Creationism

This trial just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The board members who said they had no idea who bought the copies of Of Pandas and People have been shown to be liars on this and other issues. William Buckingham went in front of his church and solicited donations for the books, collected them personally, wrote a personal check (with a memo saying “for Pandas and People books”) and gave it to board president Alan Bonsell, who gave it to his father to purchase the books and make the donation. Bonsell ended up receiving some angry questioning directly from the judge. Mike Argento of the York Daily Record has a funny column on this examination. ...

Dover Area School Board member William Buckingham gave testimony in the trial, contradicting his sworn depositions on a number of points. First, he had been quoted numerous times as calling for creationism to be taught in schools to balance out evolution, then denied it in deposition. On the stand, he admitted it, and that his statement in his sworn deposition was false. Second, he had claimed in deposition that he had no idea who purchased the 60 copies of Of Pandas and People which were donated to the school. On the stand, he admitted that he was the one who asked for donations in church and wrote the check to Donald Bonsall have the books purchased. This is the same guy who stood up at a school board meeting and said, “Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?" Way to be a model of moral behavior, Bill! Looks like Dover Area School Board member Heather Geesey has also contradicted her deposition statements. (More on Geesey at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) ...

Dispatches from the Culture Wars points out a video available from Google’s experimental video search, that features Kirk Cameron of “Growing Pains” arguing against atheism and evolution. The most entertaining argument in the video is the argument that the banana was clearly intelligently designed. Troy Britain quotes a more extensive list of banana features (several of which are used in this video): The banana—the atheist’s nightmare. Note that the banana: 1. Is shaped for human hand ...

In the Dover trial, Behe was questioned at some length about what was demonstrated in the paper he co-authored with David Snoke, “Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Feature that Requires Multiple Amino Acid Residues,” which the Discovery Institute lists as a peer-reviewed journal article supporting intelligent design. At the Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog, Ed Brayton quotes a long section from Behe’s cross-examination about this paper about what it actually demonstrates. It has been represented as demonstrating that a particular kind of irreducibly complex system cannot evolve. What it actually shows is something rather different. As Ed puts it: Yet what does he admit under oath that his own study actually says? It says that IF you assume a population of bacteria on the entire earth that is 7 orders of magnitude less than the number of bacteria in a single ton of soil…and IF you assume that it undergoes only point mutations…and IF you rule out recombination, transposition, insertion/deletion, frame shift mutations and all of the other documented sources of mutation and genetic variation…and IF you assume that none of the intermediate steps would serve any function that might help them be preserved…THEN it would take 20,000 years (or 1/195,000th of the time bacteria have been on the earth) for a new complex trait requiring multiple interacting mutations - the very definition of an irreducibly complex system according to Behe - to develop and be fixed in a population. In other words, even under the most absurd and other-worldly assumptions to make it as hard as possible, even while ruling out the most powerful sources of genetic variation, an irreducibly complex new trait requiring multiple unselected mutations can evolve within 20,000 years. And if you use more realistic population figures, in considerably less time than that. It sounds to me like this is a heck of an argument against irreducible complexity, not for it.The full exchange quoted at Dispatches is worth reading, and more commentary can be found at The Panda’s Thumb, where John Timmer points out that Based on the math presented there [in Behe & Snoke], it appears that this sort of mutation combination could arise about 10^14 times a year, or something like 100 trillion times a year.

In the Dover intelligent design trial, expert witness for the defense Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box, testified that his book received rigorous peer review–more rigorous than a paper in a scientific journal: At the same time, Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff’s counsel Eric Rothschild if the “peer review for Darwin’s Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature.” It was, according to Behe, even more rigorous. There were more than twice standard the number of reviewers and “they read [the book] more carefully… because this was a controversial topic." It turns out that the deciding factor in the book’s being published came from the rigorous peer review of Dr. Michael Atchison of the University of Pennsylvania, who has described his involvement: …I received a phone call from the publisher in New York. We spent approximately 10 minutes on the phone. After hearing a description of the work, I suggested that the editor should seriously consider publishing the manuscript. I told him that the origin of life issue was still up in the air. It sounded like this Behe fellow might have some good ideas, although I could not be certain since I had never seen the manuscript. We hung up and I never thought about it again. At least until two years later. […] In November 1998, I finally met Michael Behe when he visited Penn for a Faculty Outreach talk. He told me that yes, indeed, it was his book that the publisher called me about. In fact, he said my comments were the deciding factor in convincing the publisher to go ahead with the book.The key reviewer, whose comments were the determining factor in the publication of the book, spent ten minutes on the telephone with the publisher, whose wife was a student in one of his classes, and he never saw the book itself until after it was published. Ed Brayton and John Lynch give more detail and comment. There were four other reviewers: Robert Shapiro (prof. of chemistry, NYU, author of Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth), K. John Morrow (formerly at Texas Tech University Health Sciences, published critic of Dembski and Behe), a forgotten Washington University biochemist, and another whom Behe has completely forgotten. Perhaps they gave it a more rigorous review than Atchison, who didn’t actually review it at all. ...

Panda’s Thumb has some more evidence showing that the book Of Pandas and People, the subject of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, was originally explicitly creationist. Parts of the book by Nancy Pearcey were originally published in the Bible-Science Newsletter, which was one of the worst young-earth creationist publications in terms of poor quality of arguments and evidence. For example, it published Tom Willis’ “Lucy Goes to College,” which originated the bogus creationist claim that Lucy’s knee joint was found 2 km from the rest of the skeleton. This is a bogus claim I’ve been trying to get creationists to stop making for the last ten years, with few successes.

Denyse O’Leary (an appallingly bad journalist who blogs in favor of Intelligent Design) wrote that she won’t become an internal critic of ID because she opposes the “academic fascism” of ID critics. I find that an appallingly weak justification for being a propagandist. Internal criticism tends to strengthen the quality of arguments and evidence, not weaken them–unless, of course, what you’re advocating is false. Einzige (2006-12-09): Are there any pro-IDers who are critical of other pro-IDers? ...

A couple of items from Pharyngula: 1. P.Z. wonders, citing John Allen Poulos, why there’s not more affinity between economists and evolutionists. What, no mention of Rothschild’s Bionomics? There are some interesting comments on this Pharyngula entry, worth the read. 2. The Daily Show is going to settle the evolution vs. creation battle once and for all with a special called “Evolution Schmevolution: A Daily Show Special Report,” filling the “Daily Show” timeslot during the week of September 12. This should be a good one…

An excellent article at The Panda’s Thumb about the evolution of the blood clotting system and the flagellum (Michael Behe’s examples of “irreducibly complex” systems) that ID theorists don’t seem to want to discuss, as evidence that ID advocates aren’t practicing science.

Blogger Tacitus makes a weak argument that Intelligent Design may be good for science. What caught my attention is a comment under the heading “Andromeda Strain” by user Irving, who writes: Certainly normal statistical models “do not work for such things.” That’s the point of the research…to find new models and frameworks. …and we may not need to rely on merely statistical models either. Let me put this another way in a story perhaps more attuned to the Tacitus readership… ...