Science Debate!

Via Mark at Denialism:

We must adapt to the fact that over the last few decades it has become critical that our politicians and policymakers understand science and implement policy that is consistent with scientific facts. And it is past time that we made science enough of a priority to merit a presidential debate on science. The need is clear, these days policymakers must be able to respond in an informed fashion to new technologies, new scientific findings, and potential disasters (such as climate change). Despite the need for a scientifically-literate political leadership, we have a president who says the jury is still out on evolution, who promotes failed abstinence-only sex education programs, and refuses to make any substantive changes to address global warming.

For more, go to Science Debate 2008.

The Parable of the Ichthropic Principle

I found this while scanning the internets, and thought I would share:

The Parable of the Ichthropic Principle

Sixty meters underground, a river used to run through the limestone of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Because the limestone was uneven in density and porosity, the river carved an irregular channel, widening and contracting. Eventually, over a very long period of time, the surface of the land above underwent changes resulting from diminished rainfall. As the volume of water draining through the underground river decreased, the channel it had carved became a cave. Nonetheless, a trickle of rain still flowed through cracks and crevices, enough to maintain stable pools of fresh water in the lightless depths.

In one such pool lived a small school of fish of the family Characidae. Characids are an adaptable group, occupying many ecological niches of the planet Earth. The characids of this geologically isolated pool had several distinctive adaptations, the most unusual being that they were eyeless. Thus we can identify them henceforth as blind cave fish. Lacking sight, the blind cave fish were well equipped to detect vibrations of any sort through the sensory cells of their lateral lines, which was how they foraged for food as well as how they located each other for mating purposes. Fortunately, water is a superb transmitter of vibrations. Greater self-awareness would not have been adaptive in the bleak conditions of their pool, but if they'd possessed it, they would have had no reason to suppose that any other characids inhabited any other pool in this or any other cave, or indeed that any other pool in any other cave was inhabitable.

The blind cave fish had two rigid requirements for survival--oxygen and food. The oxygen in the pool was maintained at roughly the level they required by the dependable trickle of rain which replenished the loss of water through the porous limestone bed of the pool. Also, the water was cold--a constant forty-one degrees Fahrenheit--which of course allowed maximal oxygenation. Although the fish had no "knowledge" of it, a grave danger to their survival existed in two kinds of pollution: nitrates from their own metabolic waste products, and gradual mineralization from the influx of acid rain water seeping through the soil. Periodically, however, drenching storms would flood the land, refilling the underground river channel and flushing the pool. Most of the blind cave fish would be swept away to an uncertain fate, but enough would survive to rebuild their population. Even the most catastrophic flushing would not decimate them, since their eggs, which were adhesive, were always laid in protected chinks and cracks. Had the floor of the pool been smooth, or had the flooding carried other menaces into their cave, no doubt the blind cave fish couldn't have thrived as they did. It should be noted that the thick layers of rock above, which shielded them from hot sunlight, also shielded them from ultra-violet and other forms of radiation that might have threatened their survival.

The blind cave fish were dependent for their nutrition on another intricate and improbable set of circumstances. Since no light whatsoever penetrated the cavern, no photosynthesizing plants or algae could flourish. Nonetheless, populations of microbes and nearly microscopic arthropods shared the pool. These were the food source upon which the blind cave fish depended, though they supplemented their diet by scavenging the corpses of their own dead. In turn the arthropods and microbes were dependent on bat droppings for 100% of their nutrients. The bats, in huge numbers, infested a large dry cavern of the same cave. The only above-water outlet from their cavern to the fresh air above passed through the grotto of the pool, the ceiling of which was too encrusted with stalactites to attract bats to nest. Thus the quantity of guano the bats dropped in flight was always enough to sustain the pool's organisms yet never enough to poison the water.

The blind cave fish were by far the largest and most metabolically active of these aquatic creatures. Having neither predators nor competition, they had ample reason to be happy with their lives--that is, had they had enough self-awareness to exhibit happiness--since each and every condition of their environment seemed specifically suitable to their needs, while any variation of those conditions would have made their life impossible. Indeed, the conditions in which they subsisted were so random yet so improbably assembled that it must have seemed to the fish--again granting them the self-awareness to consider probabilities--that the pool had been designed to provide for their existence.

Allowing them just a bit more rationality than they truly possessed, logic would surely have suggested to the blind cave fish that where there is design, there must be a designer. No matter how much intellect we attribute to our three-inch long albino eyeless characids, however, it's clear they had no means of fathoming the nature of the designer, unless it were itself an inscrutable but omnipotent blind cave fish.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes from the book Evolution by Jean-Baptiste De Panafieu. As described:

Each chapter is made up of a short text that illuminates one theme of the evolutionary process-repetition, adaptation, polymorphism, sexual selection-and a series of exquisitely composed photographs of skeletons against a black background. Approximately three hundred photographs of whole skeletons or details have been made possible by the French National Museum of Natural History. The reader learns, by experiencing each text and photograph together, how the structure of every creature has been shaped by its environmental and genetic inheritance.

This one's on my Christmas list.



More photos below.

Do you suppose the Disco Institute will pay?

Do you suppose the Discovery Institute will offer to pay the legal fees of the teachers who take their advice?

The Dover decision was not appealed, and so it is not a binding legal precedent anywhere outside of the Dover school district.

Wow.

It seems they're inciting schools to test the legal waters. Would you be willing to bet a million dollars on the Disco Institute's legal advice?

74th Skeptics' Circle

The turkey edition of the Skeptics' Circle is now up at Med Journal Watch. Go have a gander.

Judgment Day on NOVA

This show was fantastic. It's a look into the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board, and all the politics, religion and science that went into the trial. For anyone who missed the story, the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania tried to insert a disclaimer into science classes saying that evolution was "just a theory" and that they should look to the book Pandas and People (a creationist text) for alternative "theories".

You can watch the whole documentary here.

Do watch it, but keep this one, teeny, tiny complaint in mind. They present some of the science as if we've just recently sewn up the theory of evolution. Not true. It's been pretty clear that the theory of evolution is the best description for the origin of species on earth for decades. Recent data is just re-confirming the theory of evolution by natural selection over and over and over coming in from completely new angles (i.e. the mountain of data in support of evolution is just getting even more massive). Anyway, watch it, you'll be glad you did.

The creationists still don't get it.

Uncommon Descent is trumpeting the release of another book. They still don't get it:

Critics, in dismissing The Design of Life, contend that intelligent design has collapsed in the wake of the 2005 Dover trial. Author William Dembski responded, “Those same people have been announcing intelligent design’s demise every year since 1990. Strangle it as they might, intelligent design just won’t die. The Design of Life shows why the better arguments and stronger evidence are now on the intelligent design side.” According to FTE president Jon Buell, The Design of Life is not intended for high school students; it is aimed rather at college/university students and adults who want a clearer understanding of why a growing number of scientists doubt Darwin.

But... But...

They couldn't get scientists to take them seriously by writing books for high school kids, so they're going to write books for college kids? This is the approach that they want to take? Oy.

This is the reason scientists don't take them seriously. This is it, folks. If you've never heard it before, this is why. They're not engaging scientists. They're not doing experiments. They aren't testing hypotheses. They aren't writing papers for scientists. They aren't trying to change scientists' minds. They're writing books for kids. (Writing books for kids is important for the future of science, mind you, but it's not where paradigms are upset).

I think it's worth highlighting what stevestory wrote today at AtBC:

On some imaginary day in the future when I have a lot of free time, I'm going to write a long essay contrasting the basic features of scientific revolutions with those of fraudulent pseudoscience. I've read quite a bit about scientific revolutions, from Relativity to H. Pylori to The Barker Hypothesis, and a fair amount about quackery. In the meantime, here's the summary:

Revolutionary Science:
*(Usually) Expert in the field has great idea
*Expert faces lots of hostility and even gets papers rejected
*Expert works hard to gather more data or convince community
*In a few years community rapidly converts
*Tons and tons of normal science is made possible and done in a few short years

Quackery:
(Usually) Non-Expert has idea
*Non-Expert faces lots of hostility and gets papers rejected
*Non-Expert babbles for a long time, no one is convinced
*Non-Expert figures out a way to sucker a bunch of laymen, and claims conspiracy
*Years go by, the scientific community's still not remotely convinced
*No normal science is made possible by quack idea

anybody familiar with science can tell which one ID resembles.

Update:

Mister DNA writes:

I get such a Pinky and the Brain vibe from IDiots. Their plans to defeat Evilution/Darwinism/Materialism never involve something like... oh, I dunno... research; it's always:

1) This press release will be the death of Darwinism!

2) We'll let 9th Grade biology students decide!

3) The mere existence of this "lab" will be a crushing defeat for materialism; we won't even need to do any research! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!one!eleventy!

4) As this flash animation demonstrates, judges aren't qualified to rule on whether or not ID is science.