Category: science education

My anti-accommodationism article at The Conversation

December 21, 2018 • 9:00 am

A while back I posted a critique on this site of an article by Tom McLeish at The Conversation, “Religion isn’t the enemy of science: it’s been inspiring scientists for centuries.” In that critique I wrote, “I think it’s time I contributed an article to The Conversation showing why science and religion are incompatible, as that site appears to be very soft on faith.”  Since then I’ve learned that The Conversation has several independent branches, and that piece was published by The Conversation UK, not The Conversation US.

But the former site, which may indeed be soft on faith, recently published yet another accommodationist article, “War between science and religion is far from inevitable” by David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History, Queen’s University Belfast, and John Hedley Brooke, Emeritus Professor of Science and Religion as the University of Oxford. And that was the last straw for me. That article, if you can get through it, is an encyclopedia of all the tropes of accommodationism: scientists can be religious, religion inspired scientific discoveries, and religion can provide useful values in a discussion with scientists. (It even begins with a mention of Faith versus Fact, whose thesis of course Livingstone and Brooke reject.). The prose, too, was deadly; get a load of this:

In our own day, there may well be benefits to be derived from a dialogue between theological anthropology and those advocating transhumanism. New technological possibilities are raising profound questions about what it means to be human, a subject on which theologians have had much to say. At the very least, theology might prove to be a useful conversational partner in articulating values by which to adjudicate among the human capacities that might be prioritised for enhancement.

The article winds up with a firm but plaintive assertion that religion, after all, isn’t going away. (Of course it is, at least in the West.)

I didn’t write about the piece here, as I finally decided to respond at The Conversation itself—if they’d let me. I sent The Conversation U.S. a pitch, they were interested, and I wrote a piece that didn’t directly attack the ideas of Livingstone and Brooke, but linked to their piece (and others), and asserted that yes, there is a kind of war between science and religion. This was published this morning. It was a pleasure to work with my editor and the site. (I didn’t realize that you have to be an academic to publish there, and have to link to every quote and claim that you make.)

At any rate, you can read my piece below (“Yes, there is a war between science and religion“) by clicking on the link. If you’re interested, give them some traffic, and stand up for empiricism! (You’re welcome to make comments and to engage with the commenters who, inevitably, will be upset by my ideas.) The Conversation also published under a creative commons license, so anybody can republish the article for free.

As Andrew Sullivan might say, “See you next Friday,” except I’ll be here all week, folks.

Princeton’s course on how marginalized scientists can produce “different ways of knowing”

December 5, 2018 • 10:45 am

The class below, found on the Princeton University course website, asks two questions:

1.) Is science gendered, racialized, ableist, and classist?

and

2.) Does the presence or absence of women (and other marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge?

 

Do any of you doubt for a moment that the answer to both questions is “yes”? (My answers to both would be “no”, since while some scientists may be bigots, science itself cannot be, as it’s simply a method for producing knowledge.) And I’d argue against anyone who claims that different sexes or ethnic groups will produce “different kinds of scientific knowledge”. Maybe they’ll ask different questions, and if that’s what Catherine Taylor means, fine, but there are already plenty of women scientists who ask exactly the same type of questions, in the same way, as do men scientists. Check out Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier’s work on CRISPR/Cas9, which builds on work by a whole community of scientists of different sex and nationality. Doudna and Charpentier approach molecular biology in exactly the way everyone else does.

In fact, if the answers to the course’s questions were “no”, there would be no need for such a course. What we have here is a semester-long exercise in confirmation bias.

Evelyn Fox Keller, in her biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism, argued that McClintock, in finding mobile genetic elements, was expressing a female quality of empathy, of letting the organism (in her case corn) tell you what’s going on (see here for a precis of that thesis).  I did not find Keller’s thesis convincing, as I have never seen—nor did I see in McClintock—a distinctively female way of approaching research. (Note that Keller is an editor of one of the course’s texts.)

That is not, of course, to claim that science is a male-oriented way of doing research, despite the fact that science was, because of sexism that limited the opportunities of women, developed largely by men. The tools that produce truth—hypothesis testing, criticism, interrogating nature, and falsification, and so on—have been developed over the centuries by trial and error: seeing what techniques give us reliable knowledge. Those methods aren’t, and cannot be, limited to or characteristic of one sex. We use what works, not what flatters particular sexes, ethnicities, or classes.

But I digress. The course above is an embarrassment for a school of Princeton’s reputation. It is simply social-justice propaganda that will distort science for ideological ends. It’s dubious scholarship, a waste of the students’ tuition money, and unlikely itself to produce new knowledge. It will produce clones that parrot Clune-Taylor’s ideology.

It’s taught by Catherine Clune-Taylor, a postdoctoral research associate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton. (In general, I don’t favor courses being taught entirely by postdocs.) Her thesis at the University of Alberta was ““From Intersex to DSD: A Foucauldian Analysis of the Science, Ethics and Politics of the Medical Production of Cisgendered Lives.” Enough said.

Evolutionist coopts the field for social justice

November 23, 2018 • 1:30 pm

Holly Dunsworth is a biological anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island, and appears to be somewhat of a biological ideologue—at least as far as male-female differences are concerned. For instance, she’s questioned my claim, supported by substantial evidence, that sexual selection (probably involving male-male competition) was likely responsible for human sex differences in size and upper-body strength (see here and here). The second link discusses her bizarre “alternative” theory for these differences, which is simply wrong, and she’s never responded to my critique.

Now Dunsworth has moved on, and is pushing social justice on the website of The Evolution Institute, David Sloan Wilson’s think tank funded in part by the Templeton Foundation. Her new article (click on the screenshot below) argues that all teachers of evolution must come to grips with both the dark past and supposedly dark present of evolutionary biology: namely, that it has been used to buttress eugenics and social Darwinism in the past, and is now used, via genetic determinism, “to justify civil rights restrictions, human rights violations, white supremacy, and the patriarchy.” She also mentions “anti-theism” as one of the bad outcomes of evolutionary biology. Really?

Dunsworth’s thesis is that this connection between human evolution and immoral and harmful programs has turned people away from human evolution, and that we have to “reclaim” it by producing and teaching a “sprawling, heart-thumping, face-melting epic, inspiring its routine telling and retelling.” She adds, “It’s time for a human evolution that’s fit for all humankind.” Unfortunately, Dunsworth’s version of evolution “fit for all humankind” seems to involve “evolution that comports with my ideology”, with “my” being “Dunsworth.”

 

Now there’s no doubt that evolution was historically misused to justify various forms of oppression (racial hierarchies come to mind), and there’s no doubt that Dr. Dunsworth means well in her effort to use introductory evolution courses as a form of social engineering. I am not questioning her motives but her program.

I differ with three claims she makes in her articles.

1.) People are turned off by human evolution, and in fact reject it, because it was historically misused. This appears to be the main claim buttressing her article, and I don’t see much evidence for it. Here’s what she says:

Human origins should be universally cherished but it’s not even universally known. It just doesn’t appeal to most people. This goes far beyond religion. Human evolution hasn’t caught on despite it being over 150 years old.  Where it has, it’s subversive or offensive. We have a problem. How could my life be subversive or offensive? How could yours?

Leaving aside the non sequitur of the last sentence, I’d say that human evolution (or evolution in general) hasn’t caught on because it has implications that bother people, especially religious ones—not because evolution is connected with racism, the patriarchy, and so on. Sure, creationists will bring up these connections (Nazi eugenics is a favorite one) to denigrate Darwinism, but, as Steve Stewart-Wiilliams shows in his excellent book Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew (recommended reading), the bulk of opposition to evolution comes from its attack on human exceptionalism. And human exceptionalism is the bulwark of Abrahamic religion.

That is why many people who accept evolution bridle at the idea that humans have evolved. (Remember that the Butler Act whose violation led to Tennessee’s Scopes Trial prohibited the teaching not of evolution, but of human evolution.) It’s religion, Jake, and there’s ample evidence that rejection of evolution is deeply connected with acceptance of religion. Not so much evidence that rejection of human evolution comes because it’s connected with propping up racism and the patriarchy.

If Dunsworth wants human evolution to catch on in America, she’d be better off loosening the grip of religion than instantiating her human-centered social justice course on evolution.

2.) Evolutionary biology is still being pervasively misused in America to justify oppression. The evidence for this claim is thin, though there are of course a few white supremacists around who might do this. But Dunsworth indicts more mainstream figures:

Genetic and biological determinism have a stranglehold on the popular imagination, where evolution is frequently invoked to excuse inequity, like in the notorious Google Memo. Public intellectuals like David Brooks and Jon Haidt root what seems like every single observation of 2018 in tropes from Descent of Man. And there’s the White House memo that unscientifically defines biological sex. Evolution is all wrapped up in white supremacy and a genetically-destined patriarchy.  This is not evolution. And this is not my evolution. I know you’re nodding your head along with me.

No, I’m not nodding, at least in agreement. The fact is that genetic determinism deserves a hearing, and the stuff that Dunsworth suggested might not be so wrong after all. Dunsworth seems to be a big opponent of evolutionary psychology in attacking Brooks, Haidt, and even James Damore, who all raise the possibility that there are evolved/genetic differences in behavior and cognition between men and women. The fact is that none of these people use that viable possibility to excuse inequity. They may use it to explain inequity, as did Damore, but his explanation, as he said repeatedly, was not to stamp women as innately inferior in tech skills. Rather, it was to explain why there’s not gender parity at Google. As more recent work has shown, the inequities in tech and other fields may represent hard-wired average differences between the sexes in preference and interest.

Society has moved past the point where genetic determinism is widely used to excuse inequities or to oppress people. You won’t find that in Brooks, Haidt, or Damore. You might find it in some marginalized and odious white supremacists, and in some evolutionary psychologists who go well beyond the realm of evidence in their genetic determinism. But too many people have gone the other way, as Steve Pinker showed in The Blank Slate. In my view we need more discussion of genetic determinism, not less.

3. We should spend a lot of time in evolution class teaching about the ways evolution has been used to promote bad social consequences. This is what Dunsworth wants (the caps are hers):

Evolution educators—even if sticking to E. coli, fruit flies, or sticklebacks—must confront the ways that evolutionary science has implicitly undergirded and explicitly promoted or has naively inspired so many racist, sexist, and otherwise harmful beliefs and actions. We can no longer arm students with the ideas that have had harmful sociocultural consequences without addressing them explicitly because our failure to do so effectively is the primary reason these horrible consequences exist. The worst of all being a human origins that refuses humanity.

I’m sorry, but there’s too little time in evolution class as it is to promote the misuses of Darwinism the way Dunsworth prescribes. By all means, teach this history in a class about biology and society, or in a class about the history of science. But evolution class is about science, not about the social consequences of science. When I taught half of the introductory ecology and evolution class required for biology majors here, I had exactly thirteen lectures to teach all of evolution, and I didn’t even get a lecture on human evolution. I was equally pressed when I taught a full semester of evolution at the University of Maryland.

Further, just teaching straight evolution has never—at least not as far as I can see—turned any of my students into raging misogynists or racists. In fact, most were pre-meds who regarded evolutionary biology as an annoyance that had no relevance to medicine (though it does).

This is not to say that there isn’t a place for evolutionists to decry any current misuses of evolutionary biology. We do that in popular writings and lectures, and on this site in posts. But if you’re going to co-opt evolution class for Dunsworth’s platform, an even better place to do that would be genetics classes, and not just introductory genetics. After all, her beef is genetic determinism, not just evolution. And why not co-opt chemistry and physics classes to teach about the misuses of chemistry (Zyklon-B, mustard gas) and physics (atomic bombs)? There is a time and a place for all that, but straight science classes are not the place. Our job is to teach science, not engage in social engineering.

And that brings me to exactly what kind of social engineering Dunsworth wants. Many of us can agree on the perfidies of racism and sexism, but Dunsworth apparently wants more: she wants us to condemn the evolutionary-psychology speculations of people like Haidt and Damore as well as genetic determinism in general. What it seems to come down to, as always with these things, is that Dunsworth wants us to teach her particular ideology in a way that will reform society along the lines that she wants. She wants us to condemn Damore, Haidt, and Brooks as those who misuse evolutionary biology at present (the rest is unsavory and unrepeated history). She apparently wants us to denigrate genetic determinism—but whose? Pinker’s? David Buss’s? All of evolutionary psychology?

Sorry, no can do. I do what I can, but I’m not getting on Dunsworth’s social-justice train.

At the end, Dunsworth offers a list of suggested alterations of evolution courses. I’ll let you see them yourself; some are okay, others not so okay. And I’ll note, just because I appreciate good writing, that Dunsworth’s article isn’t a shining specimen of that genre, as in this introduction to her list of suggestions:

Here I offer some general suggestions for how to do that and I’m speaking to all of us, whether we teach  a course dedicated to human origins and evolution, whether we teach a course dedicated to evolution and only cover humans for part of it, whether we teach a course dedicated to evolution but exclude humans entirely… because we all have to actively fix this. Learners will apply evolutionary thinking to humans, whether or not your focal organisms are human. Making rules in one domain and transferring them to new ones is humanity’s jam. Eugenics is proof that our jam can go rancid.

And while we’re actively disassociating the reality of evolution (which is just a synonym for ‘nature’ and for ‘biology’) from all the terrible things humans do in its name, we can help make it more personal as we all deserve our origins story to be. We deserve a human origins we can embrace.

Eugenics simply isn’t a big problem these days, though it may revive in a narrow way with the possibility of altering embryos with CRISPR. But nobody wants to go back to the days of Galton and the Kallikak Family. As Pinker has emphasized, the arc of morality has bent upwards. And, by the way “evolution” is not “just a synonym for ‘nature’ and for ‘biology.”

I’ll confront racism and sexism in my own way, and not in evolution class. And I reject out of hand Dunsworth’s indictment that I’m “unethical” in not using class time to push her social agenda. That’s about as authoritarian as an Authoritarian Leftist can get.

h/t: Grania

Can celebrity endorsements help people accept evolution?

November 19, 2018 • 9:00 am

The short answer to the question above is “yes”. Or so suggests new research on acceptance of evolution published in Evolutionary Psychology (click on screenshot below; access free with Unpaywall app and free pdf is here).

The method: Several samples of people from Canada (most from a “small university in northern Ontario”, probably Nipissing University) were given one of three fictitious passages to read; these passages were either pro-evolution, anti-evolution, or neutral (the last was a summary of a work of fiction). Participant’s religious beliefs as well as demographic data were also taken. There were four experiments in total, and I’ll summarize the results briefly. One of the passages involved my book, though it wasn’t from my book; I’ll put that in along with the “antievolution passsage” as examples of the readings (pictures of the book covers were also included):

1.) Acceptance of evolution after reading the three passages. After controlling for sex and age, the three passages by themselves had no effect on participant’s acceptance of evolution as judged by the often-used MATE test, which has 18 questions. In other words, reading about evolution (or fiction) didn’t affect a person’s short-term acceptance of evolution. (Although acceptance/rejection wasn’t assessed before reading, the passages were randomized among the 150 subjects, presumably taking care of stuff like religiosity—which was negatively correlated with acceptance of evolution).

The fact that students’ reading of the three passages had no overall effect on their MATE scores set up the scenario for the rest of the study, which involved adding endorsements to the passages: endorsements by either an “expert” in evolution (a fictitious professor) or a celebrity (George Clooney or Emma Watson, chosen for their likability and recognition.

2.) Endorsements by a male celebrity vs a male expert; student population. Students again were randomly assigned one of the three passages, and this time each passage was accompanied by a heading indicating it was from a magazine article called “Celebrity book review”, with the celebrity being George Clooney, or “Expert book review”, with the “expert” being fictitious American university professor George Rooney. Thus we have six conditions, with pro-evolution, anti-evolution, and neutral passages, each with an endorsement by a celebrity or expert. Remember that both celebrity and expert could endorse either pro- or anti-evolution stands.

The result was that, compared to the initial non-endorsement condition shown in 1.) above, a celebrity endorsement or a pro-evolution passage raised acceptance of evolution compared to the neutral condition, while Clooney’s endorsement of an anti-evolution passage lowered it compared to the neutral condition. In other words, a celebrity endorsement had an effect on acceptance of evolution.

This was not seen when the three passages were endorsed by an evolution science expert; here there was no effect. The figure below shows the effect of Clooney’s endorsement (left three bars) compared to Rooney’s (right three bars):

(From paper) Figure 1. Mean differences in acceptance of evolution scores across opinion (proevolution, anti-evolution, and control) and purveyor (celebrity, expert) conditions. †p < .01. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

3.) Endorsements by a celebrity vs an expert; “community” population. Here the authors did the same test, but used only Clooney and not the expert, and surveyed 157 people “recruited form various public locations. . . in a small city in Northern Ontario, Canada.” There was no assessment of the passages themselves without endorsement, but the authors apparently assumed that reading the passages themselves had no effect on the MATE score—as was found in the student population.

The result was the same: there was a significant difference between treatments in the expected direction (effects weren’t that large for the pro-evolution endorsement), showing once again a celebrity effect (see below). As I said, there was no test of endorsement by an expert scientist. But there’s a problem because there was no initial test of the effects of the passages themselves, without endorsements, on the “community members”, so there’s that critical assumption that the community mirrors the condition of the students.

(From paper) Figure 2. Mean differences in acceptance of evolution scores across opinion (pro-evolution, anti-evolution, and control) purveyed by a male celebrity among a community sample. †p < .01. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

4.) Endorsements by a female celebrity; student population. Here the celebrity was Emma Watson rather than George Clooney, and there was no comparison with an evolution “expert” (who would presumably have been a woman scientist). Let me show why they chose Watson:

Emma Watson was chosen as the female celebrity because she was included in Time Magazine’s 2015 list of the 100 most influential people. Additionally, AskMen.com (2015) placed her at the top of its list of the Top 99 Outstanding Women, in part because she is “rich, successful, famous, stylish, beautiful, intelligent, personable, and kind.”

Well, that’s more or less the same criteria used for Clooney. And once again the celebrity endorsement had an effect on the data from 158 students recruited from that same “small University in Northern Ontario” (why do they hide its name; it’s obvious!). Here are the data for Watson’s endorsement; the direction and size of the effect (i.e. the degree to which endorsement of evolution increased acceptance or criticism of evolution decreased acceptance) was about the same for Watson or Clooney.

(From paper): Mean differences in acceptance of evolution scores across opinion (pro-evolution, anti-evolution, and control) purveyed by a female celebrity. p < .01. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

The upshot. In this study, among all three groups (with the caveats given above), celebrity endorsement of a position on evolution changed students’ or the population’s views on evolution in the expected direction, whether that endorsement be an affirmation or a criticism. In other words, evolution is like a product that can be sold more readily if a celebrity endorses it (the authors cite data showing positive effects of such endorsement in commercials).

Further, a celebrity had a much bigger effect than that of a fictitious “expert”. In fact, endorsement or criticism of evolution by a scientist had no effect. These celebrity effects occurred irregardless of the effect of participants’ religiosity, which itself was negatively correlated with acceptance of evolution.

Of course there are limitations of these tests. The authors mention the limitation of much of the study to undergraduate students, and to a “young, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic sample.” Maybe celebrities don’t have an effect on other populations.  But the authors don’t mention another significant issue: the effect was measured only in the short term, presumably within an hour after reading the passages. We don’t know if this kind of “priming” has any long term effect on acceptance of evolution, which you’d need to measure a long time after the students read the passages. What we’re like to see is long-term acceptance, not short-term acceptance.

I guess I’m not surprised at the result, as we know that people tend to accept ideas more readily when those ideas are endorsed by members of their “tribe,” and I suppose that people like Clooney and Watson, who are widely admired, can be considered members of the Canadians’ “tribe.” It’s not clear whether people can see a scientist as a member of their tribe.

But what action does this result suggest if we want people to accept evolution? I suppose it couldn’t hurt to have celebrities endorse evolution, though I’m not aware of any who have. (Of course, celebrities, at least in Hollywood, tend to be liberal and Democratic, and so probably would endorse evolution). So by all means let’s get the NSF to gather celebrity endorsements and publicize them.

Since I’m not a celebrity, though, all I can do is talk about the data supporting evolution, as I’m no George Clooney! Maybe a combination of a scientist and celebrity, as with people like Brian Cox (previously a rock star) or Neil deGrasse Tyson, would work better than scientists alone.

All I can say is that if endorsements work over the long term, that’s fine; but people should also look at the data supporting evolution rather than simply relying on either scientist-experts or celebrities. After all, you can understand why evolution is true without fancy degrees in science.

More dumb antievolution statements from Jews

November 2, 2018 • 1:00 pm

I suppose that, as a secular Jew (yes, Dave Silverman, they exist!), I am biased, but it really rankles me a lot when Jews come out against evolution. We’re supposed to be down with science, for crying out loud, and a Jew who opposes evolution seems like a lion who opposes carnivory.

But apparently the pages of The Jewish Press a major Jewish website, has been having a debate about whether “a frum [very pious] Jew can – or should – accept the theory of evolution considering that it doesn’t easily fit the text of Parshas Bereishis [Genesis, Chapter 1]”. That’s like debating whether a pious Jew can accept a spherical earth given that Scripture implies that the earth is flat.

I haven’t followed this debate, but the final contribution to the “discourse” is the piece below, written by Josh Greenberger, identified as “author of Fossil Discoveries Disprove Evolution Beyond A Doubt.” He also wrote a previous and similar creationist piece for this “newspaper,” “No, evolution is not a scientific fact,” which was handily taken apart by the Sensuous Curmudgeon.

Well, read the link below and weep, and weep harder if you’re a Jew, for one of your own has shown himself to be irredeemably stupid—or willfully ignorant in the service of G-d, which is suppose is the same thing.

A few quotes (indented) and my brief and my ascerbic responserew (flush left):sarrfrrr

Charles Darwin, the “father” of evolution, was neither a scientist nor an authority in any endeavor that might have made him an authority on biological life.

The profession of “scientist” wasn’t as established in the mid-19th century as it is today, but of course Darwin was a scientist, as he practiced what everyone would recognize as science. And as for his qualifications, he studied biology in school and throughout his entire life as an autodidact. Do note that Mendel, whom Greenberger much prefers to Darwin, wasn’t a scientist in that sense, either: he was a monk.

But let’s proceed:

Upon observing many life forms and some fossils, Darwin concluded that all species of organisms develop via small incremental changes and the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the organism’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. But Darwin never ran any experiments or discovered any empirical evidence to support his beliefs. Basically, his theory was based on pure imagination.

This is complete hogwash, or muttonwash if you need a kosher metaphor. Of course Darwin did experiments, and, more important, larded his books, including the seminal Origin of Species, with empirical information: information about embryology, morphology, biogeography, development, and artificial selection, all of this evidence so strong that within a decade virtually all rational people accepted the idea of evolution and common descent (acceptance of natural selection took longer).

Darwin himself remarked: “the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.” The fossil record, though, shows life forms appearing fully formed – a “serious” difficulty in Darwin’s eyes.

The fossil record was indeed scanty in Darwin’s time, but now, as I show in Why Evolution is True, we have innumerable fossilized transitional forms between “kinds,” including between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, reptiles and birds, and, of course, between our earlier ancestors and modern humans. Darwin’s difficult is no longer an issue.

Gregor Mendel, a contemporary of Darwin – and much more qualified to opine on biological life – challenged Darwin’s views. Darwin assumed there were no limits to biological variation and that, given enough time, a fish could eventually evolve into a human being. Mendel challenged this assumption, claiming evolution was restricted to within “kinds.” A drastic development, such as a fish evolving into a human being, could never happen no matter how much time was allowed, he said.

Mendel carefully designed and meticulously executed experiments involving nearly 30,000 pea plants followed over eight generations. However, the importance of his work only gained wide understanding in the 1890s, after his death, when other scientists working on similar problems rediscovered his research.

Mendel was wrong about evolution not occurring between “kinds”, no matter how you define them. As I said above, we have evidence from fossils, genes, and development for common ancestry of what are surely different “kinds”, like reptiles and birds. And Mendel didn’t ever study evolution: he studied genetics and never published a comprehensive theory of evolution.

Greenberger then recounts the experiments of Rich Lenski, wrongly characterizing them as showing that laboratory evolution aways produces the same result over and over again. But it didn’t!

More than a century later, experiments by evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University, showed that Mendel was right and Darwin was wrong. In experiments that began in 1988 and continued for at least 20 years, Lenski demonstrated very clearly that speciation is the result of underlying genetic design, not chaos and randomness.

Lenski didn’t study speciation: he studied evolutionary change within a species: the bacterium E. coli. And he showed that different lines responded to selection in different ways: just what you’d expect if evolution depends on unpredictable (“random”) mutations that occur regardless of their adaptive value.

Lenski’s experiments demonstrated that Darwin’s notion that there were no limits to biological variation was false, and that beneficial biological changes are the result of a genetic predisposition that allows for very specific, predefined forms of life. A good analogy might be: If you hit balls on a pool table at random, they will fall into random pockets. But they can only fall into pockets prepared by the pool table manufacturer; the balls cannot drill new pockets on their own. In the same way, the evolution of life is only “random” in that it can choose, perhaps randomly, from a list of predefined organisms.

Lenski did no such thing—he showed that random mutation in some lines of the bacterium could enable them to adapt to a novel substrate, and different lines responded in different ways. That is evolution, and it’s evolution by natural selection. Those are two of the major points in Darwin’s “theory” of evolution. To buttress his Jewish faith, Greenberger is simply distorting what Lenski showed.

Finally, Greenberger has to deal with the question of why so many scientists accept evolution if there’s no evidence for it. His answer is the usual one, but again he’s wrong:

If there’s so much solid scientific evidence against Darwinian evolution, why do people embrace it? In my opinion, they do so because it allows them to believe in a universe without God. But for those to whom scientific truth and honesty mean something, there’s no getting around the fact that Mendel and Lenski demonstrated undeniable design in what appears to be genetic chaos and biological randomness. If that means there must be a God, so be it.

In fact, more than half of American scientists claim some kind of religious belief, so why would religious scientists like, say, Francis Collins and Ken Miller embrace evolution? Those two men are, respectively, an evangelical Christian and a Catholic. It’s risible, bogus, and reprehensible to say that scientists accept evolution because it buttresses their atheism. The fact that most scientists are not atheists is sufficient to refute this.

I have no words to describe how infuriating stuff like this is. Greenberger is obviously not insane, but he looks that way because he’s marinated in his faith. But, as I mention in Faith versus Fact, a 2006 poll of randomly-selected Americans showed that 64% of them would reject a scientific fact if it went against the tenets of their belief. Evolution is one of those facts, and Greenberger is one of the rejectors.

h/t: reader Mark

Israeli schools reported to avoid teaching evolution

October 30, 2018 • 8:30 am

Oy gewalt! The Times of Israel (click on screenshot below), which I take to be a fairly reliable source about what’s going on in that country, reported at the end of August that the national Education Ministry is pushing teachers to deep-six the teaching of evolution in favor of other stuff. Click on the screenshot to see the article:

From the article:

Most students in Israeli schools do not learn about evolution, and the Education Ministry is quietly encouraging teachers to focus on other topics in biology, according to a Wednesday report.

Several teachers who spoke to Channel 10 said the Education Ministry prefers they teach as little about evolution as possible. The educators said they received no training on the topic and received hints from the ministry that it was better to focus on other subjects.

Biology classes in kindergarten and elementary school do not mention Charles Darwin’s theory that all life evolved from common ancestors, and in middle school it is only alluded to as part of general discussions, the TV report said.

Four years ago, the high school curriculum was revised, the report said. Previously there had been one unit on evolution in the matriculation exams. In the new curriculum, the religiously sensitive theory of common descent has been omitted, and replaced with classes on species survival and genetic modifications and adaptations based on environmental factors. [JAC: These “modifications” and the like are often ways to avoid mentioning the e-word.]

The news report cited three biology teachers who said they simply do not teach evolution in their classrooms.

. . . The Education Ministry defended its curriculum.

“Learning the principles of adaptation to the environment is compulsory in middle school,” it told Channel 10. “The theory of evolution itself is taught as an optional class in high schools.”

Optional? Optional? Why is that? It’s high school, and it should be mandatory!

The reason, of course, is that these schools are catering to religious Jews, whose acceptance of evolution is inversely proportional to their religiosity. The government may deny that, but I can’t see any other reasons. The school system is not supposed to dumb down its curriculum to avoid offending the religious.

The article continues:

A 2016 Pew Report found that just over half of Israeli Jews believe in evolution (53%), but huge disparities were found between religious groups on the subject. Just 3% of ultra-Orthodox Jews, 11% of Modern Orthodox, and 35% of traditional Jews believe in evolution. Among the secular, 83% believe humans and other living things have evolved over time, and those with a university education subscribed to the belief more readily – 72%– than those that didn’t – 50%. Some 80% of Russian-speaking Jews believe in evolution.

A majority of Ashkenazi Jews believe in evolution (66%), while only 39% of Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews do. But more Israeli Jews than Arabs believe in evolution (37% of Israeli Arabs).

Natural History Museum: Tear down that curtain!

As I’ve reported before, evolution isn’t mentioned in the Natural History Museum in Tel Aviv, which is even built to look like Noah’s Ark (!), and the Natural History Museum in Jerusalem covers up the evolution exhibits with a curtain when Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) schoolchildren come to visit.  Here are  two photos from my earlier post, showing how the human evolution exhibit is put under wraps to avoid offending ultra-Orthodox Jews. This is the visual equivalent of censoring books (photos from the Times of Israel):

Despite my having written to both museums (who responded), and the Times of Israel having written about my criticism, the Museums are continuing their censorship of evolution. Now, it seems, the government of Israel itself is playing along. This is especially embarrassing to a secular Jew like me, but it shows that no religion is immune from being offended by the scientific truth.

h/t: Ant

The BBC changed the religion/science accommodationism question on its evolution quiz

September 25, 2018 • 1:00 pm

As reader Eric astutely pointed out, the BBC has now changed question #7—the “accommodationism” question—in the evolution quiz I described this morning. It previously read this way:

Now it reads this way:

I’m fairly sure, but not positive, that calling attention to this question by myself or others has led to the change. It’s an improvement for sure, but I emphasize again that this question has no place in a quiz about evolution. It’s a theological or philosophical question that doesn’t test anybody’s knowledge about evolution. What gives, Beeb? You in bed with Templeton?

Further, the “right” answer depends on what you mean by “incompatible”. If you construe “compatibility” as “some people can be both scientists and religious,” then of course they’re compatible. But if you construe it as “compatible in using comparable methods to ascertain what’s true”, then it’s false. My whole book Faith Versus Fact is about this issue.

But the entire quiz is very shoddy, as several readers pointed out. Virtually every question is ambiguous or wonky. I don’t follow BBC science reporting much, but letting this quiz slip by without some vetting by good British evolutionists (e.g. our own Dr. Cobb) is bad journalism.

So it goes.