Policy and Politics Archives — Page 4 of 157

Category: Policy and Politics

Todd Wood, the Disco. ‘tute, and the Monkey Bill

2012-04-13
by Josh Rosenau

Todd Wood is a professor at Bryan College, in Dayton, TN. Dayton, you’ll recall, was the home of the Scopes trial, and Bryan College was named after Scopes’s prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, and was founded in part to carry on Bryan’s anti-evolution crusade. Wood himself is a prominent young earth creationist, a leader in the creationist answer to phylogenetics (baraminology), and director of Bryan’s Center for Origins Research. Which is to say, he’s a creationist’s creationist.

And he’s against the Tennessee monkey bill.

Last month, he wrote to Governor Haslam, asking him to oppose the bill. He’s pulled down the letter from his blog, but for posterity and clarity, here’s what he said:

Dear Governor Haslam:

My name is Todd Charles Wood, and I am a biology professor at Bryan College in Dayton, TN. You might recognize Bryan College as the Christian school named for William Jennings Bryan and founded in the wake of the Scopes Trial. (Please note that the opinions expressed in this letter are my own and do not represent the opinions of Bryan College.)

I recently noted that the Tennessee state senate passed SB0893, the so-called “Monkey Bill” (ironically on William Jennings Bryan’s birthday of all days). I am sure that you’ve already received quite a number of heated letters and phone calls about this bill. As you certainly know, critics of the bill view it as a thinly-veiled attempt to inject creationism into the public science classrooms.

Because of my religious convictions, I am a committed creationist, but unlike many creationists, I have grown quite weary of the creation-evolution propaganda war. I believe this bill is an ideal example of what’s wrong with the creation-evolution war. For example, since the bill clearly states that religious discussions are not protected, it could not be used to permit “some Sunday school teachers to hijack biology class by proxy,” as the editorial in the March 21 edition of the Tennesseean suggested. On the other hand, my own reading of the bill indicates that it provides no protection that teachers don’t already have. Teachers are already well within their rights to discuss any scientific evidence that pertains to the prescribed curriculum and to encourage critical thinking about it. Many already do. Any teacher trying to bring creationist arguments into a public science classroom will run afoul of legal precedent. Judge Jones’s decision in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District found that the anti-evolution arguments of Intelligent Design are a form of religiously-motivated creationism. The controversy surrounding the other issues mentioned by SB0893 (human cloning and climate change) are also permissible subjects to discuss in science classes already, and therefore do not need any additional protection. Thus, if critics are correct that this is an attempt to inject creationism into Tennessee science classes, the language is so vague and watered-down that it would be incapable of performing that task.

Legally then, it seems that this bill is simply unnecessary. It does not directly challenge Kitzmiller v. Dover, and it does not offer any protection that does not already exist. Because the bill is useless, I ask you to veto it. Please do not allow Tennessee to become a pawn in the creation-evolution propaganda war.

Respectfully yours,

Todd Charles Wood

Wood later explained that he withdrew the post because he was concerned that the blog post “doesn’t meet my own quality standards,” and because a colleague indicated unspecified legal naivete. Since I assume he actually mailed a copy of the letter as well, and it’s thus part of the public record, I think it’s worth preserving.

Also worth preserving are the lengths creationists went to in trying to press Wood to withdraw his opposition. According to his blog today:

I took my letter to the governor down less than 24 hours after I put it up, and a few days later, a staff member at the college passed along a letter from John West of the Discovery Institute trying to drum up some resistance on the Bryan campus to my opinion. As far as I know, his efforts had zero effect on campus, since I didn’t hear from any other person on campus about it. In his letter, West described me as “one cranky self-described ‘creationist’ who seems to get his facts from Panda’s Thumb.” Then in a recent blog post, Casey Luskin (also of the Discovery Institute) described the governor’s ambivalence about the bill (which mirrored my own) as the result of being “duped by the Darwin lobby.” It’s comments like these that affirm my own refusal to identify with the “intelligent design movement.” To address serious misgivings about the Discovery Institute’s legal strategies with personal insults is disgusting. Governor Haslam and I both have brains of our own, and we can think for ourselves.

What’s particularly entertaining about this is in promoting a bill which purports to advance academic freedom, the Discovery Institute chose to assault the academic freedom of a fellow creationist. The Disco. ‘tute truly seems dedicated to redefining irony at every opportunity.

Wood closes by offering an assessment of the current state of ID that I think is widely shared among many of ID’s early supporters, and in some sense by many of its opponents:

You know, when ID was picking up steam in the nineties, I was really excited. I thought that this sort of research program could be incredibly fruitful and helpful. Maybe I misunderstood its beginnings, but somewhere along the line, the movement seems to have lost its way. It went from an interesting research program to a populist anti-evolution campaign that often recycles arguments directly from vintage creationism. Maybe that’s my naÃ¯vetÃ© shining through again, but I really don’t think that ID was intended to be just a disguised form of creationism to circumvent court rulings against religion in science classrooms.

Not that ID’s opponents ever thought it was a genuine challenge to modern evolutionary biologyÂ âÂ that was always PR fluff. But for a while it seemed like they might actually break some new philosophical ground, and perhaps generate something that, while wrong, would at least be intellectually stimulating. But, as Wood puts it so eloquently, they’ve never really gotten beyond being “a populist anti-evolution campaign that often [or, indeed, exclusively ‑JR] recycles arguments directly from vintage creationism.” There’s nothing new or interesting here anymore.

The monkey bill is an interesting legal innovation, and the consequences for classrooms in Tennessee may yet be dire. But the ID movement was never built on a promise of legal innovation, and as they themselves declared: “Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.” And that’s all they have left.

As evangelical Christian biologist Steve Matheson put it in a loving letter to Disco’s Stephen Meyer:

you seem to have abandoned scholarship and the intellectual community, and instead embraced apologetics and political persuasion. â¦

â¦you desperately need to get out of your freakish little gated community and talk to people who know that the initiation of cancer is indeed fueled to a large extent by driver mutations, and that genome sizes are indeed a hard problem for design theorists to tackle. When you have Wells whispering to you in one ear, and the bizarre perspectives of Richard Sternberg echoing in your mind, you have a huge problem: you’re out of touch with real science, with real biology, with the ideas that you have to engage â¦

Your Discovery Institute is a horrific mistake, an epic intellectual tragedy that is degrading the minds of those who consume its products and bringing dishonor to you and to the church. It is for good reason that Casey Luskin is held in such extreme contempt by your movement’s critics, and there’s something truly sick about the pattern of attacks that your operatives launched in the weeks after the Biola event. It’s clear that you have a cadre of attack dogs that do this work for you, and some of them seem unconstrained by standards of integrity. I can’t state this strongly enough: the Discovery Institute is a dangerous cancer on the Christian intellect, both because of its unyielding commitment to dishonesty and because of its creepy mission to undermine science itself. I’d like to see you do better, but I have no such hope for your institute. It needs to be destroyed, and I will do what I can to bring that about.

When creationists and evolution’s defenders can agree about the perfidy of the Discovery Institute, I think it’s time for some serious self-reflection in Seattle.

Academia

“The whole field of education theorists disagrees…”

2012-04-12
by Josh Rosenau

On Tuesday, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee allowed HB 368 to become law; it is the second of this new generation of creationist laws, along with a similar bill in Louisiana. Haslam refused to sign the bill, stating that it brought confusion, not clarity. He also noted that the bill had overwhelming legislative support (passing by roughly 3–1 margins in both houses), so a veto was unlikely to have any effect.

That morning, as Haslam weighed his options, balancing the concerns expressed by thousands of parents across Tennessee, and the concerns expressed by the state’s leading scientists and science teachers, I was part of a radio panel discussing the bill on KCRW’s To the Point, with Warren Olney. The program, which you can listen to here, started with a discussion between Larisa DeSantis, a parent and biologist at Vanderbilt University, who launched a petition against the bill, and David Fowler, a former state senator who used his new position at the Tennessee affiliate of Focus on the Family to promote the bill. The panel then expanded to including Larisa, historian Ed Larson (whose Summer for the Gods is perhaps the definitive work on Tennessee’s first monkey trial, in 1925), Disco. ‘tute spinner Casey Luskin, and little old me.

I’ll let you listen to the show yourself and decide who made the best case, but I was struck by a comment Casey made (starting just before the 30 minute mark in the MP3 version of the show):

Doctor DeSantis said this bill would somehow dumb down science education. The whole field of science education theorists disagrees with her. The whole field of science education theory today says that the best way to teach science is to teach students evidence for and against various concepts, let them weigh the evidence, wrestle with it, use these as critical thinking exercises, and learn to look at both sides of an issue. This is how students best learn science.

Casey’s claims on this point have expanded rather dramatically over the years. In June, 2010, he cited a single paper by science education researcher Jonathan Osborne to claim “Article on Evolution Education in Science Endorses Teaching Students Evidence ‘That Supports … Or Does Not Support.’ ” In that piece, Casey writes:

While I have no reason to believe that Jonathan Osborne himself is a skeptic of neo-Darwinian evolution, he does seem to be fair-minded. He argues that the very approach of — teaching the science that “supports … or does not support” is strongly supported by empirical studies of science education: …

Does This Apply to Evolution Education?

The obvious answer is yes, of course. But does Osborne have the courage to face the ridicule and suggest applying this approach directly to evolution-education? I can’t read Osborne’s mind…

There’s no need to be psychic to evaluate Osborne’s opinions, of course, but let’s first consider how Casey’s assessment of this single-authored paper has expanded since June, 2010. That October, Casey linked back to that first blog post to argue that the Disco. ‘tute’s creationist lesson plan matches the guidance of “leading science educators.” Whether or not he’s interpreting Osborne correctly (hint: he isn’t), that leap from the singular to the plural is utterly unjustified, as all he links to is the original piece about Osborne’s views. And his claim this week, in April, 2012, that “the whole field of educational theorists” backs his claims and the bill itself is, of course, absurd. If it were true, I’d think (among other things) that the bill wouldn’t have faced opposition from every major science education society and from the Tennessee Science Teachers Association. In Casey’s imagination, this single article by one man seems to have swollen to become the only thing written on the subject, and has shifted its meaning well beyond what Osborne wrote at the time, or his stated views since then.

Predictably, Casey is not even right about Dr. Osborne’s views in 2010, as he’d know from reading an exchange of letters that followed Osborne’s article’s publication in Science. The exchange took place in April, 2010, months before Casey’s first blog post on about Osborne’s views, so there’s really no excuse for him to have missed it.

Ze’ev Wurman wrote to Science, wondering at Osborne’s shift since an opinion essay he wrote months earlier, opposing creationist-inspired Texas science standards. At the time, Osborne had written:

The capability to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations is one of the primary skills required of the scientist, not the high school student of science. After all, the stock in trade of the school classroom is knowledge that has been placed beyond doubt. No school student is going to be able to seriously critique Newton’s Laws, the conservation of matter, or the atomic theory—or, for that matter, the theory of natural selection. They simply do not have the knowledge or the intellectual skills to engage sufficiently critically with the evidence in a manner that would be productive. … as it [theory of evolution] lies beyond criticism, it is hard to see what value any attempt to evaluate critically the evidence and logical reasoning on which it rests would serve.

Wurman tried to draw Osborne out by claiming this stance was inconsistent, writing: “This makes one wonder which Osborne to believe—the one who believes in the importance of argument and debate in science classrooms, or the one that does not. Or, perhaps, it is for Osborne more a matter of whose ox is being gored rather than a matter of science and pedagogy.”

Osborne replied, “Wurman is confusing the learning of science with the doing of science. And, just as the young violinist’s capacity to play improves by engaging in performance and studying how others play, so does the young person’s capability to argue and learn science improve by engaging in argumentation. However, just as such a young person is incapable of giving a concert performance of a Beethoven violin concerto, so is the learner of science incapable of mounting a critique of Newton’s Laws of Motion, Darwin’s theory of evolution, or any other elements of the standard canon of science, as they lack the necessary disciplinary knowledge.” This, essentially, is the argument I made on the radio show, as it was the point Larisa made, and which many scientists and science educators consistently made in legislative hearings and letters to the Governor.

Lest Casey think I’m quotemining Osborne now (as Casey has quotemined him for years), here is the rest of Osborne’s letter:

What they [students] are capable of doing is what I suggested in both articles that Wurman cites: exploring why the common misconceptions are wrong, what evidence leads to that conclusion, and what evidence supports the standard scientific idea. Why do we believe that day and night are caused by a spinning Earth when all your senses tell you that it is the Sun that moves and a simple calculation tells you that the speed at the Equator is larger than the speed of sound? Likewise, why do we believe in conservation of energy when daily experience gives the impression that energy is consistently “lost”? Engaging in such deliberations helps students to develop the critical skepticism that is the hallmark of the scientist and to comprehend the justification for the consensually accepted scientific idea.

When it comes to Darwin’s ideas and their teaching in K–12 classrooms, students would benefit by examining some of the evidence that led Darwin to propound his theories, or examining the evidence that leads us to believe that the Earth is approximately 5000 million years old and examining some of the evidence against that idea, rather than being taught such ideas as received dogma. However, as Wurman knows, simply to examine “all of the evidence,” as Texas would have its students do, is a field of disciplinary study in its own right.

The insistence that students examine “all the evidence” was totally unrealistic (i) because of the time required and (ii) because students in K–12 do not have the capability to undertake such a task. All the science teacher can do in such circumstances is select a partial set of evidence—both for and against—that the student can comprehend. However, the teacher’s ultimate responsibility is to ensure that the students understand why that evidence leads to a strong belief in the consensually accepted theory and why the counterarguments are wrong. By its subtle but inappropriate wording of this statement, I argued that Texas was attempting to use the work on argumentation that I and others have done to enact the impossible for ideological purposes. If the Texas standards had simply written that “students should have the opportunity to examine the evidence, both for and against, that leads us to believe in the accepted scientific idea,” I would have been delighted. But they did not, as it would not have served what I believe to be their purposes: using the science curriculum to encourage their teachers to give an inappropriate amount of time to accounts of the discredited evidence against evolution.

At most, Osborne is suggesting that students be taught the errors at the core of common claims advanced by the Discovery Institute and other creationist front groups. The language of Tennessee’s law contains some of the same phrases Osborne is criticizing in the Texas science standards, and his dismissal of this tactic in Texas applies no less forcefully to the Tennessee law.

In other words, the one education theorist Casey has ever cited to support his anti-evolution tactics, has in fact definitively denounced them. If the entire field of education theorists can be said to take any position on this point, it would seem to be exactly the opposite of what Luskin claimed on a national radio program.

Creationism

Evolution professor attacked in class

2012-03-21
by Josh Rosenau

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: âHow does evolution kill black people?â she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution doesnât 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 questionâ¦ She asked it four times, and became increasingly upset each time Kajiuraâs 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?

Climate change

Tennessee sets the stage for a 21st century Scopes…

2012-03-21
by Josh Rosenau

If you wonder why I haven’t been blogging lately, it’s because I’ve been trying to keep science safe in the Volunteer State; for instance, here’s a great piece Huffington Post science editor Cara Santa Maria put together, including an interview with yours truly.

If you watch the NCSE front page (and you should), you’ll see that it’s almost all-Tennessee, all the time. Tennessee is getting ready to repeat an unfortunate part of its state’s history, the Butler Act and Scopes trial of the 1920s.
Of course, creationism evolves, so the 21st century version won’t take the same tack. In 1925, Scopes was convicted of violating a state law banning the teaching of evolution, claiming that evolution denies the Biblical account of human origins. The judge in that case denied testimony from theologians and scientists who would have argued that evolution does no such thing, leaving prosecutor, anti-evolution orator, Secretary of State, and 5‑time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan as the sole expert witness. It was not until the 1960s that such laws were struck down by the US Supreme Court.

The bill’s advocates have had plenty of time to try to justify this bill. It was first considered a full year ago: it passed the state House handily, but was put on hold in the Senate. Many hoped that hold was permanent, but Senate president pro tempore Bo Watson sped it out of committee and into a floor vote earlier this week.

Rather than banning evolution, the “monkey bill” of 2011 and 2012 takes a subtler approach. Declaring that evolution, climate change, and human cloning (wingnut code for stem cell research) are subject to “controversy” or even “debate and disputation,” the law creates special rules for science teachers. No one has ever explained why science teachers are the only ones who ought to be promoting critical thinking and the other noble goals the legislature lists, nor has anyone justified the practical effects of the bill, which would be far less laudable.
After feelgood handwaving about encouraging critical thinking and understanding of scientific ideas (which science teachers already do, and hardly need the legislature to instruct them about), the bill announces that school administrators â from the state board of education down to locally elected school boards and school principals â are forbidden to “prohibit any teacher in a public schoolâ¦from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories.”

Of course, no one has shown that any teacher has ever been prohibited from doing any such thing, at least since the end of the last generation of monkey bills. But because so many key terms are undefined, it’s easy to see how a teacher could offer a creationist lesson, or one denying the reality or human causation of climate change, and refuse to drop that lesson by citing this law. A parent’s objections, or clear instructions from a supervisor, could be waved away with the claim that any such interference would violate this provision of the law.

Sometimes the bill’s advocates say that’s not what they intend, but sometimes they let the cat out of the bag. The bill’s sponsor explained to reporters that “the idea behind this bill is that students should be encouraged to challenge current scientific thought and theory.” Another senator suggested that the bill was needed to let teachers answer students when they ask “How does this fit with what we learned in Sunday school?” During floor debate on Monday night, Senator Andy Berke replied: “I’m a person of faithâ¦If my children ask, ‘How does that mesh with my faith?’ I don’t want their teacher answering that question,” explaining that he’d want to answer that himself, or bring it up with their own religious leader. Berke added that the bill was unnecessary, and noted, “We are simply dredging up the problems of the past with this bill and that will affect our teachers in the future.”

Despite objections from Berke and 7 other Senators (of 32 voting), the bill passed the Senate that night, the 152 birthday of Scopes’ prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan.

The bill is now awaiting action in the Tennessee House (where it previously passed 70–23 with only minor differences), and then will proceed to Governor Haslam. Haslam has declined to comment on the bill’s merits, but noted that it might well overstep the legislature’s role. “It is a fair question what the General Assembly’s role is,” he told reporters during an appearance at a local school. “That’s why we have a state board of education.”

While the board itself has yet to weigh in, Tennessee’s teachers have been vocal in their opposition. Tennessee Science Teachers Association president Becky Ashe wrote to the legislature to oppose the bill, calling it “unnecessary, anti-scientific, and very likely unconstitutional.” The state’s leading scientists â including the only Nobel laureate in science living in Tennessee â all signed a letter to the legislature, observing that the bill “would miseducate students, harm the state’s national reputation, and weaken its efforts to compete in a science-driven global economy.” They are joined in their concerns by national science societies â including AAAS and AIBS â and science education groups like NABT, NAGT, and NESTA.

If the bill’s sponsors think they’re helping teachers, perhaps they should listen to those teachers’ concerns.

It’s rather more likely that the sponsors are listening to different parties, like the creationist Discovery Institute whose model legislation served as inspiration for this bill. Disco. ‘tute spinner Casey Luskin celebrated the bill’s Senate passage, but couldn’t help acting put upon in the process. He writes:

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is already mocking SB 893 as the “Tennessee monkey bill”– reminiscent of the law passed in the 1920s that criminalized the teaching of evolution in Tennessee, leading to the Scopes trial. However, the situation is the reverse of what it was in the 1920s.

Sadly, no! The “monkey bill” coinage originated with former Tennessee House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, on March 29, 2011:

âThe monkey bill is back before us,â Rep. Jimmy Naifeh, D‑Covington, said, warning it could embarrass Tennessee and hurt the stateâs economy. âIâm just saying these things can be said and will be said about us. It may have some far-reaching effects that we donât see at this time.â

The Disco. ‘tute is no less wrong in claiming that the bill is just about science. Look at the religious context the bill’s own sponsors place it in, and the complete scientific and educational opposition to it.

As Casey himself acknowledges, “When critics have to resort to falsehoodsâ¦, you know that something else is going on.” That something else is an ideological attack on science, and thus the economic future of Tennessee.

At this point, it looks like it’s up to Governor Haslam to protect the state’s students, parents, and teachers from their own legislature.

Policy and Politics

Justice Scalia says Thomas Jefferson was irrational

2012-03-07
by Josh Rosenau

The Denver Post reports on a talk by hyperconservative Justice Antonin Scalia at a religious conference:

The 75-year-old Scalia said that today one can believe in a creator and the teachings of Jesus without being the brunt of too much ridicule, but that to hold traditional Christian beliefs that Jesus is God and He physically rose from the grave is to be derided as simple-minded by those considered leading intellectuals.…

In Washington, Scalia said, the pundits and media couldn’t believe in a miracle performed under their noses. “My point is not that reason and intellect need to be laid aside,” Scalia said. “A faith without a rational basis should be laid aside as false. … What is irrational is to reject a priori the possibility of miracles in general and the resurrection of Jesus Christ in particular.”

ThinkProgress’s Ian Milhiser rightly observes, “the clear implication of Scalia’s statement appears to be than all non-Christians — or approximately two-thirds of the world’s population — are ‘irrational.’ ”

More importantly, it also rules out a lot of Christians, including at least one Founding Father: Thomas Jefferson. As we discussed recently, Jefferson — who consistently referred to himself as a Christian — edited the New Testament to remove all the miracles, including the resurrection.

To his long-time friend and secretary, he wrote in 1820 about his edited Bible and his religious views more generally:

My aim in that was, to justify the character of Jesus against the fictions of his pseudo-followers, which have exposed him to the inference of being an impostor. For if we could believe that he really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods and the charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind, that he was an impostor. I give no credit to their falsifications of his actions and doctrines, and to rescue his character, the postulate in my letter asked only what is granted in reading every other historian. When Livy and Siculus, for example, tell us things which coincide with our experience of the order of nature, we credit them on their word, and place their narrations among the records of credible history. But when they tell us of calves speaking, of statues sweating blood, and other things against the course of nature, we reject these as fables not belonging to history. In like manner, when an historian, speaking of a character well known and established on satisfactory testimony, imputes to it things incompatible with that character, we reject them without hesitation, and assent to that only of which we have better evidence. … I say, that this free exercise of reason is all I ask for the vindication of the character of Jesus. We find in the writings of his biographers [that is, the Gospels and some Epistles of the New Testament ‑JR] matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications [i.e., miracles ‑JR]. Intermixed with these, again, are sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed.

In other words, Jefferson regarded miracles, including tales of the immaculate conception and of resurrection, to be mere fancies glommed onto a more important (and non-supernatural) story. Supreme Court Justice Scalia apparently regards this view as irrational.

Policy and Politics

Have you stopped beating your wife/father/donkey?

2012-03-02
by Josh Rosenau

For reasons not worth getting into, I was struck by the urge to find the history of the most common example of a loaded question: “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

It’s a question that demands a yes or no answer, but either response requires the respondent to affirm a) having a wife and b) having beaten her in the past, and then to either confirm or deny an intent to keep doing so. Someone unmarried or who doesn’t beat his or her wife has to reject the question outright.

And, of course, simply by asking the question, the questioner has poisoned the well for any audience, leaving them with the sense that the respondent is a wife-beater, and any semblance of ambiguity in the reply will make the respondent seem even guiltier.

Wikipedia simply cites it as the “traditional example” of a loaded question, but it seems unlikely that the author would be entirely unknown. It’s used as shorthand in a 1977 letter to the editor of College English, suggesting that it was already commonplace by then.

Similarly, a book of sermon guidance (published 2008) uses the aphorism as a title for the section discussing a loaded question in the Gospel of Mark, without any explanation, again suggesting that it’s widely-known and uncontroversial.

Commenters in the Straight Dope forums tracked it back to a Bugs Bunny cartoon (from 1956), where it seems to be presented as common knowledge and uncontroversial, in punning with Groucho Marx’s show You Bet Your Life:

BUGS (AS GROUCHO): Welcome, welcome to You Beat Your Wife. Say the magic word and win $1,000. What’s your name, sir, and what do you do?

ELMER: Elmer Fudd. I’m a hunter. I’m hunting a wabbit. A cwazy fwesh wabbit.

BUGS: Well, Mr. Fudd, for $1,000, would you stop beating your wife?

ELMER: Well, yes… I, I mean no! I mean, well, that is I never…

BUGS: Well, while you’re making up your mind, I’m going to go slip out of these wet clothes, and into a dry martini, eh?

The earliest use I could find in JSTOR (an archive of academic papers) is from a 1929 article on how to avoid being tripped up on the witness stand, where it is simply called “the classical question.” It’s fairly obviously a colloquialism, so we wouldn’t expect it to occur first in academic writing anyway.

In Paul Elbourne’s Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics, he notes:

This property of presuppositions, that both the original sentence and its negation entail the presupposed proposition, makes presuppositions in a sense hard to escape from. This fact lies behind the old chestnut about the lawyer who asks a defendant, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ â¦ This kind of example has a long history. The Megarian school of Greek philosophy in the third century BC favoured the version ‘Have you stopped beating your father?’ The medieval philosophers toned the example down somewhat to ‘Have you stopped beating your donkey?’ But then in modern times wives supplanted donkeys. (Nowadays, in a nod to gender equality, one occasionally sees the example cited as ‘Have you stopped beating your spouse?’) As the American linguist Laurence Horn says, the history of this example ‘represents a discouraging commentary on twenty-three centuries of progress in social sensitivity.’

Horn’s comment came in a passing footnote. Samuel Wheeler’s more extensive examination of this and other Megarian paradoxes is well worth reading as well.

That the question still has the capacity to shock after 23 centuries is its own small miracle.

Creationism

Good intentions and where they lead

2012-03-01
by Josh Rosenau

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.

Policy and Politics

KS Dem leaders call for an end to legal…

2012-03-01
by Josh Rosenau

This is a press release they just sent out about the effort to undo the absurd idea that “corporations are people, my friend”:

TOPEKA â Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley, of Topeka, House Democratic Leader Paul Davis, of Lawrence, and Ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee Tom Holland, of Baldwin City, announced today that they plan to introduce a resolution formally urging Congress to end corporate personhood.

In January 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations have the same first amendment rights as naturally born persons, and that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. This has led to the development of âSuper PACsâ, and yielded unprecedented influence in political campaigns, as evidenced by the 2012 Presidential Primary.

“Corporations donât live and breathe or go to war or rebuild after tornadoes,â said Hensley. âThey are simply not people and do not deserve the same rights as people.”

The resolution urges Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood by establishing that the term âpersonâ refers only to naturally born persons. Sixteen state legislatures have introduced resolutions/legislation of this nature.

âCitizens United is wrong because it confuses people with corporations and speech with money,â said Holland. âSpeech is an expression of the people, while money is an expression of corporations. It is speech and people that the First Amendment is concerned with, not money and corporations. Amending the U.S. Constitution is the only way to begin returning our inalienable rights to those they were intended to protect â we the people.â

This resolution is particularly timely as the Kansas Legislature embarks on a major tax reform debate. Citizens United opens the floodgates between corporations and the politicians who support them. Both the Brownback and House Republican tax plans will ultimately lead to the elimination of taxation on certain business entities. Additionally, both Gov. Brownback and Speaker OâNeal have indicated that they want to eventually eliminate the corporate income tax in future years. The Brownback Agenda, combined with Citizens United, will give corporations more power over public policy in Kansas than ever before.

âGov. Brownback wants to cut taxes for those at the top at the expense of schools and the middle class,â said Davis. âWe have already witnessed the impact of corporate giveaways on the lives of ordinary working Kansans throughout this recession. If corporations have free reign to influence elections, it will just be another nail in the coffin for middle class Kansans who work hard and play by the rules. This is the time to stand up and say that enough is enough.â

âI find it awfully convenient that Gov. Brownback wants to eliminate the income tax this year,â said Hensley. âBusinesses and the stateâs wealthiest citizens will be raking in record profits just in time to return the favor to Governor Brownback in the 2014 Election.â

The Kansas Democratic Party could surely use your help with this effort.

Creationism

What’s the opposite of a counterfactual?

2012-02-29
by Josh Rosenau

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 Richardsâ¦

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 âÂ contrary to Klinghoffer’s framing of the question âÂ 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 âÂ 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 natureâs 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: “Priestsâ¦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 â¦ have always understood that âBiblical religionâ 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. â¦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 âKnow how to answer an Epicurean.â

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 Torahâs divine origins. These are intellectual matters, not merely ones of temperament or manners. In a Hebrew dictionary, it is defined as an âatheist, freethinker, heretic.ââ¦

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 â an affirmed apikoros and materialist âÂ as a supporter of intelligent design? And how much of history is he prepared to tear up to do it?

Climate change

The drama or the soap opera: the future of…

2012-02-21
by Josh Rosenau

Shorter David Klinghoffer: National Center for Science Education, Darwin/Climate Enforcers, Humiliated by Forged Document Scandal:

Ethical questions about someone with no formal ties to NCSE clearly demonstrates the scientific, pedagogical, and moral failings of NCSE.

So Peter Gleick outed himself as the source of the Heartland board documents released last week, and now lots of people are chasing the shiny toy of how and why Gleick did it, rather than the important story of what the documents say.

But how and why Gleick did it, and even that Gleick did it, is irrelevant to most people, while the contents of those documents matters a lot to everyone. Gleick’s account, which matches the Heartland Institute’s account and the accounts of the folks who received the documents from an anonymous (at the time) source, is that he was mailed a document, and âÂ in trying to confirm its contents â went down a path that was surely unethical and possibly opened him to criminal or civil penalties. He impersonated someone else to have the other documents emailed to him, and then he sent those files (and a scanned copy of the document originally mailed to him) to a range of journalists, and then deleted the email account (presumably to cover his tracks, which suggests that he knew what he was doing was wrong at the time). There will undoubtedly be exciting clashes between his lawyers and Heartland’s lawyers. The soap opera will run on and on.

He’s a great scientist and a great advocate, and his improper actions in this case will take him out of the mix for a long time. That’s unfortunate for us all, and especially for a society that needs more great science communicators and climate science communicators in particular. Consider how he convinced this doubtful audience member to accept the science of climate change:

A skeptic isnât someone who merely holds doubts. A skeptic, as my daughter points out, is the one with the truly open mind. A skeptic will believe anything as long as it is supported by data, sound science and a logically consistent argument.

When I heard Dr. Gleick speak at the recent SkeptiCal, I was all braced for the typical alarmist assault. I was about to be called a âdenierâ, and told why Kyoto must be signed.

Except thatâs not what happened.

Dr. Gleick started by pointing out that good policy without good science is unlikely. I had to agree. He then carefully teased out the science from the politics and talked about the fallacies that commonly appear around the science of global warming. Especially illuminating was the part about cherry-picking data. It was refreshing.

Since his talk I have spent a lot of time on a site he recommended, skepticalscience.com. â¦

So, yes, I am now persuaded that anthropogenic global warming is real. Thatâs because Iâm a skeptic.

Public policy and science will be worse without him. Even NCSE is affected: Gleick’s lifetime of scientific accomplishments and experience running a successful environmental nonprofit (and his performance at SkeptiCal) led to his being considered as an addition to NCSE’s board, and he withdrew from consideration immediately after he posted his confession on Huffington Post. Even though there was never any formal tie between Gleick and NCSE, hacks like Klinghoffer will surely try to make hay out of this for a long time.

I don’t speak for NCSE on this blog, and I don’t know how this is sitting with anyone else at NCSE, but I’m personally still shocked by it. Heartland had been spreading rumors trying to implicate Gleick last week, using the flimsiest evidence possible: the leaker seemed to live in Pacific Time, the leaker seemed to bear animus to Heartland, the leaker seemed to like Gleick. There are actually quite a few people who live in Pacific Time and like Gleick and don’t like Heartland (indeed, people who like Gleick almost all dislike Heartland), and I publicly defended Gleick against what I considered scurrilous and baseless charges. I specifically told people that I did not consider him to be capable of the sort of unethical acts which he actually did undertake. All I can do is apologize for feelings I hurt and insult I caused. My motives were good, but my information was clearly incomplete.

Gleick and his lawyers will battle Heartland and their lawyers over what he did or didn’t do wrong, and there’s nothing the rest of us can do to shape that result. Gleick may find shelter from lawsuits or criminal charges, but there’s no ethical defense and he hasn’t tried to offer one, simply apologizing forthrightly.

While the legal details are hashed out, the rest of us must contend with the information he exposed for public scrutiny, likely sacrificing his credibility and his life’s work in the process. Heartland seems uncowed regarding their plans to promote a denier’s curriculum, and teachers and students will suffer as the falsehoods of climate change denial and antiscience lessons are forced further into classrooms. Heartland’s efforts to craft a denialist echo chamber will continue apace, misleading and miseducating the public, the press, and policymakers about one of the greatest challenges of our day, and increasing the risks to society at large and to the most vulnerable among us in particular. How we learned about these and other plans doesn’t change them, or their tremendous risks, nor will Heartland ever offer an apology for the harm they cause. For decades, deniers and public confusion they help spawn have kept this country from having a serious discussion about the consequences of climate change and the options available to us, including a forthright explanation of the dangerous consequences of inaction.

The Heartland memos give us a chance to have that conversation, while the soap opera of how they came to the public eye could obstruct it. Heartland and Disco’ have made their preference clear. Let’s make the wiser choice.