Does Jerry Coyne read his own blog?

If he does, he might remem­ber that he already wrote this blog post. That was less than a year ago. I respond­ed then, so have lit­tle to add.

One thing is worth not­ing. Coyne’s com­plaint is that the gov­ern­ment is fund­ing “accom­mo­da­tion­ism” because one page on the award-win­ning and wide­ly loved Under­stand­ing Evo­lu­tion web­site address­es mis­con­cep­tions about evo­lu­tion, includ­ing the idea that evo­lu­tion is at odds with reli­gious belief.

Coyne is hard­ly the first per­son to think that this some­how gets the gov­ern­ment in trou­ble (“fund­ing the­ol­o­gy” is his phrase). In 2003, cre­ation­ist Lar­ry Cald­well filed a suit on behalf of his wife, suing the NSF (for fund­ing the web­site) and pro­fes­sors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia (which runs the web­site). The cou­ple alleged that the web­site “offend­ed” them and caused fur­ther harm by mak­ing them feel like an “out­sider.” They claimed that the web­site’s dis­cus­sion of reli­gious views on evo­lu­tion vio­lat­ed the First Amend­ment by not dis­cussing reli­gious groups who set them­selves at odds with evolution.

A state judge and a fed­er­al judge dis­missed the suit with prej­u­dice, say­ing that the Cald­wells had not been harmed in a way that mer­it­ed the courts’ time. If Jer­ry Coyne can’t be arsed to read his own blog, let alone to famil­iar­ize him­self with the his­to­ry of the issue he’s opin­ing on, we can make the same judgment.

Disco. ‘tute: Dawkins too scary for kids, too mean…

Satanism” title=“Richard Dawkins -> Satanism” />
Richard Dawkins has a new book out – for kids no less – and Casey Luskin is on the case. Luskin, you’ll recall is the Dis­co. ‘tute’s chief pet­ti­fog­ger (in the clas­si­cal sense), and his ten­den­cy to work him­self into uncan­ny heights of excite­ment over every new cre­ation­ist argu­ment has earned him the affec­tion­ate nick­name “faint­ing dachs­hund.”

Dawkin­s’s book is about myths, how we tell sto­ries to explain things, but that some­times those sto­ries aren’t true, and how sci­ence offers a way to tell sto­ries that are true, and how kids can tell the dif­fer­ence. It’s got love­ly illus­tra­tions by Dave McK­ean, and there’s an excerpt of The Mag­ic of Real­i­ty avail­able at NCSE’s web­site.

Casey has many objec­tions, but per­haps his most enter­tain­ing charge is that the book is sim­ply too scary even for nom­i­nal grownups like himself:

One odd aspect of the book is its appar­ent obses­sion with occult-style images. A friend and I went through The Mag­ic of Real­i­ty and togeth­er we count­ed over a dozen pages with pic­tures of demons, dev­ils, and the like. The one above [a drag­on merg­ing with an air­plane ‑JR] is pret­ty tame com­pared to oth­er stuff in the book. These aren’t cute car­toony-dev­ils — they’re prob­a­bly enough to give the aver­age kid night­mares. And I say this as some­one who loves sci-fi / fan­ta­sy media and has a pret­ty strong stom­ach for this sort of thing.

Depend­ing on your ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ings, right now you might be think­ing either “Sweet!,” or “Uh, that’s a lit­tle weird.” As much as I enjoy sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy, I’m def­i­nite­ly lean­ing toward the lat­ter end of the spec­trum. After all, if you want­ed to give your kid a fun book about sci­ence, why would you want it to be full of creepy pic­tures of demons and dev­ils? I’m also left won­der­ing: Why is Dawkins appar­ent­ly so obsessed with occult top­ics and iconography?

I had a copy of the book at hand, so I checked it out. Unless you count a draw­ing of a fairy god­moth­er and some Norse and African gods, I can’t see how you’d say there are demons or dev­ils on over a dozen pages. I count­ed 4 pages with dev­ils on them, and those were fair­ly tame. Why does Dawkins include draw­ings of deities and spir­its from oth­er cul­tures? Because he’s writ­ing a book about myths, and deities and spir­its are cen­tral to most myths. 

If any­thing, the draw­ings of peo­ple are scari­er than the draw­ings of the myth­ic beasts. The magi­cians Penn and Teller are shown in the midst of their famous bul­let-catch­ing trick, with smoke still ris­ing from the gun in Pen­n’s hand. The Amaz­ing Ran­di is shown rif­fling a deck of cards, with a glint in his eye that would give Old Nick shiv­ers. But these are humans, and indeed quite friend­ly ones.
I don’t know what sci­ence fic­tion Casey reads or watch­es, but a bit of scary imagery is par for the course. The Lord of the Rings books involve orcs and sor­cery and Bal­rogs and elves and the Nazgûl, and a high­er den­si­ty of grue­some death than any­thing Richard Dawkins has offered.

Indeed, I’d file Casey’s claim to be a sci­ence fiction/fantasy fan along­side his pre­vi­ous claims to love Snoop Dogg, Indi­ana Jones, Star Wars, etc. Not as wrong, nec­es­sar­i­ly, but as irrel­e­vant. I’d guess his read­ing (and per­haps his “friend“ ‘s) runs more in this vein:

Dev­il” title=“Dawkins -> Devil” />

Com­plain­ing about the “demons” in The Mag­ic of Real­i­ty makes as much sense as attack­ing “satanism” in Har­ry Potter.

There’s anoth­er aspect of Casey’s essay that’s worth not­ing, which is that he basi­cal­ly cuts the legs out from under Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute Senior Fel­low Bill Dembski.

Casey com­plains that Dawkins “sim­ply assume[s] that mir­a­cles don’t hap­pen,” then quotes Dawkins:

Hume did­n’t come right out and say mir­a­cles are impos­si­ble. Instead he asked us to think of a mir­a­cle as an improb­a­ble event — an event whose improb­a­bil­i­ty we might esti­mate. The esti­mate does­n’t have to be exact. It’s enough that the improb­a­bil­i­ty of a sug­gest­ed mir­a­cle can be rough­ly placed on some sort of scale, and then com­pared with an alter­na­tive expla­na­tion such as hal­lu­ci­na­tion or a lie.

And Casey replies:

Of course it’s good advice not to sim­ply accept with­out inves­ti­ga­tion every claim of a mir­a­cle. But under all oth­er cir­cum­stances you can think of, you would con­sid­er the tes­ti­mo­ny of a sane, cred­i­ble wit­ness trust­wor­thy. Why not about mir­a­cles too? Dawkins wants us to dis­re­gard the tes­ti­mo­ny of such a cred­i­ble wit­ness, and hold mir­a­cles to an unrea­son­ably high stan­dard of proof — a stan­dard unknown in any oth­er human dis­ci­pline of truth seeking.…

Dawkin­s’s method sim­i­lar­ly assumes the untruth (read: insane “improb­a­bil­i­ty”) of mir­a­cles before the inquiry even begins.…

“At least,” the skep­tic may respond, “Dawkins admits the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mir­a­cles. He’s just try­ing to be log­i­cal.’ ” Not so. … Dawkin­s’s part­ing wis­dom to kids is that it is nev­er, under any cir­cum­stances OK to accept a mir­a­cle. Kids must adopt the faith of sci­en­tism, which always denies even the pos­si­bil­i­ty that mir­a­cles or the super­nat­ur­al might be real.

We’ll set aside Casey’s gross mis­de­f­i­n­i­tion of sci­en­tism to get to a more inter­est­ing slip.

Read­ers famil­iar with the work of ID cre­ation­ists may see some­thing famil­iar in that pas­sage. Bill Dem­b­ski’s argu­ments against evo­lu­tion has long cen­tered on an “explana­to­ry fil­ter,” by which one would assume bio­log­i­cal struc­tures (or indeed the entire uni­verse) were designed unless the prob­a­bil­i­ty of those struc­tures com­ing into exis­tence by ran­dom chance exceed­ed some absurd prob­a­bil­i­ty threshold. 

Crit­ics object­ed that Dem­b­s­ki was assum­ing the untruth of evo­lu­tion by let­ting “design” be the default state, they object­ed that his prob­a­bil­i­ty argu­ments set an insane thresh­old for jus­ti­fy­ing non-super­nat­ur­al expla­na­tions, and ulti­mate­ly to his hold­ing evo­lu­tion­ary expla­na­tions to a high­er stan­dard of proof than any oth­er human endeavor.

The dif­fer­ence between those charges against Dem­b­s­ki and Casey’s essen­tial­ly iden­ti­cal charges against Dawkins are that Casey is wrong and Dem­b­ski’s crit­ics were (and are) right. It’s good that Casey rec­og­nizes that the form of the argu­ment is appro­pri­ate, he’s just cho­sen the wrong tar­get. Dem­b­s­ki is set­ting up an undemon­strat­ed con­cept as the default expla­na­tion for any­thing, and requires extra­or­di­nary lev­els of evi­dence (so extra­or­di­nary no one has ever car­ried out the com­pu­ta­tions for any real­is­tic sys­tem) before he’ll accept any non-design expla­na­tion for anything. 

While I dis­agree with much of Dawkin­s’s the­ol­o­gy, the issue Casey takes with Dawkins is a non­starter. Mir­a­cles are def­i­n­i­tion­al­ly events that would be impos­si­ble with­in the nat­ur­al laws we all know about and oper­ate with­in. It’s hard­ly unrea­son­able – let alone sci­en­tism – for some­one to say so, and to note that they are inher­ent­ly extra­or­di­nar­i­ly rare. By grant­i­ng them nonze­ro prob­a­bil­i­ty under nor­mal con­di­tions, Dawkins is actu­al­ly grant­i­ng more lee­way to mir­a­cles than I – or tra­di­tion­al Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy – would do. And not to nit­pick, but eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny is noto­ri­ous­ly unre­li­able, so being dubi­ous of eye­wit­ness claims that run counter to every­thing else we know is not an insult to the eye­wit­ness, it’s com­mon sense. 

At the end of the day, mir­a­cles are inevitably in the eye of the behold­er. Mir­a­cles that can be put to rig­or­ous test­ing have always wound up hav­ing nat­ur­al expla­na­tions, and since mir­a­cles are by their nature one-time events and are (as the Catholic Ency­clo­pe­dia says) “the direct oppo­si­tion of the effect actu­al­ly pro­duced to the nat­ur­al caus­es at work”, there’s no way to test them in any reli­able way. If you believe in mir­a­cles, you believe in mir­a­cles, and you do so not because of evi­dence, but because of faith. Faith, as one of Casey’s holy books explains, is “the sub­stance of things hoped for, the evi­dence of things not seen.” To demand proof that mir­a­cles are super­nat­ur­al is, if not sac­ri­lege, at least miss­ing the point. There’s a rea­son that the god Casey wor­ships says to Doubt­ing Thomas: “because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

All of which rais­es an impor­tant ques­tion: if the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute wants us to believe they are a non­re­li­gious orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed pure­ly to sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tion, why are they so keen on defend­ing belief in mir­a­cles and the supernatural?

On Civility

Just under a year ago, I quot­ed and endorsed Stephen Post’s argu­ment that lack of civil­i­ty isn’t the prob­lem we face in soci­ety, that inci­vil­i­ty is a symp­tom, not an end unto itself.

Civil­i­ty mat­ters, and there are good rea­sons to urge peo­ple to be more civ­il in their inter­ac­tions, and to mod­el that behav­ior our­selves. It’s no acci­dent that many unciv­il styles of dis­course are also infor­mal log­i­cal errors. And there’s a rea­son that delib­er­a­tive venues ‑ like the Sen­ate floor — impose a stan­dard of deco­rum and civil­i­ty. Unciv­il dis­course often replaces sub­stan­tive exchanges about ideas with per­son­al reflec­tions or even out­right attacks, and that serves no one. As Post argues, inci­vil­i­ty often reflects “a vicious ingroup-out­group demo­niza­tion that is entire­ly dysfunctional.”

I’m remind­ed of that post because Casey Luskin — a staffer at the ID cre­ation­ist Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute ‑ has used the com­pa­ny blog to launch one of his peri­od­ic tirades about the sup­posed inci­vil­i­ty of “Dar­win­ists.”
It’s not always clear what code of civil­i­ty is he’s try­ing to enforce, or even if there is any clear stan­dard at all. His pub­lic silence about the abu­sive, slan­der­ous, mali­cious, and mis­lead­ing lan­guage used by fel­low staffers at the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute under­cuts any claim that this is sim­ply an effort to ele­vate the entire debate. Rather, I think Casey’s goal is to weaponize civil­i­ty, to use these charges of inci­vil­i­ty to silence crit­i­cism of his ideas. In his mul­ti-post series, Casey attacks peo­ple by name for express­ing ideas with which he dis­agrees. At times, he engages with the under­ly­ing sub­stance of the claims (alas, get­ting it wrong, as we’ll see below), but for the most part, he’s sim­ply try­ing to shame peo­ple into not say­ing mean-but-true things about the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute or creationism.

I would argue that peo­ple are inher­ent­ly wor­thy of respect and of being treat­ed civil­ly (though they can lose that respect with con­cert­ed effort). With apolo­gies to Mitt Rom­ney, cor­po­ra­tions like the Dis­co. ‘tute are not peo­ple, and deserve no inher­ent respect or civil­i­ty (though they can earn respect, and civil­i­ty should be the default behav­ior); even if the Dis­co. ‘tute did deserve respect at one time, they for­feit­ed that respect long ago. Ideas (e.g. cre­ation­ism) do not deserve inher­ent respect either, though cer­tain­ly the peo­ple who hold those ideas do. An idea either proves itself use­ful or it falls by the way­side. Var­i­ous schol­ar­ly and lay com­mu­ni­ties have devel­oped tools for eval­u­at­ing ideas and sep­a­rat­ing the wheat from the chaff: unbi­ased peer review and testa­bil­i­ty play key roles in the process used in the sciences.

In treat­ing crit­i­cism of his cor­po­rate mas­ter and his pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic pseudothe­ol­o­gy as “unciv­il,” Casey essen­tial­ly tries to short­cir­cuit the nor­mal process­es by which we eval­u­ate ideas and insti­tu­tions. And in tar­get­ing a few of his crit­ics by name and try­ing to use their alleged­ly unciv­il behav­ior as an argu­ment against evo­lu­tion in gen­er­al, he actu­al­ly com­mits the unciv­il acts which he wrong­ly accus­es oth­ers of.

Let’s talk specifics, par­tic­u­lar­ly his post attack­ing me. In that case, the per­son­al attacks begin in the title: “Josh Rose­nau’s ‘Potemkin’ argu­ments.” He’s reply­ing to a para­graph I wrote 6 months ago, in which I was argu­ing against analo­gies some peo­ple were draw­ing between the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute’s per­ni­cious effect on sci­ence and the effects they claim the John Tem­ple­ton Foun­da­tion has had. Ophe­lia Ben­son had writ­ten: “one can see Tem­ple­ton as in fact inter­fer­ing with sci­ence just as the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute does, but in a more sub­tle fash­ion.” I responded:

There’s no ques­tion that the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute is ide­o­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven, that their fel­low­ships are wingnut wel­fare, a way to employ cre­ation­ists and give them the gloss of respectabil­i­ty. Dis­co. ‘Tute fel­lows seem to have life­time appoint­ments, while [Chris] Mooney’s [jour­nal­ism] fel­low­ship from Tem­ple­ton was a sin­gle event — a finan­cial award and a series of lec­tures and dis­cus­sion which, once end­ed, entail no ongo­ing oblig­a­tion. That’s not how DI fel­low­ships work.

The DI does not fund exter­nal research. They have a Potemkin lab­o­ra­to­ry, and a house jour­nal ded­i­cat­ed to pub­lish­ing their own staff’s “research.” All of this is ori­ent­ed towards cre­at­ing a pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­ture, the sem­blance of an active research pro­gram and aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty, so that they can con­vince schools to teach clap­trap and can inter­fere with the admin­is­tra­tion of col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, the con­tent of text­books, and by such means to advance a nar­row ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty. Their fel­lows are cho­sen because of their sup­port for this ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da, just as papers in their pseu­do-jour­nal are select­ed for their adher­ence to the Dis­co. ‘Tute agen­da, and so forth.

By con­trast, Tem­ple­ton does­n’t run its own jour­nals. They do help fund soci­eties which run jour­nals, but no one has giv­en any evi­dence of Tem­ple­ton inter­fer­ing in the edi­to­r­i­al inde­pen­dence of those jour­nals. They fund research projects, but no one has shown any evi­dence that they inter­fere with the research or the researchers’ inter­pre­ta­tion of it. While the Tem­ple­ton folks did pro­vide some fund­ing for IDC-relat­ed work, they did so at a time in the 1990s when quite a few peo­ple held out hope that there might be some real research pro­gram spawned by the move­ment. In time, they learned better

At the time, I did­n’t both­er fill­ing those para­graphs with links because my point was­n’t about the DI, it was about Tem­ple­ton. Folks mak­ing an anal­o­gy between the Tem­ple­ton Foun­da­tion and Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute gen­er­al­ly already know that back­ground, so I did­n’t feel the need to sub­stan­ti­ate the claims there.

In Casey’s eye, this post about the John Tem­ple­ton Foun­da­tion was writ­ten because I “appar­ent­ly felt the need … to deal with the fact that Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute is fund­ing sci­en­tif­ic research that chal­lenges neo-Dar­win­ism, and is being pub­lished in peer-reviewed sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals.” He claims I “sud­den­ly became so con­cerned about this only in 2011 when he blogged about it.” Both claims are false, the first from the con­text of the blog post Casey is address­ing and quot­ing, and the sec­ond from his own knowl­edge of my work.

You see, in late 2009, Casey and I took part in a sym­po­sium on Intel­li­gent Design and the Law. We both pre­sent­ed our papers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas Law School, and we both pub­lished papers in their law review. In my law review arti­cle, pub­lished almost 2 years ago, I wrote about the claimed sci­en­tif­ic research from the DI, and even used the same “Potemkin” lan­guage (cita­tions omit­ted here, but you can find them all in the PDF):

Intel­li­gent Design advo­cates have strug­gled with­out suc­cess to achieve aca­d­e­m­ic accep­tance as sci­en­tists. For exam­ple, some attempts have been made to cre­ate ID-spe­cif­ic jour­nals com­pa­ra­ble to those of cre­ation sci­en­tists, but they have all become mori­bund, and an aca­d­e­m­ic soci­ety ded­i­cat­ed to ID is sim­i­lar­ly defunct. Major aca­d­e­m­ic ID goals set in a fundrais­ing doc­u­ment in 1998 have gone unachieved, such as the promise of a major mono­graph by Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute fel­low Paul Nel­son, which has been report­ed as near­ly ready to print for over a decade. The pro­ceed­ings of a Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute con­fer­ence held in the sum­mer of 2007, sup­pos­ed­ly high­light­ing “the very kind of research our crit­ics say we don’t spon­sor,” remain unpub­lished. William Dem­b­s­ki, once her­ald­ed on a book jack­et as “the Isaac New­ton of Infor­ma­tion The­o­ry,” has been reduced to rewrit­ing and ana­lyz­ing toy com­put­er pro­grams orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten for a TV series and pop­u­lar books in the 1980s by biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins as triv­ial demon­stra­tions of the pow­er of selec­tion. Dem­b­s­ki explained his poor record of pub­li­ca­tion in peer-reviewed sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture by say­ing, “I’ve just got­ten kind of blasé about sub­mit­ting things to jour­nals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actu­al­ly get the turn­around faster by writ­ing a book and get­ting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well.” Alas, they don’t con­vince math­e­mati­cians of his math­e­mat­i­cal argu­ments, prompt­ing Dem­b­s­ki to reply to one crit­ic: “I’m not and nev­er have been in the busi­ness of offer­ing a strict math­e­mat­i­cal proof for the inabil­i­ty of mate­r­i­al mech­a­nisms to gen­er­ate spec­i­fied com­plex­i­ty.” This, despite his claim to have devel­oped a “Law of Con­ser­va­tion of Infor­ma­tion” about which he states in one book: “The cru­cial point of the Law of Con­ser­va­tion of Infor­ma­tion is that nat­ur­al caus­es can at best pre­serve CSI…, may degrade it, but can­not gen­er­ate it.”

In 1998, the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute explained to its donors that research was cru­cial stat­ing, “Phase I [described as ‘Research, Writ­ing and Pub­li­ca­tion’] is the essen­tial com­po­nent of every­thing that comes after­ward. With­out sol­id schol­ar­ship, research and argu­ment, the project would be just anoth­er attempt to indoc­tri­nate instead of per­suade.” Judges and oth­ers seek­ing to assess the mer­its of ID going for­ward need issue no harsh­er judg­ment than the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute has pre­sent­ed here. By its own stan­dards, ID is intel­lec­tu­al­ly stag­nant, and must be regard­ed as “just anoth­er attempt to indoc­tri­nate instead of per­suade,” in line with pre­vi­ous cre­ation­ist movements.

The Kitzmiller rul­ing cit­ed as “[a] final indi­ca­tor of how ID has failed to demon­strate sci­en­tif­ic war­rant… the com­plete absence of peer-reviewed pub­li­ca­tions sup­port­ing the the­o­ry.” The move­ment, how­ev­er, did not take this as a call to return to the labs and pro­duce nov­el results in readi­ness for future legal chal­lenges [fn: Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute did cre­ate what amounts to a Potemkin lab­o­ra­to­ry — the Bio­log­ic Insti­tute. … Attempts to view the lab spaces or exam­ine their research have been blocked. See Celeste Biev­er, Intel­li­gent design: The God Lab, THE NEW SCIENTIST, Dec. 15 2006, at 8–11. Accord­ing to one report, the only research find­ing offered by Bio­log­ic actu­al­ly con­tra­dicts a cen­tral claim of ID. …“We shuf­fled off for a cof­fee break with the admis­sion hang­ing in the air that nat­ur­al process­es could not only pro­duce new infor­ma­tion, they could pro­duce ben­e­fi­cial new infor­ma­tion”).]. Instead, the move­ment has pro­duced a the third edi­tion of Pan­das (renamed Design of Life and no longer aimed at high schools) and a suc­ces­sor to Pan­das, called Explore Evo­lu­tion, which con­tains even less sub­stance and sci­en­tif­ic accu­ra­cy than its pre­de­ces­sor. The Intel­li­gent Design doc­u­men­tary, Expelled!: No intel­li­gence Allowed man­gled inter­views and the his­to­ry of the Holo­caust, and has been called “one of the sleazi­est doc­u­men­taries to arrive in a very long time.” In addi­tion, Michael Behe pub­lished a suc­ces­sor to Dar­win’s Black Box, The Edge of Evo­lu­tion: The Search for the Lim­its of Dar­win­ism, while still fail­ing to address crit­i­cism lev­eled at the ear­li­er work, even those he him­self acknowledged.

I specif­i­cal­ly con­sid­ered a doc­u­ment draft­ed by Casey, claim­ing to show the strength of pro-ID peer reviewed sci­en­tif­ic papers:

To under­stand a the­o­ry’s impact and sci­en­tif­ic valid­i­ty, it is nec­es­sary to review how it fares when lat­er researchers exam­ine its claims, and how much new research is gen­er­at­ed by insights from a giv­en line of think­ing. In the case of those few papers claimed as peer-reviewed defens­es of ID, none has met any favor­able response, or been cit­ed as gen­er­at­ing suc­cess­ful pre­dic­tions for future researchers.* By con­trast, the num­ber of papers build­ing on evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry and deep­en­ing our knowl­edge of the field has grown rapid­ly in recent years, due in part to the the­o­ry’s abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate new insights into the bur­geon­ing fields of mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gy, genomics, and devel­op­men­tal genet­ics. This reflects a com­mu­ni­ty-wide con­sen­sus among rel­e­vant sci­en­tists on the mer­its of evo­lu­tion, a con­sen­sus fur­ther strength­ened by assess­ments of sci­en­tif­ic bod­ies. Groups includ­ing the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences and its inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts, the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence, and pro­fes­sion­al soci­eties rep­re­sent­ing groups with spe­cial knowl­edge of evo­lu­tion, includ­ing biol­o­gists of many sorts, geol­o­gists, physi­cists, his­to­ri­ans, philoso­phers, and many oth­ers, have issued state­ments rep­re­sent­ing their mem­bers’ agree­ment that evo­lu­tion is foun­da­tion­al to mod­ern biol­o­gy, is well-sup­port­ed, and belongs in sci­ence classes.

* DISCOVERY INST. THE COLLEGE STUDENT’S BACK TO SCHOOL GUIDE TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN (2009), avail­able at http://www.evolutionnews.org/BacktoSchoolGuide_Sept2009 _FN.pdf. The pam­phlet states, “Crit­ic­ss [sic] often claim that intel­li­gent design pro­po­nents do not pub­lish peer-reviewed sci­en­tif­ic papers or that they do not do sci­en­tif­ic research.” To rebut this claim, 6 papers are cit­ed, none from lat­er than 2004. One of those was dis­cussed at length in tes­ti­mo­ny by Kitzmiller defense wit­ness­es, with the court describ­ing that paper as “The one arti­cle ref­er­enced [by defense’s sci­en­tif­ic wit­ness­es]… as sup­port­ing ID .… A review of the arti­cle indi­cates that it does not men­tion … ID. In fact, Pro­fes­sor Behe admit­ted that the study which forms the basis for the arti­cle did not rule out many known evo­lu­tion­ary mech­a­nisms and that the research actu­al­ly might sup­port evo­lu­tion­ary path­ways if a bio­log­i­cal­ly real­is­tic pop­u­la­tion size were used.” Anoth­er prof­fered arti­cle was repu­di­at­ed by the jour­nal which pub­lished it, with the edi­tors not­ing that it “rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from the near­ly pure­ly tax­o­nom­ic con­tent for which this jour­nal has been known through­out its 124-year his­to­ry. … We have met and deter­mined that all of us would have deemed this paper inap­pro­pri­ate for the pages of the Pro­ceed­ings.” A review of the oth­er papers list­ed by the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute in Sci­ence Cita­tion Index finds two of the papers have no cita­tions at all, and the few cita­tions gar­nered by the remain­der are either self-cita­tion by the same ide­o­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven group of authors, or are cita­tions reject­ing the paper’s find­ings. For con­text, the 254 papers turned up in a search for the nar­row top­ic “evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­men­tal biol­o­gy” pub­lished in 2004 have been cit­ed an aver­age of 13 times, com­pared to an aver­age 7 cita­tions for ID’s top papers, some of which have had many more years to accu­mu­late cita­tions. The mar­ket­place of ideas has spoken.

If Casey had read my paper (or paid atten­tion dur­ing the sym­po­sium, when I read that last pas­sage), he’d know that my inter­est in the pur­port­ed­ly pro-ID research lit­er­a­ture far pre­dates the blog post he cites. 

I lay this out at length only to note that from Casey’s first para­graph, he’s try­ing to make this not about the sub­stance of what I said or the mer­its of my case, but about whether or not I’m a good and nice per­son. And to paint as grim a por­trait as pos­si­ble, he’s mis­stat­ing obvi­ous facts, and is imput­ing motives to me that are false and which he could have known were false by a) read­ing the blog post he was respond­ing to, and b) famil­iar­iz­ing him­self with the con­tents of a vol­ume he him­self con­tributed to. That isn’t a pat­tern that speaks well of Casey’s own civility.

Casey’s sub­mis­sion to the law review ulti­mate­ly bore the innocu­ous title “The Con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty and Ped­a­gog­i­cal Ben­e­fits of Teach­ing Evo­lu­tion Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly.” We can cer­tain­ly dis­pute that Casey’s ideas of how evo­lu­tion should be taught would be sci­en­tif­ic, let alone ped­a­gog­i­cal­ly or con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly appro­pri­ate. But instead, I’ll note that the work­ing title for this paper was the rather spici­er “Bluffed Into Dog­ma­tism: How the Evo­lu­tion Lob­by Seeks to Block Per­fect­ly Legal and Ben­e­fi­cial Pol­i­cy Pro­pos­als to Teach Neo-Dar­win­ism Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly.” Civ­il? No!

While Casey did catch that title before it went out to the wider world, he did pub­lish a paper with the unciv­il, and inac­cu­rate title, “Zeal for Dar­win’s House Con­sumes Them: How Sup­port­ers of Evo­lu­tion Encour­age Vio­la­tions of the Estab­lish­ment Clause.” That’s a ref­er­ence to Psalms 69:9, a charge that “sup­port­ers of evo­lu­tion” are idol­a­tors, wor­ship­ping Dar­win (or maybe Down House), and false­ly claim­ing that these groups advo­cate uncon­sti­tu­tion­al poli­cies. Reg­u­lar fol­low­ers of the creationism/evolution bat­tle know that Casey works for the only side which has actu­al­ly found its poli­cies declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in courts.

After his iron­i­cal­ly unciv­il open­ing, Casey attempts a sub­stan­tive defense of Dis­co., of their pur­port­ed research wing the Bio­log­ic Insti­tute, and of their sup­pos­ed­ly sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal BIO-com­plex­i­ty.

First, Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute does fund research con­duct­ed by peo­ple exter­nal to Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute. It funds research by Chris­tians and non-Chris­tians alike.

It’s impos­si­ble to review every pen­ny the DI has ever spent, but the Cen­ter for Renew­al of Sci­ence and Cul­ture does not adver­tise any pro­gram for mer­it-based grants. In offi­cial IRS fil­ings, the CRSC’s activ­i­ties are described as “Pro­duc­tion of pub­lic ser­vice reports, leg­isla­tive tes­ti­mo­ny, arti­cles, pub­lic con­fer­ences and debates, plus media cov­er­age and the Insti­tute’s own pub­li­ca­tions in the field of Sci­ence and Cul­ture.” Noth­ing about research fund­ing there. 

Accord­ing to DI’s most recent­ly pub­lished 990 form (an IRS form which non­prof­its file, explain­ing where their mon­ey came from and how they spent it), the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute spent about $17,000 on 10 of its fel­lows in 2009, and they item­ize $274,000 in grants for “sci­en­tif­ic research” to Bio­log­ic, and $11,592 in grants to Grove City Col­lege, home of DI Fel­low and Bio­log­ic staffer Guiller­mo Gonzalez. 

I don’t think that the fel­low­ships (or oth­er fund­ing of fel­lows) count as “exter­nal grants.” Almost all DI fel­lows and senior fel­lows have held that sta­tus since the found­ing of the CRSC with­in the Dis­co. ‘tute in the 1990s. While var­i­ous of these fel­lows work out­side DI’s offices, many of their long-term activ­i­ties were cit­ed in a found­ing fundrais­ing memo (the famous Wedge Doc­u­ment) as impor­tant DI activ­i­ties, and DI fel­lows func­tion in pub­lic like DI employ­ees. And the Bio­log­ic Insti­tute is almost entire­ly fund­ed by DI (in 2009, their total intake was $317,770, of which $274,000 came from DI, $20,983 came from “rental income” and the remain­der came in grants from unspec­i­fied sources), and DI staff serve on the Bio­log­ic Insti­tute’s board of direc­tors, mak­ing it hard to claim that they’re a tru­ly exter­nal organization.

If the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute funds tru­ly exter­nal research, there’s no evi­dence of it.

Casey adds, regard­ing Biologic:

Rose­nau’s attempt to ridicule the Bio­log­ic Insti­tute lab­o­ra­to­ry as “Potemkin” of course intends to sug­gest the lab­o­ra­to­ry is fake. How, then, does Mr. Rose­nau explain the mul­ti­ple sci­en­tif­ic papers pub­lished by Bio­log­ic sci­en­tists in the past few years that report research con­duct­ed at the lab? (Here’s an impres­sive recent example.)

The “impres­sive recent exam­ple” is pub­lished in the Bio­log­ic house jour­nal, BIO-com­plex­i­ty. If my con­tention is cor­rect that this jour­nal is “pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic infra­struc­ture,” then the exam­ple is irrel­e­vant. Casey offers no oth­er basis for judg­ing Bio­log­ic’s merits. 

I referred to the Bio­log­ic Insti­tute as “Potemkin” part­ly because if the dif­fi­cul­ties Celeste Biev­er had in 2006 sim­ply get­ting access to Bio­log­ic or any­one who worked there. When I was in Seat­tle a few years back, I also swung by the pub­licly list­ed address for the Insti­tute, and found a few rent­ed rooms in an office build­ing, with the lights off and the win­dows shut in the mid­dle of a work day. From out­side, I saw an emp­ty meet­ing room, but noth­ing resem­bling sci­en­tif­ic lab­o­ra­to­ries, nor did any­one answer the door. Their online list of research pub­li­ca­tions lists noth­ing at all after 2008, which may reflect poor web man­age­ment, but could also indi­cate a lack of productivity. 

Cer­tain­ly that list omits any of the pub­li­ca­tions in the house jour­nal BIO-com­plex­i­ty. I don’t empha­size that it is a house jour­nal to dis­par­age BIO-com­plex­i­ty, just to put it in con­text. NCSE has a house jour­nal, too, and I think it’s pret­ty darn good. But if I thought I had a paper that would rev­o­lu­tion­ize sci­ence, I would­n’t pub­lish it in RNCSE, because an inde­pen­dent pub­lish­er would be a more trust­ed out­let than a jour­nal run by my own employer. 

Any­way, here’s what Casey says about BIO-com­plex­i­ty in reply to my ear­li­er post:

the jour­nal Rose­nau refers to, BIO-Com­plex­i­ty, is any­thing but “Potemkin.” It has an edi­to­r­i­al board with over two dozen PhD sci­en­tists and schol­ars in fields such as bio­chem­istry, evo­lu­tion­ary com­put­ing, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy, micro­bi­ol­o­gy, cladis­tics, and physics, from respect­ed aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions around the world. Yes Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute has obvi­ous con­nec­tions to the jour­nal — some of those mem­bers of the edi­to­r­i­al board are also our fel­lows. But many of the edi­to­r­i­al board mem­bers have no affil­i­a­tions with Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute, though they share with us a com­mon con­vic­tion that the debate over ID and neo-Dar­win­ism needs to be fos­tered at the high lev­el of peer-reviewed sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals. Thus, the jour­nal invites sub­mis­sions from both ID pro­po­nents and ID-crit­ics, and isn’t com­mit­ted to pub­lish­ing papers that only express one view­point. Whether affil­i­at­ed with Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute or not, BIO-Com­plex­i­ty has an impres­sive body of sci­en­tists that run that show, and they impose high qual­i­ty peer-review qual­i­ty control.

First, note that I applied the adjec­tive “Potemkin” not to the jour­nal, but to Bio­log­ic itself. Casey did­n’t address that charge, instead mis­read­ing and mis­rep­re­sent­ing my argument.

Sec­ond, he’s not actu­al­ly defend­ing the con­tent of the jour­nal, mere­ly argu­ing that because peo­ple with doc­tor­al degrees are on the edi­to­r­i­al board, it must be a legit­i­mate jour­nal. That makes no sense.

Third, the jour­nal makes it clear that they do not “impose high qual­i­ty peer-review qual­i­ty con­trol.” Their web­site’s “Peer Review Process” sec­tion explains:

The goal of pre-pub­li­ca­tion peer review should … be to decide whether the work in ques­tion mer­its the atten­tion of experts, rather than to pre­dict the final result of that atten­tion. BIO-Com­plex­i­ty uses an inno­v­a­tive approach to pre-pub­li­ca­tion peer-review in order to achieve this goal.

Basi­cal­ly, review­ers and edi­tors are not asked whether the results are right, but whether oth­ers “would ben­e­fit from con­sid­er­ing both the mer­its and the lim­i­ta­tions” of a paper, a much low­er stan­dard than gen­er­al­ly employed by sci­ence jour­nals. There are legit­i­mate rea­sons to pre­fer this lax­er form of peer review, but Casey’s claim that it’s a rig­or­ous sort of peer review is con­trary to the jour­nal’s own stat­ed policies.

Fourth, whether or not they “invite[] sub­mis­sions” from oppo­nents of cre­ation­ism, they haven’t pub­lished such papers. And it is far from clear that their edi­tors could give pro-evo­lu­tion (or anti-cre­ation­ist) arti­cles a fair shake. As Glenn Branch not­ed in 2010 in NCSE’s house jour­nal, all but two of the edi­to­r­i­al board mem­bers have long his­to­ries of anti-evo­lu­tion and cre­ation­ist advo­ca­cy (includ­ing advo­ca­cy for intel­li­gent design). A third pro-evo­lu­tion sci­en­tist was offered a posi­tion on the board, but refused, explaining:

Pub­lish­ing on this sub­ject in main­stream jour­nals is also bet­ter for … the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the even­tu­al answer to this ques­tion, as well as for the integri­ty of the sci­en­tif­ic process in general.

Fifth, the con­tent of the jour­nal more than jus­ti­fies these con­cerns. In the 2 years the jour­nal has exist­ed, they’ve pub­lished exact­ly 7 papers, with 15 authors list­ed in the jour­nal’s archive. But Dou­glas Axe con­sti­tutes 3 of those 15 authors, since the edi­to­r­i­al board­’s rig­or appar­ent­ly did­n’t extend to ensur­ing that author’s names were entered consistently. 

Ana­lyz­ing each of the 7 papers is hard­ly worth it. Two of the 7 are “crit­i­cal reviews,” not meant to com­mu­ni­cate new research results. Oth­ers appear to be minor con­tri­bu­tions from grad­u­ate stu­dents and under­grads asso­ci­at­ed with Bio­log­ic Insti­tute staff and fel­lows. Every paper has at least one author who is fund­ed at least in part by Bio­log­ic or Disco.

I’ll just dig into one of the papers, to point out that these papers are inad­e­quate even by the authors’ own stan­dards. The paper in ques­tion is by Ann Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, and describes some exper­i­ments Seelke described in his tes­ti­mo­ny to the Kansas Board of Edu­ca­tion in 2005.

John Calvert asked: “Can you describe to me a– in more detail a cam­paign of unsuc­cess­ful evo­lu­tion?” and Seelke replied:

Well, one of the things I’m doing now is one of the– one of my oth­er heroes is Michael Behe. And Behe said that if you have mul­ti­ple inde­pen­dent events that have to take place you will sim­ply not be able to observe evolution.

And so at this– last year at this time I was a vis­it­ing schol­ar at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and I basi­cal­ly built some mol­e­cules. I made some changes in a gene and I put in one muta­tion, two muta­tions, three muta­tions, and four muta­tions all in dif­fer­ent types of that gene. All muta­tions inac­tu­ate the gene. And so if this– and then– and now I’m in the process– I only have ten– I only have ten bil­lion cells that I’m look­ing at which is whoosy in this field. I would­n’t pub­lish this until I had prob­a­bly 10 to 100 tril­lion, but– so then I can take– I can take these mutants that I know exact­ly what they need to do to evolve and I can ask them to evolve and put them in a medi­um where if they do evolve I would know overnight. Because the selec­tive advan­tage of being able to make, in this case, the amino acid tripty­line [sic, prob­a­bly tryp­to­phan] is so enor­mous that I would find that out overnight if that happens.

And so I can ask, what hap­pens when you need two muta­tions and only get an advan­tage when you have both. At this point the answer is noth­ing. And that is actu­al­ly sup­port­ed by the lit­er­a­ture. What’s dif­fer­ent about this is I am specif­i­cal­ly ask­ing these ques­tions. Most cas­es peo­ple– these are things that peo­ple dis­cov­er are kind of on the side. You know, you don’t do exper­i­ments to test the lim­its of evo­lu­tion and par­tic­u­lar­ly my work is designed to actu­al­ly test that. 

Empha­sis added. As far as Seelke of 2005 was con­cerned, any­thing less than 10–100 tril­lion cells was “whoosy” and not worth pub­lish­ing. Guess how many cells his BIO-com­plex­i­ty paper reports?

About 1 tril­lion. That’s about a tenth of the low­er lim­it Seelke set in 2005. Not only did Seelke of 2010 think it was worth sub­mit­ting this “whoosy” research to BIO-com­plex­i­ty, but BIO-com­plex­i­ty’s sup­pos­ed­ly awe­some edi­to­r­i­al board agreed to pub­lish this “whoosy” research. (All of this sets aside the fact that the premise of the research is fatal­ly flawed, embody­ing a triv­ial mis­un­der­stand­ing of how evo­lu­tion works, and what it takes to prop­er­ly test the pow­ers and lim­its of evolution.)

In short, BIO-com­plex­i­ty shows every sign of being exact­ly the sort of pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic appa­ra­tus that I said it was. As far as I know, it is now the only venue in which DI and Bio­log­ic Insti­tute staff cur­rent­ly pub­lish their sup­pos­ed­ly pro-ID research, and it was the only evi­dence Casey offered for the exis­tence of any research pro­gram at Bio­log­ic or the Dis­co. ‘tute. His claims about the jour­nal’s qual­i­ty con­trol are fal­si­fied by sim­ple ref­er­ence to the jour­nal’s own stat­ed poli­cies, not to men­tion a look at the jour­nal’s min­i­mal con­tent and the poor qual­i­ty of the con­tent ‑ poor quli­ty by the authors’ own stan­dards.

Casey’s attacks on me — failed attempts to divine my “design,” false charges of inac­cu­ra­cy, per­son­al attacks charg­ing inci­vil­i­ty, etc. — all fail, and do so in ways that high­light Casey’s inci­vil­i­ty, and the under­ly­ing prob­lem in Casey’s view of the world.

Stephen Post talked about inci­vil­i­ty aris­ing from “a vicious ingroup-out­group demo­niza­tion.” Casey cer­tain­ly sees that dis­tinc­tion, speak­ing of his crit­ics as if they formed some uni­fied “Dar­win lob­by.” This lob­by, to his eyes, is a uni­fied group who he seems to think wor­ship Charles Dar­win, and who he holds respon­si­ble en masse for the “inci­vil­i­ty” of any­one he choos­es to place into that out­group. It’s a view that’s inco­her­ent on its own terms, but that jus­ti­fies him in these sort of pet­ti­fog­ging attacks. If he can paint all ID’s crit­ics as part of an orga­nized “lob­by,” then he can write off that entire lob­by by say­ing they’re rude, and there­fore unwor­thy of “dig­ni­fy­ing … with an evi­den­tial rebuttal.”

Casey’s goal here is not to elu­ci­date the strengths of ID, and express­es a strong pref­er­ence for address­ing the motives, tone, and char­ac­ter of its crit­ics instead of even try respond­ing sub­stan­tive­ly. That’s unciv­il. Tone mat­ters, civil­i­ty mat­ters, and indeed, char­ac­ter matters.

But which is less civ­il: say­ing mean things about the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute, or cre­at­ing a pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic appa­ra­tus so that one can sub­vert sci­en­tif­ic norms and indoc­tri­nate students?

I say “indoc­tri­nate,” because in 1998, the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute stat­ed that their first pri­or­i­ty had to be research, because:

With­out sol­id schol­ar­ship, research and argu­ment, the project would be just anoth­er attempt to indoc­tri­nate instead of persuade.

Since then, they’ve pro­duced noth­ing of sub­stance. But when peo­ple point that out, all we hear in response are accu­sa­tions of incivility.

Disco. ‘tute: Evolution is a “terrifying cripple,” “bang[ing] its…

The Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute is cel­e­brat­ing the 20th anniver­sary of Dar­win on Tri­al, the mediocre book that inspired their move­ment. As part of the cel­e­bra­tion, David Berlin­s­ki pound­ed out one of his typ­i­cal dron­ing mis­sives from his reclin­er in Paris. As hap­pens so often with the Dis­co. ‘tute, there’s lit­tle nov­el­ty to the argu­ment, but along the way he man­aged to stick a thumb in the eye of any­one liv­ing with a disability:

In Dar­win on Tri­al, …[i]t was the great case of Dar­win et al v. the West­ern Reli­gious Tra­di­tion that occu­pied his atten­tion. The issue had been joined long before John­son wrote. But the case had not been decid­ed. It had not been deci­sive­ly decid­ed and like some ter­ri­fy­ing crip­ple, it had con­tin­ued to bang its crutch­es through all the low­er courts of Hell and Dover, Pennsylvania. 

First, “crip­ple” is not the pre­ferred term and has­n’t been for a long time. Sec­ond, peo­ple who use crutch­es are not “ter­ri­fy­ing.” Third, I’m not sure why Berlin­s­ki is con­sign­ing any­one who uses crutch­es to “the low­er courts of Hell.” I do know where he and who­ev­er let him put this on the Dis­co. ‘tute web­site and in the DI Twit­ter stream can go.

More misogyny from the Disco. ‘tute

Dis­co. ‘tute pres­i­dent Bruce Chap­man is upset. There are ladies with their bloomers in a twist over some­thing or oth­er that they claim Her­man Cain said. Let’s read Chap­man and see if we can guess what Cain is sup­posed to have done:

A num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant insights are emerg­ing from the charges of sex harass­ment lodged against Her­man Cain. It may be wise to with­hold judge­ment [sic] about the par­tic­u­lars so far. There are a num­ber of groups oper­at­ing behind the scenes to dri­ve the sto­ry one way or another.

Aha! Charges of sex­u­al harass­ment were filed, but we should be dubi­ous because shad­owy groups are try­ing to destroy this inno­cent man.

How­ev­er, it’s not too soon to note the way job prob­lems in our times are con­vert­ed into legal prob­lems. I have com­ment­ed on the ten­den­cy of lawyers for busi­ness­es and even gov­ern­ments to dis­count charges of sex dis­crim­i­na­tion and sex­u­al harass­ment by set­tling out of court–the sup­pos­ed­ly “cheap­er” out­come for oth­er­wise cost­ly law­suits. Obvi­ous­ly, if there real­ly has been an ille­gal action or pat­tern of behav­ior the busi­ness or agency should set­tle, and effec­tive­ly admit wrong­do­ing. If not, the “cheap­er” out­come may become an expen­sive one–at least in terms of publicity.

Oh, it’s a job prob­lem. Like when Stephen Mey­er does­n’t make a new pot of cof­fee after he fin­ish the old one, or when David Kling­hof­fer writes anoth­er essay blam­ing Charles Dar­win for his hang­nail. Sure, some­one can sue over it, but it’s not a real issue, so busi­ness­es might decide, fool­ish­ly, to set­tle this friv­o­lous claim. For­tu­nate­ly, while Cain has had charged lodged against him, it isn’t like his for­mer com­pa­ny already set­tled these charges over a decade ago, “effec­tive­ly admit­ting wrongdoing.”

In The Amer­i­can Spec­ta­tor, Lisa Fab­ri­sio [sic] makes anoth­er rel­e­vant argue­ment [sic]: that the Cain issue reeks of hypocrisy. Here is a mod­ern media/entertainment cul­ture steeped in soft porn, where new break­throughs in low­ered stan­dards are accom­plished [sic] con­stant­ly. And yet it is this same debased cul­ture that acts offend­ed by some offi­cial’s con­ver­sa­tion­al gaffe or unin­tend­ed dou­ble enten­dre!

The prob­lem isn’t what Cain did (or if Chap­man’s to be believed, did­n’t do). The prob­lem is that there’s cleav­age on dis­play at super­mar­ket check­out lines. Hypocrisy! Women are allowed to wear reveal­ing out­fits, but an employ­er can’t grope an employ­ee? (Alleged­ly!) Besides, I bet this “sex­u­al harass­ment” is just a slip of the tongue, or a joke that was tak­en the wrong way. You know how women are.

Of course, those of us who’ve read the news­pa­pers in the last week (with­out being dis­tract­ed by the bra ads), know a few things that Chap­man doesn’t.

First, we know that Cain isn’t just charged with sex­u­al harass­ment, he and his com­pa­ny set­tled those charges over a decade ago. And his com­pa­ny added a gag rule to the set­tle­ment, so that he and his for­mer com­pa­ny can talk about the charges, but the women he assault­ed can­not speak pub­licly. Politi­co explains what we know about those cases:

The sources — includ­ing the rec­ol­lec­tions of close asso­ciates and oth­er doc­u­men­ta­tion — describe episodes that left the women upset and offend­ed. These inci­dents include con­ver­sa­tions alleged­ly filled with innu­en­do or per­son­al ques­tions of a sex­u­al­ly sug­ges­tive nature, tak­ing place at hotels dur­ing con­fer­ences, at oth­er offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned restau­rant asso­ci­a­tion events and at the association’s offices. There were also descrip­tions of phys­i­cal ges­tures that were not overt­ly sex­u­al but that made women who expe­ri­enced or wit­nessed them uncom­fort­able and that they regard­ed as improp­er in a pro­fes­sion­al relationship.

In addi­tion to the three women (we know of) whose suits were set­tled, a fourth woman came for­ward and dis­cussed a sim­i­lar inci­dent she expe­ri­enced. She had been fired by Cain’s Nation­al Restau­rant Asso­ci­a­tion, and asked to meet Mr. Cain to get help find­ing a new job:

After tak­ing her out for a night on the town in Wash­ing­ton, she said, he sug­gest­ed she engage with him sex­u­al­ly in return for his assis­tance — seiz­ing her inap­pro­pri­ate­ly when they were alone in a car and run­ning his hand up her skirt.…

As she described it, Mr. Cain ran his hand up her skirt, “reached for my gen­i­tal­s” and pulled her head toward his crotch. “I said, ‘What are you doing? You know I have a boyfriend; this isn’t what I came here for,’ ” Ms. Bialek said, her voice crack­ing. “Mr. Cain said, ‘You want a job, right?’”

Impor­tant­ly:

Joel P. Ben­nett, a lawyer for anoth­er of Mr. Cain’s accusers, called Ms. Bialek’s descrip­tion of the encounter “very sim­i­lar” to Mr. Cain’s inter­ac­tion with his client, who he has said received sev­er­al inap­pro­pri­ate advances from him. With­out going in details [as for­bid­den by their set­tle­ment], Mr. Ben­nett said, “It cor­rob­o­rates the claim.”

To dis­miss crotch-grab­bing, threats of forced oral sex, and offer to exchange sex­u­al favors for employ­ment as a “job prob­lem,” “a con­ver­sa­tion­al gaffe,” or “unin­ten­tion­al dou­ble enten­dre” stretch­es the legit­i­mate mean­ings of any of those terms. Chap­man is either clue­less about the actu­al cir­cum­stances at hand, or does­n’t under­stand sex­u­al pow­er dynam­ics and sex­u­al harassment. 

Mr. Chap­man runs a mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar orga­ni­za­tion, han­dling admin­is­tra­tive mat­ters and a large staff. He seems to gen­uine­ly not know what sex­u­al harass­ment is and why it mat­ters. Clear­ly, sex­ism infects the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute from the top down. Not many women work at the ‘tute, so maybe the issue has­n’t come up, or maybe this misog­y­nist atti­tude has sim­ply cre­at­ed an envi­ron­ment where few women are com­fort­able working.

A nakedly sexist attack from the creationist Discovery Institute

After Philadel­phia Inquir­er colum­nist Faye Flam took the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute to task for their Hitler obses­sion and con­stant vio­la­tions of God­win’s law, Dis­co. ‘tute fel­low Richard Weikart struck back, insist­ing, “I have spo­ken with intel­li­gent Dar­win­ists who admit point-blank that they do not have any grounds to con­demn Hitler.” This is patent bull­crap, but that’s noth­ing new for the Seat­tle-based belief tank. Weikart did­n’t, of course, say which sci­en­tists he’d heard say this, so there’s no way to inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fy his claim.

Flam flew to the fra­cas again, won­der­ing why cre­ation­ists insist on using the inac­cu­rate and pejo­ra­tive term “Dar­win­ist,” and point­ing out that Weikart is wrong about how evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists regard human life.

In response, the Dis­co. ‘tute trot­ted out an unsigned blog post that fair­ly drips with misog­y­ny. Riff­ing off of Flam’s blog post title, the Dis­co. DJ scratch­es his crotch and grunts:

Ms. Flam, if we had in fact spanked you, you would know it.

Let’s be grate­ful that he did­n’t add: “Now fetch my dinner.”

How can I be so sure the unsigned post was writ­ten by a man? Because there are no active female blog­gers at the DI blog (Ani­ka Smith is still list­ed as a con­trib­u­tor, but DI’s Casey Luskin assures me that she’s moved on). Indeed, of 50 fel­lows and staff list­ed as being asso­ci­at­ed with the Dis­co. ‘tute’s cre­ation­ist wing, only one fel­low (Nan­cy Pearcey) and 5 staffers are women. One of the 6 women list­ed is Ani­ka Smith, again, who is no longer at the ‘tute. One of the women is their edu­ca­tion coor­di­na­tor, two are involved in fundrais­ing, anoth­er is involved in sales and mar­ket­ing. Per­haps their posi­tions don’t require them to deal with whichev­er misog­y­nist penned this lat­est screed, or maybe they’ve just bought into the evan­gel­i­cal notion of wife­ly sub­mis­sion.

Since no one signed the piece, it’s fair to assume that all the ENV authors endorse this sort of casu­al humor about sex­u­al assault. If not, I’d urge them to pub­licly dis­tance them­selves from this boor­ish behav­ior, and tell us which of their cow­ard­ly col­leagues was will­ing to post this, but not put his name on it.