Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Wot’s the Big Idea

    Goodhart, Brockman, Greenfield, Bentley on Sen. Also Bunting, Klein. Oh well.

  • Simon Singh Reviews Steve Jones’s Single Helix

    ‘In addition to the amusing and sinister essays, there are the angry ones, which are my real favourites.’

  • Insipid Design

    Well, yes. It’s an obvious thought, isn’t it. One of the first that occurs to us, in fact. If the Designer is so damn intelligent, why aren’t we better? Why isn’t everything? I mean, is this supposed to be optimal? You’re kidding, right?

    Far be it from me to kick an idea when it’s down, but I do wonder whether proponents of ID have really thought this through…Because if we were designed by God, it wasn’t on one of His better days.

    Yeah you could say that.

    Why would an intelligent designer equip each of us with an appendix — an organ whose sole purpose is to become infected and periodically explode? If this was Intelligent Design, then it implies the designer hates us the way many interior designers hate the people who actually live in their creations.

    Right so the appendix is kind of like a cook or server spitting in your soup. That and one or two other glitches I can think of. Backs, colons, cholesterol, knees. And if we asked giraffes or hummingbirds or snakes or worms, they might have a few items to throw into the pot too. Maybe snakes and worms would actually like to have arms and legs, you know? Ever thought of that? No, neither did the oh so clever designer, either, apparently. Unless it did, and witheld them to be mean.

    Remember, if we are the products of an Intelligent Design, there’s no excuse for such design flaws. It would be like buying a new car and finding out someone had forgotten to include brakes. I wouldn’t call that Intelligent Design.

    Well, exactly. I wrote an essay for TPM Online a couple of years ago that says much the same thing.

    It’s all such a ramshackly arrangement, really. Who set this up? A little more imagination wouldn’t have been a bad idea. Some bigger thinking. Quite a lot more generosity, scope, long-term planning wouldn’t have come amiss. Following things through, realizing implications, seeing where all these pathetic contrivances were going to lead – you’d think that would be part of the job, quite frankly. To be brutally honest, one wonders if whoever did this even had an engineering degree. Degree, hell, one wonders if the poor bungler ever even took a single class. Maybe it was an eight o’clock, is that it? Sleep too attractive, so the result is we have to put up with these ridiculous bodies that break so easily, that get stiff and slow and then stop altogether, that ooze and drip all sorts of foul smelly liquids, that have to be fueled every few hours and turned completely off for nearly a third of every day, that get too cold or too hot, tired or sick, frightened or sad, angry or deranged? That come with throats that get sore, lungs that fill with fluid, guts that malfunction, teeth that rot and crack? And of course there’s no warranty. In short, one or two design flaws, wouldn’t you say? Rather obvious design flaws? I mean, what were they doing? Working with their eyes shut? Did they not test the product? Did they just slap something together and then ship without even checking it, or what? It’s not as if these things are subtle, or hard to detect. It’s not as if they don’t show up right away, is it.

    I even mentioned the car without brakes. (Well it is an obvious example, isn’t it, so that’s not surprising.)

    It is hard not to get exasperated. It’s all so obvious. A child could have noticed. (Maybe it is a child?) It’s not just the bodies, though they’re bad enough, it’s so many other things too. This place we’re given to live, for instance –

    I mean, it has such potential. Don’t get me wrong. Of course I realize that, I’m not stupid, I’m not blind, I know about the good bits. I’ve stood and marveled at the oceans with the best of them. Sunsets, stars, mountains, waterfalls, flowers, fruit – all lovely, yes, I know. I admire it all as much as anyone. But so what? Does that mean the not-so-good parts are not a problem? Do we usually think about things that way? ‘Well this shirt is a lovely colour so I really don’t mind that it’s full of holes. This car has excellent tires so it’s okay that the brakes don’t work.’ No I don’t think so, I think we want all the parts to work, thank you very much, not just some of them. Is that so much to ask?

    And why can’t we fly? And live forever, but hibernate for awhile when we get bored? And make some kind of electric ray shoot out of our heads so that all the cell phones within a quarter of a mile would stop working? And if we wanted not to have hair on some particular part of our bodies where there was hair, just decide not to have it there and be done with it? And go deaf whenever we wanted to, and stop being deaf whenever we wanted to do that? And have a filter so that we would hear what we wanted to hear and not hear what we didn’t want to hear? And live underwater if we feel like it? And see in the dark? And be invisible? And have our own climate control dial built into the backs of our hands?

    Intelligent designer ha. Just ha. Inattentive designer. Inept designer. Inclined to do sloppy work designer. In for a nasty shock if it expects me to give it a round of applause designer.

  • Reactions to the Dover Decision on Intelligent Design (with special attention to the unfortunate intervention by Professor Alschuler)

    This blog has a rather lengthy compendium of links pertaining to yesterday’s court decision. The New York Times, meanwhile, has run a pleasingly direct editorial:

    Judge Jones’s decision was a striking repudiation of intelligent design, given that Dover’s policy was minimally intrusive on classroom teaching. Administrators merely read a brief disclaimer at the beginning of a class asserting that evolution was a theory, not a fact; that there were gaps in the evidence for evolution; and that intelligent design provided an alternative explanation and could be further explored by consulting a book in the school library. Yet even that minimal statement amounted to an endorsement of religion, the judge concluded, because it caused students to doubt the theory of evolution without scientific justification and presented them with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.

    The case was most notable for its searching inquiry into whether intelligent design could be considered science. The answer, after a six-week trial that included hours of expert testimony, was a resounding no.

    The judge found that intelligent design violated the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking supernatural causation and by making assertions that cannot be tested or proved wrong. Moreover, intelligent design has not gained acceptance in the scientific community, has not been supported by peer-reviewed research, and has not generated a research and testing program of its own. The core argument for intelligent design – the supposedly irreducible complexity of key biological systems – has clear theological overtones. As long ago as the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that because nature is complex, it must have a designer.

    The religious thrust behind Dover’s policy was unmistakable. The board members who pushed the policy through had repeatedly expressed religious reasons for opposing evolution, though they tried to dissemble during the trial. Judge Jones charged that the two ringleaders lied in depositions to hide the fact that they had raised money at a church to buy copies of an intelligent design textbook for the school library. He also found that board members were strikingly ignorant about intelligent design and that several individuals had lied time and again to hide their religious motivations for backing the concept. Their contention that they had a secular purpose – to improve science education and encourage critical thinking – was declared a sham.

    Less pleasing is the intervention by Albert Alschuler, a distinguished criminal law expert at the University of Chicago, whose ill-informed and misleading comments on this decision have already been picked up with glee by the Discovery [sic] Institute shills. (The first commenter on the Chicago site corrects some of the errors in Professor Alschuler’s presentation as well.) Professor Alschuler writes:

    The first amendment makes intelligent design unmentionable in the classroom.

    But that is not what the decision held at all: it held that it violates the Establishment Clause to include Intelligent Design as part of the science curriculum or to teach it to schoolchildren as though it were in competition with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

    While professing to offer no opinion concerning the truth of intelligent design, the court consistently reveals its contempt for this theory.

    But the theory warrants the contempt appropriate to misinformation and deceit, and which the court’s opinion detailed: it has generated no research program or results; it is supported by no evidence; it is creationism for those who have consulted a lawyer and a public relations expert. (See the summary at 64 of the opinion, which is then amply documented in the subsequent pages. The court could have put the point about supernatural causation more effectively, but otherwise the claims are sound.)

    Most of the Dover opinion says in effect to the proponents of intelligent design, “We know who you are. You’re Bible-thumpers.” The opinion begins, “The religious movement known as Fundamentalism began in nineteenth century America as a response to social changes, new religious thought, and Darwinism. Religiously motivated groups pushed state legislatures to adopt laws prohibiting public schools from teaching evolution, culminating in the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925.” When the Fundamentalists (the court often capitalizes the word) found themselves unable to ban Darwinism, they championed “balanced treatment,” then “creation science,” and finally “intelligent design.” According to the court, the agenda never changed. Dover is simply Scopes trial redux. The proponents of intelligent design are guilty by association, and today’s yahoos are merely yesterday’s reincarnated.

    There is no guilt-by-association argument in the court’s opinion, and this is a serious misrepresentation of the court’s methodical approach in this case, one that can not be rationalized by saying “in effect”. The court did not, in fact, “begin” with a discussion of fundamentalism; that discussion began on page 7 of the opinion in the context of establishing the constitutional standards governing adjudication of the controversy. To that end, the court, quite correctly, reviews the history of efforts to impose versions of creationism in the public schools and the constitutional standards that evolved in response to legal challenges. The court’s (uncontroversial) interpretation of the “effect” prong of the Lemon test (for Establishment Clause violations) leads it to conclude that to determine whether or not the Dover Board policy “endorses” religion the policy must be considered from the standpoint of an informed, objective observer–an observer who is informed, among other things, about the relevant historical and cultural context in which the policy is adopted. (See esp. 15-19 of the opinion.) Because the meaning or “effect” of the Dover Board’s actions can only be evaluated against the background of fundamentalist efforts to inject religion into the public school classroom, the court has to attend to that background. (A technical sidenote: the court, in fact, distinguished the “endorsement” test from the “effects” test, though noting that “the Lemon effect test largely covers the same ground as the endorsement test.” For reasons of simplicity, I’m just going to refer to the two interchangeably.)

    If fundamentalism still means what it meant in the early twentieth century, however — accepting the Bible as literal truth — the champions of intelligent design are not fundamentalists. They uniformly disclaim reliance on the Book and focus only on where the biological evidence leads.

    There is one irrelevant truth here and one falsehood. It is true, but irrelevant, that the ID proponents are not committed to the literal truth of the Book of Genesis: that is what they learned won’t fly from the last round of successful constitutional challenges in the 1980s. (As the court demonstrated (p. 33): “The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates…that the systemic change from ‘creation’ to ‘intelligent design’ occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision. This compelling evidence strongly supports Plantiffs’ assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled.”)

    It is false, however, that proponents of ID “focus only on where the biological evidence leads,” and false for two reasons: first, no inference to the best explanation of the evidence would support positing an intelligent designer (as the court nicely puts it, “ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed” [71]); and second, the ID proponents routinely misrepresent the biological evidence, finding inexplicable complexity where there is none; all of this was amply documented at the trial and in the court’s opinion (see esp. 76 ff.). All of this is old news to anyone who has followed these tiresome debates. All of it, alas, is absent from Professor Alschuler’s version.

    The court’s response – “well, that’s what they say, but we know what they mean” – is uncivil, an illustration of the dismissive and contemptuous treatment that characterizes much contemporary discourse. Once we know who you are, we need not listen. We’ve heard it all already.

    Unfortunately, the only party to this dispute saying “that’s what they say, but we know what they mean” is Professor Alschuler, who simply ignores page after page of the court’s opinion detailing the expert testimony and the evidence in the record as to the Dover Board’s purposes and the scientific standing of ID, and instead says that what the court “really means” is some version of the “guilt-by-association” argument it nowhere makes.

    The court offers convincing evidence that some members the Dover school board would have been delighted to promote their old time religion in the classroom. These board members apparently accepted intelligent design as a compromise, the nearest they could come to their objective within the law. Does that make any mention of intelligent design unconstitutional? It seems odd to characterize the desire to go far as the law allows as an unlawful motive. People who try to stay within the law although they would prefer something else are good citizens. The Dover opinion appears to say that the forbidden preference taints whatever the board may do, and if the public can discern the board’s improper desire, any action it takes also has an unconstitutional effect.

    This confusing paragraph seems to conflate the “effect” and “purpose” prongs of Lemon, which are clearly distinguished by the court. The court argues that the Dover policy had the “effect” of endorsing religion (see esp. 38-42 of the opinion–or the summary at 49-50 [or at 63, for the case of the “effect” on adult members of the commmunity]); that dooms the policy quite independent of anyone’s purposes. The court also argues that, as an independent matter, the Dover Board’s policy fails the purpose prong of Lemon (90 ff.), and it reaches that conclusion on the basis of dozens of pages of evidence adduced at trial showing the clear religious objectives of Board members, as well as their attempts to cover-up those religious objectives. As the court concluded (132): “Any asserted secular purposes by the Board are a sham and are merely secondary to a religious objective.” That someone might have had a secular purpose for promoting a policy like Dover’s is irrelevant to what purposes state actors actually had in this case. (Of course, the problem is worse than that: all the evidence adduced in the context of analyzing the “effect” of the policy suggests that there could be no secular, scientific purpose for adopting the policy.)

    Professor Alschuler’s intervention into this well-travelled terrain is not as bad, to be sure, as some other law professors who’ve written foolishly on this subject, but it is perhaps more troublesome because Alschuler is so much more prominent. Already, as we noted, the Discovery [sic] Institute folks are touting his remarks. Because the opinion is long, and most will not read it, the potential for unsuspecting readers to take Professor Alschuler’s inaccurate presentation of the opinion at face value is real. Here is hoping he will do better by the court’s opinion the next time around!

    This article first appeared on The Leiter Report on December 22 and is republished here by permission. Brian Leiter is Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at the University of Texas at Austin. The Leiter Report is here.

  • Gordon Brown Quotes Gertrude Himmelfarb

    Why choose a ferociously neocon revisionist history of the Enlightenment?

  • The Edge Question for 2006

    What is your dangerous idea? Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker and many more.

  • Turkey Admits Pamuk Trial Not an Image-booster

    Laws that limit freedom of expression may be changed.

  • Top Science Stories of 2005

    Climate science and tipping point, bird flu, ID, chimpanzee genome, more.

  • Einstein as a Philosopher of Science

    Philosophical habit of mind had a profound effect on the way he did physics.

  • Black Swans and Ivory Bills

    Did you listen to Gene Sparling telling the story of seeing the Ivory Bill? Do, if you haven’t – it’s a real treat. Apart from anything else he’s funny as hell, in a marvelously relaxed leisurely drawling way. I first heard it by accident, I turned the radio on at random and in the middle, so didn’t know what it was at first, some guy talking about being out in the woods and what a remarkable place it was, I wasn’t paying much attention until he started talking about a bird – and then when he said ‘I thought “that’s the biggest pileated woodpecker I’ve ever seen”‘ I was galvanized and began paying very close attention indeed.

    And it’s not just a good story, it’s also interesting epistemologically. It’s kind of a black swan story, kind of a story about falsification, and the difficulty or impossibility of being sure of a negative. It’s about the fact we’ve talked about here more than once: the fact that not having found X does not necessarily mean there is no X to find. It could mean that, but it could just mean you haven’t found it. And it can be very very difficult to know which.

    Because Sparling wouldn’t let himself think he’d seen what he suspected he’d seen, at first – in fact for quite awhile. Why? Because he didn’t want to be ridiculed as a loony, a Big foot finder, an alien abduction believer. And he thought he couldn’t have seen what he thought he’d seen. But actually, on consideration, the possibility that it was what he thought it might be except that it couldn’t be (because Ivory bills are extinct, he said solemnly, they’ve been extinct my whole life) is really not nearly as far-fetched as either Big foot or alien abductions. And Big foot, in turn, is not as far-fetched as alien abductions. So there’s a scale of far-fetchedness here: 1, 2, 3.

    Here’s why the Ivory Bill possibility is not in Big foot territory, at least in my view. 1) It was last seen in the ’40s, which is only six decades ago – not a very long time. 2) There are some swampy hard-to-navigate places in its old range where people wouldn’t have seen it if it had been there. Those two things are enough, really. Not to make it likely that it wasn’t extinct after all, but to make it not absurd. As Sparling was persuaded. The only mention he made of the bird he saw at first was a posting to a message board of his canoe club, where it was his custom to post notes on trips. He said he’d seen a very odd pileated woodpecker, which was very large, and had the black and white colouring on his wings reversed. People in the know would know what that meant – but he didn’t say it in so many words. And that’s all he said and all he intended to say – but another canoe club person emailed him and said ‘Gene, you have to do some research on this, you have a responsibility.’ So he did. And what’s interesting is that the research told him what he hadn’t known: that the bird’s known range included Arkansas, where Sparling had seen his bird; he had thought it didn’t, that the range was in Texas but not Arkansas. Once he learned that, the possibility seemed less outlandish – so he went ahead and risked being seen as a wacko.

    But there it is, you see. No one had seen an Ivory Bill since the ’40s – but there were Ivory Bills there, all the same. No one knew there were, but there were nevertheless. That’s how it is.

  • One Shrug Too Many

    Yes, truth does matter, but it can be a hard slog sometimes convincing people of that. An American studies teacher offers some illustrations.

    O’Brien violates old novelistic standards; his book is both fictional and autobiographical, with the lines between the two left deliberately blurred. My students adored the book and looked at me as if they had just seen a Model-T Ford when I mentioned that a few critics felt that the book was dishonest because it did not distinguish fact from imagination. “It says right on the cover ‘a work of fiction’” noted one student. When I countered that we ourselves we using it to discuss the actual Vietnam War, several students immediately defended the superiority of metaphorical truth because it “makes you think more.” I then asked students who had seen the film The Deer Hunter whether the famed Russian roulette scene was troubling, given that there was no recorded incident of such events taking place in Vietnam. None of them were bothered by this.

    Well I’m bothered by the fact that none of them were bothered. I’m not surprised, but I’m bothered. It’s funny, too, because we’re always being told how ‘media-savvy’ the current generation is (we’ve been being told that for several generations now, I think), and how good they are at seeing through the ploys of hidden persuaders. I’ve never believed a word of it, and Weir’s account hints at why. I’ve talked to too many people who are serenely unbothered by falsehoods in historical movies, who say cheerily that movies are movies, they’re not supposed to tell the truth, that’s not their job, their job is to entertain, if a rewriting of history makes the movie more entertaining, then that’s what the moviemakers have to do. Everybody knows it’s just a movie, is usually the clincher. But that’s bullshit, of course. Just because everybody ‘knows it’s just a movie’ doesn’t mean everybody doesn’t also ingest some (or all) of the falisfications and believe them ever after.

    If all these tv generations are so media savvy, why have they apparently never heard of propaganda? The Triumph of the Will is just a movie too; so what? People tell lies during wars and the lead-up to wars; lies about what the North Vietnamese did or did not do mattered a great deal in the real world; Weir’s students should have been bothered.

    I mentioned John Sayles’ use of composite characters in the film Matewan. They had no problem with that, though none could tell me what actually happened during the bloody coal strikes that convulsed West Virginia in the early 1920s. When I probed whether writers or film makers have any responsibility to tell the truth, not a single student felt they did.

    Matewan is a good example. There’s a very good book about this whole subject, called Past Imperfect, in which a number of historians and other scholars (Steve Gould for instance) discuss the veracity or lack of it in a number of movies. John Sayles and Eric Foner talk about Matewan – and much as I like Sayles, I think he’s wrong about this and Foner is right. I think movie makers do have a responsibility to tell the truth – partly because movies are so very powerful, and have such searching and longlasting effects on our mental furniture.

    My O’Brien class came through when I taught the concept of simulacra, showed them a clip from the film Wag the Dog and then asked them to contemplate why some see disguised fiction as dangerous. (Some made connections to the current war in Iraq, but that’s another story!)

    Anybody who doesn’t see disguised fiction as dangerous is mad as a hatter, if you ask me.

  • Bomb in Indonesia Kills Eight People

    The bomb exploded at a stall selling pork in a largely Christian part of the town.

  • Cardinal Pitches Fit About ‘Family Life’

    Which really ought to be made mandatory for ‘the good of society’.

  • Readers Retort to Cardinal O’Connor

    Objecting to fundamentalists who hijack virtue and morality for their own pious, self-righteous reasons.

  • When Facts Change, Change Your Mind

    Marketplace of ideas does not work because large parts of the audience want comfort rather than truth.

  • Paradoxes of Postmodernism

    Truth-skeptics have to be taught to see that disguised fiction can be dangerous.

  • US Failure to Invest in Scientific Research

    A creeping crisis caused by a pattern of short-term thinking and a lack of long-term investment.

  • Squaring the Circle

    La lutte continue, as the saying goes – the struggle continues. Education can be a slow process, and as we’ve seen in the US lately, it can turn around and march smartly backwards. People can make resolute, determined efforts to become more ignorant than their parents, and to make their children more ignorant than they are themselves. People can also make resolute efforts to have it both ways – to live on technology and the safety and comfort it brings, while at the same time scorning the rational ways of thinking that technology depends on. There’s something a little contemptible about that – but so it goes.

    James Colbert has been on the frontline of America’s culture wars for 20 years but his hoped-for final victory of reason over faith is not yet in sight. Now an associate biology professor at Iowa State University, he has found since he started teaching that about a third of the students beginning his introductory course are creationists, in many cases with no knowledge of evolution at all.

    That’s students at university level, in a country which has laws about mandatory education for all children through the age of sixteen – yet a lot of them manage to slip through with no knowledge of evolution at all. Because education can go backwards.

    While trying to tread softly to avoid offending their sensibilities, he has increasingly had to defend his faculty and scholarship against what he sees as a far greater threat – the incursion into science faculties of backers of “intelligent design”, the belief that evolution is so complex that some higher force must be behind it.

    That’s a threat? Science faculties being infiltrated by ‘backers’ of unscience? Of nonscience, of antiscience? Gosh, how could that be a threat?

    Prof Colbert says most scientists ignored such arguments as coming from a lunatic fringe until August when President George W Bush backed teaching i.d. alongside evolution. Alarmed at what he saw as the growing influence of some i.d. supporters in the science faculty, Prof Colbert drafted a petition condemning “attempts to represent intelligent design as a scientific endeavour”. In response more than 40 Christian faculty and staff members signed a statement calling on the university to uphold their basic freedoms and to allow them to discuss intelligent design.

    ‘Calling on the university to uphold their basic freedoms’ – meaning what? Their basic freedom to teach nonsense? Is that a basic freedom, and is it a basic freedom that they have? Does a French teacher have a basic freedom to teach a mixture of Farsi, Tagalog and gibberish and call it ‘French’? Does a history teacher have a basic freedom to teach that Hitler fought the battle of Trafalgar in 1217 and thereby won the freedom of Papua New Guinea? Does an engineering teacher have a basic freedom to teach that precision really isn’t all that important when it comes to bridge building, lighten up a little? Do teachers have a basic freedom to teach any old balderdash to their captive students? I would have thought they didn’t. And then, there is surely a difference between ‘discussing’ intelligent design and claiming that it is a scientific endeavour, and there is also a difference between condemning something and forcibly removing someone’s freedom to do it. In short, the Christian faculty and staff members seem to be resorting to the much too familiar tactic of claiming to be oppressed and repressed and unfairly treated.

    But – we keep endlessly circling back to this – education is education. It’s not education if it traffics in falsehoods, it’s something else. Educators don’t have a ‘basic freedom’ to teach any old fool thing they feel like teaching. They have academic freedom, yes, but it’s not infinite or absolute – it doesn’t cover outright raving. Once a teacher starts dribbling and talking to phantoms, the issue of freedom is overtaken by the issue of competence. Or at least it should be.

  • ‘The science is just a façade, a Potemkin village’

    The right to believe includes the right not to believe, say plaintiffs’ attorneys in ID case.

  • Jeb Bush on ‘Darwin’s Theory of Evolution’

    He doesn’t think it should be part of the curriculum.