Science

No, it doesn’t reduce the amount of adolescent sexual activity–it merely reduces the likelihood that teens who have sex will use condoms, and thus increases the prevalence of teens with sexually transmitted diseases. This is not merely useless, it’s actually harmful and counter-productive, like the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s anti-drug advertisements. But empirical evidence is irrelevant to those who are pushing their programs due to religious fundamentalism. For such people, the fact that they not only don’t work but have the opposite of the desired effects just means they need to be pushed harder.

This video gives a five-minute plain-language summary of the origin of the universe that is scientifically accurate, which any actually existing God should have been able to author instead of Genesis. (Via Pharyngula.)

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post about how his market liberal views are very like the views of Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan, and that the libertarian-conservative alliance against a slippery slope to socialism isn’t justified by what’s actually occurring in the world today. In a subsequent post, he writes about how economic regulation and tax/transfer policies are logically separable, but most people think about them as if they aren’t; a comparison of levels of inequality and poverty across the EU shows that the common thought that less regulation and taxation goes hand-in-hand with higher levels of poverty and inequality (of the sort seen in the U.S. and UK) doesn’t hold. Thus you could have a regime with very low levels of regulation yielding more wealth, combined with more redistribution for a better safety net and less poverty and inequality. And in another post, he calls for greater empirical grounding for proposals in political philosophy, of the sort that has started to yield fruitful results in moral philosophy: But shouldn’t it impossible to take seriously an argument to the effect that, say this or that policy is required in order to secure the conditions for the development of some capacity, in the absence of (a) a well-empirically-grounded theory of the nature of that capacity and its development, and (b) some kind of actual evidence that this or that policy in fact has the kind of effect on it that one hypothesizes? I wouldn’t mind so much if political philosophy arguments were more often in the form of “Hey, here’s a conjecture! I suggest somebody competent to do so try to find out if it’s true.” I would be quite happy if I saw more “Hey, here’s a conjecture, and here’s a my attempt to honestly synthesize the relevant literature in a first pass at getting the answer.” That would be terrific. But usually, the argument aims to establish something substantive with an armchair, a Joe Stiglitz op-ed, and something remembered from the Tuesday Science Times.Let’s hear it for empiricism.

New Scientist reports that a poll of 2000 high school teachers in 2007 with 939 respondents found that 2% did not cover evolution at all, the majority spent 3-10 classroom hours on evolution, about a quarter reported spending some time on creationism or intelligent design, and of those, 48% (12.5% of the respondents) taught it as a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species." 16% of high school science teachers in the sample said that they believed human beings were created in their current form by God within the last 10,000 years. Teachers who believed in young-earth creationism spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers. The study in question, from PLoS Biology, may be found online. Further summary may be found at Pharyngula. ...

Brown University biology professor, textbook author, and Catholic Ken Miller has written an op-ed about “Expelled."

In an interview in Christianity Today: I believe God created the heavens and the earth, and it doesn’t scare me when scientists say that can’t be proved. I couldn’t give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. Science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists told Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists told Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50,000,000 people in order to further the revolution.In an interview on the Trinity Broadcasting Network with Paul Crouch, Jr. (video is available if you follow the link): Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you. Crouch: That’s right. Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people. Crouch: Good word, good word.Note that he offers no qualifiers. He doesn’t say science must be complemented with ethics. He doesn’t say that science (like any knowledge of truths about the universe) may have negative as well as positive consequences. He simply says that science leads to mass murder. If Stein really believes this, then he must be a genuine opponent of the practice of science, and his promotion of “Expelled” can be seen as an aspect of that anti-scientific attitude, despite the fact that he certainly takes personal advantage of many of the positive contributions of science. If he doesn’t genuinely believe it, then he’s not only engaging in a defamatory slur against scientists, he’s also dishonest. Either way, he’s demonstrated that he is a despicable character. And some people claim not to understand why scientists are angered by this film and its creators. Others on this subject: John Lynch at Stranger Fruit Larry Moran at The Sandwalk P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars ...

Ed Brayton has written an article about the Richard Sternberg controversy at the Smithsonian for Skeptic magazine, which will appear in the next issue. The article has been published online in advance, along with an article by Michael Shermer about his interaction with Ben Stein. UPDATE (April 18, 2008): Ed Brayton has responded to the Discovery Institute’s “non-response” on the Sternberg affair.

At Richard Dawkins’ blog, David Bolinsky of XVIVO explains the extent of the copyright infringement and reveals a previous copyright infringement action against William Dembski: To the anti-ID community which is giving XVIVO support in our ideological battle against the microcephalic apostates of “Intelligent Design”: XVIVO created The Inner Life of the Cell for Harvard, through fourteen months of painstaking examination of how a myriad of systems, functional structures and proteins in a cell, could be depicted in a sweeping panoramic style of animation, reminiscent of cinema, that fundamentally raised the bar on the visualization of molecular and cellular biology for undergraduate students. In depicting what we did, other than merely maintaining the intent of the syllabus, we needed to edit like mad. A cell has billions of molecules, millions of active functional proteins and tens of thousands of structural elements separating, sequestering and joining compartments and systems into a functional whole. An initial foundational decision process of our creative vision, consisted of editing out 95% of the contents of our cell in order to gain, for our virtual camera, a vista to visualize what elements we left in. The decisions we made blended aesthetics with science. They were not made lightly, nor were they made without extensive consultation with researchers at Harvard, and an extensive body of literature, including protein data libraries and new findings by Harvard researchers. Given the vast number of structures to be removed, and given the structures remaining “on camera”, whose positioning and relationships, both aesthetic and functional, needed to remain true to the function and beauty of molecular biology, it is inconceivable, mathematically, that the animator hired by EXPELLED’s producers, independently and randomly came up with the same identical actin filament mesh XVIVO depicted in one scene, which had never before been rendered anywhere in 3D! It is astonishing that among well over a dozen functional kinesins from which an animator might choose, we both chose the same configuration of kinesin, pulling the same protein-studded vesicle, on the same microtubule! Can YOU believe we coincidentally picked the same camera angles and left in the same specific structures in the background, positioned with the same composition? Equally astonishing is the “Intellgent Design” treatment of these and other proteins surfaces, which XVIVO derived using procedural iso-surface skinning of the PDB cloud data of our proteins’ atom placement. There are an infinite number of possble “correct” solutions to that problem. Coincidence? Given their “access to the same literature” we had, where Graham Johnson at Scripps so brilliantly worked out the real motion of kinesins, I am simply blown away that the “Intelligent Design” animators slavishly made the hands of their kenesins move exactly as we did, even though we intentionally left out the stochastic Brownian motion which actually characterizes the tractive force and periodic pedicle placement of these tiny motivators. We simply did not have the time or budget to render these, and a dozen other details, to the level of insanity we would like to have done! This was, after all, an underfunded proof-of-concept piece. The cellular biology that serves as “filler” material, between scenes copied from Inner Life, is riddled with biological errors. Imagine “Intelligent Design’s” depiction of protein synthesis without ribosomes! To Mr. Dembski: The only reason I am involved in this discussion is because I do not want the reputation of my company, hard-earned as it is, to be sullied by even oblique affiliation to your sort of smarmy ethics, if only through works of ours, purloined to fit your agenda. Last year you were charging colleges thousands of dollars to give lectures showing a copy of The Inner Life of the Cell, you claimed you “found somewhere”, with Harvard’s and XVIVO’s credits stripped out and the copyright notice removed (which is in itself a felony) and a creationist voice-over pasted on over our music (yes, I have a recording of your lecture). Harvard slapped you down for that, and yes there is a paper trail. One can only assume that had we not taken notice then, we would be debating The Inner Life of the Cell being used in EXPELLED, instead of a copy. You have enough of a colorful history that Harvard, in its wisdom, decided to ‘swat the gnat’ with as little fuss as possible. Imagine our surprise earlier this month, to see our work copied in a movie trailer for EXPELLED! And you are in the movie too! Not quite a star, but brown dwarfs are cool. XVIVO has no intention of engaging alone, in asymmetrical fighting against an ideological entity with orders of magnitude more resources than we have. That might make great theater, but would resemble a hugely expensive game of whack-a-ID. Boring! It makes me happy, though, that you decided to implicate your friends in print, on your blog (http://www.uncommondescent.com/legal/expelled-plagiarizing-harvard/#comment-229619), in what is legally, malignant infringement, since you no had doubt discussed with EXPELLED’s producers, Harvard’s previous legal infringement action against you, the Discovery Institute, where you are a fellow and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where you teach. Once we uncover the EXPELLED animation dollar trail, and bring it to light, we will have even more fun. The sublimely ridiculous claim that EXPELLED uses completely original animation, in light of copying our work so closely that a budget was reserved to pay for an infringement suit by Harvard, is delicious! Why should I try to take you guys down when you are doing such a splendid job yourselves? For free! So go ahead and release your movie. Just keep track of how many tickets you sell. We may just find that data valuable, too. David Bolinsky For more on David Bolinksy and the animation see: (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/147)UPDATE (April 12, 2008): P.Z. Myers comments. Blake Stacey also has a nice post summarizing the copyright infringement issue. UPDATE (April 19, 2008): The footage copied from XVIVO was apparently removed before the film’s public release yesterday.

Mike Beidler stopped by to post a comment on the post about “truth tickets,” and I’m very pleased to see his blog, “The Creation of an Evolutionist," which describes his personal journey from being a young-earth creationist to accepting the fact and theory of evolution. It’s people like Mike that are the most likely to have an influence on changing the minds of current young-earth creationists. Because of that, it’s also the case that people like Mike often get to take even more heat from creationist organizations than we atheists receive. Those organizations are premised on the assumption that Christianity requires creationism, and Mike is a living, breathing, and forcefully arguing counterexample. I, like Mike, used to be a young-earth creationist, but my journey continued on to the rejection of Christianity and theism. ...

The Center for Inquiry has released a detailed critique (PDF) of a U.S. history textbook by James Q. Wilson and John Dilulio, Jr., pointing out that it falsely claims that there’s doubt about the very existence of the greenhouse effect, falsely claims that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned prayer in schools (as opposed to teacher-led prayer), falsely claims that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas overturned Texas’s anti-sodomy law on a close 5-4 vote (it was 6-3), falsely claims that the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution were motivated by worries about original sin, and so on. (A summary can be found at the Friendly Atheist blog.) Wilson is Ronald W. Reagan Professor for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute; Dilulio was the first head of George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The problems in this textbook were uncovered by Matthew LaClair of Kearny, NJ, who previously received a lot of press coverage for his exposure of a U.S. history teacher at his school, David Paskiewicz, who was using the classroom as a forum for proselytizing evangelical Christianity. That story broke in the mainstream media only after being publicized on this blog. ...