Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Competing for Title of ‘Most Sensitive’

    Tendency to assume loudest religious groups represent everyone in their communities.

  • Fatwa on Rushdie Reaffirmed

    ‘History shows that the Muslims have in no era accepted their sanctities being defiled.’

  • A Certain Storman ‘Norman’ Geras on Radio

    Famous obscure Marxist talks about blogs and Iraq war.

  • President of NAAS Contradicts Michael Behe

    ‘Because “intelligent design” theories are based on supernatural explanations, they can have nothing to do with science.’

  • Conversation With John Searle

    To do philosophy well you have to know everything, and no one does.

  • Happy Darwin Day

    Science is our most reliable knowledge system, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity.

  • Science Teachers Refuse to Read ID Statement

    The struggle between ‘Godly America’ and ‘Worldly America’ continues.

  • US Government Scientists Told to Alter Findings

    Commercial interests applied political pressure to reverse conclusions thought harmful to business.

  • High Tension

    A couple of further thoughts on the Taboo question. There is a lot of tension in all this – because there are some rational, non-ostrich-like, non-fingers-in-ears, non-You Can’t Say That reasons for worry about, for instance, saying that a particular identifiable set of people may have, in however small a statistical sense, less of a given ability than another set or sets. One such reason is the self-fulfilling prophesy. The worry is that if you tell people – especially and all the more so if you tell them officially academically scientifically studies have shownically – that they are, or they belong to a group or subset of the population that is, statistically, however slightly and tail end effectly, innately less good at X, there is very often a strong tendency for the people in question to give up on X as a result. To relax their efforts, to decide it’s hopeless, to give themselves permission not to bang their heads against a wall.

    A book on US education, The Learning Gap, by Harold Stevenson and James Stigler, discusses one aspect of this problem in chapter 5, Effort and Ability. They argue that Americans put more emphasis on innate ability while Chinese and Japanese people put more on persistent effort. ‘In sum, the relative importance people assign to factors beyond their control, like ability, compared to factors that they can control, like effort, can strongly influence the way they approach learning. Ability models subvert learning…’ I have a friend who teaches high school math, and she is apt to go off like a bomb when anyone says maybe girls and women find math more difficult than boys and men. She spends much of her working life trying to counter that idea in her girl students: she says they believe it, and the result is that they don’t try. I find that highly plausible, since that was my own attitude to math when I was in school – I decided very early that I hated it and was no good at it, so I never tried hard enough.

    So you can see where such ideas can be disastrous. Group X is good at A. B, and C. I belong to group X: I’m good at A-C, less good at D-W. What follows is not only ‘I’ll do better at A-C, I might fail at D-W, A-C will be easier,’ and the like. There is also the even more insidious thought that ‘I won’t be an authentic X if I try to do D-W. Xs don’t do D-W, it’s not their scene, it’s a Y thing, a Z thing, not an X thing. I’m proud to be an X, I don’t want to imitate Ys or Zs – even or especially if Ys and Zs are above Xs in the social hierarchy. That’s all the more reason to be a loyal X, an authentic X. Ys and Zs are successful, rich, important, powerful, sure, but-therefore, they are wicked, heartless, selfish, materialistic, phony, money-mad, alienated, too clever by half. I will never desert my people – I will do X things.’

    So…one can see why people would want everyone to just shut up about the possibility of a statistical tail end effect in women’s math ability, even if it is or may be true. But at the same time one can also see that that wanting everyone to shut up about something is generally incompatible with scholarship and inquiry. So there’s a tension. It makes my head hurt. Kind of the way algebra used to.

  • Norman Geras on the Reductions of the Left

    When imperialism is the only thing and everything else is epiphenomenal.

  • Marxist Storm Eats Toast With Neocons

    Sunday Times meets Norm Geras.

  • Arthur Miller

    Writing plays was for him like breathing.

  • Death of a Playwright

    Michael Billington: ‘He had to create a tradition rather than inheriting one.’

  • More Republican Fans Than He Wants

    Hitchens was getting bored with politics and politicians.

  • Michael Ruse’s Eulogy for Ernst Mayr

    Long, detailed, indispensable.

  • No, US Was not Founded on ‘Christian Principles’

    The founders were deists and atheists, not godbotherers.

  • US Opposes Criminal Court Action on Darfur

    Bush administration doesn’t want to ‘legitimize’ the International Criminal Court.

  • Samantha Power on Bush Admin and ICC

    Admin has denounced genocide in Darfur, good, but blocked ICC, bad.

  • Taboo U

    There is a lot of discussion of the Taboo mentality going on right now – which is good, in the sense that the dangers of the taboo mentality are being pointed out, but it’s bad, in the sense that there is also a lot of Taboo mentality around right now. Is it worth it to have some people thinking badly to give an occasion for other people to explain what’s wrong with bad thinking? Wouldn’t it be better and simpler just to have everyone thinking clearly to begin with? Yes, probably, but since that’s not going to happen, it’s a good thing there are people around to do some nudging.

    Salman Rushdie at Open Democracy, for example.

    At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people’s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

    There’s a lot of disagreement over that thought, but it seems right to me. Declaring a set of ideas immune from criticism or satire does seem like the one thing you don’t want to do with a set of ideas. You could say that that’s what the word ‘God’ is for – a kind of imaginary rubber stamp or strongbox or chastity belt serving to render a particular set of ideas undiscussable, unchangeable, non-negotiable. Given what human ideas can be and what they can do, that seems like a very risky approach.

    Steven Pinker in The New Republic is talking about the same general idea, though in a different instantiation.

    To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true…

    And not only history. An easy thought-experiment can show us the same thing. Let’s see…I want it to be true that there is a steaming-hot pizza with feta, pesto and artichokes on the table. But there isn’t, and it isn’t. I guess my wanting isn’t all that powerful, then.

    What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair–the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo–the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them–is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense.

    As a matter of fact, it was reading Pinker on Tetlock and others on taboo that inspired my colleague to create the ‘Taboo’ game. Of course, some ideas are ‘so dangerous’ – the ideas that swirl around ethnic cleansing, genocide, purity, eugenics, generally cleaning up humanity by thinning it out radically, are an obvious example. But as Pinker puts it –

    Unfortunately, the psychology of taboo is incompatible with the ideal of scholarship, which is that any idea is worth thinking about, if only to determine whether it is wrong…The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.

    Yes. Books published by Taboo University Press are not the ones that promise a searching look at which ideas are wrong for what reasons. I’ll order mine from Free Inquiry Press, thanks.

  • Behe Jumps the Shark

    Nick Matzke has also commented on this, but the op-ed is so bad I can’t resist piling on. From the very first sentence, Michael Behe’s op-ed in today’s NY Times is an exercise in unwarranted hubris.

    In the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design.

    And it’s all downhill from there.

    Intelligent Design creationism is not a “rival theory.” It is an ad hoc pile of mush, and once again we catch a creationist using the term “theory” as if it means “wild-ass guess.” I think a theory is an idea that integrates and explains a large body of observation, and is well supported by the evidence, not a random idea about untestable mechanisms which have not been seen. I suspect Behe knows this, too, and what he is doing is a conscious bait-and-switch. See here, where he asserts that there is evidence for ID:

    Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims.

    This is where he first pulls the rug over the reader’s eyes. He claims the Intelligent Design guess is based on physical evidence, and that he has four lines of argument; you’d expect him to then succinctly list the evidence, as was done in the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ on the talkorigins site. He doesn’t. Not once in the entire op-ed does he give a single piece of this “physical evidence.” Instead, we get four bald assertions, every one false.

    The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature.

    He then tells us that Mt Rushmore is designed, and the Rocky Mountains aren’t. How is this an argument for anything? Nobody is denying that human beings design things, and that Mt Rushmore was carved with intelligent planning. Saying that Rushmore was designed does not help us resolve whether the frond of a fern is designed.

    Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too.

    No, this is controversial, in the sense that Behe is claiming it while most biologists are denying it. Again, he does not present any evidence to back up his contention, but instead invokes two words: “Paley” and “machine.”

    The Reverend Paley, of course, is long dead and his argument equally deceased,
    thoroughly scuttled    . I will give Behe credit that he only wants to turn the clock of science back to about 1850, rather than 1350, as his fellow creationists at the Discovery Institute seem to desire, but resurrecting Paley won’t help him.

    The rest of his argument consists of citing a number of instances of biologists using the word “machine” to refer to the workings of a cell. This is ludicrous; he’s playing a game with words, assuming that everyone will automatically link the word “machine” to “design.” But of course, Crick and Alberts and the other scientists who compared the mechanism of the cell to an intricate machine were making no presumption of design.

    There is another sneaky bit of dishonesty here; Behe is trying to use the good names of Crick and Alberts to endorse his crackpot theory, when the creationists know full well that Crick did not believe in ID, and that Alberts has been vocal in his opposition.

    So far, Behe’s argument has been that “it’s obvious!”, accompanied by a little sleight of hand. It doesn’t get any better.

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

    Oh, so many creationists tropes in such a short paragraph.

    Remember, this is supposed to be an outline of the evidence for Intelligent Design creationism. Declaring that evolutionary biology is “no good” is not evidence for his pet guess.

    Similarly, declaring that some small minority of scientists, most of whom seem to be employed by creationist organizations like the Discovery Institute or the Creation Research Society or Answers in Genesis, does not make their ideas correct. Some small minority of historians also believe the Holocaust never happened; does that validate their denial? There are also people who call themselves physicists and engineers who promote perpetual motion machines. Credible historians, physicists, and engineers repudiate all of these people, just as credible biologists repudiate the fringe elements that babble about intelligent design.

    The last bit of his claim is simply Behe’s standard misrepresentation. For years, he’s been going around telling people that he has analyzed the content of the Journal of Molecular Evolution and that they have never published anything on “detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures”, and that the textbooks similarly lack any credible evidence for such processes. Both claims are false. A list of research studies that show exactly what he claims doesn’t exist is easily found.

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

    How does Behe get away with this?

    How does this crap get published in the NY Times?

    Look at what he is doing: he is simply declaring that there is no convincing explanation in biology that doesn’t require intelligent design, therefore Intelligent Design creationism is true. But thousands of biologists think the large body of evidence in the scientific literature is convincing! Behe doesn’t get to just wave his hands and have all the evidence for evolutionary biology magically disappear; he is trusting that his audience, lacking any knowledge of biology, will simply believe him.

    After this resoundingly vacant series of non-explanations, Behe tops it all off with a cliche.

    The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it’s a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it’s so obvious.

    Behe began this op-ed by telling us that he was going to give us the contemporary argument for Intelligent Design creationism, consisting of four linked claims. Here’s a shorter Behe for you:

    The evidence for Intelligent Design.

    • It’s obvious.
    • It’s obvious!
    • Evolutionary explanations are no good.
    • There aren’t any good evolutionary explanations.

    That’s it.

    That’s pathetic.

    And it’s in the New York Times? Journalism has fallen on very hard times.

    This article was first published on Pharyngula and appears here by permission.