American anti-science, unlikely to improve

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, evolution, creationism, religious prejudice

Bill Nye ("the Science Guy") claims to be cheerful and optimistic. I sure hope so, because the goal of his new book is unlikely to be realized. He rushes into the creation/evolution debate that underlies American resistance to science education, somewhat reminiscent of the old "fools/angels" proverb. But he's no fool.

Bill Nye, with coauthor/editor Corey S Powell, opens Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation with an account of his debate against Ken Ham at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, early last year. The core "sound bite" is this: both Nye and Ham were asked, "What would it take for you to reconsider your position". Bill Nye answered that it would take only a single piece of evidence that favors "creation science", and that stood up to scientific scrutiny. Ken Ham said that such a thing is not possible, because he has "the book" (meaning The Holy Bible) and will not give credence to anything not found in it.

Nye acknowledges that any possible battle has already been lost, for the allegiance of evangelical Christians who follow Mr. Ham's way of thinking. But he has hope that well-taught science in our schools can still reach their children. I'll explain just how slender that hope is shortly.

But with this hope in mind, the 37 chapters of Undeniable describe 37 aspects of evolution, evolutionary theory, and how an evolutionary understanding of biology affects our daily life. Just for instance, if you've ever had to switch antibiotics because the bug you had is resistant to the first medicine, you're a victim of evolution in action. And if your grandfather did any moth collecting in England in the early-to-mid-Twentieth Century, the Peppered Moth provided evidence in hand of natural selection in action: Prior to laws that greatly reduced air pollution, and thus to light-colored tree bark being seen again as the grime washed off, most members of this moth species were dark colored, but in the years since, the light colored varieties have again become more common, almost to the exclusion of the darker ones.

Also in England, specifically London in this case, an annoying species of Culex mosquito has diverged into two species, with the new one inhabiting subways only. About 60 years were enough for physical near-isolation to become reproductive isolation. Culex pipien was the native species in the area prior to 1940, but then "budded" a new species, Culex molestus, by around 2000. WWII is the culprit. Londoners used the subways as bomb shelters in the early 1940s, which attracted lots of Culex pipien mosquitoes underground. This near-24-hour occupation of the subway tunnels by humans and their pets meant the little biters had no reason to return above ground. They stayed, they bred, and in 50-60 generations they diverged enough to become the new species.

The book abounds with examples of contingency in evolutionary development. How else to explain a nerve in a giraffe's neck that loops down, up and down again, except by comparing it to the path of the same nerve in short-necked ungulates to which giraffes are related? Then we see that, as the neck elongated, a nerve that follows a straight path between two blood vessels when necks are short has to loop around now that they have become further and further apart. Apparently, an innocent choice of nerve routing 50 million years ago has led to a rather unusual path for that nerve today. There is a similar loopiness in the male human urethra, which can be puzzled out by comparing with the very small primates that probably most resemble the first primates. Nye doesn't mention this one; after all, he's writing for youngsters.

There is a powerful argument in Chapter 21: "good enough". There is a lot of talk in creationist circles about the "perfection" of the human form. It is manifest that we are far from perfect, in form or in any other way. The standard riposte is that Adam was perfect, and we have degenerated. I wonder: did his urethra loop around in the same nonsensical way as ours? What we see throughout the biosphere is creatures that are good enough to thrive in their environment, but no better. Why should they be better than they have to be? It isn't cost-effective.

Tropical climes have abundant species of all kinds because, all year, it is Summertime, and the Livin' is Easy. It is just easier for all sorts of critters to make a living there. Go to a high mountaintop or into the high Arctic or Antarctic, and only a small number of species are found. Life is harder, and few species have the adaptations needed to survive there.

I just recalled that Krill, the tiny shrimplike critters that most baleen whales eat, do best in water very near 40°F (4.5°C), and die of overheating at 50°F (10°C). From time to time some are carried too far from the pole by shifting currents and perish as the water warms. I suppose a Krill would me "more perfect" if it could survive higher temperatures, but making the extra chemicals to do so would cost something, using more energy and resources. The cost-benefit balance that evolution has struck works well for the species. They are good enough.

So, our bodies and minds are good enough for us to earn some kind of living (usually), reproduce (usually), and raise our children (usually) until they can fend for themselves (usually) and also reproduce (usually). That is five "usually"s, because there are no guarantees. Think of this: Abraham Lincoln had four children. He has no living descendants. Every descending line died out by the late Twentieth Century. Whatever benefit the genes of Honest Abe might have had for humanity, all are lost except those few that survive in the descendants of a few of his cousins.

But none of the 37 items in this book will convince someone who has been taught that evolution is anti-Bible. And just how does one reach the children of Evangelical Christians (in whose ranks most anti-evolution folks reside)? Many entire congregations seem to exist for no other reason than to support the Ken Hams of the world and propagate that message. Though I think it "another Gospel" and thus anathema, they don't see it that way.

I see both sides. I am an Evangelical Christian, meaning that I favor gospel preaching and take a rather literal view of The Holy Bible. But I am also a scientist, with degrees in Geology and Geological Engineering. I excelled at paleontology as an undergraduate, and I still like to collect the odd fossil now and again. But even though I am "fluent" in both "languages", the scientific and the theological, there's no convincing most of my fellow believers that evolution is no threat to their faith. They have been taught an interpretation of the Bible that is in error. They would think me a heretic.

The fact is, most people, religious or not, are insecure. It seems the only people who are totally secure in their self-image are psychopaths. To be insecure and religious is to be in near-constant fear of "damaging" your faith somehow. This simple fact underlies every form of religious extremism. It is also well known that, no matter what religion, about a third of the children defect, at least inwardly, during their teen years, and no more than a third of those return to the faith. Christian churches in particular nearly all have special classes for parents trying to "win their children back to the faith." Those parents don't need one more reason for paranoia.

The more fearful among them place their children in private schools or get supplementary religion-sanctioned instruction, if they can afford it. Actually, most American Christians aren't sufficiently afraid of evolution nor of science in general to worry what their children might be learning in any school, private or public. But the terrified, noisy anti-science bunch have a disproportionate effect in the churches. It is they who drive out any pastor who doesn't toe the line of hyper-Creationism. It is they who have the energy to undertake ecclesiastical and public politics. They who vote in, and campaign in, school board elections. And thus they control science education where they can, and influence it everywhere.

Bill Nye calls his arguments "undeniable", and they are, to anyone capable of scientific thought. The terror-stricken Evangelical Creationists cannot think scientifically, and do their best to ensure their children will mirror them. Poor "Science Guy". You're up against a behemoth, and only the tiniest of victories is possible for at least the next couple of generations. I hope humanity survives.

Ignorance on trial in PA

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, creationism, intelligent design, evolutionary debate

The 21^st Century "Monkey Trial" took place in Dover, PA, just a couple years ago. Many folks I knew were incredulous that there could still be such an anti-science bias in a whole school board. After all, Pennsylvania is a politically, socially, and religiously liberal state, the home of "Outcome-Based Education", so hated by conservatives in "flyover country" like Oklahoma or Kentucky (Anti-OBE activism was the particular hobby horse of several good friends when we lived in the Bible Belt). Let's not forget that, if you take away Philadelphia and a couple of elite neighborhoods near CMU in Pittsburgh, you have a state filled with staunch conservatives, regardless of their registered political party.

Matthew Chapman, a confirmed liberal and Bush-hater (clearly expressed in several asides), and an apparently born atheist, went to Dover to cover the trial, firmly believing that creationism has no place in the classroom. He came away believing every kind of creationism should be presented to the children, but not for any reason you might guess.

I simply must show the jacket photo of the author. Looking like he's ready to counter-punch the photographer, he plays host, either to some three dozen ants attracted to sugar drippings on his white shirt, or to a bunch of stickers artfully arranged. I vote for the former.

In Forty Days and Forty Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin®, and other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania, author Chapman presents a running summary of the events that preceded and eventually caused the lawsuit and trial, the trial itself, and the aftermath of a divided small town. Along the way, we get glimpses of most of the protagonists—and there were many—from his interviews and observations.

Most of these are likeable folks. Chapman liked them, almost all. A few, particularly Bill Buckingham, who started it all, and a hell-fire preacher who watched proceedings as an interested party, went out of their way to be jerks. Nearly all are Christians, though of widely differing traditions. One couple, who were among those who sued the Dover school board to have Intelligent Design (ID) dropped from the curriculum, left a lasting impression; he came away thinking, "If I were a Christian, these were the kinds of Christians I would want to be like." They lived their faith, and it showed.

How sad, that the Bill Buckinghams of the world are so spiritually insecure they find every little thing a threat, and cannot feel safe unless they ram their narrow vision of what the Bible "must" mean down everyone's throat. As Chapman mentions more than once, it seemed paradoxical that people expecting the bliss of heaven should be the angriest and most bitter. He also exposed the willful ignorance of many, who didn't bother to read or study material from either side of the debate, trusting what others told them, to the point that Bill Buckingham, asked to define ID, gave a pretty good definition of Natural Selection! Jesus did say we ought to be "harmless as doves", but preceded that with "wise as serpents." The pro-ID people are seen to be wise as doves and as "harmless" as serpents.

Of the articles and longer pieces I've read on this trial, this book is by far the best treatment. And why does he want creationism taught? When children have been taught to understand the scientific method and the power of evidence-based reason, you can show them forty kinds of "creation science" and they'll clearly see it isn't science at all.

ID: Not bad science, just not science at all, or, Worthy Minds being Wasted

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, book comparisons, evolution, faith, creationism, intelligent design, science, suasion, persuasion

Michael Shermer is a former evangelical Christian, now America's leading skeptic. Joan Roughgarden is a professor of Biology, an evolutionary biologist, who is also a devout Episcopal Christian. Both authors earned PhD degrees in evolutionary science.

Dr. Shermer has written the clearly polemical (to me this word is not negative, but indicative of forcible argumentation) Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, and Dr. Roughgarden the more conciliatory, but almost parallel in argumentation, Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist (What Jesus and Darwin Have in Common). The two books have the same aim: to show that, even ignoring its close affiliation with Biblical Creationism, even giving it the benefit of the doubt, even taking at face value the stated aim of finding signs of miraculous intervention in biological relationships: Intelligent Design (ID) is not science.

Here is the basic point, made in much the same way by both writers: science seeks entirely natural explanations for natural phenomena. By definition, it can have nothing to say about supernatural things. Thus the premise of ID is invalid. The endeavor is fatally flawed from square zero.

Isaiah declared, in a long passage about both God's creation and His directing Cyrus to allow Israel to be restored, "Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God and Savior of Israel." (This same passage later states that God didn't create the Earth in the condition we find it in Genesis 1:2, a key verse to refute young-Earth creationists). One of the Proverbs states, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings." If God is as great and powerful as we claim, is it not within His power, and consonant with His nature, to cover His tracks? God is not bold in His glory, He is rather shy. He is to be found, not in the earthquake or tornado, but in a whisper, as Elijah learned.

Both authors wish scientists, many of whom are believers, and believers, some of whom are also scientists, to make peace. Both, as do I, consider the great heat and fury being raised about "godless evolution" by some Christians is not only a tragic waste of talent best used elsewhere, but an actual benefit to enemies of God. Irate tirades drive more from the faith than they gain to it.

Sadly, neither author is likely to convince his or her intended audience. Even fence-sitting Christians will "consider the source" in the case of Mike Shermer, now (temporarily, in my view) an agnostic, and discount him without a fair hearing. I have to say that he is one of my favorite authors. I read his columns in Scientific American monthly, frequently with much delight. Whether it is the influence of his period of active evanglism, or general good nature (of course, I believe it is both), he is honest almost to a fault. His book contains much for the thoughtful Christian to ponder, a greater and grander vision of our God than most of us have considered. And while Joan Roughgarden is well known in her own circle, many skeptical scientists will discount her because of her great faith, while many Christians will consider her opinion suspect, a case of "where you stand depends on where you sit"; that is, 'She earns a living from evolution, so of course she'd defend it'.

I once got into an argument with a colleague who thought God was actually a "supertechnologist". He was persuaded by Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I could not persuade him that supernatural events would be different in kind from any possible technology. But this leads to Shermer's Last Law: "Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God." I say that is nonsense. Consider the intriguing goings-on whenever the Star Trek crew bumps into Q, the omnipotent being who isn't quite as omnipotent as some of his relatives, but can nonetheless do just about what he wants—including waiting until the end of the universe to escape from whatever prison his enemies put him in, then going back in time to break it open earlier than that. It makes you wonder, is there room in any universe or multiverse for more than one omnipotent being?

None of the Star Trek authors needs to explain how Q does what he does. He's omnipotent, so his supernaturality is taken for granted. But, not so fast: we must recall that Star Trek operates in an imaginary universe with a major fantasy element. Very advanced brains are assumed to become able to affect matter directly. ESP grows in direct proportion to intellect. This in spite of the very total failure of Rhine or anyone else to prove that there is any kind of ESP, let alone any correlation between ESP and brain power.

No super-technologist will ever raise a four-days-dead Lazarus. A quick cure for Hansen's Disease (leprosy) may one day be found. Prosthetic eyes may restore sight to some. But there is no natural method for stopping the Sun in the sky, simply because there is no technology that can remove the inertia of Earth, its atmosphere, and all the things on its surface so its rotation can be insensibly but instantly halted for some period, then restarted. Nor will there ever be. Besides, God may not have stopped Earth's rotation to benefit Joshua's battle with the Amalekites, anyway. He'd have found it easier to put a substitute Sun into geostationary orbit for a while, and blocked the real Sun in the meantime...or interrupted the flow of time locally...assuming words like "easier" are meaningful to God anyway!

Dr. Roughgarden makes one point that I can really identify with. I am a computer programmer with forty years experience. I've seen programs of all kinds, as I've make a bit of a cottage industry out of paring down fifty pages of bad code into two pages of good code, that usually works better. She points out the big difference between algorithms that are designed by a programmer, regardless of skill and those that are produced by "genetic programming" methods.

Genetic programming is artificial evolution running inside a computer. You have a well-defined problem to solve, that is difficult to program by conventional means. Typically, this is to simulate the behavior of something, such as traffic flow on a superhighway, or electricity in a thunderstorm. So you take small chunks of code in a special computer language (one designed for code chunks to be mixed & matched without things getting messed up), and generate a few dozen programs made from random collections of those chunks. Then you run these various programs with a test set of inputs, and see how they perform, compared to the natural system.

A supervisory program handles the details of running test after test and compositing the results. At the end of the first test, most of the randomly-mixed programs will have failed to run at all. Some will have run for some cases, and maybe a few will have at least produced some result for all test cases, with variously errant output. The ones that could complete the tasks are those you select for the next stage. Suppose there are five. You mix and match parts of these five (actually another supervisory program does this for you), producing perhaps a hundred "sexual" offspring. Run and test again. This time a larger number will complete the tests, and some will do better than others. Suppose you take the ten best, remix and continue. As added fuel for such digital evolution to work on, at each stage, small "mutations", random code changes and code duplications, are introduced into ten or twenty percent of the offspring.

In general five or six "generations" will yield a few programs that simulate the natural system rather well, and five or six more will produce a superstar or two that do very well indeed. Now, look at the code in them. Such code is very hard to follow. Things are done all out of order, it seems. Large chunks seem to do nothing, but if you remove one of them, the program is likely to fail entirely, or its errors greatly increase. It looks nothing like something any human programmer would design.

This is precisely what we find when we look at the DNA of natural creatures, from bacteria to fruit flies to humans. Comparing genomes we find that the insulin gene, for example, is a cobbled-up variation on something bacteria use to make a structural protein. Insulin wasn't created from nothing for its natural purpose, it was edited from something co-opted from another function. Not having the same structural needs as a bacterium we don't need that protein for its original use, but we do need its remixed descendant to digest glucose.

In all those animals that need insulin for digestion, it is very similar; once the cobbling-up happened, it was found too useful to discard, so we find that it is very, very similar among all mammals, though not exactly identical. Many diabetics' lives are saved by injections of pig insulin, though some (me included) are allergic to it (No, I am not a diabetic; there are other conditions that insulin can treat in short-term use). Pig insulin is the right SHAPE to work well in humans, even though a few amino acids are different between human and pig insulin, and biochemistry is all about shape; chemistry become geometry.

My conclusion of long ago, confirmed by Dr. Roughgarden: the DNA of all creatures shows clear evidence of evolutionary production, and none of any programmer's intervention.

As much as I love her writing, I must, however, protest one point this author makes. In part of her chapter on sexual variation, an area in which she thinks Darwin got it wrong (and I tend to agree), she engages in a passionate defense of homosexuality. Here, re-interpreting Lev. 18:22, she interprets the prohibition against a man who "lies with another man as one lies with a woman" as a matter of God defining what sexual positions are and are not permitted. This is the greatest mis-construction of a biblical interpretation I've ever encountered.

This chapter is mostly concerned with defining all the relationships in which sex is forbidden, listing a man's mother, stepmother, aunt, daughter, girlfriend's daughter, girlfriend's grandchildren, nieces, and several others (notice the man is the main perpetrator in all cases). This takes twenty verses. Verse 21 forbids offering one's children to Moloch, which by context probably includes a sexual act, then verse 22 forbids homosexual activity.

The idea that what is being forbidden is a certain sexual position two men may assume, while permitting others by silence, is ignorant in the extreme. The very next verse forbids sex with animals, by implication the only thing worse than man-man sex, and the chapter closes with more general exhortations and penalties.

The 20th chapter, not mentioned by Dr. Roughgarden, places sexual sins in a larger context. The first item is sacrificing children to Moloch, in verse 5 saying they are "prostituting themselves to Moloch." Verse 6 forbids mediums and spiritists, and 7-8 demands the people consecrate themselves instead to holiness.

From Lev. 20:9-21, many of the same sexual sins of chapter 18 are repeated, with man-man sex as the centerpiece in verse 13. "Fine", one might say, "two verses...so what?" There are six more, in which the King James version uses the word "Sodomites," but more modern versions like the NIV use "male shrine prostitues". They are detestable to God, and at least three of the kings of Israel exterminated or exiled them in bunches. These kings are praised for doing so.

Let us be clear, there may be evolutionary reasons for homosexual activity (male dominance rituals seen among apes, diversionary activities because of frustration in rejected reptiles and birds, and a number of others), just as there are evolutionary reasons for some cases of murder and infanticide (a father wolf will kill his own offspring if it is too abusive of its siblings). But a big part of the Biblical message is that God is raising morality to a higher standard, and sexual activity is one big portion thereof. Modern secular liberals don't like the idea, but it can't be denied. I find it instructive to ask them, "If you say gay relations shouldn't be considered sinful, how about sex with one's children or grandchildren, nieces and nephews? They are forbidden in the same section of the Bible. How will you react if your brother sleeps with your daughter?"

Finally, to close, it is clear to anyone who really knows science that Intelligent Design is not science, and equally clear that it is poor theology. ID, and the abusive creationism it came from, are defensive reactions of people so insecure in their faith, and so narrow in their misunderstanding of the Bible, that they make God too narrow for the Universe, boxing Him into it rather than glorifying Him for His transcendence over it. Their faith is not my faith, and their God is not my God, nor that of the Bible. They will never be convinced, except perhaps a few. A pity.