August 27, 2006

The IAU. (Dude. I'm actually posting about the IAU. Wow.)

Until this year, I could never have thought for a moment that I would be especially intrigued by the workings of the International Astronomical Union.

But teaching Astronomy this year (with the absolutely indispensable help of one Joseph McCauley, now now lab coordinator at Georgia Highlands College) slapped my head around something fierce, and offered respect for this astronomy stuff, seeing as it's one of the great ancient sciences and all that. There's something about looking at stars and figuring out that, with a good telescope, you can actually observe the planets move in the sky and see Jupiter's moons that just rocks the world.

And it made me appreciate all the more that there is actually some fundamental understanding about the universe that came out of one of these talks this week.

But more on that in a moment. First, I want to discuss this Pluto thing.

I want to go on the record as saying that I think the IAU made the right call on "demoting" Pluto the way they did, even if their logic was too clever by half. Honestly, I don't know what's so complicated about this. We have these eight planets. Four of them are inside the asteroid belt. They are pretty dang dense, made of rocky matter, metals, minerals, "earthy stuff" if you will. We call these the terrestrial planets. We have for quite some time. Four planets are outside the asteroid belt. They are all huge planets but pretty light as far as huge planets go, tons o' hydrogen and helium running around, all of them have rings and satellites a go-go. We call these the Jovian planets. We have for quite some time.

And then there's Pluto. Pluto's made of rock and ice, closer in density to the terrestrials, but outside of the orbit of even the Jovians. Its own orbit is irregular, out of the plane of the other eight. Its moon is pretty huge in comparison to Pluto's size, and you can even argue that if Pluto's a planet, Charon has to be a planet too. (In fact, the original IAU proposal said as much.)

In short: Pluto doesn't fit.

And science is all about explaining power. All the protest, even from some of the smartest people I read, that because all the astronomy-fascinated little kids have nine glow-in-the-dark planets hanging from the ceiling, there ought to be nine planets, dang it misses the point, in my opinion. (And if that's the argument, I will counter that even my eldest daughter, who has only begun her middle-school astronomy training, can see clearly that Pluto doesn't fit. But I digress.) [1]

In all honesty, Pluto hasn't really been demoted at all. Here's the take from the IAU themselves, conveniently missed by most commentators:

The "dwarf planet" Pluto is recognised as an important proto-type of a new class of trans-Neptunian objects. The IAU will set up a process to name these objects.

What Pluto will be is the standard-bearer for these new "dwarf planets", which we've already started discovering, and not just one of 'em either. One of these, 2003 UB313 (a/k/a Xena), would have been promoted to planetary status had Pluto retained its own status. We honestly don't know how many more of these guys, of Pluto's size and perhaps bigger, might be in the Kuiper belt. They're important, and until I taught Astronomy, I didn't know how important and how well-characterized they were.

So Pluto's not a planet anymore. Yippee. But don't expect Pluto to leave your friendly neighborhood astronomy textbook anytime soon. Pluto's discovery is still a marvelous story, a triumph of observational astronomy, and the first hint that there was a lot more beyond Neptune than any of us had bargained for. In fact, I think it's even worth keeping up in that glow-in-the-dark model of the solar system. (Just find some room for Xena, too.)

One other footnote. The chair of the IAU Planet Definition Committee is a Harvard boy by the name of Owen Gingerich. Gingerich is not only a respected astronomer and historian of science, but he is a Christian and one of the more widely respected philosophers on the interface between science and faith, which is a field I'd dearly love to break into one of these days. Here's some theological perspective on Gingerich's work.

Okay, now, let's get to the real news.

Phooey. It's late. I have no time to get to the real news.

I'll just link back to a previously-cited take on the existence of dark matter and jabber more about what I think that means later.

[1] My eldest daughter has requested the right to weigh in with a her official opinion. I've placed it after the jump.

Pluto cannot be really considered a planet. Most people think that the IAU has gone completely berserk by cancelling out Pluto. I disagree. Pluto is a weirdo in space. It has always been an oddball. There are three reasons why Pluto cannot and will not be a planet:
  1. Pluto and Charon orbit around each other. This, therefore, breaks the rule that moons orbit around planets! If Pluto is considered a planet then Charon has to be a planet too. And Charon is not a planet.
  2. Pluto has an irregular orbit. Well, to some of us, that doesn't matter. But to me it does. Pluto orbits closer sometimes, overlapping with Neptune, Then it goes way out, almost into the Kuiper Belt!
  3. Pluto is tiny. If Jupiter were the size of a quarter, then Pluto would probably be about one one-hundredth the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

As you might see, Pluto doesn't fit. For those of you who use those shortcuts to remember things, start thinking, instead of:

My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas

start thinking
My Very Evil Mother Just Served Us Nothing!

(Note: I take the blame for the missing "Mother" in the second mnemonic earlier.)

Posted by Chuck at 03:52 PM | TrackBack

June 24, 2006

On loneliness and lousy newspaper citation

I come across this story on Americans' general loneliness from the Washington Post:

Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States...

The comprehensive new study paints a sobering picture of an increasingly fragmented America, where intimate social ties -- once seen as an integral part of daily life and associated with a host of psychological and civic benefits -- are shrinking or nonexistent. In bad times, far more people appear to suffer alone.

"That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car," said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. "There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants."

My first response to this story is, well, I fight against the loneliness for a REASON. I see so much of this in my own life, and it's a CONSTANT fight to make sure I have people around me who can be that kind of support structure. I've known people for whom I can see that I was, or am, the entire support structure; it sucks, frankly.

My second response is: I wonder how exactly they pulled this off. And this gets to my major beef with science reporting. It's always written for somebody who wants to pop into the article, say "ooh, that's interesting", and move on with their lives. There's no tools given in the reporting for somebody to find their own further information.

I've been coming to the conclusion that, while learning raw facts and problem-solving skills is really important (and a rather fundamental part of what I teach), the even more important skillset for me to give a person in the academic environment is resourcing - starting from point X, going to the library or to the 'net and getting deeper information.

And it doesn't happen much anywhere in the academic world, because we're so obsessed as teachers with evaluating how many facts our students get and how many problems they can solve in X amount of time.

In this day and age, we have several really high-quality tools at our disposal for getting this kind of information. Let me bring one of those to bear here - I'll go to Google, the engine we all know, and note that the woman quoted above is named Smith-Lovin, and the research she's talking about is cited...

The results, being published today in the American Sociological Review, took researchers by surprise because they had not expected to see such a steep decline in close social ties.

...in the American Sociological Review. Hey, GOOGLE!

American Sociological Association | ASA Journals Home
American Sociological Society - Home ... by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin,
and Matthew E. Brashears (American Sociological Review, June 2006) ...
www.asanet.org/page.ww?section=Journals&name=ASA+Journals+Home - 135k - Cached - Similar pages

Hey, first hit, even. I coulda said "I'm Feeling Lucky". :)

And, of course, when I go to the ASA Journals homepage, I find a front-and-center link to the article itsownself.

And you can get even more stunning numbers in there. In 1985, the number of people who claimed that they had no confidant whatsoever was 10% - still awfully dang high for a civilized country. When the study was repeated in 2004, the number was 24.6%. Roughly one quarter of the people in the United States don't have a single person they talk about important matters with.

In 1985, 80.1% of all people had a confidant outside of their immediate families. In 2004, 57.2% did.

There's some really hard-core stats in the formal article, too - and part of the reason you don't throw out an article of this sort to the masses is, after a while, 23 pages on statistics on social isolation (and the regression of the social isolation data, and criticism on how such a large shift over 20 years' time could possibly be real) can get really overwhelming. But there needs to be better care taken to get the basic resources in front of people.

If nothing else, which sounds more authoritative? "Studies say that..." or "Matthew Brashears studies sociology at the University of Arizona, and Lynn Smith-Lovin studies sociology at Duke; together, they have found that..."?

(Maybe it's just that I've heard the phrase "Studies say that..." too many times in my life.)

Posted by Chuck at 09:36 AM | TrackBack

November 29, 2005

How to send me running into the waiting arms of the Discovery Institute, part III

(Just in case you need an update: Here are part I and part II.)

One of my longtime themes in this whole evolution v. intelligent design debate has been the idea that is that people on either side of this debate have talked past one another, sometimes very deliberately and willfully, for the better part of forty years. I will freely grant that much of the bomb-throwing has come from the religion side of the aisle. However, what has personally been frustrating to me (as I'm one who does come from the church people, and I do have a certain affection for their traditions and their values) has been a complete failure from science teaching advocates, and academics of several other stripes, to show even the slightest attempt to understand why someone of Christian faith would have problems with evolution.

(There is quite a distinguished history of people who have Christian faith not having a bit of problem with evolution, in fact using evolution in their own ways to describe how God does business, but that's another discussion entirely. The point is, there are pretty plain reasons for Christians to be troubled by evolution, particularly the current evolutionary synthesis.)

And, while I suppose it's understandable that faculty at the Kansas U might feel particularly aggrieved towards uber-conservative political bodies that they percieve are making their state an educational laughingstock, when I read this blogpost from Centerfield, my first response was "there's no way this can be as bad as it sounds."

So I did my research, thanks to the Lawrence Journal-World's excellent KU coverage.

It is as bad as it sounds.

In a recent message on a Yahoo listserv — a venue where groups of people post questions and comments on a particular topic — Paul Mirecki, chairman of KU’s department of religious studies, described his upcoming course “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationisms and other Religious Mythologies.”

“The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category ‘mythology,’” Mirecki wrote.

He signed the note “Doing my part (to upset) the religious right, Evil Dr. P.”

“My understanding was that was a private e-mail communication that somehow was moved out of those channels and has become a public document,” Shulenburger said.

Now, I'm wondering if that post has a publicly-available link. Because that could completely put lie to the KU provost's statement.

On most of the Yahoo! Groups lists that I'm on, the posts made are publicly viewable, not just to subscribers but to the populace at large. (Here's an example near and dear to my heart.) It would be REALLY NIFTY if somebody could track down that post in question. If so, then that's not private e-mail. At best, it's a private mailing list. But, more likely, it's a mailing list where all the posts are out in the open.

And, in any event, the content says one thing and one thing only. In fact, the Associated Press story on this says it even more directly.

"The KU faculty has had enough," said Paul Mirecki, chairman of the department. "Creationism is mythology," Mr. Mirecki said. "Intelligent design is mythology. It's not science. They try to make it sound like science. It clearly is not."

Now, there are proper academic definitions of mythology that are not as loaded. But nobody who is your standard churchgoer is familiar with those. They hear "mythology" and they immediately process "they're putting what we believe on the level of Greek and Roman gods." And offense happens.

And when you brace that with "The KU faculty has had enough"?

The message is plain. Of course you know, this means war.

Now, Professor Mirecki has apologized for his e-mail - but not for his other inflammatory comments, and without even a hint that he understands what he's done to upset people - but, as far as KU is concerned, the damage might already be done. The Kansas Legislature's antennae are already raised, for better or for worse, and this is not a season when you want to be hacking off the people who supply your public funding. More importantly, there are a lot of otherwise rather moderate parents of faith who hear such talk coming from the chair of Relgious Studies (and, of all people, you would think that somebody who studies religion professionally would understand the sensitivities of religious people) and who are thinking "You know, I don't know if I want my offspring going to Kansas University."

And, if you're trying to get across the importance of understanding good science, those are exactly the parents you need to be trying to talk to.

Again, it's sheer arrogance. It's falling into the trap of saying "because I have all these degrees, I know better than you do." And that arrogance is going to blow up in the face of those who don't see the damage that it does.

If you truly want to educate, you need to talk to people, not down at them. You need to understand the biases that they bring to the table, and make sure the biases you bring to the table are out there for everyone to see. Then you can start to discuss facts and ideas, and begin to think critically about them - and hopefully get good critical responses, but not be so arrogant to believe that your understanding is above question.

When I see the knee-jerk responses of those in high positions in education when it comes to the religious faith of the populace, it really makes me wonder how much they're interested in educating - and in learning themselves - and how much they're really interested in indoctrination.

UPDATE: The folks at The Airing Of Grievances (who I like, despite the fact that I disagree with them pretty much completely on this) point to this AP article citing the e-mail that Mirecki sent as going to a Kansas student organization, for which Mirecki serves as faculty advisor, called the "Society of Open-Minded Atheists and Agnostics".

The mailing list does have a homepage on Yahoo! Groups. It is locked down; the e-mails are not publicly visible.

But it's a mailing list, according to the AP, that students and faculty are on alike. And that makes me even more wary of the whole "indoctrination" question, for reasons that I haven't totally worked out right now. Stay tuned.

Posted by Chuck at 08:11 PM | TrackBack

November 25, 2005

Scott Adams on ID

I'm not even going to attempt a comment on this series of posts. I'd be sure to misinterpret Adams somehow.

But Dilbert-guy (who has taken to keeping his own blog) has a fascinating series of posts on evolution and ID that demands your attention. They're deep posts, folks. Deep.

And groupthink is scary stuff.

Posted by Chuck at 08:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 24, 2005

String Theory == Intelligent Design?

So I'm enjoying my thanksgiving break into real, honest-to-God contemplative reading (there is a litany of things wrong with that phrase, use your imagination to find them). And at some point, I know, I'm going to have to fix the link to KausFiles in the blogroll, because Slate moves it around every now and again. So I am going to the Slate homepage (and the current KausFiles is here, by the way) and I come across the following headline:

ball o' string
Even String Theorists Don't Get String Theory
Well, THAT'S a relief. I don't feel like a total dope for not getting what everybody and their brother, cousin AND random friend at church are finding so fascinating about teh string theory, then.

But that's not all, oh no! Because what the article really is, is a book review of Hiding In The Mirror by Lawrence Krauss - in which, according to the Slate reviewer, he basically takes this whole string theory mess and rips it a new one, essentially calling it untestable pseudoscience.

Mmmm. Yummy. Here, have a money take:

Elegance is a term theorists apply to formulas, like E=mc2, which are simple and symmetrical yet have great scope and power. The concept has become so associated with string theory that Nova's three-hour 2003 series on the topic was titled The Elegant Universe (you can watch the whole thing online for free here).
(Aside: The author doesn't bother to mention Brian Greene's book that spawned the Nova thing, for some reason I don't understand. I expect that would be a far better place to start, if you want the non-scientist perspective on this string theory stuff. Anyway, continuing my quote...)
Yet a demonstration of string theory's mathematical elegance was conspicuously absent from Nova's special effects and on-location shoots. No one explained any of the math onscreen. That's because compared to E=mc2, string theory equations look like spaghetti. And unfortunately for the aspirations of its proponents, the ideas are just as hard to explain in words...

String theory proposes a solution that reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics. To get there, it requires two radical changes in our view of the universe. The first is easy: What we've presumed are subatomic particles are actually tiny vibrating strings of energy, each 100 billion billion times smaller than the protons at the nucleus of an atom.

That's easy to accept. But for the math to work, there also must be more physical dimensions to reality than the three of space and one of time that we can perceive. The most popular string models require 10 or 11 dimensions. What we perceive as solid matter is mathematically explainable as the three-dimensional manifestation of "strings" of elementary particles vibrating and dancing through multiple dimensions of reality, like shadows on a wall. In theory, these extra dimensions surround us and contain myriad parallel universes. Nova's "The Elegant Universe" used Matrix-like computer animation to convincingly visualize these hidden dimensions.

Sounds neat, huh—almost too neat? Krauss' book is subtitled The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions as a polite way of saying String Theory Is for Suckers. String theory, he explains, has a catch: Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, it can't be tested. That is, no one has been able to devise a feasible experiment for which string theory predicts measurable results any different from what the current wisdom already says would happen. Scientific Method 101 says that if you can't run a test that might disprove your theory, you can't claim it as fact.


Well.

There are two points that come out of this worth raising.

One is that, yeah, obviously, string theory is just that, and is pretty hopelessly stuck as that. Which is fine. I can't bring myself to be so bothered about the state of string theory as I can about, say, the state of intelligent design theory, because at least (as I understand it) there is still the prospect of working out the kinks in relativity and quantum in a way that can be tested elsewhere. String theory itself might not be testable, but it can lead to predictions that are testable. (Although, honestly, I'm remiss, because Dean Esmay reads his trackbacks and God bless him for it, if I don't make note of the idea that the ID folk might be on their way to testable predictions themselves.)

But here's the other angle, and the one that is currently breaking my brain.

I've been pretty doggedly avoiding the reading-up on string theory that everybody else is doing, primarily because (a) the school work load has been bad enough, and I was scared of the learning curve that would come with digging into string theory's fine points, and (b) I have a natural aversion to the hip, with-it scientific idea that everybody is talking about. I want to talk to you about chemical thermodyamics and classical mechanics, not superstrings. I got over superstrings in 1988, when I wrote a literature-review on them for something high-school-science related.

But wait. When I studied superstrings in 1988, I was trying to get my hands around the novel idea that there could be these tiny vibrating strings that existed in ten dimensions that could constitute the makeup of all matter.

Reading this, the base idea behind current string theory is that there could be these tiny vibrating strings that exist in ten dimensions that could constitute the makeup of all matter!

Um, have these guys been doing anything for the past seventeen years?

So I'm wondering if I haven't been giving the learning curve for the current state of string theory a bit too much credit. And I think I have my project for Christmas break.

Posted by Chuck at 09:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 07, 2005

Really should be filed under "foolishness"

If you ever look at teh /., you know that this little piece of faux-news has the geekboys up in arms, and with good reason:

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation...

What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.

This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.

According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong.

Which is, of course, heady stuff for a guy who is an MD and did "some graduate work in electrical engineering at MIT". Am I the only one who parses that as "MIT dropout"?

Of course (and I offer full props to Dean Esmay for this), it becomes a bit more difficult to believe this guy when he's apparently been talking crap about this hydrino for no less than six years. From 1999:

Mills says that with this new understanding he's produced clean and limitless energy and an entirely new class of materials and plasma that will reshape every industry in the coming decade. Mills also claims breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, cosmology, medicine, and perhaps even a form of gravitational jujitsu...

"I'll have demonstrated an entirely new form of energy production by the end of 2000," Mills responds. "If (insert token doubter here) has escaped our universe through a wormhole by then, I'll send my first $1000 in profits to his new address."

By the end of 2000, hrm?

This guy isn't a scientist. He's the Hal Lindsey of physics quackery.

Posted by Chuck at 09:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 20, 2005

How to send me running into the waiting arms of the Discovery Institute, part II

Why, yes, the only newspaper I read is the Washington Post.

Why, do you ask?

Because even when I get all bent out of shape with the direction that their editoral content takes, they can put out some awfully good journalism. And, in so doing, take what had been a raging he-said-she-said controversy out of the realm of he-said-she-said and into the realm of fact.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg made a fateful decision a year ago.

As editor of the hitherto obscure Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Sternberg decided to publish a paper making the case for "intelligent design," a controversial theory that holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to require the hand -- subtle or not -- of an intelligent creator.

Within hours of publication, senior scientists at the Smithsonian Institution -- which has helped fund and run the journal -- lashed out at Sternberg as a shoddy scientist and a closet Bible thumper...

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which was established to protect federal employees from reprisals, examined e-mail traffic from these scientists and noted that "retaliation came in many forms...misinformation was disseminated through the Smithsonian Institution and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false."

"The rumor mill became so infected," James McVay, the principal legal adviser in the Office of Special Counsel, wrote to Sternberg, "that one of your colleagues had to circulate [your résumé] simply to dispel the rumor that you were not a scientist..."

McVay, who is a political appointee of the Bush administration, acknowledged in the report that a fuller response from the Smithsonian might have tempered his conclusions. As Sternberg is not a Smithsonian employee -- the National Institutes of Health pays his salary -- the special counsel lacks the power to impose a legal remedy.

So, here's the story: We have a small-fry journal editor who makes the ultimate decision, after following a peer-review process, to publish a article friendly to intelligent design. The guy is then harrassed, rumors are spread about him, every single association the guy takes is questioned to high heaven and investigated as clues to "what he really believes", and hounded out of effectiveness in his current job, possibly hounded out of a scientific career in the process.

Yeah, that really makes me believe that the Smithsonian (or any government scientific body, for that matter) practices unbiased science.

Unfortunately, just about everything else you read online about Sternberg (or is it von Sternberg? what about decent reporting on what we call the guy? I've seen it both ways on the Google searches) enters very rapidly into the realm of he-said-he-said. The closest you get to half-decent reporting is this David Klinghoffer piece from the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal site, and while I'm quite frankly sympathetic to the biases woven into the piece, they're still biases and they don't give you much insight into other plausible explanations as to why Sternberg would claim to be so comprehensively harassed as to make his position untenable. The closest I got on the Technorati searches to a decent criticism of the WashPo piece was this blog post which speaks far more clearly to the blogger's internal issues than to the actual question of whether a practicing scientist who followed his best instincts in a publication decision was persecuted for that.

In other words, I'm not generally happy with the level of discussion that's going on here, with people being more wrapped up in their political or religious biases than the facts at hand. Big surprise there, hrm?

With all that said, let me make three points:

I'll freely take any other takes. I fear this post is more scattered than usual, and I'm still trying to read the relevant documents and understand what's gone down.

UPDATE: This is why Jeff is the king:

Jeff: Fascinating stuff. I think the distinction between 'structuralist' and 'historicist' is a fascinating one...
ShorterPearson: ...and one that the culprits in general need to put into words of one syllable.
ShorterPearson: Because the populace at large doesn't understand it.
Jeff: Yea, there is that. Hiding behind rhetorical smoke is a symptom of a heated debate landscape.
Jeff: Indeed.
ShorterPearson: Buddy, you're about to get yourself quoted. :-)

And, indeed, he has.

Posted by Chuck at 02:21 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 05, 2005

How to send me running into the waiting arms of the Discovery Institute

Unbridled arrogance should just about do it. That's pretty much what that Washington Post editorial on "intelligent design" and its newfound presidential acclaim boils down to.

Now, I'm not going to speak to the quality of the W's comments on this debate; last I checked, he wasn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, and probably hasn't been reading Thomas Kuhn's philosophies on scientific paradigms. But the Post's response might be even more clueless and maddening.

I'm going to go sentence-by-sentence through the key paragraph, by my reading:

Of course the president is right that, in the context of a philosophical debate, it would be appropriate to discuss both sides of an issue before arriving at a conclusion. In the context of a religious discussion, it would also be very interesting to ponder whether the human race exists on Earth for a purpose or merely by accident.

This is reasonable enough, although I hate how the reasonable point is spun to have the look and feel of a subtle dig at Christian theology. "Yeah, discussion is nice. Let's discuss this: Is there really a point to your existence, as a human being?" People answer that question for themselves daily, as a faith decision. Even that very question would be offensive enough to some people.

I'm not opposed to offending people, mind - but if you're interested in being fair-minded with what you're about to say, you'd probably choose a different example.

But the proponents of intelligent design are not content with participating in a philosophical or religious debate. They want their theory to be accepted as science and to be taught in ninth-grade biology classes, alongside the theory of evolution.

This is the standard line of argument that starts to raise my hackles. "ID people are subversive. They want in the classrooms. They want to undermine the good and proper science with their pseudoscientific ideas." And I'm not going to sit here and say that there isn't a group of people out there who aren't subversive - but to say that every last person who struggles theologically with the implications of the evolutionary synthesis is out to have creationism taught on an equal scientific level as evolution is to paint with too broad a brush.

The whole Intelligent Design movement is doing one thing right now very well. It is criticizing the evolutionary synthesis. It points out details that are not satisfying about the current theory, and it acknowledges that men are not going to very easily let go of the idea that they were put here by a power more intelligent than themselves. I don't see the problem putting this in front of young thinkers.

In fact, I think we insult their intelligence by not saying anything about it; by so thoroughly separating the religious thought from the scientific thought in the classroom, we may think that we're being respectful to kids who have a different belief system than the majority, but it's not like high school students haven't figured out that some people believe one way and others believe another.

Bottom line: telling students that intelligent design ideas are out there does not equate to putting those ideas on the same scientific plane as the evolutionary synthesis. (And those people who do want to do such things, I have different issues with them.)

For that, there is no basis whatsoever: The nature of the "evidence" for the theory of evolution is so overwhelming, and so powerful, that it informs all of modern biology. To pretend that the existence of evolution is somehow still an open question, or that it is one of several equally valid theories, is to misunderstand the intellectual and scientific history of the past century.

And this is where I make like my grandfather and say "Just a cotton pickin' second."

To pretend that ANY scientific question isn't, at some level, an open question, is to misunderstand the entire history of science. The modern advances of computing and personal technology would have been impossible if the atomic theory of John Dalton had been considered not been considered open for debate in 1900. The ideas of Einstein that are so widely celebrated today were considered in large part heretical when first proposed. For crying out loud, if everything that was understood about motion through 2000 years of history had not been considered an open question by Galileo, would simple words like acceleration and force be understood today?

Simply put, to put evolution on a pedestal that is beyond any question and critique is to fall into a trap that stagnates proper scientific thought. The best thinkers are those that can rigorously filter through all ideas, not just those ideas that are most comfortable or satisfying to you.

None of this is to suggest that I don't want to teach evolution. Frankly, given the fact that there are no other viable scientific descriptions working right now (again: Intelligent Design right now works best as a criticism, not an alternate scientific theory), we pretty much have to. But I'd hope it would be taught for what it is - the scientific idea that best explains the available evidence right now. As "overwhelming and powerful" as that evidence appears to be, all it takes is the right piece of evidence that doesn't agree for the whole thing to tumble like a house of cards, and sends everybody struggling to build something totally new.

Besides, I'd argue that the Post's obsessing about how awesome the science behind evolution is misses the real point:

We are in favor of basic scientific education that reports the consensus of scientists on questions of scientific fact while carefully avoiding disputed theological or philosophical claims. But really, what does it matter what the president thinks about evolution or how it should be taught? There are no national standards that require evolution, or any other subject, to be taught in a certain way in the public schools. Nor should there be. (The most common argument for a national standard is that math in Oregon isn't different from math in New York. But scientific facts and mathematical relations are also the same in Kiev, which does not mean we need binding international standards in education.)

That evolution is a national issue is almost entirely the result of mistakes by the Supreme Court. It has first set itself up as the regulator of all local governmental practices that have religious overtones. Compounding the error, it has decided to try to figure out the motivations of all those practices. So a local school board's failure to teach evolution becomes, literally, a federal case: a violation of the Court's version of the separation of church and state.

...those who wanted more federal control over education should have been more careful what they wished for, because they just might have gotten it.

Posted by Chuck at 08:28 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 21, 2005

This is what we call a "placeholder."

Life has been a bit nutty, as evidenced by the blank page.

Since the last post touched off a bit of a firestorm, I'm posting the Pearson Philosophy of Christian Education here. This is actually a half-serious document, part of my teaching portfolio and all. It's also a product of pretty much ten years' worth of thinking about where my faith, my science, and my teaching meet.

The thing I want to emphasize is this: There are different ways of thinking, and different ways of knowing. There is no scientific way I will ever prove to you (or to me, for that matter) that God exists. You require different ways of knowing that.

Anyway, here.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

- Matthew 22:34-40 (NIV)

This ultimate statement of the Law from our Lord is quite familiar, and yet it has powerful implications for higher education.

Mark Noll opens his jeremiad The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by defining and defending his title: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind...Notwithstanding their other virtues, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several decades.” The thesis of the book is that those Christians in evangelical movements in America have, over the past hundred years, demonstrated love for God with their hearts and souls, but have sacrificed the love of God with their minds in the process, resulting in evangelical abdication of intellectual life and, absent the influence of evangelicals, the present academic culture that is in many ways hostile to spiritual ways of knowing. I read this book early on in my graduate school education, and I still consider the implications of a heightened need for Christians to love God with all their mind as I continue in my academic development.

There is apparent conflict between Christian belief and scientific endeavor. These conflicts appear especially among those who believe that the universe cannot be explained without relying on the vital force that a creator-God would provide. A study of the history of scientific thought since the time of Galileo will demonstrate that the most successful scientific ideas have been mechanistic in nature; in other words, considering nature to operate as a machine would, without divine intervention. Physics and chemistry, the subjects that I teach, are particularly dependent on mechanistic descriptions. It is very tempting to believe that a Godless mechanism is the only possible means of understanding the world in this context.

The means I have for overcoming the apparent conflict is to emphasize that scientific descriptions, while powerful, are but one means of understanding the world. Scientific descriptions are very useful for the deterministic prediction of the behavior of mechanical systems, for the finding of patterns of behavior in biological systems, and for the development of technology. They tell nothing about the pain of human emotion, or the value of human life, or the reason for human existence. If scientific descriptions are the only descriptions of life that we have, our lives are terribly sad indeed.

Hence the second half of our Lord's command comes into play. When it is impossible, through the veils that prevent us from seeing God face to face, to demonstrate to God himself our love for Him, we demonstrate that love through “loving our neighbors as ourselves.” Christian education, however we define it, must be terribly incomplete without demonstrating love to the students who come to learn from us. We avoid lording our academic position over our students and making unreasonable demands or unfair assessments of them. We treat our students not as soulless automatons whose worth is determined by how well they do or don't complete their work, but as people starting a path that we completed not so long ago, who are struggling with many of the same things we struggled with as students.

Our students are learning science to be doctors, health professionals, wildlife managers, scientists, and teachers in their own right. Teaching them simply the soulless philosophies of mechanistsic science does not prepare them to make the ethical decisions required to be good stewards of the world they will enter upon graduation. Christian ethics of love for one's neighbors must be demonstrated daily, and then theological ways of knowing which drives that love must be presented as complementary to scientific ways of knowing. The apparent conflict between Christianity and science should be defused through emphasis being placed on both – science to explain how the world works, Christianity to inform strategies on how to treat the world.

Posted by Chuck at 01:02 PM | Comments (1)

March 16, 2005

You'll get tired of me moaning about creationists.

Monday's Washington Post piece on how generally crazy the church people aren't about teaching evolution raised my hackles enough. Pretty standard media piece, oversimplifications on both sides of the issue, several of the nouveaux-creationists look like loons, others look like fairly reasonable people with even more reasonable concerns, but overall a good piece that gets the tenor of the debate right.

I tend to be okay with talking about evolution as "mere theory", just as long as you put two things on the table: (1) it's the theory that's wound up at the center of pretty much everything in the structure of modern biology, so if it goes down a lot of other things go down like the proverbial house of cards; (2) there simply aren't any better scientific descriptions of how we got here. Yes, we as evangelical Christians have another idea, but we don't put that idea into any terms that have have any explaining power, and scientists love to do the explaining, so it's kind of hard to put those descriptions into the scientific classroom.

Whether you like it or not, we're kind of stuck with evolution. If you don't like it, work on a better theory - and make it scientific, not a "God of the gaps" idea. If you won't sack up and make the better theory, then get to understanding your Darwin real well, 'cause his stuff is what you're left with.

Of course, as I'm hacking around Technorati, I come across criticism that is a wee bit pointed:

This is a political battle to forcibly insert Christianity into everyone's lives.

Don't think so?

Why aren't they trying to wage this fight of (supposedly) competing scientific theories among science professionals? Because they aren't doing science and they know it. They don't stand a chance within the professional literature because their work doesn't merit attention. Biological scientists know this and ignore their unscientific delusions. But that doesn't matter, because they want to indoctrinate children and win a political battle.

I'm not quite sure I'm there. I mean, I absolutely see the point - and there are absolutely creationists who want to remove this debate from science and put it into politics.

But to indoctrinate the masses? That's what I think gets missed all over the pike. There are kids in the world who buy into the idea that there is a God who created everything everywhere, and who came into this belief of their own free will. This is difficult to believe, but not all the kids in my church are there because Mom and Dad make them come - several even come without, just because they know that there is something important within the walls.

Evangelicals (not even just fundies, evangelicals across the board) are just as afraid of being indoctrinated with secularism as secularists are afraid of being indoctrinated with Christianity. This is what's behind this quote:

"It's an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism," said the Discovery Institute's Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life's unfurling.

Of course, anti-[everything] (and I love that blog name, by the way, as you'll see in a moment) spins that quote a bit differently.

But it isn't an academic freedom issue and it isn't a science issue. If they want to discuss science, then let's see them do some science and submit it to the system of professional peer review that all other scientific research goes through. Let's see them submit their argument to professional scrutiny to see if has merit. They won't do this, because there is no merit to their arguments. That is why they submit their debate to school boards, politicians and others unqualified to comment on the scientific merits of anything. Sorry if that sounds elitist but it's the truth.

There is a second reason to go to school boards, though - and you may feel free to argue that this is a bull reason, but you have to admit that it's there. Christian parents want to defend their kids against indoctrination that God didn't create the world. They don't want their kids to get confused about one of the central tenets of their faith and forsake their faith while young because their teacher effectively tells them they're wrong to believe it.

Which, honestly, is their right. You may feel free to say that shielding the kids from knowledge isn't wise. You're probably right to say that. But you can't take that right away from Mom and Dad.

Of course, I read this (and several other posts just like it linked from Technorati and I'm really thinking that there has to be somebody coming at this from the other side. Root a bit, and I hit the mother lode - somebody from the Discovery Institute complaining that they were misquoted or notquoted in the original piece. (Memo to these people at evolutionnews.org - get yer PHP fixed, every time and every different means I try to get to the permalink, it comes back broken.) Unfortunately, because the link is broken, I can't get to the full content of the complaint, but apparently because the issue didn't get spun exactly the way the Discovery Institute wanted it, the Post has committed one-sided reporting.

Here's my bottom line: EVERYBODY IS WRONG. Evangelicals are wrong for fighting evolution teaching in the classrooms in the absence of any better scientific explanations. Scientific establishment is wrong because they consistently and arrogantly fail to listen to the complaints of evangelicals concerning the bias in curriculum and the failure to acknowledge that there are other ways of knowing, not just scientific ways of knowing. Until a point where we can actually start talking to one another and not past one another, this debate is going to progressively get more heated and more bitter.

Yay.

(I'll follow up on this if the Discovery Institute people ever get their act together.)

Posted by Chuck at 04:09 PM | Comments (6)

March 14, 2005

Mmmm, blogroll

If I start doing this very seriously, I'm going to come up with a list of blogs to put on the right.

And I'll probably start with this one. I'm having a blast going through the posts on physics and academia; many of my physics students would appreciate this post on exam-writing a great deal.

I'm enjoying the Left2Right blog as well, particularly as it touches on my three key topics around here: science, faith, and academia. Here's a key deep-thinker, which I buy into - most secular/non-religious folk can't tell the difference between the religous right and the religious left. Of course, the very idea that there is a religious left has been known to send people in my corner of the universe into something of a tizzy.

The Southern Baptists in particular are bad to divide the universe into two types of people: "conservatives" and "moderates." Implication being, if you are "liberal", God forbid, you must be a commie pinko heathen who wants all the kids to believe blindly that we were once fish who grew legs and crawled out of the ocean.

Clearly, some education is required in this area.

Clearly, also, it is getting late if I'm using these types of arguments to define people. Anyway, these guys write better than I do, read 'em a bit.

Posted by Chuck at 09:23 PM

March 03, 2005

Video!

As supplementary material for the below post, I really think you'd find it useful and important (with n hours of your copious spare time) to check out Annenberg/CPB and their tons of scientific videos. They're tremendous for learning the fundamentals of the various scientific disciplines.

The below post connects very well with Video 5 ("The Birth Of A Theory") of the Earth Revealed series of videos. Our geology professor at MGC, Tina Mahaffee, loved those things, and the more I watch the more I see why.

I myself (not surprisingly, given my vocation) am a devotee of The Mechanical Universe series, in which you get to see all kinds of mathematical equations jumping around.

(You do have to register to watch, but they do an absolute minimum of nag. If such things bother you, I might create a username/password combo for our purposes.)

Posted by Chuck at 11:05 AM

Immediate outlet for scientific venting

This piece on creationism has been sitting on my desktop for some time, waiting for an outlet for me to post it or vent about it or something.

Now is as good a time as any.

It's a great story to tell because Alfred Wegener's theory of plate tectonics was so much heresy for the first part of the twentieth century. It got absolutely no play whatsoever from the respected geologists. The only reason the theories began to get attention is because, when the 1950's hit and, in the wake of World War II, reports began to surface of sea-floor features that were not nice and neat and uniform - that there were actually mountain ranges on the ocean's bottom! - and no established theory could explain how they got there.

It took Harry Hess' sea-floor spreading hypothesis, which fit in so nicely with the plate tectonics description, to accurately describe what was going on on the ocean floor - and, gradually, plate tectonics was seen to fit in with other features of the Earth's structure as well.

The power behind plate tectonics, though, was the idea. It was the specific prediction that made explanations. So when David Velleman's post hits its stride, it (unwittingly) points out the fundamental problem contemporary creationists have:

...scientists are conservatives who will fight tooth and nail against changing their minds. But their conservativism is just healthy skepticism, which gives way in the face of empirical success. If scientists cannot beat you at the game of prediction and explanation, they'll eventually join you, every time. (Or if they don't, they'll be replaced by younger colleagues who will.) Science is not infallible, but it is relentlessly self-correcting.

Good news is often accompanied by bad news, of course, and this case is no exception. The bad news for creationists is this. Since the front door of the scientific establishment is clearly open to you, as demonstrated by the eventual acceptance of the Pangaea hypothesis,- you have no excuse for trying to sneak in the back door, by using political pressure to insert your views into science textbooks. Pangaea made it into the textbooks the honest way, without any help from lobbyists. Your theory, too, can make it into the textbooks -- as soon as you have won over the scientific establishment, as the proponents of Pangaea did.

For this to happen, though, creationists (and intelligent design advocates) have to advance an alternative scientific description, however nutty or loony, that can acutally be tested.

I am not a die-hard "evolutionist," however you choose to use that loaded word. I'm not terribly fond of Darwin's ideas, nor of the current evolutionary synthesis. I don't find myself with too much choice in the matter, because in the particular matter I'm concerned with (what relationship is there between proteins with similar functions across species lines?) there isn't a good "creationist" description of why all organisms should have similar proteins - in both structure and function to begin with. I use evolutionary ideas for the simple reason that they work. They have describing power.

My concern about the state of creationism is that everybody on that side of the aisle knows full well what they don't want. They don't want any idea set that takes any lordship away from the God of the Bible. Which is awesome. I'm all about that. But if you're going to that in front of scientists, then you have to have an alternative set of ideas that will explain how things in the world work, in ways that we as scientists can use in describing what we study.

Right now, I'm not seeing those ideas. I'm just seeing people who are so afraid of any intellectual challenge to their faith that they just want try to write those challenges out of textbooks, instead of facing them head-on.

Posted by Chuck at 05:47 AM | TrackBack