Teach the Controversey

Must view an excellent essay over at Daylight Atheism about the IDiots' "Teach the Controversey" theme. I'm reposting it:


When two groups of experts disagree about a controversial subject that intersects the public school curriculum students should learn about both perspectives.
In such cases teachers should not teach as true only one competing view, just the Republican or Democratic view of the New Deal in a history class, for example. Instead, teachers should describe competing views to students and explain the arguments for and against these views as made by their chief proponents.
—http://www.discovery.org/a/1134


Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the "body of fact" that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognise that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health.
—Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 1969 (source)

"Teaching the controversy" has always been a rhetorical centerpiece of the intelligent-design movement, but it has become a more prominent part of their strategy in the wake of ID's 2005 court defeat in Dover, Pennsylvania. Seeking to avoid blame for the Dover verdict, creationist groups such as the Discovery Institute pleaded that they had never wanted to teach intelligent design per se, but only the "evidence for and against" evolution.

The most sinister part of this argument is its apparent fairness. Who could object to teaching students all sides in a dispute? Hardly anyone, of course, which is why ID advocates sometimes trumpet polls showing that large majorities say students should be taught the evidence for and against evolution. That shouldn't be a surprise: if there were legitimate evidence against evolution, even I would certainly want it to be taught, as I think most atheists would. But the problem is that these polls ask a loaded question by assuming that there is such evidence.
If there is a legitimate, scientific controversy over some issue, then by all means, teachers should present all sides in a fair and even-handed manner. However, this is not a description which applies to the teaching of evolution. Creationists and their intelligent-design comrades have steadfastly avoided making their case to the scientific community (where it meets with near-unanimous scorn). Instead, they're attempting to do an end-run around that scrutiny by forcing their beliefs into public schools before they have won the approval of practicing, qualified scientists in those fields. This is completely backwards from how these controversies are supposed to be resolved.

The problem with "teaching all sides" is that it can give fringe ideas a credibility they have not earned. Excessive concern for "balance" leads to presenting the speculations of cranks and crackpots as if they were on equal footing with the positions defended by vast majorities of qualified experts. (The media has a similar problem.) And this is very useful to advocates of pseudoscience, who often do not need to win the rhetorical battle outright; they can triumph merely by muddying the waters and preventing a consensus from forming around the truth.

This is the same strategy employed by tobacco companies, as we can see from the second excerpt above, as well as by oil companies seeking to forestall regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

But with all that said, the idea of teaching the controversy isn't an intrinsically bad one. There are plenty of subjects that have legitimate controversies where this commendable call for fairness could be better applied.

For example, how about sex ed? A great many religious conservatives - many of the same ones who call for teaching the controversy on evolution, I don't doubt - change their tune when it comes to public-school health classes, demanding that students be taught an "abstinence-only" program that omits contraception, or mentions it only to discuss its failure rates. How strange. Whatever happened to fairness? Whatever happened to learning about all sides? Why can students make up their own minds about evolution, but not about how to protect themselves from STDs?

Better yet, how about the public schools that teach about the Bible? (There are plenty that do, using curricula developed by third parties such as the Bible Literacy Project or the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools.) Here, surely, is a topic that's ripe for teaching the controversy! Let's have students read selections from The God Delusion or Losing Faith in Faith. Let's have students hear criticisms of the Bible, like Richard Dawkins' famous statement that the god of the Old Testament is "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction... a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" - and then let's show them the verses that he uses to back up that criticism! To borrow some terminology from ID advocates, shouldn't the "strengths and weaknesses" of the Bible be "critically analyzed"?

Odontochelys

It's official. Another transitional turtle fossil has been discovered (the second one this year!). PZ Myers gives us a photo and fills us in on what makes this fossil so special.

So it looks like creationists will have to look for other gaps scientific knowledge to exploit.

Macroevolution IS Observable

Here is an excellent article over at the Panda's Thumb about Endosymbiosis and MacroEvolution.

This just adds to my growing list of observed evolutionary events.

More on the origin of sex

Here is something a wrote for my website a while back:

One of the biggest questions about evolution today is, "How did sex evolve?" The first place we should start is the definition of sex: exchanging genetic material with other members of a species. Bacteria have a way of exchanging genetic material; although it is more akin to the copy and paste functions of a computer than it is to sex. The next step would be for a population to evolve which went through cycles of giving and recieving genetic material. This population would be akin to the species of frogs that can spontaneously change sex from male to female. The final step would be for individuals to be born of only a single sex (Males that stay as males and females that stay as females). Richard Dawkins describes roughly the same scenario in "The Ancestor's Tale".

Guess what? Now this picture of the evolution of sex is being partly confirmed. A newspiece on Livescience says:

We all came from hermaphrodites, organisms with both male and female reproductive organs. And though the origin traces back more than 100 million years, biologists have scratched their heads over how and why the separate male and female sexes evolved.

Now, research on wild strawberry plants is providing evidence for such a transition and the emergence of sex, at least in plants. And the results, which are detailed in the December issue of the journal Heredity, likely apply to animals like us, the researchers say.

The study showed that two genes located at different spots on a chromosome can cast strawberry offspring as a single sex, a hermaphrodite or a neuter (neither male nor female, and essentially sterile). The researchers suspect the two genes could be responsible for one of the earliest stages of the transition from asexual to sexual beings.

"All of the animals and plants that are bi-sexual, or have two sexes, are theorized to have evolved according to a particular set of steps," said researcher Kim Lewers, a plant geneticist at the USDA's Genetic Improvement of Fruits and Vegetables Lab in Maryland. "Until now, no example had been found of the very earliest steps. Therefore, those steps were undemonstrated to be true."

She added, "Finding this example of the very earliest stage allowed us to say the theory is probably right."

An Atheist Who Supports Intelligent Design?

Yep. His name is Bradley Monton, and he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He's definitely a clear thinker (and an honest one at that) and so his arguments, in my opinion, are the most worthy of consideration of any other ID proponent I have yet come across. What follows is a commentary on some of his ideas.

From his paper on Judge Jones' decision:

1. He argues that science could, at least in principle, detect the existence of God. He imagines that scientists discover a pulsar which communicates with them in morse code, and answers questions which they had only thought to themselves, and provides the human race with information that only God (or a super advanced alien race) would have known.

My response: I am in full agreement. We could discover scientific evidence for God. But, as far as I have seen, the evidence for God which philosophers and IDers have presented is just not adequate for the claim being made.

2. He argues that the debate shouldn't center around whether ID is science, but only whether it is true.

My response: This is a fair point, but I would respond that

1) ID has no place in science class because it has not passed the scientific rigor that other ideas, such as Cell Theory, Atomic Theory, etc. have. In every case I can think of, an idea has won over a signifigant percentage of experts before it hits the classroom. Why should the standard be lowered for ID? If it is true, why does it not win over more adherents in the realm of biology? Monton brings up the so called "fine tuning" of the physical constants of the universe and how this is something being discussed by scientists. In this case I would agree that ID should be discussed since a good many scientists seriously consider this to be, at very minimum, a plausible answer (if not the best answer). On the other hand, I am not sure when the discussion of something like this would ever come up in a high school class.

2) Since Evolution concerns the history of life, it follows that what we can infer about its history should be from processes which we can observe (or prove possible) in the present day. If we start calling on the unobserved (namely aliens and/or God) then we stop doing science: We would have reached a point where anything goes. Note that this assumption is taken so that one can find out what is true, it is not an assumption that would hinder discover of truth, as methodological naturalism does. Intelligent Design could be perfectly compatible with this principle, but it simply needs to do demonstrate one or more of the following:
a. Give an observed example of aliens/God/Etc. designing something in the present day.
b. Give some examples of things which could never, even in principle, be explained by Evolution but which are expected (perhaps exclusively) from ID. Irreducible complexity won't work here: We know that evolution can produce IC. Neither will 'Complex Specified Information': We know that evolution can produce this too.

Finally, I disagree with Monton's thought that ID actually has some good supporting arguments. A page about his new book lists four arguments for ID which he finds "somewhat plausible":

1. The fine tuning of the physical constants.
I'll admit that this is an argument I find to be the most persuasive of all the arguments for God and/or a designer which I have heard. However, it still rests on some shaky assumptions which I feel undermine it as a successful argument for God. I also think that, even if only one kind of life is possible, and even if there are no other life friendly combinations of the values of these physical constants, God (or some other type of designer) still falls short of having as much explanatory power as Lee Smolin's theory of 'Cosmological Natural Selection'.

2. The Universe had a beginning.

I have no problem with this being discussed in a classroom. Nor would I have a problem with students being introduced to different explanations for the origin of the universe: Some think that God started it all, others think our universe is a product of quantum processes, others believe that the beginning wasn't really THE beginning (as they believe in one of the cyclic models of the universe), etc. etc.

3. The improbability of life coming from non-life

I emailed Monton about this, and he agreed with me that we do not really know what the odds of life originating are. In this case, I think students should simply be given a brief overview of what scientists think about the origin of life and nothing more. Sure, the first life may have been the product of some type of design, but only a handful of scientists espouse this view, and, from what we actually do know about the origin of life, it appears just as one would expect it to if it happened naturally.

4. An argument that we are living in a computer simulation

No comment. lol.

Pharyngula

I got mentioned on Pharyngula!! Whoo-hoo!!

BTW, If you are new to my blog, you may want to check out my website, Godriddance, especially my abiogenesis page and my irreducible complexity page. Or, even better, my article over at Infidels.Org called "Ten Falsehoods and Misconceptions peddled by Answers in Genesis".

Uncommon Descent: Fascist Bastards

I was dropping by Uncommon Descent the other day, and left a comment on one of the posts:

Denyse O'Leary had written:
“From a philosophical perspective the possibility remains that a designer may have supplied an organism with more genetic information than may have been needed for life- what one may call an “all the options, all the bells and whistles” approach. Such a designer could have been interested in placing non-functional genes in the genome for a future role in his or her design. We all install software into our computers that may not be operational until some later date when we finally choose to use it.”

If you don't know, this idea of "front loading" is essentially like Michael Behe's suggestion that God created the first cell and loaded it with all the genes that every organism would ever use.

So I wrote:

This is not viable for two reasons:

1. If, for example, the genes for blood clotting were “installed” in some cell long ago before it had function, the genes would have mutated beyond repair by now.

2. We should expect to find genes that would never have had any use in a species past. For example, finding vestiges of blood clotting genes in plants.

So of course, since I presented a scientific test of ID 'theory' what do you think the Idists did? Distorted information and backed away. They know they won't ever discover something like blood clotting genes in plants. One of the posters on ID said that the Sea Urchin had been discovered with genes for eyes and the immune system. But as I pointed out, we have only discovered that the Urchin has genes "involved in" vision. Since we know that these genes had functions before they were involved in eyes, they have probably just evolved a new funtion in other animals (vision). So it turns out that this isn't evidence of Behe and Dembski's silly genetic fantasy. What happens to that comment? It gets deleted. No bad language. No rudeness. I just stated the facts. And I get deleted. That just tells me that these fascists can't handle the free debate they are so adamantly pushing.

Yesterday I also commented on another post. The post said:

"Behe, who happens to be a Catholic, is in no sense a philosopher; he is a biochemist, and the Darwin cult’s howls of outrage against Edge are the best evidence that he is on to something and that his work should be seriously considered at such a conference."

I responded: "Michael Behe is onto something? Oh please. Student Abby Smith called him on his bogus claim that 'nothing new' had evolved in HIV. (Note that Behe eventually admitted she was correct).

He argues that evolution is mostly destructive, but he never discusses compensatory mutations (mutations which recover old functions which are lost due to, for instance, the evolution of antibiotic resistance).

And Nick Matzke completely destroyed his thesis that two protein protein binding sites cannot evolve simultaneously."

And what did I get from that simple post? It was deleted. I guess we can now see how honest and willing to debate UD really is.


P.S. A commenter left me a link to an excellent blog post which shows just how absurd "frontloading" is, making the very same points that I do.