A.C.Grayling on Humanism

At the end of a thorough fisking of Steve Fuller's (who attempted, at the Kitzmiller trial, to defend ID's legitimacy as science on rather post-modern grounds, thus proving that the Absolutist Right will happily fraternize with the Relativist Left whenever it is convenient) views on Intelligent Design and the historical relation between science and religion, Grayling almost tangentially delivers the following gem on the definition of "humanism":

Humanism in today's acceptation of the term is the view that our ethics and politics should be premised on our best understanding of human nature and the human condition, as revealed to us by empirical enquiry and by the arts, literature, reflection, and the grown-up conversation of mankind. It refuses to accept that instructions for how to live, act and believe come from the far past or outside space and time, and it refuses to believe that the whole point of life is to get membership of a posthumous choir.

Definitely deserves more prominent exposure.

Hat tip: Evolving Thoughts.

The New Ride, The Old Stompin' Grounds, and Degrees of Separation

Spent the August long weekend in Toronto, doing....stuff.

The New Ride

Saturday, after having lunch from the stalls at the St. Lawrence Market, we headed off to the Urbane Cyclist to get me a recumbent bicycle. The HPVOoO folks told me to try and get Carey to show me the bikes. He was busy, so I wound up with a guy called Chris.

First, I tried a model with underseat steering (this one, or one much like it). As I mounted for a test ride, Carey and Chris had a little disagreement on the proper way to start riding with USS, for someone inexperienced on 'bents. It didn't matter, anyways: whatever way I tried, it was painful and terrifying, like being 6 years old again and learning to ride a bike for the first time. Eventually, I fell off trying to do an uphill start (fortunately, falling off a stationary, low-slung recumbent is not particularly hazardous), so I wheeled it back to the shop. At this point I was feeling discouraged enough to give up on the whole idea, go home, and get used to my upright bike again.

Instead, I got Carey to show me a couple of long wheel-base machines. I was pleased to discover that I could actually ride these quite comfortably; they have almost the same feel as a conventional bike (only you're sitting in a nice comfy chair). I was on the point of buying the Bacchetta Agio when I decided to give short wheel-base one more chance, but this time with over-seat steering. The second one I tried, I decided was the one -- a Bacchetta Giro-20 TT. It's different from riding an upright, but not like learning all over. I took it out tonight for a quick trip to the store, and found it wonderfully comfortable -- there's no suspension, but the seat itself provides great cushioning when riding over bumps and curbs. Give me a couple of weeks of training (I'm horribly out of shape) and I'll be commuting to work on it! (Somebody please bother me about that around Labour Day, OK?)

So: Thanks go to Carey and Chris et al at UC for helping me pick the bike, and for prepping it in time to be picked up before closing. If you're ever in TO looking for some self-propelled wheels: Urbane Cyclist are the go-to guys.

The Strip

Went for dinner at the Korean Grill House on Yonge Street (definitely recommended if you're at all into that barbecue-your-own-dinner schtick), then wandered a few blocks down the famous Strip. Growing up in TO, I used to go down there fairly regularly, and it was neat to see that essentially it hasn't changed. Yeah, the billboards are now fancy-flashy animated LED signs, Sam the Record Man is now just a sad facade, and the crowds aren't nearly as lily-white as they were 30 years ago (if anything, the colour mix has reversed), but basically Yonge Street is still the same garish trashy hodge-podge of small stores selling everything, bars, bistros, cinemas -- and of course, strip joints. Hogtown's perennial floating party.

Museum Musings

Sunday was the AGM of the Humanist Association of Canada. I attended the morning session, which was about all my allergy to meetings and group politics could handle, and after lunch I wandered across to the ROM to see if that new pointy thing facing Bloor Street looks as horrible from the inside as it does from the outside. Yeah, I get that this thing is supposed to suggest the angles and striations of a quartz crystal, and I don't object in principle to weird-shaped buildings -- but an annex should respect the architecture of the existing structure, and to me the Crystal just clashes horribly with the old Gothic stone of the original ROM. Meh.

Inside it's not so bad: the Crystal works fine as an entry hall, and the galleries are bright and airy. There's a great display of Jurassic ichthyosaurs and other marine reptiles. However, I'm not so crazy about what they've done with the dinosaurs and mammals: I preferred the old dioramas. Instead these things are just stuck out on white platforms with signs to tell you the name and age. But there isn't nearly enough explanatory material to tie the whole thing together -- something about the affinities and ecology to make the specimens more than just a bunch of mounted skeletons.

A lot of the original ROM seems to be undergoing renovation: the old Invert Paleo gallery was boarded up; all that was on display were a couple of cases out on the balcony -- and disappointingly, most of the Burgess material was removed for study. I can't find anything on the ROM website indicating where and when we'll be getting those exhibits back. The beautiful old rotunda, demoted from grand entry hall, now looks sadly abandoned -- I hope they find something worthy to do with that space (a big dino like the barosaur in the entry of the AMNH wouldn't be out of place, albeit a bit derivative).

If I sound a little upset, it's because the ROM has a lot of good memories for me. As a kid, I used to beg my parents to take me there on Saturday to see the dinosaurs. Then as a teenager with the astronomy bug, I spent a lot of time next door at the McLaughlin Planetarium (now defunct). As little as three years ago at the last Toronto Howlerfest, it was still recognizable as my old ROM -- but now I go back, and find it's all different.

At least the two big totem poles still stand in the old stairwells.

After hours, we HAC people got a talk and private tour of the travelling Darwin exhibit, from its curator Chris Darling. We originally saw it last fall in Chicago, and it was interesting to see the differences from that venue. The Weston Hall, in addition to being an irregular shape instead of rectilinear, is much better lit than the Field Museum gallery.

Also from Dr. Darling, we learned out that plans for a Gallery of Evolution at the ROM are on indefinite hold, as they can't find a corporate sponsor, just as they couldn't for the Darwin exhibit. Apparently even in enlightened Canada, the E-word is too controversial and scares off anyone with a "brand" to protect. Damn these creationists for shoving their bigotted ignorance on the rest of the world.

Degrees of Separation

The HAC dinner speaker was Brian Alters, famous for having a research grant denied by a Canadian government granting agency because his proposal failed to provide "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of Evolution, and not Intelligent Design theory, was correct." To this day, SSHRC has failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of exactly what was meant by that. Alters (who was also a plaintiffs' witness at the Kitzmiller trial) gave a lively and humorous talk covering choice bits of the ID-Creationist/Evolution controversy. Much later in the evening, he regaled a few of us stragglers with anecdotes about the late Stephen Jay Gould, whom he knew at Harvard. So, having shaken hands and conversed with Brian Alters, we now have a Gould Number of 2.

Another talking head at the HAC evening was president Dr. Robert Buckman, who in addition to being an oncologist, has also worked in broadcasting, both in science journalism and comedy. He worked with John Cleese on the 1979 Amnesty International benefit event The Secret Policeman's Ball -- meaning we now also have a Monty Python Number of 2.

At the HAC dinner there was also some guy who's been in the news recently (some small dispute about something or other), receiving a Humanist Lifetime Achievement Award. We didn't actually meet him personally, but others did, so I guess that gives us a Henry Morgentaler Number of (also) 2.

Two more reasons not to read the Citizen

We dumped the Ottawa Citizen years ago, as it gradually slid into banal fluff. The last few days reminded me why we continue to not take the rag.

First, on Saturday columnist David Warren celebrated changes to the Ontario Human Rights Commission by preemptively proclaiming his own martyrdom:

As a writer who does not subscribe to the "politically correct" ideology, it is reasonable to expect that, sooner or later, they will come for me.....I was born a free citizen of the Old Canada and before her God I declare, that I will go to jail rather than acknowledge the legitimacy of any "human rights" commission.

Wow. I predict that David Warren will be arrested the day they criminalize self-important windbaggery with pomposity aforethought. But not, I think, before then (unless of course, he deliberately provokes it).

Then on Monday, Reuven Bulka writes a column on the Sanctity of Life and how we need God -- apparently, to keep us from offing all the old people and cripples (something like that). Along the way he invokes Ben Stein's "well done documentary" Expelled, which tells "the story of scientists expelled from their universities for looking positively on the notion of intelligent design, rather than embracing holus bolus the Darwinian theory of the evolution of the species". Someone should tell him that the persecution stories in the movie are (to put it charitably) significantly exagerrated.

That was just the start. It goes downhill from there:

Although Darwin somewhat arrogantly called his work The Origin of Species, it is clear that he did not explain how life actually originated. He did not know, nor do scientists today know.

The choice of title would be because Darwin was writing, not about how life began, but specifically about how new species arose in nature -- a live scientific question throughout the nineteenth century (and in many ways, still today). While I've often heard creationists assert that our ignorance of life's beginning is some fatal blow against evolution, I must say I've never before encountered that objection based on such a grossly illiterate misconstrual of the title of Darwin's book. (But note the implicit invocation of the God of the Gaps argument).

Bulka blathers on:

You are left wondering why seemingly intelligent people have zero tolerance for intelligent design. It is not as if intelligent design is any less scientific than the gaping hole in how life began that Darwinists greet with an "I do not know" shrug.

As a matter of fact, it is as if ID is "less scientific". Lacking a coherent hypothesis beyond "Evolution can't do that", it's not scientific at all. And concerning how life began, scientists know a good deal more than pious ignorami like Bulka are aware of.

By the way, for the record, I have no problem with evolutionary ingredients in creation. This can co-exist quite comfortably with intelligent design, or God's design, which is stretched out on an evolutionary canvass.
Mr. Stein takes the viewer on a Columbo-like journey trying to get to the bottom of this visceral and categorical rejection by the Darwinists. He skillfully shows how Darwinism moves people to reject religion, and some of the major tenets of faith, such as the notion of afterlife and the meaning of existence, including having a code of values.

Of course, Stein "shows" this by "skillfully" interviewing only prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and P.Z.Myers, ignoring devout pro-evolution scientists such as Ken Miller and Francis Collins. Bulka then goes on to swallow Stein's science-hatred hook, line and sinker:

In a Darwinist system, with everything happening on its own, we are bereft of values. And the scientists seemingly want it that way. If nothing is sacred, anything goes - there are no restrictions.

I have no idea what Bulka means by a "Darwinist" system, but the rudiments of morality -- compassion, cooperation, reciprocity, mutual aid, observance of social rules -- seem to be built in to our psychology, and that of our closest relatives. We don't need abstract notions of sacredness to avoid the "anything goes" apocalypse: simple enlightened self-interest gets us a long way down that road.

Of course, no anti-evolution rant would be complete without dragging in the ghost of Stalin, and the Hitler Zombie.

That brings us to ask whether we ever had such a world, a Godless world, and yes we did. Stalin killed in the tens of millions, Hitler's evil is well documented, and there are others who in the absence of any values wreaked immeasurable havoc.

That Hitler was "Godless" of course explains why he wrote copiously about his duty to God on behalf of the German people, and why the buckles on WW2 German uniforms bore the slogan "Gott Mit Uns". And Stalin (to those who have even passing familiarity with Darwin's ideas, and know what the term actually means) was anything but a "Darwinist": official Soviet dogma during his era rejected Darwin's proposed mechanism of organic change (variation and natural selection) as being incompatible with Marxist theories of history. In its place Stalin substituted the neo-Lamarckian ideas of Trofim Lysenko (with disastrous results for Soviet agriculture).

But really, the foregoing are just minor historical gaffes compared to the real fallacy of that paragraph, which is that the Stalinist and Nazi visions were far from "values-free". What they both were, were ideologies which invented and elevated certain "values" (the achievement of the Workers' Paradise through the inexorable outworking of Marxist dialectic; the perfection and triumph of the Aryan Race) over, well, pretty much every other value, including the liberty and lives of individual humans. It's not about values vs. no values: it's about which values.

Of course, Bulka is careful to throw in a token acknowledgement of the known evils of religion -- but you can tell he doesn't really mean it by his attempt to pull a No True Scotsman move (emphasis mine):

This is not to suggest that religion is free from taint. Too many have killed in the name of religion, and history past and present is discoloured by so-called religious figures who espouse, encourage, and reward killing.

And after that diversion, it's back to the real villain -- science:

As bad as religion may be, the argument can be made that absent religion, things would be worse. Mr. Stein drives this point home incessantly, as he juxtaposes scientific tyranny with Nazi imagery.

The good Rabbi doesn't explicitly mention the movie's use of Holocaust imagery -- perhaps he heard about the Anti-Defamation League's deprecation of the film as "misappropriat[ion]" of that sad episode in history, and thought it prudent not to call close attention to that aspect of it:

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

Bulka continues:

A valueless society enslaved by scientism desacrilizes life. And Mr. Stein is not oblivious to the scientism of eugenics as it impacted then, with the implicit warning that it could happen again.

I don't quite know what this "scientism" Bulka complains about is, but science is about discovering how the world works, with all its wonders; and the "Darwinism" (properly: evolutionary biology) Ben Stein derides is very much a part of that discovery. Bulka is welcome to argue all he wants for the sacredness of human life, either as a principle, or as a practical bulwark against atrocity -- but his argument is ill-served by credulously regurgitating nonsense from a film well-known to be propaganda, and which places blame on all the wrong people.

[Afterword: while surfing up references for this post, I happened across this thoughtful and nuanced essay on Expelled by an Evangelical Christian at the American Scientific Affiliation site. I don't agree with everything Schloss says, but he tries very hard to be fair to both sides, and correctly identifies the movie's many flaws. Recommended reading, especially for those who might default to Stein's camp.]

Hat tip: Dr. Dawg (though I must also credit Deborah Gyapong, who of course agrees with Bulka).

AMC Ad, Updated

For those who can't see the animation (and for after it has disappeared), here's a composite of three screen-caps that give the gist. The caption in the last one reads: "The intelligent way to go the movies". I really can't help wondering if they did that deliberately.

BTW, we just got back from Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- a fun romp and worthy successor to the earlier ones. And it's every bit as good a documentary as Expelled!

Expelled: The Canadian Connection

Over at Monkey Trials, Scott Hatfield reports on the background of the people behind the ExcretedExpelled movie. That they all turn out to be evangelicals is no big surprise -- scratch an IDist, and you'll find a Christian creationist nine times out of 10. What's a little more interesting to me is the Canadian angle. I already knew that geek gazillionaire Walt Ruloff, who bankrolled the film, lives in BC, but this is news:

Co-founder A. Logan Craft is identified as a minister and TV producer on the American board of the Canadian Center for Cultural Renewal.

I'm a little puzzled why a Canadian center would have an American board, but the Centre's website shows it as having two boards -- a Canadian one and an American one. The whole thing looks a bit like a branch-plant operation of the Seattle-based Center for Science and Culture.

Perusing the Endorsements page I had a little shock: I found the name of someone I was in a fellowship group with, about 15 years ago (no, I won't tell you who, except to say that she was one of the more conservative members of that group).

Mugshot #1

Take a good look at the grinning face at right. It belongs to a pompous, whiney lawyer who works at the Discovery Institute, named Casey Luskin. To demonstrate the pompous and whiney bit: he claims that he owns copyright to that photograph, and can forbid people from posting it on their websites.

However, as Tim Sandefur -- also a lawyer -- explains:

Luskin is, of course, a public figure who has voluntarily injected himself into a matter of national public dispute, and people using his photograph are not profiting in any way from doing so....

I don't know how well the legalisms translate across the USA-Canadian border, but I'm happy to join the small but growing chorus of bloggers posting his image -- just to prove we can.

My attempt at starting a Google Bomb follows:

Casey Luskin Casey Luskin Casey Luskin

If you post Luskin's picture, drop me a line so I can add the link.....
(Hey, it worked great on Michael Egnor)

Posters and Paranoia

Jeffrey Shallit brings to our attention that, over at Uncommon Descent, Denyse O'Leary is most upset that someone has put up, in her Toronto neighbourhood, posters advertising a movie critical of Intelligent Design. And these posters weren't put up by just anyone (like say, the staff of the cinema?). No: it was "Darwin's brownshirts".

Holy Godwin, Batman! First they postered the parking kiosk, and I said nothing. Next they postered the lamp-post....(you get the idea). The comments on Denyse's post are worth reading (assuming you find paranoia amusing).

As it happens, I visit my native city a couple of times per year. One thing I notice is that the downtown is just about wallpapered in posters advertising....well, nearly everything: upcoming nightclub acts, community yard sales, lecture series, art shows, guitar lessons, you name it. The surface of every power pole (where they can be seen) is almost solid with the rusty staples of posters long since torn down or weathered away.

Of course, Toronto Darwinazis aren't the only ones postering. At right is a sample of a poster that went up around my suburban neighbourhood last week, advertising a Christian rock concert being held at a local church. Would this be the local Evangelical brownshirts? Or maybe pinkshirts (nah -- that would be too gay). As O'Leary suggests, maybe they're not popular enough to afford "regular advertising" either.

As it happens, I don't object to this event (other than my general antipathy to evangelical religion), though I do wish they would send the postering brigade back out to remove the damn things.

The point of all this rambling is: Yes, the poster plague is a bit of an eyesore, and quite possibly illegal in some towns (albeit difficult to enforce) -- but I find it, um, remarkable that O'Leary chooses to protest this poster, as if it were the first time anyone had put one up in her neighbourhood. Methinks she doth protest too much.

Pope Benny on Evolution: Sounds Too Familiar

So, I innocently surf up the TV listings to check what time CSI is on this week, and the headline that catches my eye is: "Evolution can't be proven: Pope Benedict". It seems His Holiness has written a book giving his take on the Creation/Evolution controversy. I'm not about to run out and buy the thing -- too busy reading some real philosophy of biology to waste time on what some guy in a funny hat says his god thinks about it -- so until the reviews start appearing I'm stuck making my assessment via news-outlet sound-bites. (Not that I personally care either -- but Benny's words do carry some weight with a certain largish segment of the public, and the state of public discourse on this subject does concern me).

Reportedly, Benny's book endorses Theistic Evolution, ie. accepting that the facts of natural history are as modern science says, only that God guided the process in some way. However, that "in some way" allows a lot of wiggle room, from positions in which theology is just so much superfluous (if poetic) window-dressing on science, to ones which verge on some flavour of ID or creationism. John Pieret at Thoughts In A Haystack seems to take the optimistic view, but I'm not so sure. From the ctv.ca article (emphasis mine):

"The question is not to either make a decision for a creationism that fundamentally excludes science, or for an evolutionary theory that covers over its own gaps and does not want to see the questions that reach beyond the methodological possibilities of natural science"

and:

"But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory."

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

"We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory," he said.

Where have we heard those phrases before? The complaints about "gaps", "methodological naturalism" and "not proven"? Pope Benedict may have verbally rejected Intelligent Design along with crude creationism, but he has qualified his acceptance of evolution using boilerplate straight out of the ID/creationist movement's own phrase book. I'm not convinced. Is it possible that Theistic Evolution -- spun hard in a creationist direction -- could become the next stalking horse in the assault on science?

OTOH, my misgivings could just be the result of sloppy reportage.

Hallelujah! Rocks are Designed by God!

Unlike many creationists I don't consider engineers to be scientists, so I don't always have a lot to contribute to the science/pseudoscience discussion. But every so often, the ID/Creationists stray over the line into my territory. Like when a doctor starts saying silly things about both science and engineering.

About a month or so back, a new star appeared in the Intelligent Design firmament: Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at SUNY, and with an impressive record as a practicing physician. It started (more or less) with his post at the Discovery Institute blog on why evolution is useless in medical practice, which begat a flurry of rebuttals from medical bloggers like Orac. Additional fun and games ensued as Egnor replied to his critics, or issued fresh pronouncements, resulting in a blizzard of blog posts that I won't even try to select from (Google Is Your Friend). Along the way, Orac issued Dr. Egnor a challenge (summarized here):

1. Explain, specifically, how the design inference is "of great value" in medicine.
2. Explain, specifically, how the design inference has been of "enormous help in scientific research in general and medical research."

This week, Dr. Egnor replied to Orac's challenge. The gist of his reply is that Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA is an example of "reverse engineering":

To untangle the structure of DNA, they inferred design, not chance. They reversed-engineered DNA. They collected physical data about the structure of DNA (X-ray diffraction studies, Chargaff’s rules, the physical chemistry of nucleotides, etc), and then they designed a model of the molecule to understand its structure and function.

Egnor seems to base much of his argument on the following Wikipedia entry (bolding is Egnor's, red text is mine):

Reverse engineering... is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation…Reverse engineering is essentially science, using the scientific method. Sciences such as biology and physics can be seen as reverse engineering of biological 'machines' and the physical world respectively.

The Wikipedia entry has since been edited to remove the text in red -- a change with which I heartily agree. Yes, there is a conceptual similarity between the work of reverse engineers and that of research scientists. Both groups start with a "black box" (the externally-observed behaviour of their study system), draw inferences about what might make it behave that way, and then find methods of literally or metaphorically "looking inside the box" to elucidate its inner workings. But, really, the resemblance ends there. To apply the term "reverse engineering" to both activities is to illegitimately impose a concrete term from the one domain on to the other, on the basis of an abstraction properly seen as underlying both.

However, it gets worse. Apparently, doing this kind of "reverse engineering" of the natural world implicitly invokes the concept of "design" (presumably by You Know Who):

Much of modern biological research, and most research in molecular biology, is reverse engineering. Some scientists infer design explicitly. Some use the design inference implicitly, even if they disagree with its philosophical implications. We can’t do modern biology, at least at the molecular level, without using reverse engineering, which is the inference to design.[emphasis mine]

This simply compounds misapplied terminology with confused logic. What on earth does Egnor mean here by "inference to design"? In reverse engineering, we know that the system under study is designed and built by humans -- it's not an inference, it's part of the background knowledge we start with. (As an aside, that piece information is often useful in the reverse engineering process: knowledge of human psychology and standard practices can inform our investigation into the study system. This stands in contrast to IDists, who claim that one can study design while knowing nothing about the nature of the designer(s)[1]). But in the case of natural-world research science, we don't know in advance that the object of study was designed -- that is the very "inference" the IDists want us to make. Egnor's attempt to impose "design inferences" on his historical example seems to rest on Watson and Crick's own words concerning the relation between the structure and function of DNA:

It is probably impossible to build this structure with a ribose sugar in place of the deoxyribose, as the extra oxygen atom would make too close a van der Waals contact.

and:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

As far as I can see, this is no more than to say that, because the molecule functions in a certain observed way, it must have a structure that allows for it to behave that way -- which says nothing about it having been designed (or not) by a concious agent.

But lets do a simple case study using Egnor's reasoning (insofar as I can decipher it):

Consider a rock -- a moderate-sized, hold-in-your-hand, ordinary rock. Doing an initial black-box analysis, I observe that it has a certain heft to it -- with some simple apparatus I could measure its volume and mass, and calculate its average density. What else? I tap it with a hammer, and observe that it doesn't shatter. From this I make an inference about the internal structure of my rock: it's not hollow (this cannot be taken for granted, as some rocks are). To confirm my hypothesis, I hit it really hard and smash it open. Sure enough, it's solid all the way through.

Now, does this internal part serve any function? Sure it does: it supports the outside, and contributes to the mass. In other words, it enables the "black box" behaviour, just as much as the specific constituents of DNA enable its observed behaviour. And if I'm entitled to make the "design inference" in the one case, I'm entitled to make it in the other. So I conclude: my rock is designed by an intelligent entity.

It should be noted, of course, that this is entirely consistent with traditional Christian theology, which holds that everything in heaven and earth is in some sense under the sovereign supervision of God. But for some reason, the IDists (despite almost all being Christians of some stripe) only think that some things are designed. Maybe they're heretics; I don't know :-).


1. See, for example: page 197 of Michael Behe Darwin's Black Box, Simon & Schuster 1996