Poor beleaguered Melanie Phillips!

May 4, 2009 • 3:00 pm

Thanks to an alert reader, I’ve learned that Melanie Phillips has responded to the spate of criticism she got for her recent Spectator article claiming that intelligent design grew out of science, not religion.  She got it in the neck from bloggers and readers for that, most especially for her moronic claim that ID is not a form of creationism.  Now she has posted a long response to her critics, distancing herself somewhat from ID but still claiming that it’s not creationism.  She mentions Michael Behe as one of the scientific IDers, asserting that “He is not a Creationist.” Does she know that he once said that new species were “poofed” into being by the designer? If that ain’t creationism, I don’t know what is.

Ms. Phillips claims she’s the victim of a “secular inquisition.”

I hold no particular brief for ID, but am intrigued by the ideas it raises and want it to be given a fair crack of the whip to see where the argument will lead. What I have also seen, however, is an attempt to shut down that argument by distorting and misrepresenting ID and defaming and intimidating its proponents.

One way of doing so is to conflate ID with Creationism. I wrote below that this is wrong, since ID comes out of science and creationism comes out of Biblical literalism. This provoked Charles Johnson on LGF to accuse me of being either duped or dishonest. Johnson – who has become unhealthily obsessed with ID and Creationism in recent months — says I am wrong to say that ID is based on science rather than on religion, and wrong to say that it is different from Creationism. . .

Dogma is certainly what is on the other side of ID in this fight – a materialist dogma which, posing as the standard-bearer of reason against obscurantism, actually embodies irrationality and a kind of intellectual fascism. It is a secular inquisition – as the reaction to my post makes all too plain.

On the other head, maybe she’s just ignorant and biased, like the Inquisitors themselves.

The genetic history of Africans

May 3, 2009 • 12:05 pm

This week’s Science magazine has an absorbing article by Sarah Tishkoff et al. on the genetic relationship and evolutionary history of African populations.  (Ann Gibbons has a one-page summary here.)  This project was a massive one, involving DNA genotyping of 1,327 genes in 2,432 Africans from 113 populations, as well as 98 African-Americans and 21 Yemenites. (That’s over 3,385,000 genetic determinations; no wonder the paper has 25 authors!)  There are many results, but I’ll just list the main ones here:

1.  All the hunter-gatherer populations of Africa descend from one ancestral population that is a bit more than 35,000 years old.  This means that African tribes and ethnic groups are very young relative to when African ancestors left the continent to populate the world with modern humans (about 60,000-100,000 years ago).

2.  The population ancestral to the modern African groups appears to have lived in southwest Africa.  Tishkoff et al.  even calculate a migration epicenter:  12.5 degrees E and 17.5 degrees S, near the border of Namibia and Angola.

3.  The genetic profile of Africans put them roughly into groups corresponding to the major language differences (see figure below).  This is not surprising; it shows that almost all intermarriage has occurred within groups that speak the same language.

4.  African-Americans have a complex mixture of genes from many areas, including about 67% Bantu and non-Bantu genes from people who speak Niger-Kordofanian languages (e.g. ,Zulu and Swahili),  8% from other African areas, and 13% from Caucasians.  The authors note that this will make it hard for some African-Americans to trace their roots.

5.  The “out of Africa” group whose migration gave rise to modern humans worldwide has its closest relatives in the group of “blue” populations at the top of the figure below.  These are “Saharan” populations from East Africa. That, then, is where the rest of us came from.

language-groups

The phylogeny of African groups: a massive achievement (Figure from Tishkoff et al.)

More creationism in the UK

May 3, 2009 • 5:26 am

This time it’s the scary Ken Ham, head of the Biblical literalist organization Answers in Genesis.  (Ham is also the founder of the hildariously stupid Creation Museum in Kentucky, where you can have your toddler photographed on top of Triceratops wearing a saddle [see below].) Over at Butterflies and Wheels (a superb rationalist blog), Ed Turner recounts a talk that Ham gave at Liverpool University (why was he invited if there’s almost no pro-creationist sentiment in the UK?).  Excerpts:

It was an appalling experience for an atheist to sit through. My blood boiled, my teeth gnashed and my choice as a non-believer was very much confirmed. It wasn’t just the scientific ignorance that this man was peddling; he was also selling something far more sinister: right-wing religious bigotry of a distinctly Falwell variety.

In a nutshell, Ham’s line is that the Bible is the unalterable, infallible, unquestionable, literal Word of God. Everything in the Bible happened exactly as it is described, ifs, not buts, no metaphors, no allegories. Seven days means seven days, not a Hebrew term for a long period of time. People must choose between the Bible and human reason. Clearly Ham is a devotee of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, who recommended that tearing out your eyes of reason was a prerequisite to being a Christian.

Where scientific evidence and the Bible conflict, the Bible is always to be preferred and evidence must be massaged in order to fit it. According to Ham, we all start with “presuppositions”. Atheist scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Eugenie Scott start on the presupposition that God does not exist and the Bible is wrong; creationist scientists such as Kurt Wise start with the presupposition that God does exist and the Bible is correct. The differing conclusions result purely from differing interpretations of the same evidence.

This position was demonstrated with a highly amusing video clip showing two scientists unearthing a dinosaur fossil in the desert. “Bob says that this fossil was formed after the corpse was covered in sediment from a rising river hundreds of millions of years ago. I on the other hand say it was covered by Noah’s Flood approximately 4,300 years ago, like it says in the Bible. You see, we have different perspectives on exactly the same piece of evidence.” . . .

It soon became clear, however, that Ham is not simply preaching good ol’ fashioned back-to-basics holiness; he is also touting religious xenophobia and intolerance of the kind that should be handled with the aid of a peg over one’s nose and a very long pair of tongs.

“There’s no such thing as neutrality. If you’re not pro-Jesus, you’re anti-Jesus” Ham told his flock. So the other four billion people who are not Christians presently residing on the plant are completely wrong, evil and must be opposed to the last? We have tribalism to add to the man’s list of faith-based misdemeanours?

Gay marriage and abortion were repeatedly flagged up in Ham’s PowerPoint slides as personifying what’s wrong with our society. Ham is also out to control the minds of today’s youth. His tables and graphs of statistics showed that many young people abandon the faith in which they were raised by their parents because they are asking too many questions…

That’s right; free thought and free enquiry is a very bad thing indeed. We obviously haven’t brainwashed the little tykes enough. They are getting ideas of their own and want to lead their own lives. This is clearly the fault of teachers and the education system and needs to be changed right now. . .

The final nail in the evening’s coffin was that the audience were lapping it up like rabid dogs. They wanted it all to be true. I heard one audience member say to another before the talk started that they had come to “get educated”. Being the centre of a divine design, despite the designer treating them like his plaything and caking them in his own excrement, was better than being at the centre of nothing. The solipsism of the theistic mind knows no bounds; the desire to remain a slave burns ever brighter; we have to be responsible for it all somehow.

This is in Britain, remember?  Again I repeat, while lecturing on the Queen Mary 2 to many Brits about evolution, I was repeatedly told that creationism was “not a problem” in the UK.

Fundamentalists of all stripes, including many Muslims, want to avoid at all costs their children being exposed to free inquiry that might counteract their religious brainwashing.   Madrasas teach only the Koran, and in some places Muslim women are denied schooling or attacked with acid if they try to go to school.  And this is what much of the homeschooling movement is about:  teach your kids only what you believe. (Our correspondent on this website is a notable and welcome exception.)  Another example:  as P. Z. Myer reports over at Pharyngula, James Corbett, a high-school teacher in California was found guilty in federal court for simply telling students the truth about creationism:

“Corbett states an unequivocal belief that Creationism is ‘superstitious nonsense,'” U.S. District Court Judge James Selna said in a 37-page ruling released from his Santa Ana courtroom. “The court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement, even when considered in context.”

The legitimate secular purpose was, of course, to help students distinguish between science and non-science.  If Corbett told his students that homeopathy was medical nonsense, he wouldn’t be in trouble. The secular purpose of this statement is precisely the same.

triceratoos

Fun at Kentucky’s Creation Museum

UK columnist defends intelligent design

May 2, 2009 • 7:05 am

Lest anybody say that creationism isn’t a problem in the UK (and this is something I heard repeatedly while lecturing about evolution on the Queen Mary 2), have a look at this week’s Spectator column by the British conservative writer Melanie Phillips.  She makes the absurd claim that intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism, and asserts that Judge Jones was flatly wrong in finding them similar.

Whatever the ramifications of the specific school textbooks under scrutiny in the Kitzmiller/Dover case, the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science. Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

Really? ID comes out of science?  Which scientists did the work that led to the hypothesis of intelligent design? And  what about the doctored ID textbook in which the word “creationism” was simply replaced by the words “intelligent design”? Why is it that the biggest supporters of ID are evangelical Christians?  And if she thinks the proponents of ID are “mainly scientists,” she should look again.

Ms. Phillips has a track record of attacking evolution; here’s another example:

But evolution is not a fact. It is a theory with holes in it. What Emmanuel questions in its religion classes, and may question in its science classes, is scientism, the doctrine that says the only questions worth asking are the ones that science can answer.

This is an extremely dubious doctrine which many scientists themselves think is anti-science. Scientists such as the physicist Stephen Hawking still haven’t managed to produce their grand theory of everything that can explain the mysteries of creation.

And evolution certainly does not have all the answers. It does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began.

Scientists like Dawkins say such questions are unanswerable and therefore should not be asked. But this attitude is not only the height of arrogance – when it translates into telling faith schools what they cannot teach and what pupils are not allowed to think, it becomes totalitarian.

Her article is hardly worth refuting, but it’s important in showing that seemingly intelligent and influential people in the UK buy into forms of creationism. As I’ve said repeatedly to Brits, the problem in their country is much worse than they realize.  And The Spectator should be ashamed of itself.  This is not a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of fact.

Accommodationism, philosophy, and the meaning of life

May 1, 2009 • 1:11 pm

Over at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, Russell Blackford has a nice post on accommodationism, and how it has been deliberately but subtly integrated into the supposedly religion-neutral statements of organizations like the National Center for Science Education.  He’s a philosopher, so his analysis is much more finely reasoned than mine have been.  And lest you think that Russell is the Antichrist, just look at the nice picture of him and his cat that I posted two days ago.

40,000-year-old frozen mammoth

May 1, 2009 • 10:35 am

This baby wooly mammoth, a female estimated at six months old when she fell into a river and died, has been almost perfectly preserved for 40,000 years.  National Geographic describes the find in 2007.  As I note in WEIT, some mammoths have been so well preserved that their meat was served at a dinner at New York’s Explorer Club.

Thanks to Jeremy Manier, who does the blog “Science Life” for the University of Chicago Hospitals, for the heads up.

frozen-woolly-mammoth-baby-23068-1241115613-8