Evolution professor attacked in class

The Flori­da Atlantic Uni­ver­si­ty news­pa­per reports:

Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor Stephen M. Kajiu­ra was review­ing with his evo­lu­tion class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU stu­dent Jonatha Carr inter­rupt­ed him: “How does evo­lu­tion kill black people?” she asked. Kajiu­ra attempt­ed to explain that evo­lu­tion doesn’t kill anyone.

And then, Carr became violent.

Anoth­er mem­ber of the class taped the out­burst, though it’s hard to fol­low much of what’s going on.

A stu­dent told the paper that Kajiu­ra “was dis­cussing attrac­tion between pea­cocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her ques­tion… She asked it four times, and became increas­ing­ly upset each time Kajiura’s answer failed to sat­is­fy her.” (The arti­cle says “her ques­tion about evo­lu­tion.” It was­n’t a ques­tion about evolution.)

Kajiu­ra, a mem­ber of NCSE’s Project Steve, describes the inci­dent: “She became increas­ing­ly bel­liger­ent. It was at this point, a high­ly emo­tion­al­ly charged indi­vid­ual who was no longer capa­ble of respond­ing ratio­nal­ly. She was threat­en­ing to kill both me and the stu­dents in the class.” As the video shows, and the sto­ry describes, stu­dents fled the class­room, and a Span­ish instruc­tor came in and asked the vio­lent stu­dent to leave the room. The stu­dent attacked him instead, Kajiu­ra went over to try to inter­cede, as did sev­er­al students.

The group ulti­mate­ly led her from the class­room. Report­ed­ly, police used Tasers on her before tak­ing her to a hos­pi­tal for an invol­un­tary com­mit­ment and men­tal health assessment.

Some have sug­gest­ed that this out­burst was inspired, in part, by the mur­der of Trayvon Mar­tin, which is cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble. And it’s like­ly that she’ll be found to have some under­ly­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lem, which news cov­er­age of the Trayvon Mar­tin inci­dent may well have exacerbated.

But I’d also like to lay some blame on cre­ation­ists. Their per­sis­tent and fal­la­cious efforts to link Dar­win to eugen­ics, and even to Hitler’s atroc­i­ties, seem like the most plau­si­ble inspi­ra­tion for her ini­tial out­burst. There are oth­er instances of insti­tu­tion­al racism in sci­ence, includ­ing the Tuskegee exper­i­ment, which may also have helped inspire her, but those would­n’t bring the link specif­i­cal­ly to evolution.

The irony, of course, is that many racist poli­cies orig­i­nat­ed from cre­ation­ist argu­ments and beliefs. The judge who exiled Mil­dred and Richard Lov­ing from Vir­ginia for their inter­ra­cial mar­riage jus­ti­fied that eugenic pol­i­cy by writ­ing:

Almighty God cre­at­ed the races white, black, yel­low, Malay and red, and He placed them on sep­a­rate con­ti­nents. And but for the inter­fer­ence with His arrange­ment there would be no cause for such mar­riages. The fact that He sep­a­rat­ed the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.

Nor should we for­get that the Ku Klux Klan ral­lied in Day­ton, TN, to urge the con­vic­tion of John Scopes on the charge of teach­ing evo­lu­tion, and when Scopes’s pros­e­cu­tor William Jen­nings Bryan died short­ly after the tri­al, the Klan burned cross­es in his mem­o­ry, call­ing him “the great­est Klans­man of our time.” 

An inter­est­ing side­note about those famous Klan sheets. As Rebec­ca Skloot dis­cuss­es in her amaz­ing The Immor­tal Life of Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks, the Klan’s sheets orig­i­nat­ed as a tac­tic used to scare slaves in the area around the hos­pi­tals like that at Johns Hop­kins University:

The Lack­ses aren’t the only ones who heard from a young age that Hop­kins and oth­er hos­pi­tals abduct­ed black peo­ple. Since at least the 1800s, black oral his­to­ry has been filled with tales of “night doc­tors” who kid­napped black peo­ple for research. And there were dis­turb­ing truths behind those stories.

Some of the sto­ries were con­jured by white plan­ta­tion own­ers tak­ing advan­tage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused dis­ease and death. To dis­cour­age slaves from meet­ing or escap­ing, slave own­ers told tales of grue­some research done on black bod­ies, then cov­ered them­selves in white sheets and crept around at night, pos­ing as spir­its come to infect black peo­ple with dis­ease or steal them for research. Those sheets even­tu­al­ly gave rise to the white hood­ed cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.

Lit­tle won­der, then that many African Amer­i­cans have con­cerns about the motives of doc­tors and sci­en­tists. What’s shame­ful is how cre­ation­ists play on those fears, which only harms those African Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ties. We see this, for instance, with a 2001 bill in Louisiana, which would have declared evo­lu­tion “the main ratio­nale for racism,” or, as the bill described it, “Dar­win­ian racism.” 

Ken Ham, of Answers in Gen­e­sis, praised that res­o­lu­tion, and has aimed for African Amer­i­can mar­kets with his book Dar­win’s Plan­ta­tion: Evo­lu­tion’s Racist Roots. And in his var­i­ous writ­ings, Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute hon­cho John West reg­u­lar­ly tries to tar Dar­win as a racist, and there­by taint mod­ern evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy and implic­it­ly shore up his pre­ferred form of creationism.

That alone did­n’t cause this vio­lence in a shark biol­o­gist’s class­room, but how could it not have played a role?

Good intentions and where they lead

From The Con­fu­sion, by Neal Stephen­son, Book Three of The Baroque Cycle. The Duchess of Oyon­nax, in the court of Louis XIV, explains why good peo­ple do bad things:

In this world there are few who would kill for mon­ey. To believe that the Court of France is crowd­ed with such rare spec­i­mens is fol­ly. There used to be, at court, many prac­ti­tion­ers of the Black Mass. Do you real­ly think that all these peo­ple woke up one morn­ing and said, “Today I shall wor­ship and offer sac­ri­fices to the Prince of Evil?” Of course not. Rather, it was that some girl, des­per­ate to find a hus­band, so that she would not be sent off to live out the rest of her life in some con­vent, would hear a rumor that such-and-such per­son could pre­pare a love potion. She would save her mon­ey and go into Paris and buy a mag­ic pow­der from some moun­te­bank. Of course it had no effect at all; but she would coz­en her­self into believ­ing that it had worked a lit­tle bit, and so con­ceive a des­per­ate hope, and a desire for some­thing a lit­tle bit stronger: a mag­ic spell, per­haps. One thing would lead to anoth­er, and in time she might find her­self steal­ing the con­se­crat­ed Host from some church, and tak­ing it to a cel­lar where a Black Mass would be sung over her naked body. Errant fool­ish­ness all of it. Fool­ish­ness lead­ing to evil. But did she set out to do evil? Did she ever con­ceive of her­self as evil? Of course not.

We’ve all stood on sim­i­lar cusps, and either made a choice we could­n’t explain lat­er, or knew where an innocu­ous choice would lead. A few years back, I was blog­ging about an elec­tion, and dig­ging up dirt on a can­di­date I opposed. I heard a rumor that the can­di­date had, as a high school stu­dent, got­ten a younger girl preg­nant, and that she dis­ap­peared from school for a few months to deliv­er, then returned and nev­er said any­thing to any­one. His wife is said to look a lot like that ex-girl­friend. I was told that a pre­vi­ous cam­paign had dug up a lot of the doc­u­men­ta­tion already, and that I could prob­a­bly track down enough details to run with it.

And I thought about it. I real­ly want­ed to win that race, I real­ly did think that this can­di­date deserved to lose, I thought the sto­ry was prob­a­bly true and that his hypocrisy should be exposed if so, my source seemed legit, and a lot of the leg­work had already been done. Giv­en this can­di­date’s moral­is­tic way of pre­sent­ing him­self, those charges would prob­a­bly have hurt him on elec­tion day, and right­ly so.

In the end, I passed on the sto­ry. I did­n’t want to win that way, and I did­n’t want to drag myself into the muck along with this can­di­date. I did­n’t invest time research­ing it, I nev­er wrote it up (and am not shar­ing enough detail now to trace it back), and he lost the race any­way. But I can eas­i­ly see how I could have spent a few days research­ing the issue, which would­n’t have cost me any­thing but time and would cer­tain­ly not have been uneth­i­cal on its own. Hav­ing invest­ed time and con­firmed some­thing, I can eas­i­ly see how it might have seemed fool­ish not to post a sto­ry telling what I’d found. And then to dig deep­er, try­ing to keep the sto­ry alive and to flesh out the details, I’d have gone fur­ther down a path that would be eth­i­cal­ly murky at its best. And before long, the whole thing with the Black Mass and naked bod­ies would ensue.

I’ve been remem­ber­ing that inci­dent in light of the Heart­land doc­u­ments; I expect every choice Peter Gle­ick made seemed rea­son­able and even eth­i­cal as he was mak­ing it, though in hind­sight it was clear­ly wrong. It’s worth bear­ing in mind the ease with which some­one pur­su­ing eth­i­cal ends can wind up caught act­ing uneth­i­cal­ly whether we’re con­sid­er­ing why Peter Gle­ick pre­tend­ed to be some­one else to get doc­u­ments from the Heart­land Insti­tute, or in pon­der­ing how folks at groups like the Heart­land Insti­tute or Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute can feel OK about con­stant­ly under­min­ing chil­dren’s edu­ca­tion and endan­ger­ing the plan­et, or in remem­ber­ing the life of provo­ca­teur and reput­ed libelist Andrew Bre­it­bart.

Not that we should­n’t con­demn an uneth­i­cal but pos­si­bly jour­nal­is­ti­cal­ly accept­able act by Gle­ick or uneth­i­cal agen­das like those of Dis­co. or Heart­land or Bre­it­bart. But rec­og­nize that peo­ple don’t set out to do evil, and that how­ev­er absurd and uneth­i­cal the end result might look, it near­ly always starts out with an inten­tion that’s laudable.

What’s the opposite of a counterfactual?

David Kling­hof­fer is sur­prised that his Dis­co. ‘tute col­leagues man­aged to get an arti­cle pub­lished at the Huff­in­g­ton Post. Kling­hof­fer­’s col­league must’ve known this was com­ing, and Huff­Po isn’t noto­ri­ous for refus­ing essays, so I can’t fath­om why it was any sort of sur­prise. Nor is “pleas­ant” the word that came to mind on read­ing the essay, or any­thing com­ing from Dis­co. Any­way, Kling­hof­fer asks us to “Try to Imag­ine Our Coun­try’s Found­ing if the Founders Had Not Been Advo­cates of Intel­li­gent Design:

The Huff­in­g­ton Post pleas­ant­ly sur­prised us today with an excel­lent piece on the nec­es­sary role of faith in pub­lic life, by James Robi­son and Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute’s Jay Richards…

The authors prompt me to won­der how Dar­win­ists think the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion might have gone — whether it would have been pos­si­ble at all — if the Founders had not been intel­li­gent-design advocates.

For the rest of Kling­hof­fer­’s piece he stu­dious­ly avoids ask­ing any “Dar­win­ist” any­thing of the sort, or cit­ing their views on the mat­ter. Of course.

The thing is, it’s not a hard ques­tion to answer, since – con­trary to Kling­hof­fer­’s fram­ing of the ques­tion – it does­n’t even involve a coun­ter­fac­tu­al. The Founders were not, as a group, advo­cates of intel­li­gent design in any sense that means any­thing today.

First, because their reli­gious views were notably het­ero­ge­neous, with main­stream Chris­tians of var­i­ous denom­i­na­tions to deists like Thomas Paine (whose deis­tic attacks on orga­nized reli­gion verged on athe­ism), George Wash­ing­ton, Thomas Jef­fer­son (a self-described fol­low­er of “mate­ri­al­ism,” who loved the eth­i­cal teach­ings of Jesus but who edit­ed all mir­a­cles out of the New Tes­ta­ment), and Ben­jamin Franklin (who was regard­ed by his con­tem­po­raries as “an apos­tate or an Athe­ist”). It seems rather hard to extract sup­port for intel­li­gent design from men who saw the New Tes­ta­ment as a “dunghil” of super­nat­ur­al tales from which a dia­mond of eth­i­cal teach­ings had to be extract­ed, or who wrote, “I do not believe in the creed pro­fessed by the Jew­ish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turk­ish church, by the Protes­tant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”

Of course, the reli­gious views of the Founders are almost irrel­e­vant here. The impor­tant thing is that “intel­li­gent design” as advo­cat­ed by Kling­hof­fer and the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute is a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, an off­shoot of the 20th cen­tu­ry cre­ation­ist move­ment that came into its own in the 1980s and ’90s. Cre­ation­ism in this sense, and intel­li­gent design in par­tic­u­lar, are reac­tions against evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, an idea that did not exist dur­ing the life of any of the Founders (Madi­son was the last to die, in 1836, before Dar­win had drawn his first evo­lu­tion­ary tree).

Indeed, Kling­hof­fer and oth­er Dis­co. staff have argued that ID is defined by its anti-evo­lu­tion­ism – any even loose­ly anti-evo­lu­tion argu­ment is treat­ed as pro-ID, even if it does­n’t argue in favor of ID. But how could some­one who died before Dar­win pub­lished On the Ori­gin of Species be expect­ed to take a posi­tion on the mer­its of Dar­win’s argu­ment, let alone on mod­ern evo­lu­tion­ary biology?

To say they were “intel­li­gent design advo­cates” wrong­ly treats them as if they were of a sin­gle mind on this (or near­ly any top­ic), mis­rep­re­sents their reli­gious views, and man­gles the his­to­ry of sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy beyond repair. “Intel­li­gent design” did­n’t exist in 1776, and to claim any­one alive at the time as an advo­cate for it is rad­i­cal­ly anachro­nis­tic, not to men­tion insult­ing to the read­er’s intel­li­gence and to the founders of this great nation.

Which is to say, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca was­n’t found­ed by ID advo­cates, so a USA found­ed by peo­ple who weren’t ID advo­cates would look exact­ly like the one we actu­al­ly have.

Set­ting aside the bizarre anachro­nism of try­ing to force late-18th cen­tu­ry thinkers into late-20th cen­tu­ry argu­ments, it’s far from clear that the Founders would have been ID advo­cates even if the con­cept meant any­thing to them. Franklin and Jef­fer­son, in par­tic­u­lar, were active nat­ur­al philoso­phers, and would pre­sum­ably have tak­en some stance on evo­lu­tion if they had lived a cen­tu­ry lat­er. What would they have said about ID creationism?

Franklin’s essay “Obser­va­tions Con­cern­ing the Increase of Mankind, Peo­pling of Coun­tries, etc.” has been sug­gest­ed as an inspi­ra­tion for Malthus’ essay on pop­u­la­tion growth, an essay which Dar­win cred­it­ed as a major inspi­ra­tion for his think­ing on nat­ur­al selec­tion. Not only that, but Franklin social­ized with Dar­win’s grand­fa­ther Eras­mus (who was also an advo­cate for trans­mu­ta­tion of species), and Charles’s father vis­it­ed Franklin in Paris and regaled his chil­dren with tales of the Amer­i­can Found­ing Father. It’s hard to imag­ine him aban­don­ing this idea he may well have helped inspire.

But Franklin’s writ­ings and research tend­ed more to the prac­ti­cal, mechan­i­cal, or phys­i­cal than to the bio­log­i­cal, and it’s hard to know what he might have thought of evo­lu­tion. Thomas Jef­fer­son, was a poly­math, a polit­i­cal philoso­pher, an agron­o­mist, and a nat­u­ral­ist. And his writ­ings reveal some attempts at grap­pling with the ques­tions Dar­win would lat­er answer so clev­er­ly. And alas, Jef­fer­son let his deism lead him astray on some sci­en­tif­ic issues. “The move­ments of nature are in a nev­er end­ing cir­cle,” he wrote in “A Mem­oir on the Dis­cov­ery of cer­tain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the West­ern parts of Vir­ginia,” pub­lished in 1799 in the Trans­ac­tions of the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety. In that essay, he argues not only for the fix­i­ty of species, but denies pos­si­bil­i­ty of extinc­tion: “The ani­mal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still prob­a­bly mov­ing in that train. For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, anoth­er and anoth­er might be lost, till this whole sys­tem of things should evan­ish by piece-meal; a con­clu­sion not war­rant­ed by the local dis­ap­pear­ance of one or two species of ani­mals, and opposed by the thou­sands and thou­sands of instances of the ren­o­vat­ing pow­er con­stant­ly exer­cised by nature for the repro­duc­tion of all her sub­jects, ani­mal, veg­etable, and min­er­al.” He reject­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of extinc­tion because he saw no route to the ori­gin of new species; if only extinc­tion was pos­si­ble, the earth would become depau­per­ate in time.

Indeed, part of Jef­fer­son­’s agen­da in send­ing Lewis and Clark to sur­vey the Louisiana Pur­chase was to locate liv­ing spec­i­mens to match fos­sils found on the East Coast, spec­i­mens which would rival the size and feroc­i­ty of any­thing in Old World bes­tiaries and estab­lish that extinc­tion was impos­si­ble. He was wrong, of course.

While cre­ation­ists might pounce on his appar­ent rejec­tion of species trans­mu­ta­tion and extinc­tion as anti-evo­lu­tion, this would be his­tor­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate. Evo­lu­tion did­n’t exist yet, and in its absence, it was not unrea­son­able for peo­ple to look for oth­er expla­na­tions for the diver­si­ty of life. So we have to look deep­er, and ask how Jef­fer­son approached ques­tions of divine inter­ven­tion in the world. The fact that he edit­ed mir­a­cles out of the Bible is pret­ty sig­nif­i­cant in that regard: intel­li­gent design calls for count­less mirac­u­lous inter­ven­tions through­out life’s his­to­ry, after all. If he did­n’t think Jesus could turn water to wine, why expect Jef­fer­son to look for Jesus to slap a fla­gel­lum on bacteria?

Indeed, some of what Jef­fer­son said about sci­ence would fit him in nice­ly with the New Athe­ists. He told the nat­ur­al philoso­pher Cor­rea de Ser­ra, in 1820: “Priests…dread the advance of sci­ence as witch­es do the approach of day­light and scowl on the fatal har­bin­ger announc­ing the sub­ver­sions of the duperies on which they live.” And he declared, in an 1819 let­ter to William Short (a close friend and sec­re­tary dur­ing Jef­fer­son­’s ambas­sador­ship in France): “As you say of your­self, I too am an Epi­cu­ri­an. I con­sid­er the gen­uine (not the imput­ed) doc­trines of Epi­cu­rus as con­tain­ing every­thing ratio­nal in moral phi­los­o­phy which Greece and Rome have left us.”

That last is not note­wor­thy in itself, except that Kling­hof­fer­’s (whig­gish, anachro­nis­tic) account of the eter­nal strug­gle between intel­li­gent design and evo­lu­tion places Epi­cu­rus at the font of evo­lu­tion­ary think­ing, and there­by at the root of all moral evil. Here’s Kling­hof­fer in 2009:

The most pro­found inter­preters of the Hebrew Bible … have always under­stood that “Biblical reli­gion” sets itself against a mas­ter­less, mate­ri­al­ist pic­ture of nature. Clas­si­cal­ly, that pic­ture is crys­tal­ized in Epi­cure­an phi­los­o­phy, a vein of think­ing that led to Dar­win­ism. …The hor­ror in which Bib­li­cal tra­di­tion holds Epi­cure­anism is reflect­ed in a rab­binic term des­ig­nat­ing a par­tic­u­lar kind of heretic: apiko­rus, lit­er­al­ly an Epi­cure­an. The Mish­nah urges us to “Know how to answer an Epicurean.”

Kling­hof­fer added a few days lat­er:

The apiko­ros is list­ed along­side oth­er heretics, those who say the res­ur­rec­tion of the dead has no sup­port in the Torah and those who deny the Torah’s divine ori­gins. These are intel­lec­tu­al mat­ters, not mere­ly ones of tem­pera­ment or man­ners. In a Hebrew dic­tio­nary, it is defined as an “atheist, free­thinker, heretic.”…

The full intel­lec­tu­al line of descent from Epi­cu­rus to Dar­win is traced with bril­liant clar­i­ty by Ben­jamin Wik­er in Moral Dar­win­ism: How We Became Hedonists.

Any ques­tions?

I sup­pose the only remain­ing ques­tions are: how could Kling­hof­fer claim a self-described fol­low­er of Epi­cu­rus – an affirmed apiko­ros and mate­ri­al­ist – as a sup­port­er of intel­li­gent design? And how much of his­to­ry is he pre­pared to tear up to do it?

Deniers leak secret plan to miseducate US schoolchildren

A secret fundrais­ing doc­u­ment from a shad­owy anti-sci­ence insti­tute was acci­den­tal­ly made pub­lic. The doc­u­ment can­did­ly lays out the anti-sci­ence agen­da of group, includ­ing efforts to under­mine sci­ence edu­ca­tion in pub­lic schools, but also plans to broad­ly rede­fine society.

The year was 1998, and the doc­u­ment was from the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute. Nick­named “The Wedge Doc­u­ment” by oppo­nents of the Dis­co. ‘tute’s brand of cre­ation­ism, it details plans to use attacks on evo­lu­tion like the thin edge of a wedge, open­ing a crack which in time would break soci­ety free of “sci­en­tif­ic mate­ri­al­ism.” Ulti­mate­ly, the doc­u­ment explains, the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute’s plans would “replace mate­ri­al­is­tic expla­na­tions with the the­is­tic under­stand­ing that nature and human beings are cre­at­ed by God.”

On Valen­tine’s Day of this year, the sto­ry repeat­ed, but instead of expos­ing the anti-sci­ence agen­da of cre­ation­ists, it reveals the equal­ly anti-sci­ence agen­da of cli­mate change deniers.

The Heart­land Insti­tute is a major play­er in the cli­mate change denial move­ment, and the release has pro­duced mass­es of dis­cus­sion. Their files – includ­ing pub­lic IRS forms, pri­vate details of a board meet­ing in Jan­u­ary, and fundrais­ing and bud­get doc­u­ments dis­trib­uted for that meet­ing – were acci­den­tal­ly emailed to an unknown third par­ty, who shared them with jour­nal­ists includ­ing Richard Lit­tle­more of DeSmog­Blog. The doc­u­ments answer many ques­tions about Heart­land, demon­strat­ing their ties to the ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Koch fam­i­ly, con­tin­u­ing ties to the tobac­co indus­try (Philip Mor­ris fund­ed their work in the ’90s), fund­ing to sup­pos­ed­ly inde­pen­dent cli­mate change deniers like Antho­ny Watts, and plans to devel­op a $100,000 cli­mate change denial curriculum. 

Where the Wedge Doc­u­ment reflects the enthu­si­asm of a new orga­ni­za­tion, the Heart­land files reveal more mature plan­ning. The fundrais­ing doc­u­ment con­tains few of the grand claims for soci­etal trans­for­ma­tion that char­ac­ter­ize the Dis­co. ‘tute’s inau­gur­al fundrais­ing pitch. Instead, Heart­land lays out a long cam­paign against sci­ence, includ­ing plans for increased fund­ing from cli­mate change denial’s sug­ar­dad­dy Charles Koch, and a pro­gram to fund promi­nent cli­mate change denier Antho­ny Watts as he tries to find new ways to pre­tend weath­er records don’t tell us about cli­mate change.

Most intrigu­ing to sci­ence edu­ca­tion advo­cates is their plan to invest at least $100,000 over this year alone to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute a cur­ricu­lum lay­ing out their cli­mate change denial mes­sage. The thumb­nail at the right links to a full-sized ver­sion of the rel­e­vant page, which explains:

Many peo­ple lament the absence of edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al suit­able for K‑12 stu­dents on glob­al warm­ing that isn’t alarmist or overt­ly polit­i­cal. Heart­land has tried to make mate­r­i­al avail­able to teach­ers, but has had only lim­it­ed suc­cess. â€¦

Dr. David Wojick has pre­sent­ed Heart­land a pro­pos­al to pro­duce a glob­al warm­ing cur­ricu­lum for K‑12 schools that appears to have great poten­tial for suc­cess. â€¦

Dr. Wojick pro­pos­es to begin work on “modules” for grades 10–12 on cli­mate change (“whether humans are chang­ing the cli­mate is a major sci­en­tif­ic con­tro­ver­sy”), cli­mate mod­els (“models are used to explore var­i­ous hypothe­ses about how cli­mate works. Their reli­a­bil­i­ty is con­tro­ver­sial”), and air pol­lu­tion (“whether CO2 is a pol­lu­tant is con­tro­ver­sial. It is the glob­al food sup­ply and nat­ur­al emis­sions are 20 times high­er than human emissions”).

Wojick would pro­duce mod­ules for Grades 7–9 on envi­ron­men­tal impact (“environmental impact is often dif­fi­cult to deter­mine. For exam­ple there is a major con­tro­ver­sy over whether or not humans are chang­ing the weath­er”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weath­er sys­tems, and so on.

We ten­ta­tive­ly plan to pay Dr. Wojick $5,000 per mod­ule, about $25,000 a quar­ter, start­ing in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2012, for this work. The Anony­mous Donor has pledged the first $100,000 for this project, and we will cir­cu­late a pro­pos­al to match and then expand upon that investment.

The file also claims “Dr. Wojick has con­duct­ed exten­sive research on envi­ron­men­tal and sci­ence edu­ca­tion for the Depart­ment of Ener­gy,” but the Depart­ment clar­i­fied: “David Wojick has been a part-time sup­port con­trac­tor for the Office of Sci­en­tif­ic and Tech­ni­cal Infor­ma­tion since 2003, work­ing to help the office man­age and orga­nize its elec­tron­ic data­bas­es. He has nev­er advised or con­duct­ed research for the Depart­ment on cli­mate change or any oth­er sci­en­tif­ic top­ic, and the office he works for is not a research orga­ni­za­tion.” His back­ground in phi­los­o­phy and engi­neer­ing hard­ly qual­i­fy him to devise an edu­ca­tion­al cur­ricu­lum, either.

Aside from the sub­stan­tial dona­tion Heart­land has already received for the cur­ricu­lum from an unnamed donor, and the sig­nif­i­cant addi­tion­al funds they plan to solic­it, there are some impor­tant rev­e­la­tions here. Heart­land’s efforts to influ­ence edu­ca­tors are not news: they’ve bragged about mail­ing out cli­mate change deny­ing DVDs and hand­outs to teach­ers before. But because the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem is so decen­tral­ized, it’s hard to know how effec­tive those mail­ings have been. This doc­u­ment sug­gests that those efforts have large­ly been a flop.
What’s also note­wor­thy is the lan­guage Wojick is quot­ed using. It is con­sis­tent­ly the lan­guage of doubt and con­tro­ver­sy, and he has returned to that well in his pub­lic defense of the pro­gram, telling AP reporter Seth Boren­stein: “My goal is to help them [teach­ers] teach one of the great­est sci­en­tif­ic debates in his­to­ry… This means teach­ing both sides of the sci­ence, more sci­ence, not less.” 

His goal is to sow con­fu­sion among teach­ers and stu­dents about what the sci­ence of cli­mate change actu­al­ly says. This is a strat­e­gy famil­iar to afi­ciona­dos of cre­ation­ist rhetoric (as is the idea of “both sides of the sci­ence”), but more impor­tant­ly to those famil­iar with the his­to­ry of tobac­co indus­try obfus­ca­tion. As a famous memo to the tobac­co indus­try argued in 1969: “Doubt is our prod­uct.” Few­er peo­ple know that that line con­tin­ues: “Doubt is our prod­uct since it is the best means of com­pet­ing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the gen­er­al pub­lic. It is also the best means of estab­lish­ing a con­tro­ver­sy.” (The link is more than rhetor­i­cal: Philip Mor­ris gave sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing to Heart­land in the ’90s, and the same doc­u­ment lists Philip Mor­ris par­ent com­pa­ny Altria as a major donor today.)

Estab­lish­ing a con­tro­ver­sy and under­min­ing pub­lic under­stand­ing of the body of fact on cli­mate change are cen­tral to Heart­land’s account of their new cli­mate change cur­ricu­lum, and long-stand­ing keys to Heart­land’s broad­er agenda.

For a sense of that agen­da, and Heart­land’s his­to­ry, it’s worth turn­ing to a pro­file in Nature last July. In that pro­file, Heart­land hon­cho Joe Bast explains his agen­da now that Con­gres­sion­al action on cli­mate pol­i­cy had been stalled:

“We’ve won the pub­lic opin­ion debate, and we’ve won the polit­i­cal debate as well,” Bast says. “But the sci­en­tif­ic debate is a source of enor­mous frus­tra­tion.” …

Bast’s assault on cli­mate research takes two forms: chal­leng­ing the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the sci­ence, and dis­put­ing the claim that there is a sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus on cli­mate change.…

Heart­land plans to spend $1.8 mil­lion on its cli­mate pro­gramme this year. Of that, $413,000 will go to sup­port­ing the Non­govern­men­tal Inter­na­tion­al Pan­el on Cli­mate Change (NIPCC), a small group of scep­tics who have set them­selves up as a coun­ter­weight to the IPCC. … The NIPCC … ignores moun­tains of evi­dence about the adverse effects of glob­al warm­ing and instead strings togeth­er a con­fi­dent sto­ry that makes ris­ing car­bon diox­ide con­cen­tra­tions seem entire­ly ben­e­fi­cial. â€¦

Bast, Heart­land and the NIPCC all approach sci­en­tif­ic data as attor­neys, sim­ply try­ing to sow doubt and jus­ti­fy polit­i­cal inaction.…

Bast hap­pi­ly acknowl­edges hand-pick­ing data to sup­port his posi­tion, but argues that sci­en­tists on the oth­er side do the same thing when they are build­ing a case for glob­al warm­ing. He also says it is only nat­ur­al that a lib­er­tar­i­an like him would decide to ques­tion the sci­en­tif­ic foun­da­tion for cli­mate change.

The cli­mate change deny­ing cur­ricu­lum is a log­i­cal exten­sion of the Heart­land agen­da, and par­al­lels the rhetoric and strate­gies of cre­ation­ists as well. Just as Wojick calls for teach­ing “both sides” and to cov­er “more sci­ence, not less,” the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute’s offi­cial pol­i­cy claims: “Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute seeks to increase the cov­er­age of evo­lu­tion in text­books … a cur­ricu­lum that aims to pro­vide stu­dents with an under­stand­ing of the strengths and weak­ness­es of neo-Dar­win­ian and chem­i­cal evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ries … there is noth­ing uncon­sti­tu­tion­al about vol­un­tar­i­ly dis­cussing the sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry of design in the class­room.” (This wrong­ly assumes that there is such a sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry, that evo­lu­tion has such weak­ness­es, etc.)

The Heart­land mem­os also reveal an effort to cre­ate an echo cham­ber of sci­ence denial, much like the pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­ture cre­at­ed by the cre­ation­ists since the 1960s. Heart­land spends hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to fund NIPCC, a group meant to under­mine the con­clu­sions of the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Pan­el on Cli­mate Change, a body which pro­duces syn­the­sis reports on the state of cli­mate sci­ence for use by world gov­ern­ments. The extent of Heart­land’s fund­ing, and the degree to which they con­trolled that project, has nev­er been clear, and these mem­os show that Heart­land is call­ing the shots. Heart­land fund­ing goes direct­ly to pub­li­cize NIPC­C’s work, but also goes to indi­vid­u­als involved in NIPCC, includ­ing Fred Singer, the god­fa­ther of cli­mate change denial. Singer has nev­er acknowl­edged such fund­ing before, and indeed has denied any such funding.

In addi­tion, the fundrais­ing memo shows that Heart­land is coor­di­nat­ing an effort to raise funds for a new web­site rais­ing con­fu­sion about the caus­es of record tem­per­a­tures. In order to push back against media cov­er­age of the role cli­mate change plays in record-break­ing weath­er, they pro­pose to pay promi­nent cli­mate change denier Antho­ny Watts $88,000 to put up a web­site refor­mat­ting weath­er data from the Nation­al Weath­er Ser­vice. The mon­ey comes from the same unnamed donor fund­ing the cli­mate change cur­ricu­lum and many oth­er Heart­land initiatives.
It isn’t the first col­lab­o­ra­tion between Heart­land and Watts. As the memo observes, Watts has pro­mot­ed the claim that flaws in the US-gov­ern­ment oper­at­ed weath­er sta­tion net­work are so great as to inval­i­date the claim of glob­al cli­mate change. The memo says this was “work that The Heart­land Insti­tute sup­port­ed and pro­mot­ed.” That Heart­land pro­mot­ed the project is not news – they pub­lish a book­let Watts draft­ed on the top­ic – but how did they “sup­port” it?

The report only men­tions Heart­land as the pub­lish­er, not as a sup­port­er of the work (which I take to be finan­cial sup­port). Nor does the web­site Watts cre­at­ed for the project ever men­tion sup­port from Heart­land. He acknowl­edges vol­un­teers and tech­ni­cal assis­tance from indi­vid­u­als, but the only men­tion of Heart­land’s role is a note in the print­ed report explain­ing: “Opin­ions expressed are sole­ly those of the authors. Noth­ing in this report should be con­strued as reflect­ing the views of The Heart­land Insti­tute, or as an attempt to influ­ence pend­ing leg­is­la­tion.” Either Heart­land is inflat­ing their role in Watts’s ear­li­er work, or Watts failed to dis­close Heart­land’s support.

This tan­gled web of hid­den fund­ing and hid­den influ­ence is a tool for cre­at­ing an echo cham­ber. Heart­land qui­et­ly funds Watts, Watts pro­duces reports for Heart­land to pub­lish. Watts retains a sem­blance of inde­pen­dence. Heart­land can then point to his work and tout its inde­pen­dence, claim­ing that they are sim­ply report­ing what oth­ers dis­cov­ered. Then NIPCC can cite his work, with­out acknowl­edg­ing any coor­di­na­tion between their effort and Watts’s. And Watts can cite NIPCC with­out hav­ing to say any­thing about his shared fund­ing source. To out­siders, it seems like there are mul­ti­ple inde­pen­dent sources all arriv­ing at the same posi­tion, instead of a coor­di­nat­ed media cam­paign by Heartland.

We don’t know who dis­trib­uted the Heart­land mem­os, or exact­ly how they were obtained. But by doing so, the leak­er pro­vid­ed a pro­found pub­lic ser­vice, one that we can all be grate­ful for. These mem­os pro­vide an inside look at the cli­mate change denial machine, reveal­ing how they talk about their work behind closed doors, and reveal­ing their machi­na­tions to sow doubt about some of the most impor­tant sci­en­tif­ic issues of the day.

We also don’t know who the anony­mous donor is who fund­ed the denial­ist cur­ricu­lum and the weath­er sta­tion project. All we know for cer­tain is that he’s a man who has tak­en great inter­est in Heart­land’s work since at least 2007. As table 5 of the fundrais­ing memo shows, he gave over three and a quar­ter mil­lion dol­lars in 2007, anoth­er $4.6 mil­lion in 2008, and is expect­ed to give $1.25 mil­lion to Heart­land in 2012. Much of that dona­tion is unre­strict­ed, allow­ing Heart­land to spend it as they choose, while he’s giv­en between $3.3 mil­lion and $630,000 in pre­vi­ous years specif­i­cal­ly to sup­port Heart­land’s cli­mate change denial efforts. For con­text, pub­lic records show that the 2010 bud­get for the Nation­al Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion was $1.1 mil­lion, only slight­ly more than the $964,150 that Heart­land’s anony­mous donor gave for cli­mate change denial in the same year (only a frac­tion of their total cli­mate change denial fund­ing). It’s also well less than the $2 mil­lion that the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute spent on their cre­ation­ist efforts in 2010.
If that imbal­ance con­cerns you (and it should), I’d sug­gest donat­ing to NCSE (and I’m not say­ing that as an employee).