggest Dawkins means evidence of any kind.) Sheldrake reports that Russell Barnes, the director, also “confirmed that he was not interested in evidence either.” (Again, probably referring specifically to evidence for telepathy, rather than evidence in general.) Sheldrake responded that “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low-grade debunking exercise.” To which he reports that Dawkins responded, “It’s not a low-grade debunking exercise. It’s a high-grade debunking exercise.” I don’t see how anyone can reasonably disagree with Sheldrake’s statement. Sheldrake told them he had received assurances that this would be “a balanced scientific discussion about the evidence,” and when Barnes asked to see the emails in question, he showed them. Sheldrake writes, “He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left." UPDATE (April 25, 2008): Rupert Sheldrake has posted “Richard Dawkins comes to call” on his website, which looks to be more-or-less the same as the FT article. William Dembski has pointed to this article as evidence that Richard Dawkins has done the same kind of duping that he has complained about when the producers of “Expelled” did it to him, but I don’t think they’re quite the same in a number of respects. While Dawkins was (to his discredit) uninterested in the scientific evidence underlying telepathy that Sheldrake wanted to discuss, footage from Sheldrake wasn’t used in the final documentary. The case would have been parallel if Dawkins had pretended to be interested in the scientific evidence, completed the interview, and then used the footage in such a way as to criticize and ridicule Sheldrake. And it would have been parallel to how P.Z. Myers’ footage was used in “Expelled” only if Dawkins had conversed with Sheldrake about the scientific evidence for telepathy and then used excerpts from it in a film on another topic that hadn’t been mentioned. (Myers wasn’t asked questions about intelligent design, only about the relationship between religion and science.) UPDATE (June 8, 2008): P.Z. Myers has weighed in on this controversy at Pharyngula, arguing that Sheldrake’s evidence (which hasn’t been discussed, so far as I can see) doesn’t count as evidence because of a lack of a plausible mechanism. I disagree that lack of a mechanism means that anomalous data doesn’t count as evidence–it is reason to reject a proposed explanation, but it’s not a reason to deny that there is anomalous data. UPDATE (June 15, 2008): Sheldrake responds to Myers: [W]ith such a farrago of prejudice, ignorance and arrogance, it’s hard to know where to begin. It doesn’t really seem worth replying to people who aren’t interested in the facts but simply in venting their rage. ...

The National Center for Science Education has put up a website, ExpelledExposed.com, to respond to the dishonest intelligent design movie featuring Ben Stein, Expelled. The current content is links to news coverage and reviews of the movie, but I expect the site will become more interesting when the movie is actually released on April 18. geo (2008-03-09): It should be noted for the benefit of fair minded readers here that...every one of the allegations made on the "EXPOSED" site are...false. Not merely inaccurate, but intentionally so.Fortunately, the film EXPELLED will serve as its own refutation of these allegattions. The lies will in fact corroborate the main point of the film, which is a chronicle of the depths to which Big Science will sink, when it is questioned in the harsh light of day.geo ...

Another paper that seems to advocate creationism has somehow managed to fly under the radar and get published in a science journal, Proteomics, authored by a couple of South Koreans. Unfortunately for creationists, the paper is not only badly argued, it is full of plagiarism. Pharyngula has a two-part summary, and one of the authors whose work has been copied has put together a side-by-side comparison of the plagiarized sections and their original sources (PDF). Lars Juhl Jensen has also reported details of the plagiarism at his blog. The authors, Mohamad Warda and Jin Han, are both in South Korea. South Korea, perhaps not coincidentally, is the home to four of the world’s ten largest megachurches and a young-earth creationist movement second only to the one in the U.S. in size, and larger in percentage of the population with having membership in creationist organizations. Ronald L. Numbers’ The Creationists (2nd ed.) states that “By 2000 the member ship [in the Korea Association of Creation Research] stood at 1,365, giving Korea claim to being the creationist capital of the world, in density if not in influence” (p. 418). UPDATE (February 11, 2008): Mike O’Risal at Hyphoid Logic finds someone (apparently a creationist) defending Warda and Han’s paper at something called “AcademicFreedomBlog.” That poster, “DrMC,” apparently thinks that plagiarism should be published as part of academic freedom. As it turns out, part of the reason that the logic seems so awry in the Warda and Han paper is that almost the entire thing (aside from a single paragraph, presumably the one with the God reference) has been cobbled together from pieces of other people’s work. UPDATE (February 13, 2008): The Guardian’s blog has an article on this issue, including a non-apologetic response from one of the authors (Warda) which denies plagiarism. UPDATE (March 14, 2008): A month later, Proteomics still hasn’t explained how it came to publish such an awful paper. Lars Juhl Jensen points out: ...

The Discovery Institute is behind an attempt to gather signatures and push state legislation to defend “the rights of teachers and students to study the full range of scientific views on Darwinian evolution.” “The full range of scientific views on Darwinian evolution” is apparently the new code phrase for creationist misinformation and nonsense. The proposed legislation prohibits termination, discipline, denial of tenure or other discrimination against K-12 teachers who lie to their students by teaching them creationist nonsense. The promotion is tied in with the dishonest film, Expelled. ...

Daniel Brooks has written a fascinating summary of a 2006 conference put together by intelligent design advocates as a retrospective of the famous 1966 Wistar conference on evolution that is often cited by creationists who haven’t bothered to understand what actually happened at that conference. (It was an example of what happens when you try to come up with models for phenomena you don’t understand well enough to formulate models for.) The ID advocates invited numerous prominent scientists to the conference, including Brooks, whose book with E.O. Wiley, Evolution as Entropy, is a classic on evolution, thermodynamics, and information theory of the sort that creationists ignore except to quote mine (e.g., as Duane Gish did in his Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics). My favorite part of the summary is this paragraph, which ends the summary of a talk by ID advocate Ann Gauger: She was then prompted by one of her colleagues to regale us with some new experimental finds. She gave what amounted to a second presentation, during which she discussed “leaky growth,” in microbial colonies at high densities, leading to horizontal transfer of genetic information, and announced that under such conditions she had actually found a novel variant that seemed to lead to enhanced colony growth. Gunther Wagner said, “So, a beneficial mutation happened right in your lab?” at which point the moderator halted questioning. We shuffled off for a coffee break with the admission hanging in the air that natural processes could not only produce new information, they could produce beneficial new information.Quick–time for an emergency coffee break, and let’s just forget that last question… The ID advocates repeatedly evaded tough questions from the scientists, and at the end of the conference… A few days after the meeting ended, we all received an email stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting, and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute’s web site (the entire proceedings were recorded). They claimed they would have some announcement at the time of the publication of the edited volume of presentations, in about a year, and wanted all of us to wait until then to say anything.So it’s left to the real scientists, not the ID advocates, to publicly discuss their conference and its implications. Read the full summary at The Panda’s Thumb, as well as some revealing exchanges in the comments between ID advocate and young-earth creationist Paul Nelson, Dan Brooks, and Nick Matzke. John Lynch also has a nice brief summary. There is one notable error in Brooks’ summary, and that is his erroneous claim that Richard von Sternberg was fired as editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Sternberg is actually a false martyr who hasn’t actually lost any jobs, positions, or status as a result of his opinions.

And they both appear to be pretty accurate, informed about the dishonesty of the movie’s producers. One is by Dan Whipple in Colorado Confidential, the other by Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel. Historical Comments olvlzl (2008-02-03): Sounds sleazy, using Myers under false pretenses. Sort of like Francis Collins got used a while back, not that the neo-atheists were all that willing to be understanding when it happened to him. A better way to fight ID might be the one that some materialists had trouble thinking their way through when I proposed it last week, science can't deal with "a designer" since it is made to only deal with the material universe and can't address the supernatural. Of course,though they would gain a logically strong arguement for keeping religion out of science, they would lose the entire basis of popular neo-atheism. I guess that could indicate which one is more important for them to keep. Anthony McCarthy formerly styling himself as olvlzl ...

John Lynch has looked up the backgrounds of the 300 signatories to the Discovery Institute’s “Dissent from Darwinism” statement who signed in 2004 (it’s now up to 700, which he plans to also examine). He reports on the backgrounds of the individuals who signed, finding that “Chemists, physicists, engineers, bench jockeys, doctors and mathematicians account for over 200 of the 300 signatories” but only five organismal biologists. He also notes that there’s also at least one soccer coach and a home-schooling mom in the list. The comments are worth reading as well. UPDATE (January 27, 2008): John Lynch has a further post on this statement, and commenter Ken, below, points to his analysis of the religious beliefs of signers at his Open Parachute blog. UPDATE (May 14, 2008): A YouTube video documents further Discovery Institute deception with regard to this list. ...

Creation Ministries International has published a new web page summarizing their dispute with Answers in Genesis, much of which is already familiar to readers of this blog. The summary includes an update of events immediately preceding and subsequent to the attempt at arbitration in Hawaii that occurred last August, and links to supporting documents, several of which are newly made public. New in this report are two interesting emails from Philip Bell, former deputy CEO of AiG-UK, about what was going on inside AiG after the split from CMI. Bell resigned from AiG in June 2006 and is now head of CMI-UK. The first email is quoted in a letter from Carl Wieland to a CMI supporter in Australia who asked why CMI needed to take legal action against AiG, which includes these two paragraphs: ...

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out allegations from a neo-Nazi that Ron Paul has regularly met with a variety of white supremacists at a Thai restaurant in D.C. Others have pointed out that Paul campaign expenditures have included expenses at that restaurant and that he has spoken to some questionable groups. I’ve also updated this blog’s post on “Ron Paul, religious kook” to point out his recent statement that he doesn’t accept the reality of evolution. UPDATE: The alleged campaign expenditure link to Wednesday restaurant meetings with white supremacist groups has been conclusively refuted at the Irregular Times blog, which goes through the expenditures in detail and shows that while Ron Paul has spent money for meetings at the Tara Thai restaurant in D.C. (which is right around the corner from an office he rents in D.C.), none of those expenditures have occurred on a Wednesday. The source of the allegations, Bill White of the American National Socialist Workers Party, is not a particularly credible source, as has been remarked repeatedly in the comments at Ed Brayton’s blog (first link above). However, Paul has definitely taken contributions from and posed for photographs with at least one white supremacist, Don Black, who runs the Stormfront website. ...