Luskin makes more mistakes on the Cambrian and Cladistics - The Panda's Thumb

Luskin makes more mistakes on the Cambrian and Cladistics - The Panda's Thumb

This week, the Discovery Institute Press put out another book called Debating Darwin’s Doubt. I took one for the team and bought it, in part because a a decent chunk of the book is responding to me. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been mentioned so much in a book!


Sadly, though, looking through it, almost all of it is material re-hashed from the DI “Evolution News and Views” blog and is no better than it was the first time. There is, however, a new chapter (I think it is new) by Casey Luskin, chapter 9, “Cladistics to the Rescue?” responding to me. If you don’t want to buy the book, there is a free podcast at ID the Future (heh), “Debating Darwin’s Doubt: Casey Luskin on Classification of Organisms” that interviews Luskin (although I think he wrote the questions). It has mostly the same material.

Understanding creationism: An insider's guide by a former young-Earth creationist - The Panda's Thumb

1. Introduction and overview: Philosophy of pseudoscience.

2. Variation and adaptation.

3. You don’t evolve, your species does.

4. Transitional fossils.

5. Evolution of evolution.

6. Genetic evidence.

7. The religion of evolution.

Understanding creationism, VIII: An insider's guide by a former young-Earth creationist - The Panda's Thumb

How kinesin actually moves – Pharyngula

How kinesin actually moves – Pharyngula

Recently, Carl Zimmer made a criticism of the computer animations of molecular events (it’s thesame criticism I made 8 years ago): they’re beautiful and they’re informative, but they leave out the critical aspect of stochastic behavior that is important in understanding the biochemistry. He’s talking specifically about kinesin, a transport protein which the animators are particularly fond of illustrating.
Every now and then, a tiny molecule loaded with fuel binds to one of the kinesin “feet.” It delivers a jolt of energy, causing that foot to leap off the molecular cable and flail wildly, pulling hard on the foot that’s still anchored. Eventually, the gyrating foot stumbles into contact again with the cable, locking on once more — and advancing the vesicle a tiny step forward. This updated movie offers a better way to picture our most intricate inner workings…. In the 2006 version, we can’t help seeing intention in the smooth movements of the molecules; it’s as if they’re trying to get from one place to another. In reality, however, the parts of our cells don’t operate with the precise movements of the springs and gears of a clock. They flail blindly in the crowd.
The illusion of directed, purposeful movement is a simplifying shortcut: as Zimmer describes, there actually is a lot of noise in the system, it’s just that the thermodynamics of the interactions promote a directionality to the motion. This is Chemistry 101. I figured that everyone with an undergraduate level of understanding of molecules would be able to grasp this.
I did not take into account willful ignorance, however. Jonathan Wells is angry that anyone dared to question the perfect “stately grace” of molecular machines, and accuses proponents of stochastic motion of Flailing Blindly: The Pseudoscience of Josh Rosenau and Carl Zimmer. He has a Ph.D. in biology, and he doesn’t understand what I just said was Chem 101?

Ten (and counting) Commandments before agreeing to debate a creationist

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2014/02/ten-commandment.html

TEN (well, 7 & counting) COMMANDMENTS THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT, AND RESOLVE, BEFORE YOU EVEN AGREE TO DEBATE A CREATIONIST
(Actually, I only had time at the moment for Seven Commandments. I will take suggestions and improvements. If you write a sufficiently good one, I will include it and list you as an author; if the Commandments come together well, perhaps we can submit it to NCSE Reports or some such.)
(also, all I know about this debate is based on news reports, and the assumption that if something has not been mentioned, it was not thought about by Bill Nye; please correct me if I get something wrong)

Note, as commenters did, none of this deals with what should happen at any debate.

I. THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT THE MOOLAH. Is there going to be an admission fee charged to this event? Where will this money go? In today’s debate, something like 800 attendees are paying $30/each to attend (I forget the exact details). That’s $24,000 on the table right there.
....
II. THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT THE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS. All too often, professors get goaded into debates or “discussions” (or sometimes “interviews”), show up like they would to a normal low-publicity academic event, and then discover that the creationists have a full film crew ready to professionally tape the whole thing. Some nice person sticks a consent form in front of them, they sign it, and then the professor is surprised to find themselves featured in creationist videos and documentaries for the next several decades.
....
III. THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT THE TICKET SALES. If the tickets will be on sale, who is going to have access? According to reports, the tickets for the Nye/Ham debate sold out in 2 minutes once ticket sales opened up. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that the creationists had many of the tickets, or perhaps virtually all of the tickets, reserved ahead of time, for donors, supporters, and the like.
....
So: get some tickets alotted to yourself, that you may distribute as you wish.
....
IV. THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT DONATION APPEALS. You can bet that AiG will be hitting up the audience for donations in some fashion. At the actual event, it could just be donation cards handed out at the entrance, or it could be explicit appeals and passing the hat before and after the event. You can be sure that the video versions distributed to the fundamentalist churches and schools contain donation appeals in some form too. Did you sign up to this debate to help the creationists fundraise? No? Then why didn’t you stipulate that you would refuse to participate unless such donation appeals were excluded?
Alternatively, you could demand that at the event, and in any subsequent videos, NCSE (for example) gets a plug for donations.
....
V. THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT PRE- AND POST-DEBATE EVENTS. This never occurs to scientists until after the fact, but on the occasions when evolutionists (or mainstream Bible scholars, or whatever) do get invited to speak before fundamentalist audiences, it is entirely standard for the fundamentalists to have organized ahead of time for the audience to be subjected to post-debate rebuttals from other speakers. This ensures the creationists get the last word and gives them a chance to paper-over any cracks you might have opened up in the mind of creationists in the audience.
....
VI. THOU SHALT THINK ABOUT EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS. I strongly suspect that for their $30, the audience at the debate will get a bonus armful of AiG propaganda, ads for AiG materials, etc. Why aren’t there any pro-science materials being handed out as well?
....
VII. THOU SHALT GET ALL OF THE ABOVE AGREED UPON IN WRITING, AND PUBLICLY ANNOUNCED, BEFORE PROCEEDING FURTHER. None of the above has any point unless it is in writing, legally binding, and agreed to by all parties. Announcing it publicly helps create a tradition of less-than-total-naiveté amongst science defenders, and also lets audience members, etc., know what they are signing up for and what they are supporting with their time and perhaps money.

Robert Asher on Stephen Meyer's "uniformitarianism" argument in Darwin's Doubt - The Panda's Thumb

Link: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2014/01/robert-asher-on.html (via shareaholic.com)

Meyer basically claims that inferring intelligent design is an application of uniformitarianism, because in everyday human experience the only known explanation of “information” is intelligence, therefore we should infer ID when new information arises billions of years ago in the origin of life, or hundreds of millions of years ago in the Cambrian Explosion. (Meyer really believes that intelligence is necessary for any nontrivial evolutionary adaptation or complexity increase, i.e. he thinks there were millions of miraculous interventions in the history of life, but he’s a bit coy about admitting this up front.)....But, there are yet other problems with the inference, namely, how uniformitarian is Meyer, really? Robert Asher argues that Meyer is being selectively uniformitarian. Meyer basically uses the term as rhetoric, and then arbitrarily drops uniformitarianism whether it would lead to problems with his ID argument.

Discovery Institute tries to "swift-boat" Judge Jones | NCSE

http://ncse.com/creationism/general/discovery-institute-tries-to-swift-boat-judge-jones

From the outset, an impartial observer might have expected that Judge Jones would be predisposed toward the Bush-endorsed concept of ID. Let's see what else the Times found out.

But Judge Jones is praised by people on both sides of the aisle as a man of integrity and intellect who takes seriously his charge to be above partisanship. He appears to define himself less by his party affiliation than by his connection to the Pennsylvania coal town where he still lives, and to a family that grabbed education as a rope to climb out of the anthracite mines, and never let go. Clifford A. Rieders, a lawyer in Williamsport who is past president of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association, said he had found Judge Jones to be "moderate, thoughtful" and "universally well regarded."

"I think that his connections are not so politicized, nor is he so ambitious that he would be influenced in any way by those kinds of considerations," said Mr. Rieders, a Democrat.

Mr. Ridge called him a "renaissance man" and "the right kind of person to be presiding over a trial of such emotional and historic importance." He added, "I don't think he goes in with a point of view based on anything prior. I really don't. I think he loves the challenge."

And all this testimony came in before the decision was rendered.

“Darwin’s Dilemma”: Was the Cambrian Explosion Too Fast For Evolution? | NCSE

Link: http://ncse.com/blog/2013/10/darwin-s-dilemma-was-cambrian-explosion-too-fast-evolution-0015109

In the "sudden appearance" of organisms during the geologically brief Cambrian explosion, creationists imagine tangible evidence for the supernatural creation of animal "kinds." To their eyes, these rocks record the moment of creation when Yahweh declared: "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds." They point to Precambrian rocks with their lack of fossilized hard parts, then point to Cambrian layers with their copious fossils and say, "See! Right there: creation." The story is not so simple, of course; we now know a lot more about life in the period before the Cambrian. The ancient lineages that eventually diversified extend far back in time, a long fuse leading to the eventual explosion.

While the rapid evolution during the Cambrian is described as geologically brief, it is important to define what that means. On human timescales, the shortest estimation for the length of the Cambrian explosion, about 10 million years, is incomprehensibly long. Moreover, the tiny Cambrian arthropods likely had much faster maturations and much shorter lifespans than humans. Our anthropocentric perception of the flow of time, in which a family might have only three or four generations per century, is very different from the number of generations Cambrian critters produced. Ten million years provides plentiful time, as Lee et al. showed. Yet creationists insist that there was not enough time for such biological complexity to arise, without ever defining why that time frame is insufficient.

ENCODE hype? From now on I'll just reply: #oniontest

ENCODE hype? From now on I'll just reply: #oniontest

via The Panda's Thumb by Nick Matzke on 9/5/12

The science media exploded today with the claim from the ENCODE project that 80% of the genome is "functional". The creationists are already beside themselves with joy. And the problem cannot be blamed on the science media, although I wish they were quicker to exercise independent skepticism – the 80% claim is right there in the abstract of the Nature article.
However, skepticism has arisen spontaneously from all over the scientific blogosphere, facebook, and twitter. You see, most of us scientists know that (a) ENCODE is using an extremely liberal and dubious definition of "function", basically meaning "some detectable chemical activity". People have pointed out that randomly generated DNA sequences would often be "functional" on this definition. (b) All the evidence for relative nonfunctionality which has been known for decades is still there and hasn't really changed – lack of conservation, onion test, etc. But I'm beginning to think that certain parts of molecular biology and bioinformatics are populated with people who are very smart, but who got through school with a lot of detailed technical training but without enough broad training in basic comparative biology.
Anyway, I'd write more, but I'm jammed and Ryan Gregory has said everything I would say, except better: http://www.genomicron.evolverzone.c[…]encode-hype/
See also Larry Moran: http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2012/0[…]-of-our.html, especially the rather wry comments.
Hashtag: #oniontest

Evolution and Origin of Biological Information

The link below goes to a six-part series. Each blog post is very
short, however, and the whole can be read in less than an hour.

http://biologos.org/blog/series/origin-information-series

How not to examine the evolution of proteins

How not to examine the evolution of proteins

via The Panda's Thumb by PZ Myers on 10/20/11

The Discovery Institute has me on a mailing list for their newsletter, Nota Bene. That's probably unwise: usually I just glance at it, see another ignorant bit of fluff from Luskin or Nelson or one of the other usual suspects, and I snigger and hit 'delete', but sometimes they brag about how they're really doing science, and I look a little closer. And then I might feel motivated to take a slap at them.
The latest issue contains an article by Ann Gauger, babbling about her recent publication disproving Darwinism, written with her colleague Douglas Axe, published in their tame 'science' journal, Bio-complexity, and edited by Michael Behe. It's not work that could survive in a real journal, I'm afraid.
The work focuses on a diverse family of enzymes, the PLP-dependent transferases. These are all paralogs, or genes produced by duplication and divergence, as determined by their similar sequences. They picked two members of this family that use different substrates and catalyzed different reactions, and asked how they could possibly have evolved from each other…and they did it all wrong. The mistakes they made were fundamental, obvious, and amazingly stupid.

• The cousin problem. You should have picked up on the key problem from my short description above: they picked two extant proteins and then asked how they could have evolved from each other. Imagine if I picked one of my many cousins — say, the tall, red-headed Mormon fellow from Oregon, or the slender fan of horses in California — and started enumerating our many differences and declared that I couldn't possibly have evolved from either of them. You would rightly stop me and suggest that maybe my problem is that I didn't evolve from my cousins — that maybe the smarter approach would be to look at our respective parents, and the grandparents we have in common, and trace the lines of descent.
  And you'd be right, of course. A more sensible way of looking at this problem is to start with a valid premise, and examine parental and grandparental states. Gauger and Axe don't do that at all. They speculate about the huge number of possible intermediate states between two cousins, and decide that there are so many possibilities that the path from one to another is so improbable that it couldn't have happened in the history of the planet. You might be able to say the same thing about me and my very different cousin, if you disregarded the fact that there actually were known intermediates.
• The bridge hand problem. Creationists pull this one all the time. Here's the situation: you are dealt 13 cards in a hand of bridge. What's the probability that you'll get the hand you've got? Obviously, the probability of getting a hand is 1.0, but the probability of getting any one specific arrangement of 13 cards is less than one in 635 billion. The silliness of the creationists is to point at a number like that and announce that the arrangement must have been designed. Gauger pulls this same stunt.
  

  …we calculate that the waiting time for a bacterial population to acquire seven specific mutations in a duplicated gene, none of which provide any functional benefit until all seven are present, is something like 10²⁷ years. That's a ten with 27 zeros after it. To put this in perspective, the age of the universe is believed to be on the order of 10¹⁰ years.

  If I played bridge very, very fast, dealing out one hand every minute, that means I'd still have to wait 1.1 million years to get any particular hand you might specify ahead of time…and my life expectancy is only on the order of 10² years. Therefore, bridge is impossible. Similarly, if you add up all the nucleotide differences between me and my cousin, the likelihoods of these particular individuals is infinitesimally small…but so what? We're here.
• The talentless critic problem. Let's pretend that the prior problems don't exist (I know, that's an awfully big hypothetical leap to make, but try). Let's pretend therefore that the Gauger and Axe paper actually accomplishes what they claim: that neo-Darwinian mechanisms are inadequate to explain the origin of the family of PLP-dependent transferases. Now what? They're here, obviously — how did they get here? They don't say. They don't even speculate; "intelligent design" is a phrase studiously avoided. Lord knows, their experiments and simulations aren't even designed to reveal alternative mechanisms. This is their conclusion:
  

  …answers to the most interesting origins questions will probably remain elusive until the full range of explanatory alternatives is considered.

  Yeah, but…if Ann and Doug aren't considering them in their papers, let alone putting together experiments to test them, why should I? And given that their protocols are so deeply flawed and built on faulty premises, I don't think they've ruled out natural evolutionary mechanisms at all. I'll be much more interested when they actually try to explore their unstated "explanatory alternatives" and show me a novel mechanism.
• The much more attractive friend problem. I was surprised at one thing: usually creationists assiduously avoid the possibility of comparisons by, for instance, shutting off comments and not bothering to cite their critics, but in this case, Gauger actually links to a paper by Carroll^*, Ortlund, and Thornton. It's a terrible tactical mistake. Gauger and Axe are saying, "Ooh, we shit in a pot and we couldn't even get mushrooms to grow in it," and then pointing to the flourishing, hugely productive garden that Thornton has cultivated and saying, "…and they're doing it all wrong." It's crazy. It just tells me my time is much better spent reading PLoS than Bio-complexity.

That other paper is so much better than the creationist paper, let's talk about it.

---

^*Sean Michael Carroll. No, not the physicist Sean M. Carroll who works at CalTech, and not the developmental biologist Sean B. Carroll at Madison, but another Sean Carroll at Harvard. It's so confusing. If there was a secret research project decades ago to clone a set of hot scientists, you'd think they'd have at least had the decency to append a plate and well number to the ends of their names.

Joe Thornton beats on Behe

Joe Thornton beats on Behe

via The Panda's Thumb by Richard B. Hoppe on 9/30/11

Joe Thornton is a distinguished researcher who works on reconstructing ancient biomolecules to study how they evolved into their present forms. Recently ID creationist Michael Behe has commented on Thornton's work, interpreting it to mean that the molecules couldn't have evolved. On Carl Zimmer's Loom Thornton eviscerates Behe's misintepretation. A couple of quotes to give the flavor:

Behe contends that our findings support his argument that adaptations requiring more than one mutation cannot evolve by Darwinian processes. The many errors in Behe's Edge of Evolution – the book in which he makes this argument – have been discussed in numerous publications.

and

Behe's discussion of our 2009 paper in Nature is a gross misreading because it ignores the importance of neutral pathways in protein evolution.

and

This brings us to Behe's second error, which is to confuse reversal to the ancestral sequence and structure with re-acquisition of a similar function.

and

Behe's argument has no scientific merit. It is based on a misunderstanding of the fundamental processes of molecular evolution and a failure to appreciate the nature of probability itself. There is no scientific controversy about whether natural processes can drive the evolution of complex proteins. The work of my research group should not be misintepreted by those who would like to pretend that there is.

Read the whole thing. (And don't miss Matheson's remarks on natural selection at the link below.)
Hat tip to Steve Matheson for calling my attention to Thornton's piece..

YouTube - Evolution vs. Creationism:Creationism's Negative Effects

YouTube - Evolution vs. Creationism:Creationism's Negative Effects

The Unpublished Challenge

The Unpublished Challenge: "

Late last month, Casey Luskin wrote an article advocating a positive case for ID creationism. Jack has already done a good job of refuting Casey’s wishful hand waving.

However, in the comments of the post, Casey and I had a little exchange in which I tried to get him to commit to developing a positive model of common design, and he just, well, assured me that his legal education prepared him to deal with the statistics that he was butchering left and right. Yeah, umm … anyways, my last comment was never published, and now enough time has passed that I feel I can share it with you and let you decide why it never showed up on the DI’s website.

and...

The conceptual alchemy of ID, transmuting baseless assertions into scientific predictions: "

[Republished from Homologous Legs]

A well-accepted characteristic of a scientific hypothesis is that it must generate predictions about the world against which tests can be run - confirming or falsifying those predictions and thus supporting or not supporting the hypothesis in question. Understandably then, intelligent design proponents need to demonstrate that ID can produce predictions if it is to be taken seriously as a scientific hypothesis and alternative to evolutionary theory.

Origins of life, ATP Synthase, and ID

Irreducible complexity cut down to size

Dembski Coming Clean - He's a Creationist YEC

Dembski Coming Clean - He's a Creationist YEC

In 2000, Dembski wrote an essay, ID Coming Clean that, among other things, got me interested in the whole ID movement issue. In that essay, Dembski "came clean" about his stance on young-earth creationism:

By creationism one typically understands what is also called "young earth creationism," and what advocates of that position refer to alternately as "creation science" or "scientific creationism." According to this view the opening chapters of Genesis are to be read literally as a scientifically accurate account of the world's origin and subsequent formation. What's more, it is the creation scientist's task to harmonize science with Scripture.

Given this account of creationism, am I a creationist? No. I do not regard Genesis as a scientific text. I have no vested theological interest in the age of the earth or the universe. I find the arguments of geologists persuasive when they argue for an earth that is 4.5 billion years old. What's more, I find the arguments of astrophysicists persuasive when they argue for a universe that is approximately 14 billion years old. I believe they got it right. Even so, I refuse to be dogmatic here. I'm willing to listen to arguments to the contrary. Yet to date I've found none of the arguments for a young earth or a young universe convincing. Nature, as far as I'm concerned, has an integrity that enables it to be understood without recourse to revelatory texts.

[My emphasis]

Fast forward ten years: Dembski once again comes clean, and times have changed. This time he clearly states he is a Biblical inerrantist, and as such he is a creationist and he does think that Genesis is historically true.

Let's look at what Dembski has to say now.

[Edit remark: changed "evangelical" to "fundamentalist", in response to a remark by Wes Elsberry.]

Towards the end of last year, 2009, Dembski wrote a book, The End of Christianity, that attempted to reconcile the theology of the Fall, and its relationship with sin and death, to an old earth. In a comment at Uncommon Descent in October 2009, he pointed out that "As I note in THE END OF CHRISTIANITY, I would be a young-earth creationist in a heart-beat if I didn't see the evidence for an old earth as so strong." (Link)

However, given that Dembski teaches at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, his book aroused a lot of resistance from his YEC colleagues. One particular thing that stood out was that Dembski argued that the evidence for the Flood being a local event was strong, writing "Noah's flood, though presented as a global event, is probably best understood as historically rooted in a local event."

This was enough to get Southwestern Seminary's president Paige Patterson involved. According to an article at the Florida Baptist Witness,

Patterson said that when Dembski's questionable statements came to light, he convened a meeting with Dembski and several high-ranking administrators at the seminary. At that meeting, Dembski was quick to admit that he was wrong about the flood, Patterson said.

"Had I had any inkling that Dr. Dembski was actually denying the absolute trustworthiness of the Bible, then that would have, of course, ended his relationship with the school," he said.

Oh no! Threatened with being expelled!

And did Dembski take a stand for the strength of the evidence? You know, follow the evidence wherever it leads?

Nope.

According to an article A Reply to Tom Nettles Review of Dembski's End of Christianity, page 8, Dembski issued a "clarification", which is really a retraction. He says that if he were to write End of Christianity again, today he would say things differently.

In writing The End of Christianity today, I would also underscore three points: (1) As a biblical inerrantist, I accept the full verbal inspiration of the Bible and the conventional authorship of the books of the Bible. Thus, in particular, I accept Mosaic authorship of Genesis (and of the Pentateuch) and reject the Documentary Hypothesis. (2) Even though I introduce in the book a distinction between kairos (God's time) and chronos (the world's time), the two are not mutually exclusive. In particular, I accept that the events described in Genesis 1- 11 happened in ordinary space-time, and thus that these chapters are as historical as the rest of the Pentateuch. (3) I believe that Adam and Eve were real people, that as the initial pair of humans they were the progenitors of the whole human race, that they were specially created by God, and thus that they were not the result of an evolutionary process from primate or hominid ancestors.

and in respect to the flood

Yet, in a brief section on Genesis 4-11, I weigh in on the Flood, raising questions about its universality, without adequate study or reflection on my part. Before I write on this topic again, I have much exegetical, historical, and theological work to do. In any case, not only Genesis 6-9 but also Jesus in Matthew 24 and Peter in Second Peter seem clearly to teach that the Flood was universal. As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality.

So there you have it: Dembski

• is a Biblical inerrantist,
• accepts that Genesis 1-11 are historically true, and thus that the universe, the earth and all life were created in six literal days
• is furthermore a creationist in respect to human beings, who are not related to hominid ancestors by common descent,
• believes the Flood was a real universal event (presumably not too many thousands of years in the past),
• and, since he believes "that what the Bible teaches is true", he "bow[s] to the text."

It can't be any clearer than that. He bows to the text.

If there ever was another nail that needed to be driven into the coffin of whether Dembski's contributions to arguing for ID have any chance of being taken seriously by the scientific world, this is it. He is an fundamentalist theologian: given a choice between the evidence - even evidence that a year ago he said was convincingly strong - and the inerrant Bible, he chooses the Bible. He's lost any possible credibility of being someone who wants "to follow the evidence wherever it leads."

Now an obvious cynical reaction to all this is that he wants to keep his job, and will say whatever it takes to stay in Southwestern's good graces. (Of course, the irony of this in respect to the whole Expelled schtick is breathtaking.)

However, there's another possibility. Dembski, and the ID movement in general, ever since Phillip Johnson devised his Wedge strategy, has been trying to create this illusion that what they were doing was "scientific" and had nothing to do with religion. Johnson has specifically said that the strategy was to get people to accept scientifically that a Creator was necessary, and after that was established the sectarian differences about the age of the earth, common descent, etc. could be worked out in house, so to speak.

This strategy has been a dismal failure. They've lost in the school systems (for instance, Kansas), they've lost in the courts (Dover), they have never got off the ground in the science community: in fact, every time the ground troops get involved in trying to sell ID, their blatant creationism comes right to the forefront.

If I were Dembski, I'd be tired of it. He's a fundamentalist theologian, and he's got a job where he can be one. Why not give up the ID charade, join the flock, and come clean as a YEC.

Looks to me like that's what he's done.

Big Bang vs "Tired Light"

From the Starts With a Bang blog: Big Bang Alternatives: Could my light just get tired?

No, assuming photons lose energy as they travel along doesn't cut it.

You can plainly see that if you start with a blackbody spectrum, and cool it down without expanding it, you end up with the wrong spectrum for your observed radiation!

So that's the simplest explanation of why tired-light doesn't work. Remember this when you look for alternatives to a scientific theory: it isn't enough to make a better explanation of some of the observations; you have to account for them all.

Thing is, scientists have models sophisticated enough that they can calculate what we'd expect to see, given various changes. If someone wants to propose an alternative to the accepted theories, it needs to account for all kinds of things, not just one or two.

Creationism in the classroom

Dale McGowan is a parent. When his son came home after having seen a questionable presentation in his physical science class, he eventually took action. Science, interrupted

“He did this whole thing with overheads, and a bunch of it just didn’t make any sense,” he said. “This one overhead said something like…” Connor paused to remember the wording. “‘Experiments and evidence in the present can’t tell us anything about the distant past.’”

I’m not sure how much time passed as the wind-up monkey in my head banged his little cymbals. That my son’s high school science teacher was almost directly quoting the favorite trope of young earth creationist point man Ken “Were You There?” Ham was not encouraging.

“Then he goes off on this thing about ‘If no one was there to witness something, we can only guess about it. This is a big problem for the evolutionists…’ And he goes on and on about how they’ve got all these little bits of bones but how they can never really know what they mean.”

He decides to act on this. Step 1 is an e-mail exchange with the teacher to clarify. Dear Mr. Taylor (Part 1), Dear Mr. Taylor (Part 2)

Neither of these clears up the problem, though several smoking guns are uncovered. So he takes the matter to the principal. Up the ladder.

Disinterested in creating unnecessary difficulties, and perfectly willing to create necessary ones. That’s the balance to strike.
....
We’re not done, but at this point I’ve already achieved most of what I set out to do. Mr. Taylor has surely been shaken out of the complacent belief that he can spin ID-inspired threads in front of a captive audience without consequence. And Mr. Weatherbee now knows who to watch and what to watch for. That’s a win.

While I wait to hear back, I’ll check in with NCSE to bring them up to date and ask a few specific questions. What should I consider an acceptable resolution in this case? What if Taylor flatly denies it to Mr. W? And is it reasonable to insist on seeing the damn overheads that were trotted out in front of my son?

And the resolution seems to have been a good one. I guess we'll know for certain if the offending course material fails to appear next year.

What The Haeckel

What do Haeckel's embryos signify? : Thoughts from Kansas

Casey Luskin thinks they signify fraud. Other people beg to differ.

And Matt Young writes:

My colleague Paul Strode wrote a very clear and concise explanation of Ernst Haeckel’s “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” law for our book Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails). In Chapter 11, Strode explains that Haeckel was wrong in thinking that embryos resemble the ancestral adult forms; rather, early embryos resemble the embryos of ancestral forms. In other words, Haeckel was on to something, but he didn’t get it quite right. Strode explains further, “Recapitulation nevertheless provides helpful insight into evolutionary relationships and ancestry,” and argues that von Baer’s law is closer to the truth.

---

Nick Matzke writes:

Like Napoleon on Saint Helena, good ol’ Casey Luskin is re-fighting old lost battles again.
....
First, Haeckel didn’t ignore the differences in embryos in the earliest period just after fertilization (differences which are visually significant but mostly fairly trivial, due to the different amounts of yolk in different vertebrate eggs) – in fact, Haeckel himself prominently diagrammed them, as I showed here back in 2006. Whoops! And such diagrams are standard in any book which gives a thorough treatment of vertebrate development, although this may not include the most absolutely introductory general biology texts.

Second, Luskin makes it out as if it’s me and NCSE against developmental biology experts like Michael Richardson (whom he quotes), and as if we ignored the textbooks that did have the classic Haeckel’s embryo drawings. But (as I find out when I go back to the 2006 article which Luskin quotes) actually, no, Richardson’s on our side, and we counted the textbooks that had the drawings – taking the numbers directly from Jonathan Wells, no less! Not good enough for Luskin.

For those who actually want to be fair-minded about it, it’s pretty clear that what happened was that in the mid-1990s, as happens every few decades, a scientist (here, Michael Richardson) discovered the real, but moderate, problems with Haeckel’s embryo drawings. This led to some some guns going off half-cocked in the media and in popular works (e.g. by Gould), and this is the stuff which Luskin cites. In the meantime, the originator of the latest wave, Richardson, learned some more about the complex history of the drawings and the even more complex history of claims and counterclaims about “scandal” by creationists – from Haeckel’s day to today – and published an updated version of his assessment. We quote the updated version, and Luskin quotes the more heated early reactions, pretending (despite knowing better) that the later assessments don’t exist. Oh well.

Why Creationism?

From Distributed Republic a couple of years ago:

I've been having a bit of an ID/Evolution tussle with Bob Murphy here and here, and a question just occurred to me: What exactly is it the purpose of Intelligent Design/Creation Science?

Yes, yes, the obvious explanation is that theists want God taught in the science classrooms. But doesn't this violate a central tenet of theism? Namely, don't all theists have to account for the hiddenness of God? That is, if God exists, why doesn't God make its own existence obvious, and eliminate all of the time wasted (and sins committed) as a result of reasonable doubt?

Most versions of theism that I have encountered give a similar answer to this question: the hiddenness of God is a test of faith, for which believers will be rewarded. Open, obvious evidence for God's existence would remove a significant element of free will - we would not be believing because we choose to believe, but because we must believe.

But if that's the case, then why the urge to prove, scientifically, that God is in the gaps? Why are IDers/Creationists looking for, not just any evidence, but scientific evidence, in the form of irreducible complexity as an argument for the existence of a designer?

If God really did exist, why would God provide complex, statistical, scientific evidence for its own existence only in the micro-world of biochemical processes, and not instead, say, host his own public access television show called Jesus and Pals? Are microbiologists more deserving than the rest of us to bask in the knowledge and glory of the Divine? Or does God want us all to give up our day jobs and become microbiologists?