evolution

I usually don’t comment on things of no worth¹, but this movie Expelled, which purports to take on evolution being taught in schools, appears to be so dumb that I can’t help myself.

In it, “Darwinism” is depicted as being the cause of and impetus for the Holocaust. It’s been said that this is a form of Holocaust denial — as in ignorance or rejection of the real cause of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ crackpot racial theories, based on such scientific pursuits as the occult and Teutonic myth. True science, such as it could be said to exist at that time and in that place, was and remains only a tool, used in that case to perverted ends.

I wouldn’t go quite that far as to call it “denial” — “Holocaust revisionism” seems appropriate — but many of the points are valid.

I have not seen this film — and I don’t plan to, unless I can steal it or someone else pays my way — so I cannot comment fully on its content. I do know that the people who made it were dumb enough to publicly kick P.Z. Myers out of a first screening but allow in his traveling partner, one Richard Dawkins. If this movie is as I understand it, what it tells me is that the Dover decision put these “intelligent design” idiots down for the ten-count — they may be walking around, but there’s nothing behind the punches they’re throwing, if this is all they have left.

1. Yeah. Yeah, I do. [↩]

The story itself is old news, sort of. You all know by now that Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA along with Dr. Francis Crick — a discovery for which they won a Nobel Prize — apparently made comments which were widely seen as racially antagonistic:

he 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”. He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

Dr. Watson made the comments in an interview with the Times of London which appeared in the Sunday 14 October edition. As you’ll see, this is not the first time he has made controversial comments. This time, however, he had the added disadvantage of not having presented a single shred of science to back up his comments. An official at the research lab which he was the chancellor of disavowed those comments and said that there was no research going on at the lab related to such topics. That’s not 100% true, as it turns out, but it no longer matters — the die is cast. I’m not arguing that Watson doesn’t deserve scorn or doesn’t deserve to be challenged.¹ That is all old news. This post is only peripherally about race — it’s actually about the ethics of storing and sharing genetic data.

I was pointed to the Web site of John Hawks by an old pal of this site to look for information on Hawks’s article on the last five thousand years of human evolution. Instead, I found the post that motivated this one.

An Icelandic corporation called deCODE analyzed Watson’s genome, which he had published on the Internet for all to download, and found the following, according to the New York Times:

A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of African origin than the average white European does — about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African, said Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of deCODE Genetics of Iceland, which did the analysis.

“This came up as a bit of a surprise,” Dr. Stefansson said in an interview, “especially as a sequel to his utterly inappropriate comments about Africans.”

After the news of Dr. Watson’s genetic ancestry was published in The Times of London on Sunday, much of the British media played the news for a lark, with headlines like “Revealed: Scientist Who Sparked Racism Row Has Black Genes” and “DNA Pioneer James Watson Is Blacker Than He Thought.”

But the news, straddling the uncertain boundary of genetic science and society, is more than a Southern gothic drama of racial identity played out on the world stage.

“The irony is bigger, and broader, than his having made derogatory comments and having an ancestral relationship with the folks he insulted,” said Kathy Hudson, the founder and director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington. As people see what happens to Dr. Watson and others as they undergo what she called the “molecular Full Monty,” the inevitable surprises might “help people make the decision about whether they want their information for themselves, and to ask, Who will I share this with?”

It turns out, however, that the methods used and claims made by this company might not be so hot. John Hawks writes,

I find it strange that the leader of one of the major genetics firms in the world is cheerily showing one of the worst possible abuses of personal genomics, in the most high-profile way possible! I find it just flabbergasting… [snip]

[T]he entire reason why many people think public genomics is a bad idea revolves around privacy and informed consent. People want to believe that their genes won’t be used against them — that information about risk alleles won’t be used to deny employment or insurance, for example. Information about one’s ancestry clearly falls in that category: most people want to keep such information private.

Informed consent is a problem in public genomics because your genes are not only yours — they are also the genes of your parents, children, and other relatives. When you make your gene sequence public, you are taking with it information about your kin, who may not want such information out there. At present, they have no way of stopping you — they have to live with your decisions.

No kidding. Is there anyone out there reading this who doesn’t believe that we’re about ten years away from seeing this in American political campaigns? I’m picturing a debate in 12 years where all the candidates are electrolyzed free of hair and are wearing full-body hazmat suits to prevent any “genetic material”² from floating down to opposition researchers with sample bags.

This whole area of science leaves me hopeful that humanity can solve a great many heretofore intractable problems. But with technological change always comes societal and economic change, and there are a great many social and economic power groups that would love to have this information, exploiting it for their own benefits. Let the genetic material-holder beware.

In addition, I agree with Hawks — these sorts of stories “move product” and draw attention, but do not help the cause of science at all. Scientists like the Icelandic folks above would do well not to participate in them.

[inherited from: Stephen aka "The Commissar", Pharyngula]

1. For the record, I don’t accept the notion that members of different “races” are all that different from each other — I think that “race” at least in America is mostly a political construct now used for the benefit of a few which should be rejected entirely. [↩]
2. The first person who says “Monica Lewinsky” at this point gets punched in the face. I don’t even want to think about what else we might be reading about if the future I described comes to pass. [↩]

I watched the PBS special on the case earlier this evening, and I must say it added a new dimension to the effects of the original ruling — which you can and should read again here.

You’ll recall that the case, brought by parents and teachers of the Dover, PA school district against their own school board, challenged a policy implemented by the board under which teachers would read to biology students statements purporting to highlight “gaps” in evolution as a scientific theory.

The ruling, as you know if you read it, was sweeping in its destruction of the current state of the “intelligent design” movement. Let’s recap the situation so that you can appreciate just how sweeping it was. The judge was a Republican, a Bush appointee, and former head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control board — one of the most onerous such institutions in the country. He had, according to the PBS program, expressed at one time prior to the issue sympathy to the cause of teaching “alternative theories” to evolution in public schools. The parents and teachers who were opposed to the “intelligent design” movement brought the case, so all of the burden of proof was on them. In other words, the “intelligent design” movement — represented with absolute incompetence¹ by members of the school board, Michael Behe, and the Discovery Institute — had a hearing as sympathetic as they will find.

Thanks to the facts of the case, and their own bumbling, it is not likely they will find even a tenth of the sympathy they had when the trial started. The judge found in favor of the plaintiffs, and additionally found (accurately, in my view) that the “intelligent design” movement’s position was utterly without scientific merit, and permanently enjoined the board (most of whom by then had been voted out of office) from implementing the policy. The judge also singled out two of the pro-ID board members who testified and essentially accused them of perjury — the PBS program mentioned that the judge had even gone so far as to recommend they be prosecuted for perjury.

The news stories told you that the “intelligent design” people got hammered, and the judge’s ruling shows why. The PBS program shows how, and is well worth your time to watch if you feel you need more context in which to put the ruling.

1. I really can’t see how the “intelligent design” movement could have possibly been represented with any reasonable competence whatsoever. Their position was and continues to be represented by (false) negative arguments and almost no concrete facts. [↩]

Guess what:

Men and women rate kissing differently, according to a study of 1,000 American students published in Evolutionary Psychology. Women rated kissing as more important than men did, and continue to value kisses throughout long-term relationships. Men, who reported using kisses to increase their chances of getting sex, also preferred wet, tongue kisses to lighter kissing favored by women.

“Kissing is used by everyone as a bonding and testing mechanism,” according to researcher Glenn Wilson. Yet some men reported a willingness to engage in sex with bad kissers, or to forego kissing altogether. Wilson claims women need to be more discriminating than men, and rely on kissing to assess the status of the relationship.

You don’t say. (link)

Seriously — the first thing I thought of was the stimpacks the Terran Marines take in Starcraft.

Doesn’t it sort of take the romance out of smoking?* Is the post-sex puff a thing of the past? Will Lawrence ban them in bars? Does it mean that CJ Janovy will be buying triple-A batteries by the case?

These are all questions that must be answered, people.

*: Assuming there is any left.

Apparently, playing mahjong can cause seizures:

In a study published in the Hong Kong Medical Journal’s August edition, researchers from the Queen Mary Hospital reviewed 23 cases of mahjong players in Taiwan and Hong Kong who suffered seizures. They concluded that mahjong-induced epilepsy is a specific condition - not the result of the stress or exhaustion associated with the game… [snip]

The researchers called mahjong a “cognitively demanding game.”

“It involves substantial higher mental processing and outputs: memory, concentration, calculations, reasoning, strategies, sequential thinking and planning,” they said.

Come on — it isn’t that hard. I own a set of tiles, and my meathead college buddies and I used to play while drinking beer. I’d be interested to know what the prevailing conditions were around these players — like whether or not they were at a casino of some sort playing all night for money, or just a bunch of old folks gathered around an old card table.

But we knew that already, right?

I’m as big a believer in the power of science as you’ll find. But doesn’t it seem like there have been a lot of studies headlined “X may be better/worse for you than thought” in the last few years, followed closely by another story titled “X may be worse/better (the exact opposite of the previous) than thought?”

Those of you still left in my audience may be wondering how I can claim to be a commentator on all things Kansas and yet make no mention of Sam Brownback’s Times op-ed on evolution (the science, not the blog).

Well — I try to comment on noteworthy or surprising things. Sam Brownback’s views on evolution, faith, and reason are neither. I have felt for a long time that Brownback is a Christian fundamentalist lightweight with a collectivist, statist, and globalist streak a mile wide. I felt compelled to vote for a union lawyer instead of Brownback when last the Senate seat he holds came up for election.

The op-ed itself contain many of the rhetorical games common to anti-evolution writings by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Forget the science for a minute — let’s discuss basic logic. Brownback writes,

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

People of faith should be rational, using the gift of reason that God has given us. At the same time, reason itself cannot answer every question. Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

How the same person could have written both of those bolded sections, read them back, and not finished up with a massive headache is beyond me. He rejects a “stark choice” between two non-comparable things, complaining about being saddled with it, and just a few paragraphs later offers us… a stark choice between two non-comparable things. The rest of the piece contains further examples of such sophistry.

You can now easily find other bloggers that pick apart the rest of this essay. I, for one, find Sam Brownback unremarkable as a man, a politician, and as a Senator. If he is truly finished in 2010, I will not miss him.

I haven’t said much about “climate change”, because I’ve only peripherally followed the scientific developments, and I don’t know much of what there is to know about it.

That’s never stopped me before, so here are my thoughts.

• Scientists are probably right, mutatis mutandis, about global warming.
• There is some doubt about whether it is all caused by humankind, but there is little doubt that some of it is.
• Some of the damage can probably be corrected.
• The price of that correction will be massive restriction and infringement of liberty worldwide [in the relatively few places which have it].

Cf. some snarkage by Bill.

Ken Willard to be named president of the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Just from the title, it sounds like one of these “meta-organizations” that doesn’t mean a whole lot, but still.

If you’ve forgotten who Ken Willard is, then let me remind you. I fart in his general direction.