Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
For the first time (I think), I’m going to ask my readers to help me track down the source of a quotation. The following pithy statement is all over the internet, but I can’t find the original source, and by “original” I mean the full reference (if in a book, the title and page number, if on the web, an original URL).
“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”
—Delos Banning McKown
Thanks for any help!
This new compilation of Bill Maher’s “rules for religion” is hilarious, and I’m posting it despite having put up a small section of this video a few months ago (that 5-minute video has, by the way, now vanished from YouTube). This video, 25 minutes long, is as good a collection of Maher’s views on religion as you can get. (I’m not counting “Religulous” since in that movie the faithful helped mock themselves. And I still haven’t seen it yet.)
The bits about Mitt Romney, Mormonism, and the ending showing a real scene of Sarah Palin rebuking witchcraft under pastoral incantation (24:10) are priceless.
What I like about Maher’s take on faith is the combination of hilarity and the dead serious points behind it. No living comic comes close, though George Carlin did when he was alive.
h/t: Barry
There’s a really nice Google doodle today, even though it celebrates woo: the 66th anniversary of the Roswell Incident, in which a UFO supposedly crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. That led to a bunch of conspiracy theories about how the U.S. Government covered up the incident, including autopsies of the aliens that were aboard the spacecraft.
Well, most of us know about this, but you can still have fun by clicking on the Google doodle, which is an animated game. After the spaceship crashes, move the cursor to help the stranded alien find the piece of his missing spaceship and put them back together.
Be sure your browser is up to date.
Here’s a screenshot of what you’ll see; click on the triangle to play.
Sadly, although I thought I was finished reading for my own book, I’m having to plow through two newer books, both of them dire. The first, which I just finished, is Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God. The less said about this discourse on apophatic theology the better. Well, let me just say that she claims that:
That is the most sophisticated of Sophisticated Theology™, and of course she uses it to attack New Atheists, who, she says, have a juvenile and unsophisticated emphasis on Biblical literalism. Her vision of the true religion isn’t subject to attacks like theirs.
I’m about to start reading another critique of the new Atheists, the infamous The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers by Curtis White. It’s an anti-scientism book as well, and since I haven’t read it, here’s the Amazon blurb:
One of our most brilliant social critics—and the author of the bestselling The Middle Mind—presents a scathing critique of the “delusions” of science alongside a rousing defense of the role of art and philosophy in our culture
The so-called new atheists, most famously Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, made a splash in the new millennium. They told the evangelical and the liberal believer that they must give up religion and submit to science.
More recently, neuroscientists and their fans in the media have delivered a variation on this message: the mapping of the human brain will soon be completed, and we will know what we are and how we should act. Their faith is that the scientific method provides the best understanding not only of the physical world but also of art, culture, economics, and anything left over. The message is nearly the same as that of the new atheists: submit to science.
In short, the rich philosophical debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been nearly totally abandoned, argues Curtis White. An atheist himself, White fears what this new turn toward “scientism” will do to our culture if allowed to flourish without challenge. After all, is creativity really just chemicals in the brain? Is it wrong to ponder “Why is there something instead of nothing?” or “What is our purpose on Earth?” These were some of the original concerns of the Romantic movement, which pushed back against the dogmas of science in a nearly forgotten era.
White published an excerpt of that book in Salon a while back, “Christopher Hitchens’ lies do atheism no favorites,” which is a deeply misguided critique of Hitchens, accusing him of (as usual) lack of theological sophistication, ignorance of Eastern religions (true; he concentrates more on Abrahamic religions) and having his own metaphysics and code of conduct which, being faith-based, is precisely the same as what one gets from religion.
You can read it for yourself, but Salon just published a nice rebuttal of White’s piece by Carlo Dellora, a student at the University of Melbourne: “God is not great”: Christopher Hitchens is not a liar.” While admitting that Hitchens was indeed Eurocentric and didn’t deal with Eastern religions in God is not Great, he nevertheless defends him against the charges that he was a liar, and had no good secular system for ethics.
Just a couple of quotes from Dellora’s piece:
As White points out, Buddhism may in fact be a solid ethical framework, but this is not the point. Buddhism is yet another fiction, another deep sleep that convinces adherents that life is only an appetizer for the next incarnation; whether or not their ethical structures have more in common with Western notions of “decency” or violent Wahhabism remains irrelevant so long as Eastern religions preach that life here and now is merely foreplay before the real thing, and that more than anything provoked Hitchens’ ire.
As for the charge that there’s nothing wrong with moderate religion, and Hitchens is just attacking a fundamentalist caricature of faith. As did Sam Harris, Hitchens sees moderate faith as enabling more extreme forms of religion, and I have to agree with that:
Like many before him have done, White suggests that Hitchens’ visceral resentment for all religions ignores “an important source for correcting the very real shortcomings of fundamentalism.” In a subtle reworking of the stale “why focus on the extremists argument” White suggests that only by accepting religion can society attempt to redress its excesses. Hitchens has consistently refuted this line of argument, contending that even seemingly moderate religions are in essence a kind of extremism as they reject the most basic forms of reason and instead trust a faith that praises an unseen creator and runs counter to most objective notions of reality. Furthermore, Hitchens saw moderates as facilitators of the abhorrent extremist brand of religiosity that threatens abortion clinics and blinds “adulterous” women with acid. When the Danish cartoon controversy erupted in 2005 Hitchens was shocked to see that moderate adherents to Christianity and Islam spent their time decrying the cartoons but not the violence itself, ignoring the murderous mobs who had taken to the streets in reply. This was illustrative of a broader issue, namely, that moderate religiosity provides a plinth upon which a firebrand version of any faith can be constructed, moderation in essence creating the environment necessary for extremism to survive.
Finally, I have to quote Dellora’s defense of Hitchens’ secular ethics against the charge that it’s religious. It includes a wonderful quote from Hitch (I’ve put it in bold) that I’ve not heard before:
It is here that White finally comes to the point that he and many others like him have been making for at least the last decade – that the “new-atheist” movement is just another religion. A contention that echoes the twist at the end of the mediocre Hollywood blockbuster, atheism is religion. White asserts that Hitchens’ reliance on enlightenment reason is a metaphysical claim and tantamount to the faith-based logic of the religiously inclined. White asks: “What is “reason” for Hitchens? Your guess is as good as mine. Is it the rules of logic? Is it the scientific method? Is it Thomas Paine’s common sense? Some combination of the above?”
Yes, here White is correct. We should understand what made up Hitchens’ irreligious principles and ethical framework. How can we possibly be expected to trust a man who decries religion yet offers very little in the way of a description or framework of ethics as an alternative? Except, he does. On the very same page, in the very same paragraph that White quotes, Hitchens succinctly and brilliantly outlines his own version of an ethical and principled kind of reason: “Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
Into the fray.
by Matthew Cobb
The Curosity Mars Rover does stargazing, too. On 28 June, shortly after sunset, Curiosity turned its Navigation Camera skyward, and recorded 86 frames of pictures, capturing Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons, rising in the centre of the frame. The actual time it took to record these images was 27 minutes (on the video Phobos-rise lasts about 16 seconds).
h/t @xtaldave on Twitter and http://spaceindustrynews.com
The last five words of the title were added by the photographer, Stephen Barnard, when he sent me this picture. Barnard is proving an endless source of great nature photography:
And no pedantry about “We’re not sure that it’s really a true bug!” (Hemiptera). The Latin binomial of this bird is Chordeiles minor.
I’ve been known for a while as a critic of evolutionary psychology, particularly when it first began as “sociobiology” in the Seventies. At that time there was a lot of unsupported speculation being bruited about as “science” (i.e., human males evolved to have “rape modules”, a view that I criticized strongly). But over the decades, evolutionary psychology has matured, and I now see it as a valuable way of studying the origins of human behavior. Not that it’s all perfect—the “pop” versions, such as those produced by Satoshi Kanazawa, seem pretty dire to me, debasing a field that’s striving for scientific rigor. But even Kanazawa has been rejected by serious evolutionary psychologists.
Sadly, some self-professed skeptics have decided to debunk the entire field of evo-psych, and for reasons that I see not as scientific, but as ideological and political. That is, like the opponents of sociobiology thirty years ago, these skeptics object to the discipline because they see it as both motivated by and justifying conservative political views like the marginalization of women. Well, that may be the motivation of some people, but not, I think, of most well-known workers in evo psych, who are merely trying to study the evolutionary roots of human behavior. It pains me that skeptics are so dogmatic, so ideological, in viewing (and rejecting wholesale) a legitimate scientific field.
Because of this ideologically-motivated critique, last December I published a defense of the field, “Is evolutionary psychology worthless?“, pointing out a dozen areas of evo-psych research—most of them not involving gender differences—that I saw as valuable, interesting, and productive.
Nevertheless, the dissing of evo-psych by skeptics continues. The latest critique occurred at the Convergence 2013 conference on a panel described in a post by P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula:
First panel: Evolutionary Psychology, with Stephanie Zvan moderating, and Greg Laden (a biological anthropologist), me (neuroscience by training, evo devo by occupation), and Indre Viskontas (neuroscience) (and who I met for the first time, and who was on a panel at an SF con for the first time…she’s good). My main point: Developmental plasticity is all. The fundamental premises of evo psych are false.
This paragraph disturbed me for two reasons. First, the notion that “the fundamental premises of evo psych are false” seems deeply misguided. After all, those premises boil down to this statement: some behaviors of modern humans reflect their evolutionary history. That is palpably uncontroversial, since many of our behaviors are clearly a product of evolution, including eating, avoiding dangers, and the pursuit of sex. And since our bodies reflect their evolutionary history, often in nonadaptive ways (e.g., wisdom teeth, bad backs, the coat of hair we produce as a transitory feature in fetuses), why not our brains, which are, after all, just bits of morphology whose structure affects our behaviors?
Second, “developmental plasticity” does not stand as a dichotomous alternative to “evolved features.” Our developmental plasticity is to a large extent the product of evolution: our ability to learn language, our tendency to defer to authorities when we’re children, our learned socialization—those are all features almost certainly instilled into our brains by natural selection as a way to promote behavioral flexibility in that most flexible of mammals.
I haven’t listened to the entire Convergence panel because the audio is apparently quite bad, but I was distressed by the comments P.Z. made in the ensuing discussion, in which he expands his reasons for rejecting evolutionary psychology. I sent P.Z.’s post and comments to my friend Steve Pinker, whose books have engaged quite deeply with evolutionary psychology, to get his reaction. Steve sent me an email with his responses, and then gave me permission to publish them. (I add the caveat, at Steve’s request, that this was an informal email, and he’s not to be held responsible for slips of grammar or punctuation!)
I post P. Z.’s comments (with links) below in italics (and an “M”), and Steve’s responses in bold type (with a “P”)
A comment P. Z. made in the ensuing discussion:
M: Fundamental assumptions of evo psych: That you can infer an adaptive history from the distribution of current traits — that they are adaptations at all is an assumption usually not founded in evidence (this is not to deny that that there are features that are clearly the product of selection, but that you can’t pick an arbitrary attribute and draw elaborate scenarios for its origins). . .
P: Of course “arbitrary” and “elaborate” are the straw-man giveaways here. What about carefully selected attributes, and minimal assumptions about phylogeny with a focus on function, as we do for other organs? You can ask what the spleen is for – and it would be perverse to do physiology without asking such a question – without “drawing elaborate scenarios for its origins.”
M:. . . That behavioral features that have been selected for in our history are represented by modular components in the brain – again with rare exceptions, you can’t simply assign a behavioral role to a specific spot in the brain, just as you can’t assign a behavior to a gene.
P: No one in Ev Psych points to specific spots in the brain – that’s cognitive neuroscience, not evolutionary psychology. The only assumption is that there are functional circuits, in the same way that a program can be fragmented across your hard drive.
M: . . . That the human brain is adapted to a particular environment, specifically the African savannah, and that we can ignore as negligible any evolutionary events in the last 10,000 years, that we can ignore the complexity of an environment most of the evo psych people have never seriously studied, and that that environment can dictate one narrow range of outcomes rather than permit millions of different possibilities.
P: The savannah is a red herring – that’s just a convenient dichotomization of the relevant continuum, which is evolutionary history. A minimal commitment to “pre-modern” gives you the same conclusions. By saying that the brain could not have been biologically adapted to stable government, police, literacy, medicine, science, reliable statistics, prevalence of high-calorie food, etc., you don’t need to go back to the savannah; you just need to say that these were all relevantly recent in most people’s evolutionary history. The savannah is just a synechdoche.
M: I’d also add that most evo psych studies assume a one-to-one mapping of hypothetical genes to behaviors. . .
P: Completely untrue – this was Gould’s claim in the 1970s, which confused a “gene for x” (indispensable in any evolutionary thinking, given segregation) in the sense of “increases the probability of X, averaging over environments and other genes” with “a gene for X” in the sense of “necessary and sufficient for X.” Every honest biologist invokes “gene for X” in the former sense; evolution would be impossible if there were no additive effects of genes. No one believes the latter – it’s pure straw.
M [continuation of previous sentence]:. . . and never actually look at genes and for that matter, ignore most human diversity to focus on a naive typological simplicity that allows them to use undergraduate psych majors at Western universities as proxies for all of humanity”
P: It’s psychologists, not evolutionary psychologists, who focus on Western undergrads –field research and citations of anthropology are vastly more common in ev psych than in non-ev-psych. PZ is engaging in prosecution here, not analysis – he’s clearly ignorant of the sociology of the fields.
As for diversity – is he arguing for genetic differences among human groups, a la Herrnstein & Murray?
P.Z. then made a second comment:
M: Developmental plasticity vitiates most of the claims of evo psych. Without denying that some behaviors certainly have a strong biological basis, the differences in human behaviors are more likely to be a product of plasticity than of genetic differences. . .
P: Plasticity is just learning at the neural level, and learning is not an alternative to innate motives and learning mechanisms. Plasticity became an all-purpose fudge factor in the 1990s (just like “epigenetics” is today). But the idea that the brain is a piece of plastic molded by the environment is bad neuroscience. I reviewed neural plasticity in the chapter “The Slate’s Last Stand” in The Blank Slate, with the help of many colleagues in neuroscience, and noted that the plasticity that allows feedback during development and learning during ontogeny is superimposed on an innate matrix of neural organization. For example if you silence *all* synaptic activity in the brain of a developing mouse with knock-outs, the brain is pretty much normal.
M: . . . I think good evo psych would focus on human universals (much more likely to be driven by genetic properties!) than all this stuff seeking justifications for cultural differences between the sexes or the races or arbitrary subgroups.
Steve didn’t respond to this last bit, but I did ask him to tell me what he thought were the greatest accomplishments of evolutionary psychology. This was in response to one remark (made, I think, by a panel member) that the discipline had produced no substantive accomplishments. Steve’s response:
P: On accomplishments – there are vast numbers of topics in psychology that were barely studied before EP came along, and in which you just can’t formulate sensible hypotheses without giving some thought to function – they’d include sexuality, violence, religion, beauty, play, emotions, and parenting. Even other areas, like perception and memory, have always been evolutionary in the sense that researchers had a vague idea about “function” – the difference being that common-sense is enough when it comes to seeing in 3D, whereas you need to give some more thought to function in the case of, say, beauty.
For me there shouldn’t even be a field called “evolutionary psychology” for the same reason there shouldn’t be a field called “cognitive neuroscience” – you can’t understand any biological system without considering each of Tinbergen’s four levels of mechanism, development, adaptation, and phylogeny. “Ev psych” is simply the attempt to take adaptation/function seriously, just as “cog neuro” is the attempt to sharpen mechanism.
One gets two impressions when listening to the skeptics’ criticism of evolutionary psychology. First, they haven’t read widely in the discipline, and are criticizing either pop-culture versions of the field or a caricature (born of ignorance, possibly willful) of EP. Even I know that EP advocates don’t often publish studies that rely solely on undergraduates.
Second, it’s pretty clear that the opposition to evolutionary psychology from these quarters is ideologically rather than scientifically motivated. One gets the feeling that research on gender differences shouldn’t be done at all because it’s either designed to repress women, motivated by the desire to do that, or has the likely outcome of promoting discrimination. Well, sexist scientists may try to do that, but I haven’t seen much of that since the Seventies. And gender differences are fascinating. There’s a reason, for instance, why human males are larger and hairier than females, and have more testosterone. Are we supposed to say “You can’t work on that—could have bad repercussions!” Sure, scientific results can always be misused, but I don’t see that as a reason to put up roadblocks against scientific research. After all, what field is more misused and misquoted than evolutionary biology? I am a frequent recipient of emails from Jews trying to convince me to reject evolution because Darwin ultimately caused the Holocaust.
And the differences in sexual behavior between males and females do parallel those seen in many animals. Is that just cultural construction, or are there genes and selection pressures involved? One can surely study such things scientifically, just as one studies differences between the sexes of other mammals, without being committed to sexism. There are, after all, testable predictions involved.
No, the fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is absolutely sound: our brains, like the rest of our bodies, are the product of evolution and natural selection over the past six million years, and some of our current behaviors reflect that evolution. To deny that is ideologically motivated nonsense. To parse out the evolutionary component of such behaviors is the goal of evolutionary psychology.
News flash: I’m now a member of The Darwin Lobby! Or so says the vice-president of the Discovery Institute.
Yes, that’s true, but this is only a note of unintentional humor in a rather distressing piece of news.
Seth Slabaugh at the Muncie Star Press has written a piece on the hiring of intelligent-design (ID) advocate Guillermo Gonzalez in the Physics and Astronomy Department of Ball State University (BSU) in Muncie, Indiana. This department is already under fire for hosting a science course given by professor Eric Hedin, accused of teaching intelligent design (ID) in a public university as well as pushing a Christian point of view on his students. Hedin’s course is currently under review by a committee of professors appointed by BSU’s administration.
Gonzalez, you may recall, was something of an ID cause célèbre when he was denied tenure in 2007 at Iowa State University for failing to produce adequate scholarship. Since Gonzalez was also a vociferous ID advocate, having co-authored the ID book The Privileged Planet and its accompanying video, the Discovery Institute and other backers claimed that Gonzalez was discriminated against for working on ID. But his tenure appeal was denied on the grounds of poor academic performance, and Gonzalez took an untenured position at Grove City College, a small Christian school in Pennsylvania. As Wikipedia notes, Gonzalez is active in several venues for intelligent design:
Gonzalez was a regular contributor to Facts for Faith magazine produced by Reasons To Believe, an old earth creationist group. In addition to his work for the Discovery Institute and International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, he is a researcher for the Biologic Institute, which is funded by the institute for research into intelligent design.
He’s also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
A reader at BSU had informed me that Gonzalez’s name was down for two courses at BSU this fall, but it wasn’t clear whether he was simply doing a teaching stint or had been permanently hired at BSU, Now, according to Slabaugh’s piece in today’s paper, “Ball State hires intelligent design leader to teach astronomy“, the latter is the case. Gonzalez is now on staff as a tenure-track faculty member at BSU:
President Jo Ann Gora approved the hiring of Guiellermo Gonzalez as an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy on June 12 at a salary of $57,000.
Beginning Aug. 19, Gonzalez will be teaching The Sun and Stars, as well as The Solar System, both introductory astronomy classes.
Slabaugh quotes me on this turn of events, though I’m not keen on his characterization of me as “an atheist.” Is that relevant? If so, why aren’t Hedin and Gonzalez identified by their faith as well, for surely that’s at least as relevant to their activities as to mine?
“Do you see any pattern here?” Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, asked. “I’m wondering … why Ball State’s physics and astronomy department has a penchant for ID (intelligent design) people. This (hiring) is a very unwise move for Ball State, particularly when one of its other astronomy professors, Eric Hedin, is under investigation for teaching ID in an astronomy class. If the university wants to retain any scientific credibility, they should start hiring scientists who will teach real science and not religious apologetics.”
An atheist who claims religion and science are incompatible, Coyne is behind the investigation of Hedin. He complained about Hedin’s class to the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
“Why would [BSU] hire a person who didn’t get tenure at Iowa State because of his poor academic performance … and then went to a small religious school where I’m not sure he was tenured?” Coyne asked.
The paper also gives a bit of Gonzalez’s history and, unlike previous articles in the paper, at least attempts to show why there is scientific opposition to ID:
Intelligent design creationism is not supported by scientific evidence, according to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which was established when Abraham Lincoln was president to address the government’s need for an independent advisor on scientific matters.“Echoing theological arguments that predate the theory of evolution,” intelligent design supporters “contend that biological organisms must be designed in the same way that a mousetrap or a clock is designed,” NAS reports.
. . . The Des Moines Register reported in 2005 that Gonzalez had said publicly that he wanted to find a graduate student to pursue intelligent design.
After being forced out at ISU, Gonzalez told The Associated Press he had trouble finding another job. He sent about 15 applications to schools around the country.
“I didn’t receive a single invitation for an interview from many of the large public universities, even though I expected to,” he was quoted as saying. “In my opinion, if it hadn’t been for my known stance (on intelligent design), I would have been interviewed.”
Gonzalez finally wound up at Grove City College, a Christian school in Pennsylvania that does not have a tenure track program.
Grove City College has been on the American Association of University Professors’ list of censured administrations (for violations of academic freedom and tenure standards) longer than any other institution — since 1963, AAUP’s Greg Scholtz told The Star Press.
Fifty years on the censured list!
Gonzalez was one of the scientists who appeared in the controversial 2008 documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” It documented the plight of scientists and scholars who dare to question the claims of Darwinian evolution, which the film links to fascism, the Holocaust, communism, atheism, and eugenics. “Expelled: [sic] was denounced as propaganda by The American Association for the Advancement of Science, USA Today, The New York Times and others.
In response to questions about the hiring of Gonzalez, BSU spokeswoman Joan Todd — to whom press inquiries about Hedin and Gonzalez are being funneled — said in a prepared statement: “This is our response. His qualifications are in his cv (curriculum vitae).”
I guess those qualifications, though not sufficient for Iowa State, are good enough for Ball State. I haven’t yet seen the c.v., but BSU sounds awfully defensive.
Among other questions, [Todd] declined to answer whether BSU is seeking to become a research hub for intelligent design. She also declined to respond to Coyne’s comments, including, “Is there some unholy connection between BSU and the Discovery Institute, or is the department of astronomy just sympathetic to intelligent design?”
It probably would have been wiser had Todd admitted that ID is not science and that by no means would BSU try to become an ID research hub. Does BSU want scientific credibility or not?
[Gonzalez] declined comment to The Star Press. But his colleague John West, a political scientist and vice president of Discovery Institute, complained that Coyne is “taking it upon himself to try to dictate the curriculum and now the hiring decisions” of BSU’s department of physics and astronomy.
Coyne belongs to what West calls “the Darwin lobby.” “They don’t believe in academic freedom for anyone who disagrees with them, and they want to win the intellectual debate simply by silencing and intimidating any scholars who differ from them. In this case, Coyne is trying to destroy the careers of people in a discipline where he has no expertise whatsoever. Frankly, this is outrageous.”
I don’t believe in academic freedom for anyone who teaches religiously based woo as science, just as I wouldn’t for someone who taught astrology in a psychology class or homeopathy in medical school. As for my silencing and intimidating IDers, or trying to destroy careers, that’s insane. I have simply pointed out what I see as a violation of the First Amendment in a public university, and a blatant rejection of good standards for teaching science. And as for destroying careers, West is behaving just like an ID advocate: ignoring the facts. I’ve repeatedly said that I don’t think Hedin should be fired, but only that his course be deep-sixed. And I’ve said that BSU should keep an eye on Gonzalez to make sure he doesn’t teach ID in his science classes.
That doesn’t sound like “destroying careers” to me. The Discovery Institute is being a Drama Llama here, trying to set up these guys as martyrs.
But I do chuckle as being identified as a member of The Darwin Lobby. If that’s true, they haven’t yet sent me my membership card!
If you can’t read Slabaugh’s piece since there’s a per-month article limit, his piece also appears in the BoilerStation, apparently the Purdue-University news section of the Journal and Courier paper in Lafayette, Indiana. Like the Star Press, the Journal and Courier is also a Gannett paper.
Here’s an instructive comment on the BoilerStation site by one of Hedin’s students. She admits that Hedin was teaching the class from an intelligent-design viewpoint:
h/t: Diana