But everybody -- believers and skeptics alike -- can do equally good things on our own initiative. Not because we want to please some invisible Big Brother in the sky, but just because we want to be good people.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III Rules: "Intelligent Design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism."

I haven't had time to read the entire ruling yet, and I'm no lawyer anyway; but it appears to be a carefully reasoned, detailed document with clear guidance for other school boards who might be tempted to teach religion as science. And it's actually written mostly in plain, everyday English.

Sunday, December 18, 2005

"The best argument against 'intelligent design' (ID) has always been humanity itself. At a time when only 40 percent of Americans believe in evolution, and only 13 percent know what a molecule is, we're an argument at best for only 'mediocre design.'"

Kristof says the entire evolution v. "intelligent design" debate is only "a symptom of something much deeper and more serious: a profound illiteracy about science and math as a whole." As evidence, he adds that "One-fifth of Americans still believe that the sun goes around the Earth, instead of the other way around. And only about half know that humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs."

I can't easily verify his numbers, but  I suspect it's all true. Clearly, most Americans are scientifically ignorant and proud of it. And it's pathetic.

"Without some fluency in science and math," he says, "we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, 12 doctors, and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines."

It's not my intent to be pessimistic, but I agree completely that we are on the brink of disaster because of our collective ignorance. And it may be even worse than simply being "left behind." The Old Testament prophet Hosea said it well: "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge:" (Hosea 4:6). We're not destroyed yet, but we had better do something fast before it's too late.

Buckingham had previously told reporters, "The board simply wants to provide an alternative, scientific theory of how the world works. And intelligent design is science."

Then he was asked under oath, "Do you have an understanding in very simple terms of what 'intelligent design' stands for? What does it teach?"

His reply was, "Other than what I expressed, that's -- scientists, a lot of scientists -- don't ask me for names. I can't tell you where it came from. A lot of scientists believe that back through time, something, molecules, amoeba, whatever, evolved into the complexities of life we have now." (Reported by Steve Mirsky in Scientific American, Dec. 2005, "Antigravity," p.127)

That's an answer? "Molecules, amoeba, whatever?" Does this sound like a man who knows what science is? Does this sound like a man who knows where we came from? He doesn't even know where his ideas came from. He doesn't know the names of any evolutionary scientists. He doesn't know a molecule from a microbe from a whatever.

Does this sound like a man who even knows what he thinks he believes? Does this sound like a man you want deciding how your children are going to be educated? Could you possibly believe this man is not only a school board member, but the board's curriculum chairman?

Does this man even know the difference between evolution and ID? Did you read anything in his answer about a designer? Or any reason for a designer? Was he really discussing ID at all? It sounds more like an awkward fourth-grader commenting on evolution to me.

Besides his obvious lack of scientific understanding, the poor guy can't even put words together to make sense. But he's trying to tell biology teachers in his state how to teach biology. Is it any wonder both science and education are in such a state of disrespect in our country?

We MUST do better.

We MUST learn to understand science, because science is running our world. And science MUST keep on running our world; because most of us would be dead without it, and most of the rest would be suffering.

We MUST learn through science to deal appropriately with each other and with the world around us, or the next mass extinction on earth will include us. And it will NOT be long in coming!

I, for one, don't want that. I want my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live continually better lives than I have. I want every generation to be healthier, richer, better educated, and better off in every possible way than the generation it replaces.

This can NEVER happen without an attitude of skepticism and an understanding of science that most Americans seem happy to reject.

Yes, we also need ethics. And arts. We need knowledge of history, geography, government, great literature, and more. My purpose is not to belittle any of those things. My purpose here is to add science to the mix. It must not be forgotten, rejected, or ignored.

We MUST teach our students real science. Pseudo-science will never support the six billion plus people on earth. If we don't teach real science in a way that makes people want to learn and embrace it, we will be the next dinosaurs.

Through No Bull, I intend to do my best to make genuine science interesting and simple while stomping pseudo-science and superstition into the ground. I realize I am barely (if at all) qualified to do this, and I would love to have some appropriate articles by better qualified people from time to time. (Hint, hint.)

Friday, December 16, 2005

This is almost totally untrue. There is almost zero debate among working scientists about "the truth of evolution." Rather, the debate is nearly always about how evolution works.

The history of evolution on earth is unimaginably complex. It began more than three and a half billion years ago (3,500,000,000 years) and involves five known kingdoms of life comprising literally hundreds of millions of different species of plants, fungi, protists, bacteria, and animals. Living, evolving things range from the microscopic, single-celled bacteria and yeasts to the elephant and giant redwood trees on land and the great whales that swim the oceans.

And let's not forget to mention the semi-living (but rapidly evolving) viruses so small that millions will fit on the head of a straight pin. Nor the recently discovered fungi that live just below the surface of the ground and cover many square miles each.

We'll never understand every detail, so there's always going to be disagreement among scientists. But almost no scientist doubts that evolution is real. They agree almost unanimously that it is, for the simple reason that the evidence is overwhelming.

It is almost always non-scientists who argue that evolution is questionable or false; and those particular people fall into two main categories: (1) they have an axe to grind, or (2) they simply don't understand evolution. Many fall into both groups.

This is ridiculous. When Einstein showed some flaws in Newton's understanding of gravity, did apples stop falling from the trees?

In a sense, all science is tentative; but the facts of evolution are very well established. Furthermore, science is not a democratic venture; it is a search for knowledge. Real science does not depend on how many people believe it.

Again, this is totally untrue. The word "evolution" means "change." Biological evolution is change in the forms and species of living things. (More technically, it is changes in gene frequencies in a population over a period of generations.)

Life had to exist already before evolution could begin taking place, so evolution has NOTHING to do with the origin of life. Many scientists are trying to understand how life on earth originated, but evolution simply does not care. That's an entirely different field of study.

This sounds good, until one realizes there simply are NO alternative ideas to explore. Evolution is very well grounded in evidence and we have no other theory with which to compare it. No other theory has ever been invented that explains life as it exists on earth and agrees with all the evidence.

"Intelligent Design" (ID), for example, is definitely NOT a good scientific theory. For more information, see 8 below.

This is obviously false, because many people believe in both God and evolution. Evolution can no more disprove the existence of God than the law of gravity can. Evolution does, however, provide additional proof that some particular fundamentalist beliefs cannot be not correct.

There are plenty of ways to test the theories and facts of evolution. We see the slow evolution of plants and animals in the fossils that have been deposited since life began on earth, and we study the faster evolution of micro-organisms in the lab.

Certainly evolution has always happened in the past so far. That's where everything has happened, after all. But it is not over and done with. Evolution is a continuing process that still continues today and will undoubtedly continue as long as there is life.

Speciation doesn't usually happen within a human lifetime; it is more likely to require thousands or even millions of years. We can't watch it happen in real life, but we can study the fossils and other evidence and create hypotheses about how evolution worked in specific areas. With a good hypothesis, we can predict the kind of fossil or other evidence we are likely to find in future studies.

The details are necessarily different from chemistry or some branches of physics, but the principles are the same. A scientist make observations, forms a hypothesis that meets certain criteria, and then finds a way to test the hypothesis.

In the past, evolutionary studies have had to focus largely (though not entirely) on the shape and size of fossils. We still study fossils, but we study them with microscopes, CT scans, and MRIs now. In addition, studies of genes and other biochemistry are verifying a lot of what we knew, changing a little of what we thought we knew, and adding a tremendous amount of new detail.

After all, science is not about knowing everything. It is about learning. And learning things that nobody ever knew before takes time and a lot of effort.

"Intelligent Design" theory (ID) actually admits that many things evolve over very long periods of time. Where they differ is in saying that some things are so complex they could not have evolved, so a "designer" must have guided the process in those specific areas. It focuses on areas of supposed "irreducible complexity," like eyes and the human immune system.

ID also points to other "gaps" in our knowledge of evolution as "proof" that evolution is wrong. Or even fraudulent.

If you still have any doubt, subscribe to their free "Days of Praise" Devotional and Bible Commentary to see how scientific it is. The current issue equates "the faith of Abraham" with Mendelian genetics. It is very clear that ID is NOT science; it is religion in disguise.

I aleady discussed this in 8 above. There are things about evolution that we don't fully understand yet, but we do know pretty well how it works. The "holes" are being filled very rapidly without assuming a designer.

Evolution says NOTHING about religion in general or about God, except that certain creation myths are not literally true.

There is another false claim that I believe may be even more important than most of the ten above. Dr. Wightman didn't mention it, but I'm going to add it here as the eleventh false claim about evolution.

They are essentially the same. One is just a continuation of the other, usually over a much longer period of time.

Micro-evolution refers to small changes in the members of a species from generation to generation. A common example is a light colored species of moth that turned dark in response to air pollution in London in the nineteenth century.

Certain trees there are naturally light colored. When a light colored moth landed on the bark, it was camouflaged from birds and other predators. Then soot covered the trees and buildings, and the light moths stood out clearly; so they tended to get eaten, and only the darker ones survived to reproduce. Naturally, after a while, the whole population of moths was noticeably darker.

Recently I read the moths are gradually lightening again in response to cleaner air that no longer turns tree bark and buildings so dark. (For more details, see http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/06/anne_coulter_cl_1.html .)

There are many more examples of creatures that evolve into a slightly new form or color over a few generations in response to changing environmental pressures. I don't know of anybody who denies this.

Macro-evolution, on the other hand, refers to larger changes. It includes such things as microbes evolving into multi-cellular plants and animals, fish evolving into quadrupeds, certain dinosaurs evolving into birds, and ape-like creatures evolving into humans. This is the kind of evolution many people deny.

What many people don't realize is that the two "kinds" of evolution are exactly the same. Micro-evolution that continues long enough becomes macro-evolution.

Over a long enough time frame, other things occasionally come into play. Like the asteroid that finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, for example. Dramatic events like this may kill off species that were well adapted before and let some new ones take their places.

But then the same old pressures of day-to-day survival of the fittest take over again; and evolution plods on and on as the world changes; keeping the genes that help the creatures carrying them survive long enough to reproduce, and discarding those that can't keep up in a given environment.

Micro or macro. It's all the same, if you wait long enough.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

This Wednesday, the same day I wrote about the current educational fiasco in Kansas and the election of a new school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, Pat Robertson spilled the proverbial beans on "intelligent design."

I wrote (below) that "'Intelligent design' holds that the universe -- and especially certain living things and biological structures like human eyes -- are so complex that they must have been created by a 'higher power.' Advocates claim the 'theory' does not specify who or what that higher power might be. If you have any doubt Who most of them really believe the Designer is, you're way too gullible."

They MUST not claim the "designer" is God, because that makes their claims obviously religious. Instead, they claim not to know who the "designer" was in order to avoid being so obvious. Some have claimed, "It might be God; it might be an alien or somebody else. We don't know."

He says clearly what the more circumspect advocates of "intelligent design" were not willing to say: that the "designer" they imagine is God. Not an alien. Not anybody else. God.

Don't tell me this is a scientific theory. The so-called intelligent design theory is religion. It is nothing but a modified version of the old creationism that was rejected long ago for teaching in public school science classes. It's just dressed up in pseudo-scientific language to try to fool a lot of people and get by the school boards and courts.

The strangest thing to me is it's changed so much that Bible literalists would not even agree with it, if they understood it. Most of them seem to realize it is a form of creationism in disguise, so they're for it without learning any more than that. They don't appear to realize it promotes a form of directed evolution that requires millions or billions of years.

The literalists neither believe in any kind of evolution nor a creation that took millions or billions of years. Genesis clearly says it took six days.

Fortunately, most people are not literalists. And most people don't seem to be fooled by the claim that "intelligent design" is science, either.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Well, it appears that Kansas has done it again. Or pretty close.

In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education removed references to evolution and the Big Bang from the science standards for public schools in the state. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould reacted by saying this was akin to teaching "American history without Lincoln." A Washington Post columnist imagined God telling the board members: “Man, I gave you a brain. Use it, OK?”

Here's the take on it from What's New by Bob Park, physics professor at The University of Maryland:

People constantly ask, "Where is the evidence?"

Why don't they look around first to see for themselves?

The evidence of evolution is everywhere. All one has to do is look around and think with an open mind. To find the precise evidence she is asking about, of course, requires a little study. (We'll talk more about that soon. The fossils have been found and are being studied right now, although her description is off a little.)

That decision was overturned two years later, because the voters appeared to be smarter than the school board. They elected some new school board members who restored the teaching of evolution and real cosmology in science classes.

After yet another election, though, the current board voted 6-4 yesterday to adopt science standards that cast serious doubt on the theory of evolution and include references to "intelligent design." The new standards were praised by "intelligent design" advocates who helped draft them.

"Intelligent design" holds that the universe -- and especially certain living things and biological structures like human eyes -- are so complex that they must have been created by a "higher power." Advocates claim the "theory" does not specify who or what that higher power might be. If you have any doubt Who most of them really believe the Designer is, you're way too gullible.

This is true to some extent, but misleading. Scientists agree almost unanimously that new life forms evolve from previous life forms through natural selection and related means. Probably less than one percent of recognized, working scientists disagree with this. The controversy is in the details. The vast array of life on earth is so complex that we'll never understand it all in detail, so there'll always be room for this kind of controversy.

The standard continues: "All scientific theories should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.  We therefore think it is important and appropriate for students to know about these scientific debates and for the Science Curriculum Standards to include information about them."

Yes, teach the scientific controversies. But don't waste time confusing students with wild, pseudo-scientific, religious ideas disguised as science.

John Bacon, a board member who voted in favor of the standards, said the move “gets rid of a lot of dogma that’s being taught in the classroom today.” Another member, Janet Waugh, disagreed: "This is a sad day. We're becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that."

You're right, Janet, and I sympathize with you; but it's even worse than that. Unless you and your fellow Kansans can put a stop to this bull, you're going to be teaching a load of superstitious nonsense to your students and convincing them it's science. They deserve better.

The good news today was from Dover, Pennsylvania. A New York Times article by Laurie Goodstein says, "All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy."

The AP adds that the eight members voted out of office were all Republicans, and they were all replaced by Democrats who want intelligent design stripped from the science curriculum. However, a different source says four of the new members were actually Republicans who ran as Democrats so they could oppose the old members. It doesn't matter to me. I've always suspected there must be a few rational Republicans. Somewhere.

Judy McIlvaine, one of the new board members, is quoted as saying, "We are all for it being discussed, but we do not want to see it in biology class. It is not a science."

I agree. "Intelligent design" should be discussed. Maybe even in biology class. Because it has gained so much attention, a teacher should take about five minutes to discuss why the "intelligent design theory" of beginnings and the stork theory of reproduction are not science. He or she might add another minute to discuss why the tooth fairy theory of income generation isn't taught in economics classes. Then teach science and don't mention them again.

It was in Dover that seven brave biology teachers recently risked their jobs by refusing to teach "intelligent design" and writing a letter to their superintendent of schools, Richard Nilsen, containing these statements: "'INTELLIGENT DESIGN' IS NOT SCIENCE. 'INTELLIGENT DESIGN' IS NOT BIOLOGY. 'INTELLIGENT DESIGN' IS NOT AN ACCEPTED SCIENTIFIC THEORY.'" (The capital letters are theirs.)

I would hope this means the lawsuit now in federal court can be dropped, but I don't know.

I promise to try to finish at least a short article very soon on why "intelligent design" is not science, not intelligent, and not even design.

Friday, October 28, 2005

"For centuries, mankind knew all there was to know about the shape of the Earth. It was a flat planet, shaped roughly like a circle, with lots of pointy things hanging down from the underside. On the comparatively smooth topside, Europe sat in the middle of the circle, with the other continents scattered about the fringes, and parts of Africa hanging over the edge. The oceans lapped against the sides of the Earth, and in places ran over, creating currents that would pull over the edge ships that ventured too far out to sea. The space beyond the edge of the world was a dark realm inhabited by all sorts of unholy beasts. Fire and brimstone billowed up from the very depths of hell itself and curled 'round the cliffs whose infinite length jutted straight down to the darkest depths . . . ."

The website assures us that "The Flat Earth Society is not in any way responsible for ... the recent yeti sightings outside the Vatican, or for the unfortunate enslavement of the Nabisco Inc. factory employees by a rogue hamster insurrectionist group" or a few dozen other equally probable things. They don't seem to deny being responsible for causing a few grins, though.

Friday, October 21, 2005

For several months I have wanted to create a blog for No Bull, but I just don't have the time and energy to do everything I want to. I've decided to solve the problem by using this page as a "semi-blog." In two or three weeks or less, I'll begin using this home page as if it were a simple blog.

We have archives of our previous home pages, and I'll add this one. Then I'll begin adding shorter, hopefully more interesting articles and comments a lot more often on this "Semi-Blog" home page. I think it'll create a more lively home page for people to see when they come to NoBull.ws, as well as drawing more attention from the search engines; because it'll contain something new several times a week.

Lots of new material is likely to get more attention from people and search engines alike. Also, it'll provide a forum for some of the short, informal comments and observations that I love to write. If you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them, this will work great! Also, I'll be able to provide short reviews of other websites here from time to time.

As with most blogs, I'll place all new material near the top of the page, with older material underneath it. When it gets too long, I'll archive the page and start over. All archives will be available through the Table of Contents menu near the top left corner of every page.

This will be an experiment for a while, of course. If it doesn't work well, we'll try something else; but I think it'll be very useful. In general, I'm fairly pleased with No Bull; and I hope you are, too. But there's always room for improvement, and we'll find ways to make it better as often as we can.

This page was last updated 08/21/09 04:43 PM.

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