Confusing Science with Magic

Arthur C. Clarke once observed that any sufficiently advanced technology can seem indistinguishable from magic. Many TV shows and situation comedies have presented time travel, where present technology appears magical to an earlier population, or even where a technologically sophisticated alien presents herself as a god. It's a fair observation.

At the same time, it can be easy to lose track of how we perceive the development of technology, particularly if we lack a sufficient understanding of the science underlying the technology. Watch an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica series and much of the technology seems antiquated - voice recognition software putting your dictation on a low resolution CRT? How about the communicators from the original Star Trek series? Why don't they upgrade to iPhones? And a separate tricorder? Why isn't there an app for that?

Quite a few years back I was involved in a discussion about food shortages and distribution issues, regional overpopulation and the like. Somebody who was reasonably well-educated popped in with the comment that she didn't worry about food shortages because it was only a matter of time before we had food replicators, as seen on Star Trek, the Next Generation. If Jean-Luc Picard could turn to a hole in the wall, say "Earl Grey, hot", and have a cup full of tea magically appear, clearly it is only a matter of time before we all have such a wondrous device creating and serving our favorite foods in unlimited quantity, right?

Well, wrong. I pointed out the physics involved - development of the device aside, the extraordinary amount of energy it would take to replicate food in that manner. My comment fell on deaf ears. "Scientists will figure it out."

There's nothing new in that attitude. Charlatans have, for centuries, promised that they can find ways (figuratively or literally) to turn common items into gold. Even in this age of modern pharmaceuticals, we're always hoping for a magic pill or potion that will allow us to live forever, to overcome the effects of inactivity, overeating, aging. We are primed to hope, and there will always be somebody looking to capitalize on that fact.

On Real Time this past weekend, Bill Maher criticized a Member of Congress, John Shimkus, for making the insipid suggestion that we don't need to worry about climate change, because God had promised Noah that he would never again destroy the Earth with a flood. Never mind that the promise wasn't, "I'll stop you from destroying the Earth."

One of Maher's guests, Will Cain, expressed skepticism that climate change was as serious as some suggest. He employed the traditional had waving defense of many climate change deniers, pretending that there's a meaningful disagreement among climate scientists about the reality of climate change. He then launched into what I expect he believes to be a discussion of science, reciting that the world had been predicted to run out of food but that the development of fertilizers proved that theory wrong.

In other words, "Don't worry about the facts. Don't worry about what science can actually do. Because, magic."

When religious people respond to criticism of faith-based argument by asserting that a lot of argument that is supposedly based on science is in fact based on faith, they can point to Will Cain as their poster child.

It was not scientifically wrong to look at the world's capacity for food production and, based upon the amount of food an average individual requires to survive, projecting a maximum carrying capacity for the planet. Although the development of nitrogen-based fertilizers did significantly increase the planet's capacity for food production, it remains possible to do exactly the same thing: to calculate the Earth's carrying capacity based upon current levels of food production. It's also possible to examine how regional or global shortages will change that number.

Beyond confusing science with magic, and adding a generous topping of faith and self-centeredness - never mind where science hasn't worked out so well for past or present populations, if Will Cain needs science to fix something it will deliver and it will do so in a timely manner - Cain demonstrates confused thinking.

The fact that the world once faced an issue that was (partially) overcome by science does not mean that the world, facing that same issue again, will experience a similar scientific breakthrough. It certainly does not mean that, faced with a completely different issue, we can count on science to provide the necessary solution within the necessary time frame.

Cain's resort to "science", really science fiction, as a solution to a real problem is scarcely more intellectually sound than Shimkus's reliance on God's promise not to again flood the world. While they practice their respective forms of faith, the rest of us need to keep working on a back up plan.

If a Study Isn't Published....

Dean Baker describes a NYT reporter's reaction to the use of an unpublished study on the possible health risks of fracking as a basis for forming public policy:

From his blogpost, it sounds like Revkin gave Hill a really serious grilling about the ethics of allowing her unpublished study to influence debate on a major national issue. (Don't you wish reporters would just once give the same sort of grilling to Jamie Dimon or some other corporate honcho?)

There is something to be said for distinguishing published studies from unpublished studies, and peer reviewed studies from those that have not been submitted for peer review. But let's not forget, many publications exist to push an agenda, and lots of junk gets through peer review - you still have to be careful. When you're looking at unpublished research, it's more than fair to explore why it's not published and whether it's likely to be published. There are plenty of examples of people grabbing an unpublished concept based upon data that turns out to be erroneous or incomplete and... end up embarrassing themselves. (Again, that can also happen with published, peer reviewed studies - it's just that on the whole it's less likely.)

But that last sentence hints at another problem. Much of our nation's public policy is driven by assumption and ideology, not data. Politicians (and newspaper columnists) will at times express skepticism of science, with that skepticism at times more driven by ideology than by concern for the merits of a study, and may be quick to point out that a particular study is (or may be) incomplete, flawed, inaccurate.... But when it comes to making an actual decision, all too often we get assumption-based legislation driven not by any sort of study or analysis, but because the politician believes it will help him get reelected, or it's what lobbyists and special interests want.1
---------------
1. Arguably, that's a subset of things that a politician believes will help him get reelected, but let's not forget those who position themselves to profit once they leave office, and perhaps before.

A Feel Good Story About Teachers....

... That's isn't properly supported by the data. Yes, it's nice to think that a kindergarten teacher can have a profound effect on the future incomes and success of her students, and yes there probably is some truth to it - it makes sense that your future education will build upon the foundation laid in kindergarten. It also makes sense that a more positive kindergarten experience, even if it's simply at an emotional level, will make it more likely that a child will come into future years of schooling with the expectation of further positive experiences. But...

The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

There are two issues here. The first is that the mere fact that the statistical significance of a finding is supposedly "too big to be explained by randomness" doesn't mean that it isn't, in fact, the result of chance. A very interesting New Yorker article recently discussed a number of studies in which statistically significant results, sometimes well beyond what researchers believed could be explained by chance, were followed in subsequent studies by a regression to the mean. That is, the initial findings were outliers or were otherwise flawed. The article doesn't mention this, but sometimes data sets are analyzed by computer for hundreds or thousands of factors - and when you do that, odds are you're going to find some outliers at the p < .01 or even p < ..001 level.

Also, with due respect to Sherlock Holmes, ruling out the obvious does not necessarily mean that you are correct that only one explanation remains, or that the one explanation you identify is the solution to your puzzle. If you come up with a hypothesis that lies outside of your data, you should attempt to replicate your experiment while collecting a more complete set of data.

Even if the answer does lie with the quality of the kindergarten teacher, the questions are raised, what qualities made the difference and were they consistent between teachers? If some teachers were introducing basic math and reading concepts, while others were focusing on play and socialization, that could explain why one group performed better than the other, but that's really a question of priority as opposed to teacher quality.

When it comes to schools we're better off erring on the side of quality, top to bottom, so to the extent that "great kindergarten teachers cause significant increases in lifetime earnings" means that as a society we'll emphasize finding and retaining great kindergarten teachers, I'm all for it. But, perhaps thanks to my kindergarten teacher (although when I started school in the U.K. I didn't attend a kindergarten, as such) I don't accept "We can't figure out what else caused the difference so it must be the teachers" with sound science.

Assuming Genetic Racial Inferiority in the Absence of Evidence

Maybe I'm not giving Ann Althouse a fair shake, being as I don't regularly read her blog and when I follow a link it's usually to some of her more absurd proclamations (like "OMG, that feminist has boobies"), but it seems like every time I stumble across one of her posts... calling it "inane" would be to lavish it with undue praise. The latest case in point, her defense of the statement, "I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent".

Althouse's argument is, in effect, an argument in the alternative. First, "I don't see how that comment can be interpreted to mean that, as a group, African Americans are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than other racial groups, maybe it means the opposite," and second, "Even if the speaker did mean that African Americans are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent, maybe she meant it as a compliment." The first defense is inconsistent with the plain language of the email under discussion; the second defense is, well, pathetic.

Althouse argues that it's unfair to characterize a refusal to rule out the possibility that African Americans, "on average, [are] genetically predisposed to be less intelligent" as suggesting that "black people are genetically inferior to white people" because the speaker was not saying that was the case, instead simply refusing to rule out the possibility. Althouse glosses over the fact that the speaker was defending her prior position, was unable to present any evidence to support her genetic theories, and instead engaged in a cheap rhetorical trick - reversing the burden of proof - to in effect argue that she was entitled to her beliefs until somebody proved them wrong. ("I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.")

Althouse argues that we don't have the full context of the conversation. That's true. The person who leaked the email, whose identity as far as I know remains unknown, provided only the one email and we have to infer what else might have been said. As I understand the back story, the person who leaked this email got into some sort of dispute with the speaker and, six months after-the-fact, decided to try to damage her career - pretty deplorable. But Althouse's pretense that we can't know what position the speaker was taking - that she could have been "criticized by someone else for ruling out the possibility" that "African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent", is a demonstration of either willful or inept misreading of the email.

I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.... I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.

Althouse follows up with an attack on the law school dean who spoke against the statement, first speculating on where the dean falls on the "nature vs. nurture" debate, then adding:

But consider Minow's other interpretive leap — that to be less intelligent is to be inferior. Why isn't that an even more outrageous statement than what the student [name omitted] said?

Well, let's go back to the statement at issue:

This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria.

Althouse can read that passage and truly remain confused on the question of whether the speaker believed high intelligence to be a positive attribute and low intelligence a negative?

In what might be a form of anticipatory self-defense, Althouse argues the case that less intelligent people might not be "inferior". First she presents a quote from Brave New World, in which sleeping children are programmed to believe that they should be happy to be "Betas" because they don't have to work as hard as Alphas and are better than Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons... that is, the children are being programmed to accept their situation in life, in what amounts to a caste system.

“They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson.”

Althouse argues, "Betas don't think they're inferior! They are less intelligent though." Um... yeah, Ann - they accept their lot in life after their brainwashing sessions are complete. Althouse would probably have been better served by quoting J.K. Rowling's "sorting hat" story from the first Harry Potter book, because at least there it's a conscious wish to be something other than a "Ravenclaw".

Althouse next tries to save herself by quoting conservative satirist P.J. O'Rourke. Like him or hate him, I am not sure that it's possible to see O'Rourke perform without recognizing that he's an intelligent man - and that he knows it. When he writes something like, "I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts," he's not saying it's good to be stupid - he's playing up to his audience with the caricature that "left wing elites" condescend to them and think they're stupid. Having won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to attended Johns Hopkins, even if with a non-scientific major, O'Rourke has little room outside of his satire to make fun of Harvard graduates as thinking themselves smart - the distinction from his fellow Johns Hopkins alums would be what?

But more to the point, the issue is not whether O'Rourke thinks of it as being good to be a C student... good, I would have to presume, for other people... With all due respect to O'Rourke's quip,

The Mayflower was full of C students. Their idea was that, given freedom, responsibility, rule of law and some elbow room, the average, the middling, and the mediocre could create the richest, most powerful country ever.

Even if we were to assume O'Rourke to have meant that as an expression of historical fact, by the time of our nation's independence the founding fathers had a very clear sense of a natural aristocracy, with any number of checks and balances imposed in the Constitution to make sure that the nation's "C students" didn't take over. Although she appears to take no offense, herself, I'll assume that Althouse has read enough of the Constitution to understand why, more than two centuries later, assertions that African Americans are inferior to whites might continue to rub many other people the wrong way. Really - Althouse thinks, "Maybe she meant it as a compliment" is a viable defense?

Further, it's again obvious from the comment on its face that the speaker views intelligence as a positive attribute. What other inference would Althouse have us draw from the assertion, "I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals" - bad is good, up is down, and she hopes that her children will be burdened by beauty and genius?

Then there's the inevitable question, why is Althouse attempting to defend the statement? Even if we assume the first defense to be in good faith, based upon a clumsy or inept reading of the contentious email, why the "It's not bad to be less intelligent" defense? Does she imagine that people offended by the original statement will read her defense and say, "Maybe the speaker thought her statement was a compliment" or "Whether or not there's a genetic component, we shouldn't see the comment as insulting because being less intelligent is a good thing"? Seriously?

Were Althouse to think about the issue of IQ and race, it might occur to her first that the value of the claim that race correlates with intelligence is of minimal benefit, because there is no valid dispute that a randomly selected African American may be more intelligent - even vastly more intelligent - than a randomly selected person of a different race, the Harvard student who authored the email or, dare I suggest, Professor Althouse herself. Second, there's no clear definition of what it means to be African American. Do we apply the "one drop" rule, in which case the assertion becomes that the genetic influence of that one drop is so profound that it impairs the intelligence of the recipient and his descendants for untold generations? If not, why doesn't intelligence more closely associated with skin color - does it need to be explained that African Americans are not uniform in color?

And wow, to assume that the genes for skin color and intelligence are somehow linked? Scientists, ranging from absolute hacks to the sincerely misguided, have spent generations pursuing dead-ends such as phrenology or other "scientific" measures of the human body in order to try to find "objective" evidence of the biological superiority or inferiority of one ethnic group or another. Need I post a Nazi illustration of the "Jewish Nose" for it to click where this brand of scientific racism can lead? Althouse finds it in some way defensible for somebody who has no evidence of her own to offer to resurrect those discarded notions while rejecting their attempt at objective measure, and simply arguing that the key correlate to genetically superior intellect is African skin pigmentation (but not the genes that lead to dark skin in other ethnic groups)?

There's an intrinsic element of racism in the assumption, based upon "personal experience", that a particular ethnic group is "less intelligent" than another - and, as she waits for her assumptions to be disproved by others, that's all the author of the email has to offer. It's a natural human tendency, but it's not even close to scientific, to see somebody from our own ethnic group struggle with a problem and attribute their struggle to something extrinsic - education level, their upbringing, etc. - while attributing the same struggle by an ethnic minority to something intrinsic - their genes. People have to train themselves, or be trained, to consider such factors as sample size and their own biases. The author of the email gives no indication of how intelligence should be measured or what measure she has applied, beyond her own assumptions, in her determination that it's possible for African Americans, on the whole, to be genetically programmed to be less intelligent.

Further, recent scientific research indicates that aspects of intelligence, even of the structure of the brain, that many have believed to be innate or fixed are in fact far more flexible than we've previously thought. Meanwhile we have identified genes that govern hair color, eye color, skin color... and there's no indication that any of them correlate to intelligence - let alone define "race".

It's interesting that although Althouse finds it horrible that people have assumed, based upon the plain language of the controversial email, that its author believes that African Americans are, on the whole, less intelligent, she plays a game with the statement of the dean who responded to the statement,

It's possible — possible! — that Minow thinks that everyone less intelligent than her is inferior, but for reasons having only to do with nurture. This must be an interesting subject for her, because she's the daughter of a highly successful man, Newton Minow (the FCC chairman who called TV a "vast wasteland"). Does she trace her high intelligence only to environmental factors?

It's also possible - possible! - that Dean Minow believes that there is a genetic component to intelligence, but not one that correlates with race. It's also possible that she recognizes the huge amount of interracial mixing in the African American community and, particularly in light of the aforementioned "one drop rule", finds the notion of a genetically based "African American" race to be absurd.

Althouse links with approval to "neoneocon" who writes,

As for me, I don’t happen to think that African Americans are genetically inferior in this arena. But I do think that banning speculation and/or research into the question is both intellectually dishonest and an affront to liberty.

We can start by noting that unlike Althouse, neoneocon had no trouble recognizing the remarks for what they were - an assertion of racial inferiority. But wait a second. Scientists are researching genes as they relate to physical appearance. Scientists are also researching genes that may be linked to intelligence, however defined. There's nothing scientific about assuming something to be the case in the absence of evidence. When you say something along the lines of, "I don't have any evidence to support my position, but until you show me proof to the contrary I'm absolutely not going to rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on the whole, genetically programmed to be less intelligent," the problem is not that you're suggesting that an answer could be reached through research.

Althouse is correct in this statement,

There is a difference between "suggesting" something is true and conceding that you don't have a basis for excluding the possibility that something is true.

For example, there is a difference between saying "Professor Althouse is an idiot" and saying "I don't have a basis for excluding the possibility that Professor Althouse is an idiot." Yet I suspect that if Professor Althouse were to hear that second statement from her peers, or to overhear it in a conversation between students, she would take offense. (I don't want to be presumptuous - I'll leave open the possibility that she would shrug and think to herself something along the lines of, "Maybe they only know me from my 'BoobGate' posts.")

Zombie Arguments

I was recently debating with a friend, whether politicians, pundits and the like who make irresponsible, inaccurate, false or fraudulent claims about various issues are mendacious or stupid. They say, "don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity", and that's the position my friend took - that no matter how absurd the argument, most of their advocates were either too stupid (or insufficiently intelligent while blinded by their own narcissism) to know that they were spouting nonsense. I don't disagree that it can happen, but I am skeptical that people who are clearly reading from the party memo, or where they offer a succession of discredited argument as each is refuted, aren't being deliberately dishonest.

I stumbled across a decent explanation of that phenomenon:

But the key to all of this is the recurring mischief of criticisms mounted against climate change. I am very happy to affirm that I am not a giant expert on climate change: I know a bit, and I know that there's not yet been a giant global conspiracy involving almost every scientist in the world (although I'd welcome examples).

More than all that, I can spot the same rhetorical themes re-emerging in climate change foolishness that you see in aids denialism, homeopathy, and anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists.

Among all these, reigning supreme, is the "zombie argument": arguments which survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down. "Homeopathy worked for me," and the rest.

Zombie arguments survive, immortal and resistant to all refutation, because they do not live or die by the normal standards of mortal arguments. There's a huge list of them at realclimate.org, with refutations. There are huge lists of them everywhere. It makes no difference.

"CO2 isn't an important greenhouse gas", "Global warming is down to the sun", "what about the cooling in the 1940s?" says your party bore. "Well," you reply, "since the last time you raised this, I checked, and there were loads of sulphites in the air in the 1940s to block out the sun, made from the slightly different kind of industrial pollution we had then, and the odd volcano, so that's been answered already, ages ago."

And they knew that. And you know they knew you could find out, but they went ahead anyway and wasted your time, and worse than that, you both know they're going to do it again, to some other poor sap. And that is rude.

Think, for example, of the tobacco executives who for decades flat-out lied about the dangers of cigarettes.

Update: Thoughts along a similar line from Paul Krugman:

When I first began writing for The Times, I was naïve about many things. But my biggest misconception was this: I actually believed that influential people could be moved by evidence, that they would change their views if events completely refuted their beliefs.

As Krugman notes, it rarely happens. Krugman's a bit cynical about their motivation:

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The Problem With Forensic Science

I should say "problems". I think they're two-fold:

1. There's no such thing as "forensic science" - there's just science. The term "forensic" refers to how the science is used, not to the underlying scientific concepts or procedures. Instead, the term is treated as a brand - as something that sets the science apart from routine, day-to-day science (and, it seems, often exempts "forensic science" from the scientific method).

2. Forensic science is driven by police and prosecutors. Crime scene investigation is performed by police officers, who have attended a weeks-long police training course and perhaps some additional seminars. The evidence they collect is submitted to government funded "crime laboratories" that are sometimes deplorable. The credentialed professionals who may form the backbone of a prosecutor's case may turn out to be well-spoken incompetents.

Criminal defendants typically have no money to hire experts of their own. On those rare occasions when the court grants an indigent defendant money to hire an expert, the funds are typically not just inadequate but grossly inadequate to hire a quality expert. The not-so-quality experts? Very often retired from the police side, without either the self-awareness or the capacity to question the "science" they learned on the job. Judges are often former prosecutors, and many have little to no background in math or science. Prosecutors? Well, let's just say it's a rare prosecutor who is wiling to admit losing a case because of weak scientific evidence or their poor presentation of the case, rather than spinning about the "OJ Simpson Effect" or its successor, the "CSI Effect".

Occasionally I read about hopes to shake up the system, bring in real science, and there have been modest improvements in some areas, such as fire science as applied by arson investigators. Absent a scandal there's little to no movement for reform from within the system. Yet we have these scandals on a cyclical basis, and promises of reform (or potential for reform) never seem to take root. What is probably the best solution, adequately and independently funding defense experts, isn't going to happen.

Kathleen Parker's Stupid Stem Cell Argument

Note I'm not stating that Kathleen Parker's stupid, nor am I saying she believes what she's saying - her editorial appears to be stenography of a memo from one of possibly many pro-life groups. But her argument is stupid.

Let's start with a similar argument - avoiding arguing the morality of the death penalty by instead arguing that it's not cost-effective as compared to life imprisonment. The idea here is that you could convince death penalty proponents that it's a bad idea, not because you risk killing an innocent person, for such issues as racial disparity, or because of skepticism that the state should have that type of power over a citizen's life, but because alternatives (such as life without parole) are cheaper. What if they then demonstrate a mechanism to make it more cost-effective? You're sent reeling back to the arguments you actually believe, but you've given up a lot of credibility by making them the backups to a failed argument that you, yourself, never found convincing.

Parker opens with a distortion of the status quo - that somehow, in ending the absurd Bush policy on funding for embryonic stem cell research, Obama is "ignoring... amazing strides in alternative stem cell research." Her argument reflects her willingness to come across as a scientific ignoramus, and maybe that's also the reality. But the fact is, researchers aren't lining up to get funding for their grants, or to launch new projects based upon embryonic stem cells, because they're unethical or aren't aware of other sources of stem cells. They're doing so for valid, scientific reasons, and with full awareness of the ethical issues. Parker can yammer all she wants about how "Science and ethics finally fell in love" while "Obama seems to have fallen asleep during the kiss", but she only demonstrates her ignorance, dishonesty, or quite probably both.

This type of argument reflects the worst of "conservatives" like Parker - it demonstrats abject contempt for her audience, whom she apparently regards as scientifically ignorant rubes, while smearing the ethics and social responsibility of thousands of scientists who want nothing more than to cure presently untreatable diseases and to save lives. Parker truly believes they are intentionally pursuing research that has no scientific merit, because they get their jollies destroying embryos?

But this is where her argument gets truly stupid:

If people "know" anything, it is that embryonic stem cells can cure diseases and that all stem cells come from fertility clinic embryos that will be discarded anyway. Neither belief is entirely true.

In fact, every single one of the successes in treating patients with stem cells thus far - for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis, for example - have involved adult or umbilical cord blood stem cells, not embryonic stem cells.

Parker first pretends that embryonic stem cell research isn't in its infancy, and that miracle cures should somehow develop overnight or embryonic stem cells have no medical or scientific value. She second conveniently forgets that Bush's policies have held back research into the medical application of embryonic stem cells while allowing other forms of stem cell research and treatment to proceed. And she exaggerates the successes of research based upon other stem cell lines, to suggest that they're living up to the potential that many scientists perceive in treatments based upon embryonic stem cells. It's great that other types of stem cell are available, and that certain diseases can be treated based upon those other forms of stem cell. But, all of Parker's prevarication and exaggeration aside, they're not presently a substitute for embryonic stem cells.

Parker cites as authority a blog post by Bernadine Healy, one-time head of the NIH under George H.W. Bush, without mention of the fact that Healy engages in fear-mongering tactics that betray her ignorance of the subject matter. Healy suggested that embryonic stem cell treatments will cause cancer, citing a single case that involved repeated injection of fetal stem cells at a Moscow clinic in a manner that is both medically and scientificaly dubious.

Parker carries on for several paragraphs about how "induced pluripotent stem cells" (iPSs) may ultimately prove as useful and flexible as embryonic stem cells, both in research and medical treatment. How quickly Parker forgets her prior argument, that embryonic stem cells have no medical value and the "real" progress is being made with other types of stem cell - if that were the case, after all, there would be no need to develop something potentially as useful as embryonic stem cells, and doing so would be vastly more foolish than working with stem cells from non-embryonic sources. As anybody with modest knowledge of science is aware, its absurd to suggest that something that carries scientific potential will always pan out - a lot of science that shows potential never lives up to its potential, or it takes years or decades for the potential to become reality.

Truth be told (and you're unlikely to get it from Parker), organizations performing stem cell research are proceeding on both fronts - IPSs and embryonic stem cells. If it turns out that embryonic stem cells are no better than IPSs, the research will continue based upon IPSs. The big question is, "What if they're not." And that's where Parker's construct fails. She's set up a house of cards that falls apart the moment a significant medical breakthrough emerges based upon embryonic stem cells. Even to her most ardent followers, all of her equivocation about how the only "real" progress arises from other sources is revealed for the anti-scientific, counter-factual nonsense that it is.

Meanwhile, Michael Gerson writes an editorial of his usual quality, suggesting that it's tokenism for Obama to have a pro-Choice Catholic as his Secretary of Health and Human Services. That she serves as "religious cover" for the pro-choice policies that she has... supported throughout her career.

It also smacks of religious humiliation - like asking a rabbi to serve the pork roast or an atheist to bless the meal.

Standing up for your beliefs is "humiliating"? Okay... So what, then, of appointing Catholics to the Supreme Court, knowing that they would vote to uphold the death penalty despite the teachings of their faith? Catholics who won't even promise to reverse Roe v Wade? Samuel Alito and John Roberts, for example. Religious cover for G.W.? A form of constant public humiliation for those poor men? I guess the contest continues.

I guess writing this sort of column is a lot easier than answering difficult questions - such as, why is Obama's policy any less ethical than Bush's? Or why it's more ethical to treat the nation's hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos as medical waste or to let them perish of freezer burn than to allow their parents to donate them for use in medical research? Which gives their life more meaning?

Note to Fred Hiatt: There are people who are smart, informed, honest and articulate who write about these issues from the pro-life standpoint. Ever thing about hiring one of them?

Stem Cell Research

The Washington Post embarrasses itself with this editorial by Yuval Levin, attacking Obama for abandoning Bush's cowardly stance on stem cell research. Embarrassment starts with the headline, "Science Over All?". Was that picked by the author? Given the tendency of stem cell research opponents including and perhaps especially Levin to compare it with eugenics and Nazism, the allusion to "Deutschland Über Alles" is hard to overlook. If the title was picked by one of Fred Hiatt's employees, all the worse.

Does it need to be said? It gets worse from there. The second paragraph is mind-numbing drivel:

What you think of his policy depends on what you think of the moral status of embryos. If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life, and if (as the Declaration of Independence asserts) every human life is equally deserving of some minimal protections, government support for the destruction of human embryos for research raises profound moral problems. But if you think an embryo is not quite a person, or that its immaturity or inability to suffer pain or its other qualities mean that destroying an embryo does not amount to taking a life, the promise of stem cell science might well outweigh any doubts.

Where to begin....

• If in fact the debate turns on "the moral status of embryos", Levin should be embarrassed that he elided from his discussion Obama's discussion of the moral issues and description, albeit brief, of how he reached his conclusion; or Bush's vacuous half-measures on the same subject.

• "If (as modern biology informs us) conception initiates a human life..." - as if no distinction can be made between "human life" and a "human being". Leaving aside my skepticism that Levin supports the extension of human life in all circumstances (e.g., that he opposes the death penalty), and even granting that he might have dogmatically defended the notion that Terry Schiavo should have been kept alive in a persistent vegetative state, even he must be able to recognize both qualitative and quantitative differences between a fertilized ovum and a human being.

• "...and if (as the Declaration of Independence asserts) every human life is equally deserving of some minimal protections..." - What a way to build a syllogism. The Declaration of Independence says, "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Their use of the term "men" did not even extend to slaves, and didn't apply equally to women or Indians, let alone to embryos.

• "... government support for the destruction of human embryos for research raises profound moral problems." - The conclusion is reasonable; it just isn't drawn from Levin's false premises. Also, as previously indicated, that's not a point of distinction from Bush's policies - if use of embryonic stem cells is a per se moral wrong, Bush's blessing it based upon a limited set of stem cell lines is also a per se moral wrong. If Levin finds Bush's policies defensible, he's already abandoned the moral framework that he's using to attack Obama.

• "But if you think an embryo is not quite a person..." - An embryo isn't a person. Again, if it were a person Bush's stem cell policy would have been morally repugnant.

• "... or that its immaturity or inability to suffer pain or its other qualities mean that destroying an embryo does not amount to taking a life..." - Have you ever heard that suggested by a proponent of stem cell research? Even once? It's a canard pulled out by the likes of Levin to impugn the morality of those with differing views on stem cell research, as a smokescreen over his conflation of "human life" with "personhood". I don't believe for a second that Levin believes this representation to be either fair or accurate in relation to anybody, let alone Obama.

• "...the promise of stem cell science might well outweigh any doubts." - Again, Bush was sufficiently impressed with the promise of stem cell research that he permitted it, and even permitted limited federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Does this mean that Bush didn't respect the "personhood" of embryos, or does it mean that he (and people who served him... like Levin) never met a moral principle that couldn't be bent?

Further, where's the morality in Levin's alternative position. The rare exception of "snowflake children" aside (just over 300 kids born as the result of an eight-year campaign), if not used for research there are hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos stored in fertility clinics that will either be discarded as medical waste or die in a freezer. That's a morally superior outcome? That's a moral acknowledgment of their personhood?

In a barely concealed swipe at his predecessor, he pledged that his administration would "make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."

Given Bush's scientific legacy, shame on Obama for being indirect.

In pledging to advance science, Obama acknowledges the importance of ethics - of morality - and the importance in making sure that stem cell research is conducted in an ethical manner. This is a vastly superior approach to both science and ethics than that of Bush. You can't address issues like this while avoiding any intrusion of morality or religion; but you can recognize the nature and importance of science, and any responsible President should openly and unambiguously reject the anti-scientific propagandizing, distortion, and policy-making of the Bush Administration.

Perhaps Obama could have added another paragraph or two to his speech about the moral issues. But let's be honest. That wouldn't have affected more than a sentence or two of Levin's editorial, and his conclusion would have remained the same. Note that there is no policy suggestion in the editorial - it's an attack on Obama for parting ways with Bush's cowardly compromise. His implied conclusion, one can reasonably infer, is the one he has more explicitly stated elsewhere but here chooses to imply with his headline: that embryonic stem cell research is a form of eugenics that verges on Nazism.

Well Go Figure

Don't tell Thomas Friedman, but here's a little footnote from history.

Though [Isaac Newton] never managed to turn base metal into gold in an experiment, later in life he became Warden of the Mint - the man in charge of making the country’s money. Here, he oversaw the production of gold and silver coins, and ensured that they were made more exactly than they had ever been made before. He also went after counterfeiters, several of whom were hanged.

That's the best and the brightest for you. Always trying to make a mint in banking.

"No, I'm Not Getting Fatter"

It's cosmic expansion.

But What If God Makes You Infertile?

The New York Times has a rather vapid piece on same-sex marriage, Using Biology, Not Religion, to Argue Against Same-Sex Marriage. The authors present the views of a Christian couple who contend that their opposition to same-sex marriage arises from biology, not their religious beliefs:

“It takes a man and a woman to create children and thus create a family,” Mrs. Galloway, 60, told a legislative panel in Connecticut last year as it was considering a bill to legalize same-sex marriage.

Except....

For the Galloways, the notion that same-sex couples should not marry because they cannot have children is complicated by their own story. They married nearly 17 years ago, and tried to have children. When they couldn’t conceive, they became foster parents in the hope of adopting.

If the argument truly is that biology dictates the answer - couples who can't have children shouldn't be allowed to marry - why should the Galloways be permitted to remain married? Why should any infertile person be allowed to marry? If the solution to God's will is adoption, as the Galloways suggest at least in relation to their own inability to bear children, how is their marriage different from that of a same-sex couple that adopts?

What of a fertile couple that chooses not to have children, or an infertile couple with no intention of adopting - should they be allowed to marry? How does "biology" justify their marriage?

It's sleight of hand - the argument is quietly shifted from biology - the capacity to reproduce - to "gender roles":

The notion that gender roles are unimportant in raising children is “bunk,” added Mrs. Galloway. “It is not an accident that it takes a man and a woman coming together to create a child,” she said.

Certainly, it's not an "accident" that species that reproduce sexually engage in sexual reproduction. That's a given. But what do we make of "biology" when mommy mantis bites off daddy's head or mommy wolf spider eats daddy. Even if we stick to humans, the mere fact that a species engages in sexual reproduction does not necessarily require that the father have any involvement in the child's life past the point of conception. And that's true even when parents have the best of intentions:

Mr. Galloway, whose father died when he was 3, said being raised solely by women - his mother and his aunts - hindered his development and altered his sense of self-worth.

The Galloway's argument is premised in sociology, not biology. And even in that context, its based upon personal experience and opinion, not empirical data.

This emphasis on biology roughly parallels the idea that "if we call it 'intelligent design' it's not really creationism." When the religious argument doesn't gain traction, spin it into something you can try to rebrand as science, even if there's no actual science involved.

The Gerson War On Reality

Michael Gerson's in a tizzy because Hillary Clinton has accused the Republican Party of "conducting a 'war on science.'" He quickly names three civil servants, one of whom earned his position under Clinton and another of whom received his two most recent promotions under Carter (Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation for the NIH) and Reagan (Director of NIAID), whom he claims to have stellar scientific records.

Um... wow? Way to defend (either) Bush?

And, because we haven't had enough of this type of mindlessness lately,

Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

Okay... by whom? Where and when? Should we hold our breath waiting for your answer?

Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science."

I didn't realize that it was "anti-science" to have practical concerns over the documented failure of "abstinence only" sex education, but there you go. Now if your concern is that there's scientific content in sex education, and you prefer to omit that science from sex education programs in favor of the discredited theory that "abstinence-only education" works? Now that would be anti-science.

That "abstinence only" agenda was anti-science even before "abstinence-only" education was discredited, as there was never any data to support "abstinence-only" education as a viable alternative. You want to talk scientific ethics? How about the Bush Administration's using our nation's schoolchildren as lab rats for that failed social science experiment? May I please at least see the "informed consent" forms?

Liberal views are "objective" while traditional moral convictions are "biased."

Surely even Gerson can construct a better straw man than that.

Public scrutiny of scientific practices is "politicizing" important decisions.

Oh... I guess not.

These arguments are seriously made, but they are not to be taken seriously.

An ambiguous reference. If he means, "The fake arguments I'm presently raising," for once he's right on the money.

And of course we devolve into this type of claptrap, popular with dishonest right-wingers:

Without a firm, morally grounded belief in equality, liberalism has been led down some dark paths. The old, progressive eugenics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved widespread sterilization of the mentally disabled as a form of social hygiene.

We can start by pointing out that just because a historic group called itself "progressive" and that's the new preferred term in a lot of circles for the term, "liberal", doesn't mean the two are one and the same. Further, if Gerson had any idea what he was talking about, he would understand that when eugenics movements were at their peak they were broadly embraced by society, even by people he would have to grudgingly concede were "conservatives".

Gerson argues that parents' decisions to abort Down syndrome babies

highlights a real conflict, a war within liberalism between the idea of unrestricted science in the cause of health and the principle that all men are created equal - between humanitarianism and egalitarianism.

Yet he doesn't explain how. Do you suppose he has evidence that parents who self-classify as conservatives don't choose abortion when they learn that they are expecting a Down syndrome child? Well, he says, "In America, the lives of about nine of 10 children with Down syndrome are ended before birth." So either Gerson has to admit that American conservatives are a big part of what he describes as the problem, or argue that significantly less than 10% of Americans are "conservative."

I guess there's one more possibility: He could be arguing that while liberals fret over the conflict between humanitarianism and egalitarianism, conservatives are skipping the debate and heading straight to Planned Parenthood.

Nazism largely discredited the old eugenics. But a new eugenics - the eugenics of genetic screening and abortion, the eugenics of genetic selection in the process of in vitro fertilization - is alive and well. Its advocates contend that the new eugenics is superior because it is voluntary instead of compulsory, and unrelated to race.

Posing some questions to Mr. Gerson:

Who are these "advocates"? Where can I find these statements you attribute to them? Do they truly compare "genetic selection in the process of in vitro fertilization" to Nazi-style eugenics? Oh, I know, hyperbole - nobody is really making such a comparison or statement. So let's ask a question that ignores your attempt to conflate genetic screening with Nazism. You're not claiming that these "advocates" are liberal - what are their politics? And the people paying for these services - people who are wealthy enough to afford cutting edge infertility treatment and genetic testing - what are their politics?

I'm also curious as to how you distinguish in vitro fertilization involving genetic testing from the traditional variety. Either way, a number of eggs are fertilized for implantation, but most of those fertilized eggs are discarded. The difference, then, is that with genetic screening certain birth defects are eliminated, which should significantly reduce the abortion rate.

After that rhetorical exercise, I am left with three obvious questions for Mr. Gerson:

• Are you opposed to all in vitro fertilization, given that with or without genetic testing the number of viable embryos that are not implanted are roughly equal?
• Are you stating that it's more "moral" to forego genetic screening and discard a healthy, viable embryo than it is to employ genetic screening and improve the chances of a genetically normal child? (That's a subject ripe for debate - I'm just trying to figure out if you're trying to engage us in that debate or, as seems to be the case, foreclose it by suggesting that anybody who would engage in genetic screening is tantamount to a Nazi eugenicist.)
• Leaving aside for the moment the psychological and medical toll on an expectant mother, do you believe that there's no difference between having an embryo expire without ever being implanted and having a fetus aborted in the first or second trimester - and if you do see a difference, unless you believe the former is worse, why are you suggesting that doctors who help avoid that second outcome are tantamount to Nazi eugenicists?

Gerson clarifies,

The point here is not to catch liberalism in an inconsistency.

Well, that's probably for the best. Because if that were the point, Gerson would look even more the fool.

Meanwhile, Gerson might benefit from brushing up on the non-scientific positions taken by the Bush Administration, even while he was hacking away as a speechwriter for G.W., on such topics as sex education, global warming, "intelligent design", misrepresentation of the viability of stem cell lines, etc. Because if he really wants to make the case that Republicans care about science, his former paymasters have a lot of explaining to do.

Rolling the Percentile Dice

I'm all for taking care before violent criminals are released from incarceration, and that concern is heightened where they have killed and may kill again, but what should I make of this:

Why was Hanson considered for release when he had apparently been evaluated in prison as being an inmate with a 91% chance of reoffending and an increasing tendency towards violence?

By what scientific method, dare I ask, can one establish such a specific probability figure?

Looking For Villains In All The Wrong Places

Recently, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column, The Hubris of the Humanities, in which he quite rightly pointed out that the U.S. is losing ground in maths and sciences.

But put aside the evolution debate for a moment. It's only a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole.

One-fifth of Americans still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.

In this society, which for generations has venerated the high school athlete and demeans studious ("geek", "egghead", "nerd", etc.), who is to blame for this?

The problem isn't just inadequate science (and math) teaching in the schools, however. A larger problem is the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you.

Now I admit to having a liberal arts education, which (as you would expect) included extensive study of the natural sciences and math. Kristof conflates the liberal arts with the humanities.

Leaving aside his careless choice of words, I can agree with Kristof's overall argument that our society would benefit from greater scientific literacy. Kristof's examples, though, seem designed to advance his notion that it is experts in the humanities who are somehow at fault for this nation's poor grasp of science:

What do I mean by that? In the U.S. and most of the Western world, it's considered barbaric in educated circles to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi-squares.

* * *

In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines. A year ago, I wanted to ornament a column with a complex equation, so, as a math ninny myself, I looked around the Times newsroom for anyone who could verify that it was correct. Now you can't turn around in the Times newsroom without bumping into polyglots who come and go talking of Michelangelo. But it took forever to turn up someone confident in his calculus - in the science section.

Apparently, those Times employees confident in their calculus did not include Kristof, hence his need for verification. Which isn't a surprise as, "math ninny" or no, if you don't exercise your calculus skills they become rusty. And Kristof concludes,

But there's an even larger challenge than anti-intellectualism. And that's the skewed intellectualism of those who believe that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes. That's the hubris of the humanities.

This isn't the first time that Kristof has invented a soft target at which to aim his barbs. I am wondering - can he identify even one person who believes "that a person can become sophisticated on a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleavened by statistics or chromosomes"? And upon what basis could he possibly suggest that this fictitious faction poses a greater danger to scientific literacy than anti-intellectualism? Perhaps it's all the sports dads suddenly pulling their kids off of the football team to study Monet and Michelangelo.

Kristof perhaps takes his call for scientific literacy beyond what I would deem necessary. I could devote the necessary time to refresh my math, calculus, physics, and other science knowledge and skills, or even to expand them. But realistically, there is not much call for calculus in my daily activities, and when there is I find it more efficient to refresh my memory in relation to the specific need. My knowledge of science and statistics provides a framework which I attempt to use when processing information, even as some of the specifics become hazy. I would like to see our society embrace the maths and sciences as an important part of all levels of education, and to provide both opportunity and encouragement to kids who are inclined toward the maths and sciences.

Intelligent Design

The Washington Post recently ran an article entitled, "Editor Explains Reasons for 'Intelligent Design' Article", with regard to what really should be a tempest in a teapot:

As editor of the hitherto obscure Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Sternberg decided to publish a paper making the case for "intelligent design," a controversial theory that holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand - subtle or not - of an intelligent creator.

Within hours of publication, senior scientists at the Smithsonian Institution - which has helped fund and run the journal - lashed out at Sternberg as a shoddy scientist and a closet Bible thumper.

Well, the article doesn't bear out the "closet Bible thumper" end of the story, although with Sternberg's résumé, activities, and the subject and content of the article at issue, I can see why some might infer a religious motivation for his editorial decision. But, within the context of evolution, I cannot find anything in the article which would redeem Steinberg as a scientist.

Three years [after his appointment as editor], Sternberg agreed to consider a paper by Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge University-educated philosopher of science who argues that evolutionary theory cannot account for the vast profusion of multicellular species and forms in what is known as the Cambrian "explosion," which occurred about 530 million years ago.

Scientists still puzzle at this great proliferation of life. But Meyer's paper went several long steps further, arguing that an intelligent agent -- God, according to many who espouse intelligent design -- was the best explanation for the rapid appearance of higher life-forms.

Sternberg harbored his own doubts about Darwinian theory. He also acknowledged that this journal had not published such papers in the past and that he wanted to stir the scientific pot.

Assuming that "stirring the pot" is a sufficient basis to publish a paper on a non-scientific theory in a scientific journal, that still doesn't explain the decision to publish an article that seeks to advance such a theory. Nor does it explain why no counterpoint was presented, or for that matter an editorial disclaimer that the purpose of the publication was to "stir the pot" as opposed to trying to legitimize junk science.

He mailed Meyer's article to three scientists for a peer review. It has been suggested that Sternberg fabricated the peer review or sought unqualified scientists, a claim McVay dismissed.

"They were critical of the paper and gave 50 things to consider," Sternberg said. "But they said that people are talking about this and we should air the views."

Sternberg may wish to ask that his reviewers reveal themselves, so as to rebut the accusations of selectivity and fabrication. But even giving him the benefit of the doubt, I find it hard to believe that if such a list of "50 things to consider" were presented in relation to an article that advanced evolution, with the supposed conclusion being "but you might want to publish it anyway, so people can talk about it", the paper wouldn't be published. "People are talking about this and we should air the views?" There are still people who talk about the "fake moon landing." Being controvercial, or being the subject of discussion, does not transform something into science. And when a scientific journal gives a platform to only one side - particularly the "junk science" side - the editor deserves to be held accountable.

An e-mail stated, falsely, that Sternberg had "training as an orthodox priest." Another labeled him a "Young Earth Creationist," meaning a person who believes God created the world in the past 10,000 years.

An email to whom? From whom? Lots of nonsense gets included in emails - if these are the best examples of mistreatment that can be culled from the "near instantaneous and furious" response to Sternberg's decision to publish junk science, he got off easy.

This latter accusation is a reference to Sternberg's service on the board of the Baraminology Study Group, a "young Earth" group. Sternberg insists he does not believe in creationism. "I was rather strong in my criticism of them," he said. "But I agreed to work as a friendly but critical outsider."

Apparently with an emphasis on "friendly".

A former professor of Sternberg's says the researcher has an intellectual penchant for going against the system. Sternberg does not deny it.

"I loathe careerism and the herd mentality," he said. "I really think that objective truth can be discovered and that popular opinion and consensus thinking does more to obscure than to reveal."

And there he is, contradicting his prior herd mentality assertion that you should ignore hard science because "people are talking about" a junk science alternative.

Blinded With Science

The New York Times the other day wrote an editorial, supposedly by a "science writer", which can only be described as atrocious in its reasoning. Ostensibly "in defense of common sense", the author effectively proposes something else entirely - the "what makes sense to me" standard. The first major flaw of the argument is that scientists don't reject "common sense" - they reject instead the notion that uninformed opinion is an appropriate substitute for measurable scientific data. The second major flaw, which ties into the first, is that "common sense" flows from knowledge. It was once "common sense" to many that the sun was carried around the earth in a chariot driven by the sun god, Ra. We now have a great deal more knowledge, and the columnist would probably now decry that particular belief as defying common sense (presumably without even noticing the contradiction in his argument).

It is interesting to note that this type of flimsy argument is effectively couched in terms of common sense. (Essentially, "It is common sense that common sense makes sense.") This type of overstated case, in my opinion, furthers an increasingly problematic contempt for science by our nation's leaders, most notably its Republican leaders. When you don't like the scientific consensus on global warming, appoint ideologues to important commissions and phony up dissention. When you don't like the scientific consensus on fighting HIV, appoint ideologues to important commissions and phony up data to favor "abstinence only" programs for Africa. When you don't like the scientific consensus on evolution, embrace the phonied-up "alternative" claim of "intelligent design". Get your supporters to close quarters in defense of ignorance over science, get them to extend grants to institutions which advance ignorance over scientific knowledge (as companies like Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil have done with global warming), and laugh when people take this particular science writer's advice and dismiss global warming with "common sense" statements such as, "If the world is getting warmer, why was it so cold last night?"

Oh, C'mon....

The Washington Post owns Kaplan, so one might expect the reporter they assign to school issues to, well, be reasonably good. Today, that reporter presents an editorial which suggests otherwise:

My biology class, sadly, was another story. I slogged joylessly through all the phyla and the principles of Darwinism, memorizing as best as I could. It never occurred to me that this class could have been as interesting as history until I recently started to read about "intelligent design," the latest assault on the teaching of evolution in our schools. Many education experts and important scientists say we have to keep this religious-based nonsense out of the classroom. But is that really such a good idea?

I am as devout a Darwinist as anybody. I read all the essays on evolution by the late Stephen Jay Gould, one of my favorite writers. The God I worship would, I think, be smart enough to create the universe without, as Genesis alleges, violating His own observable laws of conservation of matter and energy in a six-day construction binge. But after interviewing supporters and opponents of intelligent design, which argues among other things that today's organisms are too complex to have evolved from primordial chemicals by chance or necessity, I think critiques of modern biology, like Ladendorff's contrarian lessons, could be one of the best things to happen to high school science.

The initial thesis seems to be that because biology classes are uninteresting - or, more correctly, because the author found the biology class he once took in high school to be uninteresting - the answer is to introduce material which may have no basis whatsoever in science or logic, but which might be more interesting than actual science. The next argument appears to be that if introducing competing scientific theories into the classroom can have educational value and make study more interesting, the same should apply for non-scientific theories. Well, um, yeah. And watching cartoons during English class may really perk up class attention - it's not education, but darn it, it's far more entertaining.

And why stop with biology? Physics teachers could ask students to explain why a perpetual-motion machine won't work. Earth science teachers could show why the steady-state theory of the universe lost out to the Big Bang -- just as Al Ladendorff exposed the genius of the U.S. Constitution by showing why the Articles of Confederation went bust.

I'm not sure what this argument has to do with the author's advocacy of teaching "intelligent design". First, many physics teachers do discuss perpetual motion devices, and I first encountered a teacher who capably discussed the competing theories of the formation of the Universe in a 7th grade science class. But again, how does the discussion of the scientific during science class justify inclusion of the non-scientific.

The intelligent-design folks say theirs is not a religious doctrine. They may be lying, and are just softening up the teaching of evolution for an eventual pro-Genesis assault. But they passed one of my tests. They answered Gould's favorite question: If you are real scientists, then what evidence would disprove your hypothesis? West indicated that any discovery of precursors of the animal body plans that appeared in the Cambrian period 500 million years ago would cast doubt on the thesis that those plans, in defiance of Darwin, evolved without a universal common ancestor.

Hm. So if I throw up any criterion, no matter how absurd, that I claim will cause me to doubt my theory, the theory magically passes "Gould's favorite question" and becomes scientific?

"I propound that the moon is made of green cheese, but I will doubt that theory if I observe Jay Mathews consume several pounds of moon rock without declaring it to be 'yummy'."

Or perhaps, "I propound that Jay Mathews hasn't given sufficient thought to these issues, but the discovery of any precursors of Jay Mathews thoughtfulness predating the Cabrian period would cast doubt on my thesis."

Unintelligent Design?

In today's Times, Michael Behe, a leading proponent of "intelligent design" was given the opportunity to beg the question of the theological aspects of his theories. What I mean by that is that, while the author proposes a designer, he also pretends that his theory is separate from theology... presumably because he provides no information about the "designer" and does not speculate as to who the "designer" might (or might not) be. Beyond that rather patent omission, the author asserts, "Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic." Or, more accurately, not. Starting at the beginning:

The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.

Of course, we know who is responsible for Mount Rushmore, but even someone who had never heard of the monument could recognize it as designed.

Except this theory is neither new, nor is it compelling. It was, what, some eight centuries ago that philosophers suggested that order in the universe evidenced the existence of a God? The difference between "now" and "then" is that the larger forces of nature which create the apparent order in the universe are accepted by Behe and are acknowledged as "unintelligent physical forces". Yet this is a distinction without a difference - Behe is repeating the error of observing something that appears ordered and designed and, because he does not know (and refuses to acknowledge) "unintelligent physical forces" which could account for the same phenomenon, assuming intelligent design.

Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too. The 18th-century clergyman William Paley likened living things to a watch, arguing that the workings of both point to intelligent design. Modern Darwinists disagree with Paley that the perceived design is real, but they do agree that life overwhelms us with the appearance of design.

That's not really a second claim, so much as a variant of the first. It has a simplistic appeal - if something looks like it might have been designed, it is reasonable to assume a designer. But, as Behe himself suggests in asserting "unintelligent physical forces"as the force behind what philosophers once viewed as evidence of "design", this claim begs the question.

The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.

Scientists skeptical of Darwinian claims include many who have no truck with ideas of intelligent design, like those who advocate an idea called complexity theory, which envisions life self-organizing in roughly the same way that a hurricane does, and ones who think organisms in some sense can design themselves.

Here, again, there is nothing that lends support to "intelligent design". If one were to assert, "Many scientists believe the Earth is flat. I think it is shaped like a cube. As there are many scientists who disagree with the 'Flat Earth' theory, including some who think it is hexagonal and some who believe it is a dodecahedron, my theory is valid," the illogic would be patent. (I don't mean to belittle the two alternative theories Behe mentions - my analogy is to his effort to, through simplistic presentation, implicitly suggest that his own speculations are at least equal.)

Beyond the illogic, it also is not correct from a scientific perspective. There is extensive scientific analysis - which, unlike "intelligent design", has passed peer review - which presents observations and theories of evolution at the subcellular level. It is possible that Behe does not understand that body of science, or that he disagrees with the concusions of the scientists behind it, but it is fundamentally dishonest for him to pretend that it does not exist. The fact that Darwinism itself has evolved from its rawest, 19th Century form is no surprise. But subsequent additional scientific research, knowledge, and theories do not mean that "anything goes" or "my speculation is equal to (or better than) their science".

The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.

A circular and self-serving argument: If I don't find other theories more compelling than my own, I should not only be able to adhere to my opinion but should be able to advance it as equal or superior to its "competitors". And, at its core, this isn't really different from the earlier points that, if something looks like it was designed (like the "face" some used to imagine on the surface of Mars) then it is reasonable to assume that it was designed. However Behe rationalizes the manner in which he puts these four "claims" together, he's remarkable in his circularity.

But it seems to me that the principle failing of Behe's theory is one he chooses not to address: His refusal to identify the designer, or to apply his own "claims" to the notion of an intelligent designer. Why? Presumably because he knows that the concept of God that is embraced by most of those who purchase his book falls apart when his four "claims" are applied to its existence. After all, if God is an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful being, capable of simultaneously being everywhere and anywhere, and credited with knowledge of the smallest act of man, and with designing life and matter right down to the subatomic level, God is the most complex being ever conceived. Why isn't Behe demanding that theologians explain, "Who designed God"?

A surprising level of honesty....

In George Will's latest rant on global warming, he is surprisingly up front about the fact that the bulk of his argument is based upon a work of fiction. Granted, that's par for the course, but usually the knee-jerk "it doens't exist" types choose fictional works that are at least disguised as science. Next stop, Jurassic Park? Congo?

Applying Scientific Methodology To Security Screenings

Imagine that the police show up at your house, and insist upon searching your closets. They explain that once a year or so, somewhere in the United States, they catch a murderer hiding in a closet, and thus they have to do closet screenings "just in case". They advise you of safety regulations which may cause them to seize certain items as a result of their search - they'll be taking your wire coathangers, for example. And if you argue, they'll probably search a bit more intensively, maybe also searching your crawlspace and attic.

Obviously, the police aren't on their way to randomly search a closet near you. The "general warrant" which allowed the British authorities to search a neighborhood on generalized suspicion was one of the abuses which led to our constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. And such searching would be regarded, quite correctly, as an extraordinary waste of time and resources.

Except at airports. Perhaps our government can be made to realize that searching people who have no conceivable relation to airborne crime or terrorism is, similarly, a waste of time and resources. Perhaps there are even methods which could be applied to winnow down the list of suspects from "everybody" down to, well, people who might intend harm to their fellow air travelers. But as long as our transporation security agents feel unduly threatened by the likes of Patti LuPone and Cat Stevens, I wouldn't count on it.