Skepticblog

Last Feb. 11, the day before Darwin’s 203rd Birthday, I was invited by Ross Blocher and Carrie Poppy of the “Oh, no, it’s Ross and Carrie” podcast to accompany them, along with Emery Emery and Heather Henderson of the Ardent Atheist podcast, to visit the Creation Museum in Santee, east of San Diego, California (videoblog available here). This museum was originally built by the Institute of Creation “Research” (ICR), once led by the late Henry Morris and Duane Gish, which has since relocated to Texas. At one time ICR was the leading creationist organization in the U.S., but lately they seem to have lost their influence (they couldn’t even get their school accredited in conservative Texas!). Now they are overshadowed by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and his multi-million-dollar creation museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (which I saw back in 2009). When ICR left California, they sold their museum to Tom Cantor, who made his fortune with a biotech firm, Scantibodies Laboratory, Inc. Cantor bills himself as a Jew converted to creationism, and gives away free DVDs of his story (complete with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in the background) subtitled “A Message of Hope and Gladness for the Jewish people”! With the new ownership, the drab building in an industrial park that long housed the creation museum is now shared with Scantibodies. In one of the many ironies of the place, Scantibodies Inc. makes antibodies, blockers, serum, plasma, and other medical kits, all of which demonstrate the process of evolution in action, and require evolutionary principles to work with….

Emery Emery and Heather Henderson mug in front of the tail-dragging T. rex in front of the drab industrial building that houses the museum.

You arrive and drive through heavy black iron gates and walk past a few cheesy dino sculptures in front. These include  a miniature T. rex based on the outdated concept with tail dragging behind it. (At least they don’t claim that the predatory dinos ate coconuts. not meat, with their long sharp teeth, as Ken Ham’s museum does). There is a Galapagos tortoise model, a small ankylosaur, and  a replica of a dinosaur egg nest, with the false statement that dinosaurs did not take care of their young (long ago debunked by Jack Horner’s Maiasaura nests in Montana). Once inside, there is a lobby with a reception desk and a gift shop which has more products from Ken Ham’s organization than it does from the old ICR gang. The docent that Ross and Carrie wanted to interview was already inside giving a tour, so we headed right in.

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Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.
—Hypatia of Alexandria

I happened to be flipping through the cable TV movie channels the other night, and managed to catch the 2009 movie Agora, about the 4th century female astronomer and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. A Spanish production (in English) directed by Alejandro Amenabar, it received great reviews, seven Goya Awards in Spain, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival, and accolades at Cannes as well. It broke box office records in Spain. But it only played on four screens in the U.S. in very limited release in New York and LA, so almost no one in this country got to see it. Now, three years later, it appears on cable TV, and can be purchased on Amazon.com or rented on Netflix and other outlets. This seems to be a typical pattern of most thoughtful or provocative European movies that are not written for American teenage boys with lots of guns, violence, superheroes, and car crashes. If you don’t live in a major media center with lots of small independent theaters that cater to a worldly intelligent crowd that likes stimulating, challenging movies, you just have to wait for it to show up on cable or Netflix.

Although it has its flaws, it is a gem of a movie with amazing, provocative scenes and the overarching theme of religious intolerance suppressing science and free inquiry. It was filmed in Malta with minimal CG imagery, so it truly captures the milieu of the blazing Egyptian sun baking the ancient stone city of Alexandria. It portrays both the glories of the temples and monuments to a mixture of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman gods, and the degradation of the slums and the poor amidst great wealth. The acting by an international cast, including the luminous Rachel Weisz (as Hypatia), is excellent, and it does a far better job than most period pieces (especially the “sword and sandal” genre of films about ancient Rome) of capturing the essence of late Roman Alexandria. In that regard it evokes more recent efforts like Ridley Scott’s and Russell Crowe’s “Gladiator” and the HBO series “Rome”. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that it is ”an ambitious, cerebral and complex movie…Unlike most toga movies, it doesn’t rely on CGI spectacle, but real drama and ideas.” As many other reviewers noted, it is an historical epic (done on an epic scale) not about wars and conquests and romance, but about complex concepts and themes of science, religion, and intolerance.

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“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”

—The Wizard of Oz

Having just suffered a major court defeat in 1987, the major players in the “Intelligent Design” creationism movement were trying to recover their momentum. They decided to transform and disguise their attacks on science by hiding their religious roots, and changing their creationist textbooks to remove overt references to God. They planned a subterfuge to get their unconstitutional dogmas taught in public schools in the form of “intelligent design” (ID), and claimed to be non-committal about the “designer” (even though every one of them was a devout evangelical Protestant, and open about their creationism when they spoke to religious groups). Behind the scenes, however, their intentions were very clear all along: drive a “wedge” of “intelligent design” to separate evolutionary biology and materialistic philosophy from its support in the United States, defeat not only evolutionary science but also materialism, and replace them with their own theistic dogmas. For public consumption, the ID creationists and the Discovery Institute in Seattle refused to admit that they were any more than scientists who wanted ID to get a legitimate chance of being heard and taught, since on the face of it they made no reference to a specific deity or designer.

But their cover was blown when a document which described their “wedge strategy” was leaked over the internet, and is now available to anyone who wants to read it. The “Wedge Document” describes their true intent: not new and important scientific research on evolutionary topics, but to win the battle by a concerted PR campaign to influence the public and political officials. Unlike all other legitimate scientific ideas that must pass muster of scientific peer review to persuade the scientific community that their approach was superior and truly scientific, the ID creationists planned an “end run” around the legitimate scientific community through PR and political pressure.

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Niles Eldredge as he looks today, Curator Emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History

Experimental biology … may reveal what happens to a hundred rats in the course of ten years under fixed and simple conditions, but not what happened to a billion rats in the course of ten million years under the fluctuating conditions of earth history. Obviously the latter problem is more important.

—George Gaylord Simpson, 1944, Tempo and Mode in Evolution

Last Sunday, Feb. 12, we celebrated the 203rd birthday of two of the most important figures in world history, Abraham Lincoln—and Charles Darwin. To mark the occasion properly, I spent part of my weekend visiting the Creation Museum in Santee, California, with Carrie Poppy and Ross Blocher of the podcast “Oh no, Ross and Carrie!” (more on that trip in my March 7 post). But I thought I’d mark this anniversary with a discussion of another important anniversary in the history of evolutionary science.

(left to right) Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Shermer, and yours truly, Mt. Wilson Observatory, 2001

It was 40 years ago this year that the most frequently cited  paper in the history of paleontology was published. That was none other than the legendary 1972 article by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould which proposed the “punctuated equilibrium” hypothesis. (Full disclosure: I took seminars from Niles while I was a student at the American Museum of Natural History, and Steve Gould was very interested in and supportive of my research even though I was not his student in a formal sense). At the time the paper came out, the dominant concept about speciation was the allopatric speciation model. In a nutshell, good biological evidence showed that new species arise not in the large mainland populations (with their extensive gene mixing) but in small isolated populations with unusual gene frequencies (peripheral isolates), usually living separate (allopatric) from the mainland population. Once these allopatric populations were no longer isolated but remixed with the mainland population, they would be genetically and behaviorally distinct from their parent species. Thus, they would be no longer capable of interbreeding, which is part of the definition of a biological species.

Even though the allopatric speciation model was accepted by biologists as early as 1942, it took paleontologists 30 years to recognize its implications. In their historic 1972 paper, Niles and Steve pointed out that if you took Ernst Mayr’s allopatric speciation model seriously, it would predict that species should arise in a normal biological time frame: a few years to a few hundred years at most. That’s a geologic instant, the difference between one bedding plane and the next in strata that span millions of years. The allopatric speciation model also predicted that species should arise in small, peripherally isolated areas, so they were unlikely to be fossilized in the few places for which we have a good fossil record. Rather than slow gradual change through millions of years of strata (the “phyletic gradualism” model), the allopatric speciation model accepted by biologists should give a fossil record where species seem to appear suddenly without any gradual transition preserved (“punctuation”), and then persist for long periods of time without change (“equilibrium”). (continue reading…)

Following up on the theme of my last post, there’s an even larger issue about pure vs. applied science: the best research is “pure” research, often with no practical goal in mind. As I pointed out in my book  Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs, it turns out that the most important discoveries in science come from “pure” research with no obvious goal. In fact, a lot of important discoveries are made by accident, or “serendipity”.

Most people think that science is about planning your research carefully to achieve some specific goal. They are often not tolerant about “pure research” that doesn’t have a specific conclusion in mind, but is focused on finding out general facts about nature, whether or not they have practical uses. Even the scientific funding agencies operate this way, where they tend to reward research that is conventional and “more of the same,” and seldom fund research that is a speculative gamble. Again and again, talking heads on TV or Congressmen ridicule “pure research” which doesn’t have a specific practical goal or application. Occasionally, narrow-minded and poorly educated people manage to interfere with the well-established scientific review process and shut down research they don’t like (even though it was approved by established scientists).

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It pops up in the news every few years, typically when eager politicians are looking for a cause to champion and raise voter anger, and make themselves popular as “guardians of our tax dollars.” The latest version is a recent article in The Los Angeles Times about “duh” science: research that appears to confirm what people regard as everyday knowledge. They included studies that demonstrated that alcohol reduces reaction time; that obese men have a lower chance of getting married; that people who live in safe well-lit neighborhoods are more likely to walk and get exercise; and that college drinking is just as bad as we all thought, but not worse than expected. Such stories are then grabbed out of context and flogged on talk shows as examples of government waste, and become the staple of politicians from both sides of the aisle, eager to enhance their standing with voters.

In this recent incarnation, Senator Tom Coburn (R.-OK) is castigating studies funded by the National Science Foundation which seem silly or frivolous to outsiders to bolster his cred as an anti-waste, anti-tax crusader. He has repeated called for the elimination of the NSF altogether, although he has no idea where American scientists would get their funding if he did so. In past years, the charge was led by Rep. John Dingell (D.-MI), who has served in the House since 1955, the longest serving member of the current Congress. A generation ago, it was Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who replaced Joe McCarthy in the Senate and served for 44 years. Proxmire created the famous “Golden Fleece” awards, which publicize what he regards as useless research. Or take a recent quote from that paragon of education and science, Sarah Palin, is in the same vein: “Some of these pet projects, they don’t really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good, things like fruit fly research.”

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It happens with disgusting regularity. You will flip through the various basic cable channels which are nominally “science oriented” (often grouped together on the dial if they feature scientific topics) and come up with nothing but junk, pseudoscience, and worse. “Reality shows” about subjects with little or no science content, tons of paranormal and pseudoscientific shows promoting ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and creationism—all fill the airwaves for channels like Discovery, The  Learning Channel, History Channel, and even the Science Channel and National Geographic Channel. We watch a few minutes of these with complaints to anyone within earshot, then (usually) move on—or occasionally we get sucked in to watch the whole thing, like gawkers at a car crash. The cartoon at the top (from the great website PhdComics) says it all: four channels that used to be largely documentaries on science and history are now dominated  by guns, explosions, dangerous occupations and other “reality” TV. Their shows have  buzz words in the titles like “biggest”, “wildest”, “monsters” or “killers”, and plain old junk fill up most of their air time.

I’ve seen it from both sides. I’ve appeared in prehistoric animal documentaries that have aired on all four channels (and keep re-appearing years after I made them, so I feel like Dorian Gray, with my younger self perpetually preserved in documentary limbo). Almost all these documentaries are made by small independent film outfits that are searching for any sexy topic that they can sell to the major cable networks, so they are under great pressure to come up with something flashy, noisy, scary, and/or mysterious. If I  have any chance to review the script, I try my best to tone down the excessive hyperbole, but they usually ignore me. As I film segments with them, I try to be as dynamic and entertaining as a “talking head” can be, but they are always pushing me to oversimplify and exaggerate to make the spiel more colorful (but less scientifically accurate). And then when I see the final product, most of what I did ends up on the cutting room floor, with only a few seconds left of many hours of filming. Even worse, I’ve put in many  hours on projects that never got picked up at all. Documentary filmmaking is a high-risk, low-reward proposition—you have better odds of making big money in Vegas.

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Last Saturday, January 14,  our Skeptic Society field trip “Viva Mojave” passed by a freeway exit marked “Calico Early Man Site”. On the bus, I briefly discussed the story behind the sign, but it an interesting object lesson about science and skepticism that bears repeating here.

If you drive up the bumpy road, you will find a few sheds, trails with railings, and pits in the ground, and on weekends, maybe a volunteer or two. There is a dedicated support group with its own website, and the BLM maintains the site as if were a legitimate scientific discovery. Even the Wikipedia entry seems to be written by a true believer, with only minimal mention of what the professional archeological community thinks about the site. But in the anthropological profession, the “Calico Early Man” site is a running joke which became a blemish on the career of the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey—yet the loyal amateur acolytes still promote it.

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Consider the graph above (from the website Calamities of Nature). It shows the relationship between the acceptance of evolution (here defined as “humans beings, as we know them, evolved from earlier species of animals”, a reasonably good metric of true acceptance of evolution) in various countries around the world versus their relative wealth (as measured by GDP adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity). The main trend of countries form a well defined cloud with a reasonable curvilinear fit. At the top are a well-defined cluster of northern and western European nations (plus Japan), with the southern European nations just behind them. Near the bottom are the former Soviet bloc countries of eastern Europe, which still suffer the effects of decades of backward Soviet educational and economic policies. (China, South Korea, and Singapore are not shown, but on other surveys, they all rate high on the acceptance of evolution scale. so they would plot high on the ordinate or Y axis, no matter what their GDP).

The same relationship could be shown if you consider any of the recent surveys that measure science literacy on an international scale. The northern and western European nations (especially Germany and the Scandinavian countries plus Iceland) nearly always come out near the top, along with Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and sometimes China. The exact order differs from survey to survey, but they only shuffle within the top 10 or top 15. In other words, the acceptance of evolution in these countries is a very strong predictor of overall science literacy.

Now look at the position of the U.S. It is a striking outlier on the graph shown here, because its low rate of acceptance of evolution relative to its national wealth (and the same would be true if you plotted it against the money spent on education per student). It falls down near the bottom of the curve on evolution acceptance along with Islamic nations like Turkey, which spend much less per student. What is this telling us?

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As P.T. Barnum famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”. Sometimes the scams are old and well known, but some con artist will resurrect them and try to cash in before people get wise.

Take, for example, this video, which my friends at Panda’s Thumb were dissecting a few months ago. The credulous Fox news station reports this “great invention” as a “miracle” that can solve the energy crisis. This “inventor” is proclaiming that he has “discovered” a new form of dihydrogen oxide (they claim it’s HHO, not H2O) by separating hydrogen from the hydroxyl ion by electrolysis. The video then breathlessly describes how hot this gas burns through various objects while allegedly it is not hot to the touch. Then the “inventor” shows off his hybrid car which runs on a mixture of this “miracle gas” plus regular gasoline. The video footage concludes with various people trying to help him get a patent on his “invention” and the possibility of him testifying before Congress about his “miracle discovery.”

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