Thoughts in a Haystack

A thought:

Intellectualism should not mean that one must possesses a graduate degree in order to embrace it. It means we cannot allow oversimplification to trump responses to complex issues that require more than a sound bite.

It also means that our civic duty did not end on November 4, 2008. Our elected officials will treat us however we dictate. If rote, simplistic responses will suffice that is what we will get. But we should demand more because we deserve it.

-Byron Williams, "Is 2009 the Year of the Intellectual?," The Huffington Post, December 26, 2008

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:49 PM 9 comments

In all the hoopla to be expected in the next year over Darwin, it may become a cottage industry to spot and correct the errors in popular accounts of his life and work (not to mention the deliberate distortions of creationists). Just to warm up a bit, here is an account in The Independent by Archie Bland entitled "The Big Question: How important was Charles Darwin, and what is his legacy today?":

It's a mark of how extraordinary a step Darwin took on humanity's behalf that a principle that seems so straightforward and uncontroversial today – that random mutations would make some species better suited to their environments than others, and that those species would be more likely to breed – could have caused such extraordinary upheaval as recently as 1859. Still, that's what happened.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:43 PM 4 comments

The traveling exhibit that started at the American Museum of Natural History and moved to the Museum of Science, Boston, the Field Museum, Chicago and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, has now reached its natural home at the Natural History Museum, London. And, wouldn't you know it, those dogmatic British Darwinists are displaying their intellectual bias against "alternative science," namely, Intelligent Design! As Martin Belam paraphrased it:

There was also a video loop at the end showing members of the Natural History Museum staff expressing their views on the topic. 'Intelligent design' was decried as pseudo-science, and the mutations of organisms like the HIV virus and MRSA were cited as examples of natural selection in action around us. Sandy Knapp put it clearest, saying she felt that evidence based theories should be taught in science class, and faith-based beliefs should be taught in religious class.

I was really heartened to see that rather than opting for a safe "Well, some people believe x and that's ok too" attitude, a scientific exhibition had decided to say outright "Well, some people believe x and it is unscientific nonsense".

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 2:08 PM 2 comments

The Carnival of Elitist Bastards, Version 8.0, is up and soaring at Submitted to a Candid World. Here's one of my (many) favorites bits:

Just when I thought the la guerre de Noel n'aura pas lieu, in walked Bill. Sometimes I can't decide what the best thing about O'Reilly is---his pugnacity or his stupidity. Right now, I'm gonna say both.

There's no doubt that Billo is a virtual Renaissance man among the illiterati, combining ignorance and confidence to paint a veritable Sistine ceiling of stupidity that mesmerizes a minuscule, but commercially exploitable, fragment of the populace. The only real issue about O'Reilly is whether his work is the result of his own genuine dullness or just the cynical manipulation of the imbecile.

Much other flaying of the de-elitist can be found at the final frontier.
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Labels: Carnival of Elitist Bastards

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 1:41 AM 1 comments

Greg Laden, in his end of the year reveries, is reviving Crackergate. Okay, I thought PZ was wrong in obtaining and disposing of the Communion host the way he did but what really interests me is this from Greg, who reveals that he is an erstwhile altar boy:

PZ intones "It's a cracker!" But you know, it's not a cracker. It's a flat dried up piece of bready stuff. Crackers are round and brown and have a little salt. This thing is not a cracker. Too chewy.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 12:06 AM 3 comments

Michael Barton of The Dispersal of Darwin got a nice write-up in The Billings Gazette for the work he did at Yellowstone National Park's Heritage and Research Center a while back when he was working as an intern there.

Barton found that use of religious language in descriptions of the park was common during the Romantic movement, a reaction to the 18th century's Enlightenment that stressed science and objectivity. Romanticism was about emotions and imagination. It was a period that produced such American literary giants as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe. But it also carried over to the writings of travelers to Yellowstone and is found in newspaper accounts, journal entries and letters sent to family and friends. Barton catalogued the references in more than 50 documents - everything from short journal reminiscences to published books and U.S. Geological Survey writings.

There's no mistaking the references, especially when they were highlighted. Following an 1871 trip to Yellowstone Lake, journalist Calvin Clawson wrote: "We could not help feeling that we were lifted up BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL, for while the seething, sulphurous lakes were on each side and far beneath us, the placid sky hung in grandest beauty above us." ...

Barton said he saw scientists in the 1870s steer away from Romanticism and be more descriptive about what they saw, rather than describing sites in emotional terms.

"They started to write more about the height of a geyser, the times of eruptions rather than the raw emotional scenes," he said.

Perhaps the best part of the research, Barton said, was having access to the park's extensive archive collection in its newly built facility, to view the original watercolors of artist Thomas Moran stored there and to travel to some of the places he'd read about.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:38 PM 2 comments

British MP John Redwood:

It is typical of evil governments down the years that they think nothing of the convenience of their citizens. I am sure the last thing Joseph wanted with a pregnant Mary, and all the extra bills fatherhood would bring, was to down his carpenter's tools and travel to Bethlehem just to register and pay a tax.

If an Islamic TV station owned by Iran can wish me a happy Christmas, all is well with the world.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:01 PM 0 comments

Here is an excerpt of an excerpt from The Man Who Invented Christmas by Les Standiford, available at the NPR website:

... There were no Christmas cards in 1843 England [when Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol], no Christmas trees at royal residences or White Houses, no Christmas turkeys, no department-store Santa or his million clones, no outpouring of "Yuletide greetings," no weeklong cessation of business affairs through the New Year, no orgy of gift-giving, no ubiquitous public display of nativity scenes (or court fights regarding them), no holiday lighting extravaganzas, and no plethora of midnight services celebrating the birth of a savior. In fact, despite all of Dickens's enthusiasms, the holiday was a relatively minor affair that ranked far below Easter, causing little more stir than Memorial Day or St. George's Day does today. In the eyes of the relatively enlightened Anglican Church, moreover, the entire enterprise of celebrating Christmas smacked vaguely of paganism, and were there Puritans still around, acknowledging the holiday might have landed one in the stocks.

In fact, for much of the first two centuries of settlement in New England, Christmas was scarcely celebrated. As Yule scholar Stephen Nissenbaum points out, from 1659 to 1681 there was actually a law on the books in the Massachusetts Colony that forbade the practice and levied a fine of five shillings upon anyone caught in the act. Sitting down with their new native friends for a Thanksgiving feast might have been perfectly acceptable, but when Governor William Bradford discovered a few of his fellow Pilgrims trying to celebrate Christmas the year after their arrival, he broke up the ceremonies and ordered everyone back to their jobs.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:09 PM 0 comments

PZ Myers gives a pointer to some excellent work done by Allen MacNeill in tracking the crash and burn of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Clubs, apparently the idea of Casey Luskin and fomented by the Discovery Institute, that had a brief presence at some colleges, community colleges and high schools.

Just to add another small data point to that, it's now been almost two months since the DI established the YouTube site for its Academic Freedom Day Video Contest and over two weeks since the Discovery Institute announced the contest at its Evolution News & Views ("The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site.") blog.

So far, there have been zero student videos posted. The only video is one featuring Ben Stein that appears to have been made for the DVD release of Expelled humping the "Academic Freedom Petition" (i.e. the "Keep Our Children as Ignorant as Us Petition"). There are a total of 11 "members" and one "discussion," consisting of a single comment: "Great idea! I look forward to viewing the entries."

It's hard to believe there is so little interest, given the fabulously lucrative prize involved:

The grand-prize winner will be awarded $500, and one essay runner-up and one video runner-up will receive $250. Up to 10 finalists will receive their choice of a free book or DVD.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:31 PM 2 comments

Another reminder of why we won't miss him when he's gone:

Another organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, has documented hundreds of instances of political interference throughout government agencies charged with researching — and then regulating — issues of public and environmental health and safety. This past spring, UCS followed up earlier investigations at the FDA, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with a survey of scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Of the 1,586 staff scientists who responded to a questionnaire, 889 said they had experienced some political interference.

Two-hundred and eighty-five said they had experienced “selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome.” And 224 said they had been “directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document.”

“What we’ve seen under President Bush,” said Michael Halpern, program manager of UCS’s Scientific Integrity program, “is a culture of secrecy and suppression where if scientific information doesn’t fit with predetermined policy decisions they wanted to put forward, that scientific information was summarily distorted, suppressed or misused to justify the decisions they wanted to make.”

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:35 PM 0 comments

A thought:

[The following are] the ideal assumptions of anti-intellectualism. Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate; snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive. The plain sense of the common man, especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools. Not surprisingly, institutions in which intellectuals tend to be influential, like universities and colleges, are rotten to the core. In any case, the discipline of the heart, and the old fashioned principles of religion and morality, are more reliable guides to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to new trends in thought and art. Even at the level of elementary education, a schooling that puts too much stress on the acquisition of mere knowledge, as opposed to the vigorous development of physical and emotional life, is heartless in its mode of conduct and threatens to produce social decadence.

- Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life

Labels: Hofstadter Anti-intellectualism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 7:58 PM 0 comments

Mark Chu-Carroll has an excellent must-read post on why Dr. Michel Egnor's blather about evolution being useless in medical practice because natural selection is supposedly a tautology ("what survives, survives") is not only wrong, it would be, even if true, only trivially so and why Egnor's misrepresentations, on the other hand, are not themselves trivial and must be constantly and forcefully opposed.

Egnor is wrong because he leaves out the crucial and well supported observation that offspring aren't exactly the same as their parents, and those changes can be inherited by their offspring. That means that populations are not merely shifting between preexisting traits but that new traits are arising that have immense import for medical practice.

But even if we ignore this fundamental error of Egnor's, all science can have crucial bits reduced to apparent tautologies because logically valid syllogisms, on which inferences can be based, have to be tautological in order to be valid.

Finally, Mark demonstrates from personal experience why Egnor's misrepresentation can lead to tragic results:

My father died a year and a half ago. What finally killed him was pneumonia. But what caused his death was the stupidity and ignorance of an asshole doctor. My father died of an antibiotic resistant infection. His doctor was, unfortunately, a fundamentalist christian, but for some reason, my dad trusted him. This doctor watched as a series of infections ravaged my father's body, and at pretty much every step, he did the wrong damned thing. The reasoning behind his errors relates directly to the kind of argument Egnor makes: antibiotic resistance isn't the production of new traits; it's merely the selection of existing traits in a population. So he prescribed antibiotics in a way that anyone with a damned clue about how bacteria evolve would have predicted would increase the antibiotic resistance of the bacteria.

Egnor is not just a ludicrous shill for religious denial of science, he is a dangerous one.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 8:21 PM 6 comments

David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. He has an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times that, among other things, makes this extraordinary statement:

The latest scientific theory holds that particular brain functions evolved for purposes suited to the survival of the species, but then got "hijacked" by religious and other supernatural beliefs. Maybe that's right, but explanations like that partake of a certain pat, naive quality reminiscent of a Rudyard Kipling "Just So Story" ("How the Leopard Got His Spots" ... "How the Human Got His Belief in Demons"). They are also suspiciously unfalsifiable. If people had over the centuries completely abandoned the supernatural, evolutionary psychologists could spin out an equally plausible tale to explain that.

Another possibility is that the human need to believe in the unseen world itself points to, while not proving, the reality of hidden dimensions. It could be that materialism -- the philosophical assumption that reality is nothing but physical stuff -- is a prejudice rather than a fact. Perhaps an unseen reality does exist, revealed in flashes that can be confusing or misleading, to which we sometimes give flaky designations. Like "Bigfoot."

... U.S. polling data from Gallup, reported by Baylor University researchers, shows that belief in the occult is more common among non- or infrequent churchgoers or those belonging to a liberal Protestant denomination than it is among frequent churchgoers and conservative evangelicals.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 12:01 AM 0 comments

According to Misty Upton, "Christians are under siege again."

Why? Because people dare to say there is no God ... gasp ... in public!

[T]he American Humanist Association is launching an ad campaign appearing on Washington, D.C. buses. The ads read, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake."

The spokesman for the group stated, "Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types on non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion." The ad features a man in a Santa costume, hands mid-air, shrugging. Since Santa Clause is traditionally associated with Christmas, this ad seems not to be geared at attacking all religions, but solely attacking Christianity.

In the case of Murray v. Curlett in 1963, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 to absolish mandatory school prayer and Bible readings in public schools. Oddly enough, it is reported not a single Christian organization filed a brief in support of school prayer. In 2003, it was ruled that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore should remove a granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of Alabama's judicial building. Moore stated, "It is a sad day in our country when the moral foundation of our law and acknowledgment of God has to be hidden from public view." The majority let these things slide. After all, they were little things. Tiny. Not a big deal and we should have separation of church and state. Right? ...

[I]f Christians continue to allow the government to bully individuals to keep their religious convictions confined to their homes and locked behind Church doors, Christians will also evolve. Christians will evolve into Christians without Christ. In order to survive and adapt in a politically correct society, Christians have stood by and let tiny changes occur at the expense of religious freedom.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:50 AM 4 comments

Um ... why did the short-term rescue of US automakers fail?

[Sen. Bob] Corker [Rep. KY.] said he proposed that wages and benefits of U.A.W. members be competitive with lower rates at American plants run by foreign rivals — Toyota, Honda, Nissan and B.M.W. — during 2009, and offered the union the opportunity to pick the date next year when the changes, which would be certified by the Labor Department, could be put in place.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 4:51 PM 2 comments

Here’s an interesting article by Hania Köver for the Berkeley Science Review entitled “The psychology of teleology.” It is a brief report on a study by Berkeley psychologist Tania Lombrozo on why some people find teleological explanations, such as Intelligent Design Creationism, so compelling.

Lombrozo was motivated by the observation that young children often explain the existence of objects and phenomena with reference to their function, a kind of reasoning termed teleological. Ask a three-year old why it rains, for example, and you are likely to hear something like "so that plants have water to grow." ... This tendency of children to infer design suggests an explanatory default: In the absence of competing knowledge, the best explanation for an object with a plausible function is that it was designed to fulfill that function.

Unlike children, most educated adults know that clouds form because water condenses, and that mountains exist because of plate tectonics. However, Lombrozo was interested in whether adults would fall back on teleological reasoning in the absence of background knowledge.

“ ... have some characteristics of adults and some characteristics of children," says Lombrozo. "Like adults, they have undergone normal development and have presumably gotten rid of any reasoning strategies associated only with children. But like pre-school children, they might not have access to the kinds of rich causal beliefs that adults typically have access to."

"The results support the idea that adults and children have the same sorts of cognitive mechanisms at work, and that adults are just overriding the explanatory default with background knowledge," says Lombrozo. They also fit in with findings from other studies that show more frequent use of teleological explanations in less educated adults, and in educated adults making speeded judgments.

"One possibility is that if you look at our evolutionary past or at our experiences growing up, one of the things we did most often was explaining human behavior. And human behavior is generally goal-directed — it does involve intentions and functions. We may be taking the mode of explanation that we're best at and then applying it to other domains," she says. "Another possibility is that it's more effective. We're going to learn more about the world if we go around assuming that things have functions and then sometimes discovering we were wrong, rather than the reverse."

[M]ost of the time, functional explanations don't do a lot of harm. In fact, they can sometimes help people understand concepts that might otherwise be too difficult. In chemistry, for example, it can be helpful to think about the electron wanting to go to where it's positive, or, when learning about evolution, that the moth doesn't want to be visible to its predator.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:01 PM 3 comments

This should be interesting:

A Kansas-based church that has blamed deaths in Iraq on U.S. tolerance of homosexuality has asked Gov. Chris Gregoire's office to approve a "Santa Claus will take you to Hell" message to display among other religious statements in the Capitol's third-floor hallway. ...

According to Spokesman-Review reporter Rich Roesler, the first part of Westboro's proposed message:

“You'd better watch out, get ready to cry, You'd better go hide, I'm telling you why 'cuz Santa Claus will take you to hell. He is your favorite idol, you worship at his feet, but when you stand before your God He won't help you take the heat. So get this fact straight: you're feeling God's hate, Santa's to blame for the economy's fate, Santa Claus will take you to hell."

Westboro Baptist, led by Fred Phelps Sr., has protested at funerals for gays and at military funerals, blaming the nation's tolerance for gays for the loss of U.S. military personnel in Iraq. The actions prompted the Washington Legislature to pass House Bill 1168 in 2007, making it a misdemeanor crime of disorderly conduct to disrupt a funeral or protest within 500 feet of a funeral or funeral procession.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 6:46 AM 2 comments

The Harris Poll released a new nationwide survey of 2,126 U.S. adults surveyed online between November 10 and 17, 2008. Some of the results:

-- 80% of adult Americans believe in God - unchanged since the last time we asked the question in 2005. Large majorities of the public believe in miracles (75%), heaven (73%), angels (71%), that Jesus is God or the Son of God (71%), the resurrection of Jesus (70%), the survival of the soul after death (68%), hell (62%), the Virgin birth (Jesus born of Mary) (61%) and the devil (59%).

-- Slightly more people - but both are minorities - believe in Darwin's theory of evolution (47%) than in creationism (40%).

-- Sizeable minorities believe in ghosts (44%), UFOs (36%), witches (31%), astrology (31%), and reincarnation (24%).

-- Catholics are more likely than Protestants to believe in Darwin's theory of evolution (by 52% to 32%), ghosts (by 57% to 41%), UFOs (by 43% to 31%), and astrology (by 40% to 28%). Protestants are slightly more likely than Catholics to believe in creationism (by 54% to 46%).

-- only 26% of all adults believe that the Torah is the word of God, even though it is the same as the first five books of the Old Testament. Presumably many people do not know this.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:57 PM 6 comments

Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority has a bit of a (justifiable) rant about the lack of honesty of Dr. Michael Egnor, The Discoveryless Institute’s brainless surgeon. Perhaps, in the end, what is most notable about Mike’s post is the fact that, once circumstances were pointed out to him that suggest that the example from Egnor's article he was particularly focusing on might have been the result of sloppiness on Egnor’s part (a peculiar trait for a neurosurgeon) rather than the result of malice, Mike acknowledged it immediately, though Mike still thinks Egnor is ethically challenged. Let’s see if Egnor can muster the integrity to acknowledge his errors, much less his greater sins.

In any event, I agree with Mike’s overall assessment, since I noticed that Egnor utilized the following quote:

This irrelevance of evolutionary stories to real scientific work was pointed out by biologist Adam S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, in 2000:

…most [biologists] can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas … Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one.

Yet, the marginality of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology, from diverse questions about human nature to the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting evolutionary events. A spate of popular books on evolution testifies to the development. If we are to fully understand these matters, however, we need to understand the processes of evolution that, ultimately, underlie them.

Yes, I can go into my lab right now, make up some solutions, run a pH meter, collect embryos, use a microscope, etc., without once using the principles of evolutionary biology. Likewise, I can do a lot of the day-to-day stuff of the lab without even thinking about developmental biology, biochemistry, molecular biology, or physiology; that does not imply that these disciplines are not central to how life works. We don't need evolutionary biology . . . except whenever we want to think about how these narrow, esoteric little experiments we do fit into the grander picture of life on earth. You know, biology.

Labels: Quote Mining

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:24 PM 2 comments

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In an exercise with more than a little midrift gazing, Australian astronomer Dave Reneke, who is also news editor of Sky and Space magazine, has announced yet another candidate for the “Star of Bethlehem.” Using a computer program to map the night sky as it would have appeared over the Holy Land more than 2,000 years ago and using Matthew's Gospel as a reference, he pinpointed the slightly inconvenient date of June 17 in the year 2 BCC as when:

"Venus and Jupiter became very close ... and they would have appeared to be one bright beacon of light.

"We are not saying this was definitely the Christmas star - but it is the strongest explanation for it of any I have seen so far.

"There's no other explanation that so closely matches the facts we have from the time.

"This could well have been what the three wise men interpreted as a sign. They could easily have mistaken it for one bright star. ...

"Astronomy is such a precise science, we can plot exactly where the planets were, and it certainly seems this is the fabled Christmas star." ...

"This is not an attempt to decry religion. It's really backing it up as it shows there really was a bright object appearing in the East at the right time.

"Often when we mix science with religion in this kind of forum, it can upset people. In this case, I think this could serve to reinforce people's faith."

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:36 AM 2 comments