What Spore Teaches Us About Intelligent Design: The Four Lessons of Casey Luskin

I'm proud to note that I've added numerous points to my geek cred scale recently by purchasing a copy of EA/Maxis' computer game, Spore. I haven't had much time to play it, but I have managed to take a species of mine all the way to the galactic phase. My little critters, the Shub, are gleefully jetting about the galaxy, although their home world, Mloukhiye, is currently under attack. You can see a Shub there on the right. Cute, no?

I like Spore. It's a fun little game, and that's all it is. I wouldn't dream of using it as a tool with which to instruct students about evolutionary biology for a very simple reason; it's nothing like evolutionary biology. It lacks most of the mechanisms that we see driving evolution in the real world. There's no random mutation in Spore, for instance. Nor is there sexual selection, genetic drift or gene flow. In fact, Spore is essentially The Sims with characters that aren't necessarily human or even human-like. In the real world, species don't jump from being cells to having legs because they eat enough bits of nutrient floating in liquid medium. They don't grow bigger brains because they sing duets with other organisms. The real world simply doesn't work like Spore. In other words, Spore isn't evidence for or against any empirical principle. It is, after all, just a fun little game.

That, of course, isn't going to stop the ID Creationism contingent from advancing the notion that this bit of electronic fluff from Electronic Arts somehow supports their notion of how the diversity of life arose on the planet. They are not, after all, under the constraint of testing hypotheses, nor even of rudimentary common sense, because the vacuous nonsense they assert as a theory (proving that they're not even under the constraint of English usage) is just that — vacuous. They could as easily maintain that the existence of pie is evidence that prayer has the power to turn the head purple. We are thus treated to platters of blather such as an article in The Christian Post in which Casey Luskin, better known to sentient beings everywhere as Captain Clownie, yammers on about how a computer game is evidence of, and teaches users about, his favorite content-free fairy tale:

'Spore' Game Helps Players Understand Intelligent Design
Fans of a video game about evolution include young Christian teenagers and intelligent design proponents

By Katherine T. Phan
Christian Post Reporter

While the latest video-game craze, "Spore," touts the theory of evolution, taking gamers from a single-celled organism to complex civilizations, some say it also promotes God and intelligent design...

Players start the game with the task of feeding a single-cellular amoeba that eventually lays an egg after it has consumed enough blob-like nutrients in its 2-D world. The egg allows gamers to edit their simple organism into a more complex creature - with seven legs, one eye and purple skin if they so desired.

At each egg stage, players can further "evolve" their creatures to have different body structures, physical capabilities and even bigger brains – all of which affect the creatures' abilities and personalities in the game...

Let's pause right here for a moment. In Spore, players do not "evolve" their creatures, they edit their creatures. There's a big difference here. See, you have to click this little button and a new window opens. The player then spends a few "DNA points" to buy arms and legs and eyes which they choose from a menu on the left side of the screen. That isn't evolution by any definition, of course. Is it intelligent design? Sure, assuming that the player isn't a member of the Discovery Institute, barring appropriate use of the word "intelligent" in this context. However, is it evidence for what Luskin and his Creationist clown car assert? Is this how the designer designs? Is he constrained by a budget of DNA points amassed by creatures eating blobs of algae? Well, the truth is... I don't know. Since one of the assertions these numbskulls make is that we can't know anything about their designer (whom, for the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to as Bob the Builder henceforth), he could be clicking away at a menu on some celestial computer somewhere and we could all be nothing more than critters in a pangalactic Sporepedia. However, I am unaware of the proponents of ID ever having advanced this notion beforehand... which, for their purposes, is just fine, since their vacuity isn't constrained by the requirement of predictiveness, anyhow. Unlike real scientists, IDolators are free to make it up as they go along. Everything they do is ad hoc.

And here we have the first thing that Spore really does teach players about Intelligent Design; one can say nearly anything (real biology is barred from discussion, of course), and ID pseudotheory can find a way to accommodate it. Chalk one up for Captain Clownie. We've all learned a valuable lesson. To continue with the article, then:

"Anyone can see that Spore is not really about evolution by the Darwinian mechanism; it's about evolution by intelligent design," Casey Luskin with Discovery Institute, a leading intelligent design think tank, wrote on the group's affiliated blog Evolution News & View...

Well-played, Captain! I agree entirely; anyone who knows anything about evolutionary biology can see that Spore is not about evolution by Darwinian mechanisms, nor by any other mechanisms seen in the real world. The thing is, so what? Computer games routinely violate the laws of physics; one might just as well state that Super Mario Brothers isn't about quantum mechanics. See, entertainment devices don't always seek to replicate the real world and Spore is not a teaching tool. It isn't science. It's a computer game from which precisely zero lessons about the universe in which we (by which I do not mean to necessarily include Captain Clownie and the Funtime Gang over at the DI) actually exist. In truth, Spore is about neither evolutionary biology nor about religiously-derived "alternative theories." It's about having a bit of fun.

But here we have our second lesson about Intelligent Design inadvertently brought to the fore by Spore: ID advocates can't tell the difference between a fantasy role-playing game and reality. Note that this is a notoriously poor sort of mindset from which to begin the genesis of anything useful to science. But they do go on:

The game even refutes many Darwinist objections to I.D., argued Luskin, including one objection that says detecting design requires knowledge about the designer.

"Browsing on YouTube I can find hundreds if not thousands of Spore creatures that were designed by people whose real names, parents' names, and tribes of origin I know nothing about. We don't have to know who the designer is, or who spawned the designer, to be able to detect design," wrote Luskin...

I'm unfamiliar with the argument that Luskin says we "Darwinists" bring up in regard to IDiocy. I am, however, familiar with two arguments that he may have crammed together here. The first is that if design is present, it should be detectable and the second is that if there is a designer present the designer should also be detectable and because that designer can be observed, even indirectly, it absolutely follows that we could say something about the nature of that designer based upon how Bob the Builder designs. We could infer, for instance, what kind of design regime it follows, what sorts of tools Bob uses, etc., all of which perforce tell us something about this veiled designer.

Captain Clownie, of course, puts his foot right in it when he says that he can't tell anything about the people who designed the Spore creatures he's found on YouTube. This may be indicative of the extent of Luskin's brain damage, since anyone lacking his degree of cognitive impairment can say any number of things about the designers of Spore creatures without even looking at the creatures themselves. For example, it's a sure bet that every single person who has designed a Spore creature has used the Spore creature creator to do so, and we can thus infer that such individuals also have access to at least one computer and furthermore know how to use it, could we not? We can make some educated guesses about what colors these designers favor, particular if we can find several of their creations and note what they have in common in this regard. More importantly, we can test our hypotheses about these junior Bobs by sending them an email and asking a few questions. Some might choose not to respond, but at least a few of them would and we could expand from our initial hypothesis to build a profile of one or more designers, look for commonalities between them and ultimately come up with some idea of what unites the kind of people who make creatures for Spore. In fact, you can bet your bottom dollar that there are people working at EA who do just this kind of thing for a living. In case Captain Clownie missed it, then, here's a clue; this discipline is called marketing. Even if Luskin didn't investigate the creators of those Spore critters on YouTube, other people make a living doing precisely that. In fact, they did so before anyone ever bought the game, and the information they uncovered was used to make predictions about who would buy Spore and how many buyers there would be long before the game itself ever hit the shelves. If they were correct, they might get a nice bonus. If they were wrong, they might get fired. This works just like science; what's known prior to an experiment (in this case, the launch of a product) is used to create a hypothesis which is then tested, evidence for and against the hypothesis is gathered, and the hypothesis is either conditionally accepted or rejected.

Here, we learn our third lesson about ID Creationism — it doesn't lend itself to inquiry. As soon as a bit of useful agitprop is formulated, inquiry ceases. Luskin didn't find anything about to say about the Spore creators because he didn't even trying once he could make some statement in support of an a priori conclusion. We have learned that Intelligent Design is, in fact, exactly the opposite of the search for the truth about the world in which we live — a most valuable lesson, indeed.

Benjamin Cormack, writing on the gaming Website GotGame.com suggested Spore may even help players understand, in a small way, the heart of God.

"As you guide and care for your creations, you may actually develop an almost parental sense of pride in watching them grow, kind of like children or sea monkeys," he wrote...

Well, that's a very long way from Captain Clownie's assertion that it isn't necessary to infer anything about Bob the Builder, isn't it? Cormack is certainly saying something about God (and, after all, that's precisely who Bob the Builder really is!) Of course, it's also a tremendous leap of logic and certainly a category error. It's based on a major statement about the nature of the designer — this designer has human emotions and, not only that, applies them in an entirely human way. Bob the Builder forms attachments to the things it creates.

We get yet another lesson about Intelligent Design, then. It has no problem with contradicting itself in order to accommodate any opinion about anything at all, so long as that opinion is one in contradiction of sound science and reason. This is, of course, a major advantage of being vacuous.

It turns out, then, that Captain Clownie is absolutely correct in his assertion, shared with numerous other IDolators, that Spore teaches players about Intelligent Design. He's just wrong about what lessons those players can learn. What Spore has done is simply to bring the termites out of Bob the Builder's woodpile to make the usual round of silly statements that those of us who still have a few working brain cells firing away can then dissect using that most incisive of scalpels, reason. In summation, we who are still in possession of this valuable faculty and who hold it in esteem learn the most valuable lesson of all about Intelligent Design from the reaction of one of its leading advocates to Spore. That is, they aren't very good tool-users. They tend to apply a cudgel when what's called for a nice, sharp blade.

The ability to use tools is a major part of what makes us humans. To be a bad tool user is, in a sense, to be an inferior human being. I would submit, then, that the ultimate lesson one can take away from all of this is about Casey Luskin himself and, based upon their assent to Captain Clownie's arguments, about the leadership and members of the Discovery Institute. They don't know how to use the one tool that makes all other possible — reason. They're not so much a think tank as they are a holding pen for the chronically deficient who have benefited from the relaxed requirements of fitness that good tool-users have engendered. Natural selection having failed to remove them from the ideological gene pool so far, we shall have to wait for the effects of some other factor to lead in the end to their inevitable extinction. Surely the very fact that this rubber-nosed know-nothing can assert that one can learn about the real world by playing a video game should be enough to demonstrate how jejune is the black hole of intellect termed "intelligent design" for all of humanity. At least, I would like to think it that obviously stupid.

I also suspect, sadly, that someone will come along to dash my hopes any minute now.

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Neo-Creationists Upset by Michael Dowd but It Has Nothing to do with Religion

For all my points of disagreement with Michael Dowd's ideas, there's one thing I do particularly like about him. He's apparently driving the ID-Creationists into a fit. They're complaining that he's part of a "blitzkrieg" against them. Why, oh why, is everyone against the poor, oppressed loons?

Having heard Dowd last night and seeing his reaction to my critique of his presentation, I find it hard to believe that "blitzkrieg" is even part of the man's vocabulary, let alone something he'd engage in. But that hasn't stopped Uncommon Descent into Intellectual Paralysis author Salvador Cordova from whining about him doing it in an entry entitled, amusingly enough, Theistic Darwinists blitzkrieg the ID movement. A couple of the comments are quite precious:

That's gotta be the most inane drone promotional thing I've seen in years. Unbelievable!

How much lower can they go?

Reverend? Of what church?
My 1st guess is the FSM church for the brain-dead?

And look at these comments from amazon :

"The universe took 13.7 billion years to produce this amazing book. I heartily recommend it."

— John Mather, NASA Chief Scientist, 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics

Indeed! The universe produced this book - it evolved like a brain tumor...

— Borne

Ah, yes, the evolution of brain tumors. Ancestral to IDolators, as I recall.

...It is incongruous to affirm an Orthodox Christian theology while simultaneously affirming a completely unguided process of random mutation and natural selection. The two are mutually exclusive.

— toc

All this concern over Orthodox Christianity... I'd almost think that Intelligent Design had a religious basis, but we all know that that can't possibly be true because they never actually say "Goddidit" while the cameras are rolling. Where this particular IDolator got the impression that Dowd counts himself an orthodox anything is beyond me. After hearing what he had to say, I doubt he'd consider himself orthodox in much of what he does, if anything. If I'm wrong about that, I'd be surprised.

No one can serve two masters, because either he will hate one and love the other, or be loyal to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Darwin.
– Matthew 6:24, modified

— Larry "Everybody's Favorite Nutsack" Fafarman

Yes, there's nothing quite like "modifying" a Biblical passage to make it say whatever you want it to while simultaneously denying that the movement you consider yourself part of has nothing to do with religion. News for Farfleman; nobody serves Darwin. Darwin's a dead guy. Just like Jesus.

I don't think it a stretch to see this as a sign of the times - namely a deluding influence - as Dowd says- forget guilt. We then would not need Jesus to take it away (ALL that Gospel/Bible stuff for no real reason), just realize our less enlightened past was the reason and pop - FREEDOM INDEED - step into our glorious future!. So - OK Mr. Dowd - have you now NO sin? I would quote some verses for you, but I am sure they would only be some of the ones not needed anymore. Sad indeed the anyone would have this level of not understanding and think themselves enlightened and lead other right into the pit with them. You think 5 Nobel prize winners can save you? Well, as you say - its your choice.

— alan

Nope, no religion in that ID bunch at all. I'm sure that alan's comment was meant in the most secular sense possible.

A lot of people have figured out that many atheists due to the "threat" of ID have fanatically embraced evolution in a religious fervor. Thus creating a large market for evolution porn where they can mentally wank to the idea that "theocracy" in the Trojan horse of ID is being soundly beaten into submission.

— mentok

Somehow, it makes sense that someone with such a comic view of reality would use the name of a cartoon character, but no matter. I predicted in my critique of Dowd's talk that infelxibly religious types would take his ideas as evidence that science seeks to replace religion, or to become a religion, and I barely had to look at all to find someone doing exactly that. The masturbatory images coming from the cartoon character in combination with religion probably tells us a little bit more about him than we really wanted to know. I've already critiqued Dowd, so I don't think I need to point out how silly the assertion is. I'd no more follow a religion based on evolutionary biology than I'd follow one based on flying monkeys, burning bushes, implements of torture or talking fish. We can see readily from whence the wanking cometh, can we not... eth?

Still, anything that upsets the Uncommon Decline crowd is OK by me. Whatever else I may say about such things, they have merit for that fact alone.

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Little Revelations from Maine and a Thank You to Bloggers Big and Small

Actually, the note of appreciation comes first to the many bloggers who have picked up the story of the Creationist escapade in Maine and so are helping it to get exposure outside of that single state:

• The Austringer — Maine: School Board Director Seeks to Exclude Evolution
  
• Dispelled: No Unintelligence Allowed — Can't "Teach The Controversy"? "Don't Teach at All!"
  
• Further Thoughts — Maine school board: teach creationism or drop evolution
  
• Science After Sunclipse — Antiscience in Maine
  
• The Teapot Atheist — Matthew Linkletter is anti-science

Thanks, too, to people who've left comments on other blogs alerting them to this so-far little exposed situation, such as The Chaplain of An Apostate's Chapel.

One of the interesting things to me when these debates flare up in online fora is to take note of how people view things. For instance, fundamentalists often appear to view evolutionary biology as a religion because, I think, they tend to see the whole world as divided into two camps: their own religion and the opposition. Anything that opposes their own religion becomes another religion in their minds as a product of their own fundamentalist mindset.

Equally revealing is the conflation of Intelligent Design and Creationism. Personally, I don't see much of a difference. Intelligent Design mainly seeks to find specific points at which to inject a creator; that's why I tend to refer to it as Neocreationism. Classical Creationism, in keeping generally with scriptural literalism, always asserts that the creator came in the beginning. It's just a matter of where one puts the gaps. Neocreationists see gaps here and there; Classical Creationists essentially see one huge gap at the very beginning of everything. That's not a terribly important distinction, though. Many ID proponents place emphasis on the big gap at the beginning, too. This is fostered by the Neocreationist leadership itself by conflating abiogenesis, or even cosmology, with evolutionary biology. I've yet to see any of the big ID guys from the Discovery Institute take Classical Creationists to task and, indeed, if Ben Stein's drek had anything new to reveal, it was that the Neocreationist crowd is more than happy to include explicit religious ideology in its tactics.

The upshot of this produces some either very confused or very intuitive (in a skewed way) individuals, one of whom has been quite active in the fora associated with newspaper reporting of the Matthew Linkletter/Norman Luce exploit. He goes by the user ID C-Fairer and is from Waterville, Maine according to his profile. Waterville is about 30 miles from Athens and about 20 miles from Madison, the "ground zero" in this latest Creationist flare-up. I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that C-Fairer has or will attend the SAD 59 Board of Directors meetings.

He or she (I think he's male, but that could be my own bias) wrote something today that I felt should be shared:

C-Fairer of Waterville, ME
May 11, 2008 1:19 PM
The 1st Amendment is this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The founding fathers didn't want a Congress to establish a national religion like the "Church of England". Mentioning "Intelligent Design" along with Evolution does not "establish a national religion". Muslims, Jews, Buddhist, Christians and atheist exist together in this country cause all beliefs are tolerated.

Banning any discussion of "Intelligent Design" definitely is prohibiting the free exercise of religion (a violation of the 1st Amendment). Congress did pass laws restricting its practice in todays schools.

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Therefore, banning any discussion of "Intelligent Design" is in violation of this Amendment. Schools are being censored.

"Separation of Church & State", however you choose to define it's meaning, is not in the Constitution. The 1st Amendment is.

This says a lot about how this individual thinks, of course. First, he's bringing up Intelligent Design. Note that nobody on the SAD 59 Board of Directors has explicitly used those words to describe what they want taught or not in science courses. Linkletter, for instance, has used the word Creationism in every instance. C-Fairer, however, is obviously perceptive enough to realize that there's no meaningful difference between the two "alternative theories." Therefore, what it's called is of no concern. It's not the "religion" of evolutionary biology.

Secondly, C-Fairer certainly does see this as a religious issue and not a scientific one. He's invoking a Constitutional amendment that was written to protect religion (in his interpretation of it), but not protect anyone from religion. Not allowing Intelligent Design, words he has substituted for Creationism, to be taught in science classes, is not a violation of rational thought, good science or sound education but a blow against Christianity. I don't know that he means Christianity with certainty, of course, but somehow I doubt that the Creationism he'd want students to learn about would be based on the story that Vishnu in the form of a boar (Varaha) raised the earth out of the waters of primordial chaos. Call it a hunch.

I'll make another bet here. I'll bet that the Discovery Institute Illuminati won't chastise C-Fairer or people like him as they go about pulling the strings behind the scenes as they've done in several states now. For all of their protestations that ID isn't based on religion, they don't do anything to discourage the idea held by many of its adherents that it's religious in nature. In fact, I'm sure they'd be absolutely happy with getting Classical Creationism inserted into science classes instead of Neocreationism if they thought it could be gotten away with.

If I'm wrong about that, I'd love to see Casey Luskin or William Dembski or any of the other odd fellows of the DI make a public statement on Evolution News and Views that they don't want Creationists in their movement and rebuke those who conflate ID with religiously-inspired stories of how the leopard got its spots.

I wouldn't advise anyone holding their breath on that score, though.

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Feral Bullshit's Day Out: Florida Legislators Lobbied with Expelled in Tallahassee

Ben Stein and Casey Luskin were on hand last night at Tallahassee's Challenger Learning Center for an exclusive screening of the anti-evolution propaganda film Expelled. Of course, so were the authors of the so-called Academic Freedom Bill, a piece of proposed legislation intended to undermine Florida's at-long-last-modernized science education standards by creating a proviso to allow dissenting teachers to teach students personal opinions as scientific fact.

The people involved in this effort are unquestionably motivated by religious beliefs. Ronda Storms and Alan Hays, authors of the bill, are members of the fundamentalist First Baptist Church. Casey Luskin is a fellow of the Discovery Institute, an organization perhaps best characterized by the statements of fearless leader William "The Designer of intelligent design is the Christian God" Dembski. While not explicitly endorsing a particular religion, the intent of the bill is to allow for religious instruction disguised as science delivered to students who would, in nearly all circumstances, lack sufficient prior education to know the difference between the two.

Concerns that this screening violates Florida's Sunshine Law, which mandates that discussion of legislation and meetings with lobbyists over the same be conducted in public, were brushed aside:

The House general counsel's office advised members that the private screening of Stein's film does not violate the state's "gift ban" law, because the film company does not have a legislative lobbyist. It also is not subject to be "Government in the Sunshine" law because, Stemberger said, there would be no discussion of the Storms and Hays bills.

— Source

While it may be true that no such discussion took place during the screening of the film, it does seem that it took place after the film:

Stein, a conservative commentator on CBS best known for his role in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," scheduled meetings with House Speaker Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, and other legislators to endorse bills by Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, and Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Brandon.

— Source

Meeting with legislators to endorse legislation sounds a lot like lobbying to me.

The question about the Academic Freedom Bill being asked is whether it permits for teaching Creationism as science in science classrooms. It does so without actually mentioning Creationism or its weaselier sibling Intelligent Design by name, and it does it by allowing for something called "any scientific theory" to be taught. It doesn't mention how to recognize a scientific theory, however, reducing it to whatever someone thinks might be one, particularly when that consists of an imagined scientific debate — even when the debate isn't taking place within a scientific discipline but instead is a political, social, or religious contention.

Asked whether intelligent design qualifies as "scientific," Storms was more circumspect. Anything that "legitimately provides for a scientific critique of the theory of evolution" should be permitted for discussion, she said.

— Source

Orlando attorney John Stemberger, head of the Florida Family Policy Council, and Casey Luskin, an attorney and program officer for the Center for Science and Culture at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, said the pending legislation would not permit teaching of religious theory in public schools. They said, however, that teachers and students need protection from being discriminated against for questioning evolution or advancing their own beliefs in other science-based theories.

— Source

Note that at no point have Storms, Hays, or anyone else advanced an alternative scientific theory, nor even been able to define what other theory would be protected by this legislation. Instead, let's put this in context: what's being protected here is an imagined right to teach things that are either bad science or not science at all. Whose opinions are being protected, then?

People who haven't been able to get papers published because they failed peer review. Teachers who have taught non-scientific, religious ideas as viable alternatives to the product of real inquiry. In fact, the only thing protected by this is crackpottery. This isn't about debates over the legitimacy of endosymbiosis theory or the frequency of transversions or the extent of epigenetic effects. We aren't talking about people who are attempting to apply their knowledge of skeletal physiology to the question of which extinct organisms were the progenitors of endothermy. What we're talking about, in fact, are those educators who want to assert a role for supernatural, untestable involvement against the force of knowledge gathered by the application of methodological naturalism.

"The answer is no," said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council. "This does not allow the permitting of alternate theories to be taught. It only allows the criticism and the presenting of relevant, objective scientific evidence which criticizes chemical or biological evolution."

That would seem to settle the question. Yet moments later, Casey Luskin, an attorney for the Seattle-based Discovery Institute said that even as he agreed with Stemberger, he personally considers intelligent design to be "scientific information."

All of which raises questions about what qualifies as "science" - and who, ultimately, decides.

— Source

The actor, and former speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, is preparing to release "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," his documentary about scientists and educators who have paid a price professionally for challenging natural selection and other premises of Darwinian evolution.

Some have been denied jobs or tenure; others cannot get their articles published, and many have been subject of ridicule, he said.

— Source

Stein's ludicrous comments — mind you, they come from an actor and speechwriter from the Nixon administration, so Stein can't be said to be anything like an authority on any of this — betray a complete opposition to the peer review process. Why are scientific journals peer reviewed at all in Stein's estimation? Why don't they just publish everything submitted to them? The reason, of course, is that just because someone says something, no matter how fervently they might believe it, doesn't make it good science or science at all. In fact, material is refused publication in journals routinely because it's simply incorrect, flawed, or incomplete. A paper based on illegitimate hypotheses shouldn't be published. If Stein were to have his way, every crackpot idea that anyone could dream up would be put on the same footing as legitimate inquiry by finding an outlet in publication. It's impossible enough to keep up with all of the material that passes peer review; adding many times over that amount in sheer junk would swamp all attempts at scholarship. How useless would science education itself become if this were the state of things? But that's exactly what Stein, Luskin, and the authors of the Academic Freedom Bill would like to see. Make no mistake, this isn't just about evolutionary biology, but about science in general. In fact, it's about education in general; under the language of this bill, any belief could be taught in a classroom as if it were as well-founded as real inquiry. Children could get a Sally Kern version of history and sociology, for example, and I don't think it's coincidental that Kern is sponsoring legislation in Oklahoma that bears a good deal of resemblance to the legislation pending in Florida.

This effort by Stein, the Discovery Institute, the First Baptist Church, Hays, Storms and, yes, Sally Kern as well, has nothing to do science and everything to do with social engineering. This is the Wedge Strategy in action, nothing more and nothing less. Thankfully, not everyone is falling for it, not even all of those who attended the screening.

The ambiguity concerns Rep. Kevin Ambler, R-Lutz. "I don't want that rubric to become a subterfuge for teaching faith-based lessons, which really belong in Sunday School."

— Source

"I wasn't aware of anybody being penalized for questioning evolution," said [House Minority Leader Dan] Gelber. "The Legislature needs to walk away from this debate. The State Board of Education has addressed it and that's the end of the debate. This is a solution in search of a problem."

— Source

People in Florida who are concerned with the students of that state receiving a well-founded, useful education in the sciences — and more generally — would do well to listen to Barry Boerner, president of the Tallahassee Scientific Society, in his letter to the editor appearing in the Tallahassee Democrat.

...Reviewers who have seen this film, which is set for general release next month, conclude that it is a baseless, scurrilous attack on science. On the basis of these reviews and the film's lengthy trailer, we concur.

We feel that this event runs counter to the CLC's mission "to foster long-term interest in math, science and technology; create positive learning experiences; and motivate students to pursue careers in these fields."

When we asked the CLC to explain why such a film would be allowed , we were told that in renting its facilities, the center is bound by guidelines that discriminate only on the basis of whether a proposed activity is "pornographic, exceptionally violent or illegal."

We feel that such guidelines beg for review. Under these conditions, a nonpornographic, nonviolent showing of a movie "proving" the genetic inferiority of blacks, just for one egregious example, would be acceptable to the CLC...

I would go one step further. The directorate of the Challenger Learning Center has, by allowing this film to be shown in their facility, has utterly failed in its mission and should either do the honorable thing and resign or else be removed from their posts. In a private email from someone close to the center, I have been informed of the following:

As you can see they had previously consulted their lawyers about the private showing, who advised that they would have no legal basis for refusing the rental of their theater even though they did not like the material to be presented. Whereas the programs they themselves produce must follow certain guidelines, only blatantly offensive presentations are prohibited by private showings.

By any standard, attempts to link evolutionary biologists to the Holocaust qualify as "blatantly offensive" in much the same way that Boerner's example is "blatantly offensive." Regardless of what attorneys may have said, someone charged with fulfilling the CLC's mission should have stood up to this. Attorneys are not the arbiters of conscience and any lawsuit that resulted from Michelle Personnette and Norman Thagard demonstrating the possession of a spine in the face of this egregious attack on science would have been met with widespread support in fighting it. Can you imagine a world in which people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been cowed into non-action by the threat of a lawsuit? "Oh, we can't march on Selma. The governor of Alabama might sue us." "Forget about women's suffrage; we might get sued." Cowardice will lose every time; at this unfortunate point in our cultural history, we need leaders to insure that America isn't plunged into a pre-scientific darkness. The directors of the CLC clearly aren't the right people for their jobs at this time and should be replaced with someone willing to do what needs to be done "to foster long-term interest in math, science and technology; create positive learning experiences; and motivate students to pursue careers in these fields."

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Game Time! Spot the Looney

Two rather looney things have happened in the last few days, both involving Creationists and review articles in scientific publications. While there are several differences between the two events, the most important qualification is that in one instance there was nobody behind the affair but a single looney while in the other case a reputable and responsible individual was willing to stand up and accept responsibility for the event, promising to remedy the situation.

So, let's play a game, shall we? It's time to play...

Spot the Looney!

Contestant #1
Our first contestant comes to us from Seattle's Discovery Institute. He used an icon tied to a service that helps foster discussion about peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals for use on his manifestly anti-science website (not a blog as stipulated in the service's charter; his site doesn't allow for comments and, in fact, bills itself as a news source). The article he wrote about was a review paper, not original research which, again, is in violation of the BPR charter. The author of the review, now deceased, states throughout the article that there are aspects of the phenomena under review which we haven't yet worked out and that more scientific investigation is called for to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of a biological process — which this contestant proceeds to twist into a declaration by the author that the system in question has been "intelligently designed."

When his misuse of the icon was discovered, he was called on it by one of the people who runs ResearchBlogging.org in a thread calling for discussion of whether our contestant violated BPR's charter. Respondents to that request gave specific rationale as to how they thought that the icon had been misused. After all of this, Dave Munger reached a decision taking into account all of the feedback and weighing it against our first contestant's excuses for his abuse.

After all of this, our contestant concludes that he is being persecuted by perpetrators of "intolerance" and effectively throws a tantrum and threatens his most effective weapon: gossip:

...The intolerance expressed here comes as no surprise to any of us. But this incident has given me some valuable anecdotes that I can retell in the future. I wish I did not have these anecdotes and I wish that people acted differently, but it seems I now have these anecdotes nonetheless.

— Source (scroll to comment #70)

Is our first contestant the looney? Before you decide, let's have a look at Contestant #2!

Contestant #2
Our second contestant hails from Dublin, Ireland where he works as Research Professor of Biomedical Proteomics at the Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research at University College Dublin. He's also the editor-in-chief of the journal Proteomics which released online on January 23 a paper ahead of publication entitled Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence. Their curiosity aroused by the rather strange title of this review paper by Mohamed Warda and Jin Han, the online scientific community looked into it and didn't like what they saw. The article claimed that mitochondrial endosymbiosis — a well-respected theory about the evolution of eukaryotic cells — had been disproven and that mitochondria are thus most likely to have been inserted into our cells by an act of divine intervention. The paper claimed that they were "fingerprints" of this supernatural event and represented the "preservation of divine wisdom." On further investigation, scientists discovered that a number of the references to other works scattered throughout the paper had nothing to do with the topic supposedly under discussion (a daunting task, considering that the review cites more than 230 other works!) and, perhaps worst of all ethically speaking, that most of the paper wasn't original writing by the so-called authors but plagiarism mainly from previously-published works. Much of this discussion can be found on Pharyngula.

Having discovered all of this, a number of scientists then contacted our second contestant wanting to know why Proteomics would even consider publishing such an unscientific, plagiarism-riddled, poorly-written review. Our contestant promptly responded to these inquiries with an email containing the following verbiage:

Thank you for your e-mail and for drawing my attention to the issues regarding the Review Article by Warda and Han (2008) Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence. PROTEOMICS 8: EPub.

Clearly your e-mail raises very serious questions regarding the manuscript and our Editorial and Review Process which I am currently looking into together with my colleagues on the Editorial Board and at the Publishing House.

I will get back to you with our response as soon as possible.

He thereby accepted responsibility for the unfortunate event and promises to remedy it in order to insure the reputation (and viability) of the journal under his charge. While it's too early to say what will happen, it seems likely from the response that this unethical and unprofessional work of fiction will be withdrawn in short order and never find its way onto a printed page.

So, now that you've had a chance to have a look at our two contestants, it's time for all of you to buzz in and

Spot the looney!


Votes are being tabulated...

And we have a winner!

Contestant #2, Dr. Michael Dunn, our audience has determined that you are not the looney. Thanks for playing; you'll receive a home version of our game.

That means our winner is...

Casey Luskin of Seattle's Discovery Institute!!!!



Congratulations to Casey Luskin, and thanks everyone for playing Spot the Looney!

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Casey Luskin Demonstrates that ID Stands for Insidious Deception

As readers may have noticed, I contribute every once in awhile to a relatively new science blogging project, ResearchBlogging.org. It's a marvelous resource for those who want to keep up with the ever-changing world of scientific inquiry. The premise is simple enough; scientists and students of science register their blogs and write entries in them about peer-reviewed articles. The original reviews contain a bit of code that an aggregator finds and those entries are then aggregated on the ResearchBlogging site. It's all intended to facilitate discussion between scientists and academics and also to make science just a little more accessible for those who may not have a substantial background themselves. I wholeheartedly encourage folks to use it. I know I spend a lot more time reading what others have written than trying to write for it myself though, as I said, I do try to contribute something when I can.

There are just a few rules involved in publishing to ResearchBlogging and so being allowed to use the ResearchBlogging icon; those rules are openly available here. They're well-considered items that allow for discretion and provide a mechanism for filtering out crankery, thereby keeping the resource useful for anyone with legitimate interests in everything from philosophy to biology.

Still, it was only a matter of time before some crackpot got wind of the project and tried to damage it somehow, and in this case it's one of the most cracked crackpots on the net, Casey Luskin. Luskin is neither a scientist nor a student of science but marginally a lawyer (he passed the California bar; what he's done as a lawyer since then is anyone's guess) and a fellow of the Discovery Institute, an infamous group of science deniers and general mental cases that mainly exists to whine about how real scientists and science educators consider their pet speculation, Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC), a pile of meritless manure. Nonetheless, they do want to play with the big boys, as it were, so there was only one thing to do.

Research? No, not research. None of them would ever deign to get their hands dirty actually testing a hypothesis.

No, instead Casey Luskin decided to misappropriate the ResearchBlogging icon while simply ignoring the rules governing its use. He simply copied the icon and stuck it into the beginning of an entry he wrote about an essay — not a peer-reviewed article, but an essay. Moreover, he exhibited no understanding of the material, instead choosing to quote-mine it in order that he could assert that it backs up a god-of-the-gaps argument. This isn't implicit, of course, in the essay itself. Luskin quotes bits and pieces, stringing together sentences that are paragraphs apart in order to make his case — a typically dishonest tactic employed by a typically dishonest Creationist.

The rules for use of the icon also state that the reviewer must provide a link to the original document or a DOI at the very least. Again, Luskin doesn't bother with that. He's not interested in having anyone read the essay, after all, only in having them read his twisting of what it actually says.

In fact, Luskin doesn't even link the icon back to ResearchBlogging.org or include the code necessary for its aggregator to pick it up. The forum in which he wrote his piece of utter garbage, in fact, doesn't even allow for comments. In other words, Luskin stole the icon (in violation of copyright laws) and didn't want anyone to find out about what he'd written who wasn't already a reader of his tripe. If his "review" had been aggregated, it would have been immediately picked to pieces by actual scientists and, in any case, Luskin's violation of the terms of usage would have gotten him excluded from future aggregation, anyhow. What he wanted to do was impress his sycophants; he's not interested in exposing himself to critical analysis and the kind of discussion that actually goes on amongst real scientists.

And therein lies the irony. It has been my experience that scientists love to argue, debate, converse and communicate with one another, by and large. It can be a rather intimidating process, and it should be. New ideas should be subject to intense, even uncomfortable, scrutiny. Luskin wants to play with the "big boys," but in doing what he's done, he's revealed himself to be a frightened little girl playing dress-up with mommy's cosmetics. His insidious deception demonstrates perfectly that he lacks both the balls and the brains to ever be a real scientist.

If Luskin had the slightest shred of integrity, he'd remove the icon from his entry. Of course, if Luskin had a shred of integrity, he wouldn't have stolen it in the first place. Then again, if he had a shred of integrity, he wouldn't be a fellow of the Disinformation Institute. As they demonstrated during the Dover trial, the first requirement for fellowship there is that one checks both balls and integrity at the door. How many of them testified again?

Oh yeah. None.

[Note to female readers: use of "big boys" and "balls" above are metaphors and not intended in the least to imply that women can't be great scientists. Indeed, I know of more than a few females of the species whose balls are as big as any males! I needed something to contrast Luskin's cowardly, childish act with those of a responsible adult. I hope you understand.]

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