Salem and Philadelphia: A Tale of Two Cities

CONSIDER Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s — a small Puritan town about 16 miles north of Boston. Salem was, as you know, the site of the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692-3. Wikipedia informs us, with our bold font added:

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before local magistrates followed by county court trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex Counties of colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with even more accused who were not formally pursued by the authorities. The two courts convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged. One man (Giles Cory) who refused to enter a plea was crushed to death under heavy stones in an attempt to force him to do so. At least five more of the accused died in prison.

Those were the good old days. None of that separation-of-church-and-state nonsense for those folks!

Thirteen years later in nearby Boston, Benjamin Franklin was born. Quoting his Wikipedia entry:

Franklin is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values and character, a marriage of the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment.

Franklin moved to Philadelphia at age 17, so our title contrasts that city, where Franklin achieved fame and fortune, with Salem, roughly 30 years earlier during the glory days of the witch trials. Two colonial American cities, not far apart in time or space — and yet they were worlds apart.

Observe, dear reader, the high place that Franklin holds in American history, compared to that of Cotton Mather. Although he lived in neighboring Boston and wasn’t a judge or prosecutor at any witch trials, Mather was a principal influence on and is closely associated with the Salem proceedings. What is the cause of the vast chasm that separates the reputations of Franklin and Mather? Why is one man universally admired, while the other is someone most of us would cross the street to avoid?

We’ve written before about the Enlightenment — particularly the Scottish Enlightenment, which (quoting from the linked article) “… asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority which could not be justified by reason.” The difference between Cotton Mather’s Salem and Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia was entirely due to the Enlightenment’s influence.

Franklin’s life is as well-known as anyone’s in America. Try to imagine what his life would have been if he had lived 30 years earlier in Salem. Franklin was a bit of a rogue, and was reputed to be a womanizer. His writings weren’t what one would describe as pious in nature. The Wikipedia article on Franklin mentions one of his livelier works, which is used as the title for this collection of his essays: Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School.

Franklin was also an important researcher into the nature of electricity. In addition to his theoretical work, his invention of the lightning rod was an extraordinary benefit to mankind. Had there been a Nobel Prize for physics in those days, he surely would have won it.

How would Franklin have fared in Salem, had he been living there during the witchcraft mania? We’ll leave it to your judgment. According to a book review in the New York Times about Stealing God’s Thunder — Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, By Philip Dray:

The clergy turned a disapproving eye on Franklin’s great invention, the lightning rod. Who was he to disturb the instruments of divine wrath? Even Jean-Antoine Nollet, one of France’s foremost lightning researchers, warned that it was ”as impious to ward off Heaven’s lightnings as for a child to ward off the chastening rod of its father.”

Franklin was amused. ”Surely the Thunder of Heaven is no more supernatural than the Rain, Hail or Sunshine of Heaven, against the Inconvenience of which we guard by Roofs & Shades without Scruple,” he wrote to a friend.

Is there any doubt what would have been Franklin’s fate in old Salem? Think about it. And then think about what America might have been if the intellectual climate of Salem, not Philadelphia, had become that of the new nation.

We can hear you now, saying: That’s all very nice, Curmudgeon, but what does this have to do with evolution and creationism?

Our answer is simple. But first we must remind you: When we speak of creationists, bear in mind that there’s a big difference between someone: (a) who believes in a creator; and (b) who also believes in creationism. The former is likely to be a gentle soul and doesn’t concern us here. The latter is a “creationist,” who not only believes things for which there is no evidence, but who insists on beliefs that are contradicted by readily observable evidence, and who denies tested, well-supported scientific theories.

The advocates of mandatory creationism in government schools have much more in common with Cotton Mather than they do with Ben Franklin. They have pre-Enlightenment intellects, and would fit right in if they were living in Salem during the 1690s. It’s their great misfortune to be born in a far better age than the one for which they are suited.

We, who find it entirely congenial to live in the post-Enlightenment world, cannot allow ourselves to be dragged backwards by the intellectual descendants of the Salemites among us. Any compromise with such people is a huge step backwards. You know what they would do to you if they could.

That is why there can be no middle course when dealing with creationists. No cease-fire agreements. No concessions. None, not ever — unless you want to nourish the spirit of Cotton Mather and Salem, so they can rise up to destroy the Enlightenment legacy of Ben Franklin’s Philadelphia.

Copyright © 2009. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Texas Education Chainsaw Massacre: Part 4

AS THE WORLD knows by now, the creationist-dominated Texas Board of Education (BOE) made a number of last-minute changes to the state’s science education standards — changes that no one was expecting. This was done right at the end of the hearing on 21 January at which the pro-science witnesses were focused on whether the BOE should keep the anti-science, anti-evolution, creationism-friendly “strengths and weaknesses” language in the state’s current standards for science education.

As we mentioned earlier, the creationists had a Plan B ready for deployment. The generations-old game of “Sneak Creationism Into Public School Science Classes” has now changed; and the creationists changed the rules while the game was in progress. You think that wasn’t fair? They don’t care what you think. Hey, what’s the point of having a creationist board if they can’t cheat whenever they want?

The code-phrase strengths and weaknesses is out. The new creationist code-phrase is “analyze and evaluate.” Those once known as creationists, then creation-scientists, and more recently, intelligent design advocates, are now evolution analysts and evaluators. The new science education standards in Texas provide a place for these purveyors of pre-scientific “science,” due to the treachery of the BOE and the naivete of the science witnesses, who should have boycotted the hearings because they were an obvious show-trial.

Each of the science advocates at the 21 January hearing left that event with a figurative dental drill jammed into his anatomy, an act sneakily but joyfully performed by Don McLeroy, the creationist dentist who is chairman of the Texas BOE. (Your Curmudgeon has obviously exhausted his stock of tasteful metaphors.)

Here are excerpts from today’s newspapers, as the rational world begins to realize how the creationists have totally out-maneuvered the scientists. The bold font was added by us.

We’ll lead off with an editorial in the Waco Tribune-Herald, Word games with evolution:

Thursday, in what brought the most attention and was a stinging setback for evolution opponents, a committee voted to uphold this recommendation made by a curriculum advisory panel: Drop the current requirement in state standards that requires teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theory. Though the standards in question aren’t explicit, it’s clear the phrase was meant to open the door to the undermining of evolution theory. Well, score one for sound science.

Yes, but …

Then, in a move that brought less fanfare, the board approved wording proposed by chairman Don McLeroy, a creationist. It would insert into high school biology standards the requirement to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record.”

Yes, that’s what the BOE did. Now what do the editors of the Waco Tribune-Herald think about it?

Just as Texas’ standards have shed the “strengths and weaknesses” wording pending final approval in March, so should this add-on be subtracted.

[...]

Texans should insist that when these standards are finalized, religiously driven word games are not part of the end result. The result should be science in science class.

Fine, except it wasn’t strong enough. Besides, the BOE doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. They’re on a mission.

Next, we turn to the Daily Texan, which appears to be a student publication serving the University of Texas at Austin, in which we read Board’s vote to change state evolution curriculum stirs controversy:

The State Board of Education voted unanimously Friday to adopt controversial changes for Texas public schools’ science curriculum. The board deleted the words “strengths and weaknesses” and added language about “analyzing and evaluating” scientific explanations of evolution as argued over during Wednesday’s public hearing.

One of Thursday’s most controversial amendments pertained to teaching about fossils. According to the the amendment, students should “evaluate a variety of fossil types, proposed transitional fossils, fossil lineages and significant fossil deposits and assess the arguments for and against universal common descent in light of this fossil evidence.”

Steven Schafersman, a geologist and a member of the workgroup that helped write the new standards, said the revision is unscientific and unacceptable. Schafersman is also the current president of Texas Citizens for Science, an advocacy group opposing the teaching of creationism in schools.

“Transitional fossils are not ‘proposed,’” Schafersman said in a written response to the amendments. “There is no doubt about their existence, so insertion of the word ‘proposed’ makes that part unscientific, since it suggests a false uncertainty.”

Schafersman added, “There are no good arguments in modern science ‘against universal common descent,’ which has been accepted by biologists for over 130 years, so the phrase is asking for something that authors and publishers cannot honestly supply, especially to high school students.”

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Don McLeroy, the creationist dentist, good people like Steven Schafersman, who trusted the BOE to run a fair and open hearing, got caught in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Dr. Schafersman now has the creationist dental drill protruding from … well, you know. This is very embarrassing, but darn it — you folks should have seen it coming!

The New York Times has an editorial on the subject, Texas Two-Step, which concludes:

The lesson we draw from these shenanigans is that scientifically illiterate boards of education should leave the curriculum to educators and scientists who know what constitutes a sound education.

Yes, but we doubt that anyone in Texas cares what the New York Times says, even if they happen to be right on this one.

Copyright © 2009. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Where’s the Proof — Evolution’s “Smoking Gun”?

We are sometimes asked by a creationist for the one best piece of evidence which “proves” Darwin’s theory of evolution. By asking that question, the creationist seeks to avoid what he regards as the distasteful task of studying evolution. He’s looking for a shortcut so he can focus on only one item and perhaps refute it, hoping that this will suffice to demolish the theory. But the creationist’s question reveals not only his ignorance of evolution, but a fundamental misunderstanding of science itself.

In science, theories are never proven to be true. Proof is something that happens in geometry, not science. The only proof of which science is capable is proof that a theory is false. That will happen when something is verifiably observed that undeniably contradicts an essential feature of the theory.

The best-known recent example comes from cosmology. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation was predicted by the Big Bang theory, and its existence was inconsistent with the Steady State theory, which was thereby discredited. Big Bang wasn’t proven true — although one of its predictions was spectacularly confirmed — but Steady State was conclusively proven false. This illustrates a vital characteristic of scientific theories — they’re testable.

Note: Like so many other superseded scientific theories that litter the dustbin of science, Steady State may be mentioned as part of the history of science, but it’s not taught in school as a still-viable alternative to the Big Bang. It would be incredibly irresponsible to do so in the interest of “academic freedom,” allowing the children to decide which theory they prefer.

Instead of being proven true, a scientific theory can aspire only to being solidly supported by tests and observations. In science it’s the accumulation of supporting evidence that raises an untested hypothesis to the ultimate status of being a well-tested and therefore widely accepted theory. But all scientific theories are, in principle, subject to the same fate that was suffered by the Steady State theory.

To the disappointment of the creationist questioner, there is no one piece of evidence that “proves” the theory of evolution. The theory’s acceptance rests on the totality of all the evidence. Any one item, considered alone, may have many possible explanations, and to a casual observer, a non-evolutionary explanation may seem as plausible as any other. (Perhaps the questioned fossil is a fake, or a jumbled collection of several fossils, or perhaps it was accidentally dropped in the wrong place by a clumsy backpacker.) But what of all the other evidence?

The “clumsy backpacker” explanation, even if true for one item, can’t account for everything else that supports evolution. Can an alternate explanation survive the same rigorous testing that the existing theory has survived? Is it consistent with other branches of science? The theory of evolution passes those tests. No alternative explanation comes close.

That’s the problem facing evolution deniers when they attack evolution by focusing on one piece of evidence and trying to explain it away. Even if there were a bad data point (and there have been some), all the rest still stands, and the quantity is enormous. The more evidence an existing theory explains, the more difficult it becomes to find excuses for it; and it’s still more difficult to devise a credible alternative explanation for all of that evidence.

The reason there is nearly universal acceptance among scientists for the theory of evolution is that all the evidence thus far examined supports the theory — and none contradicts it. It’s not just the biological evidence from the fossil record, comparative anatomy, and DNA analysis. It’s also that the theory is consistent with other fields of science, such as geology, plate tectonics, astronomy, and physics.

Note: In all scientific fields, there are issues not yet resolved, and there probably always will be. Such items are research candidates, not contradictions or weaknesses of existing theory.

Darwin’s biggest problem, largely unnoticed by today’s creationists, didn’t come from experts in his own field, but from non-biological sciences. Darwin understood that the grand course of evolution requires hundreds of millions of years, but Lord Kelvin’s calculations of the age of the earth and the sun — before anyone knew about nuclear physics — indicated that the earth and the sun were far younger than the eons Darwin required. Later discoveries showed that Kelvin, through no fault of his own, was exceedingly wrong, and that removed the greatest obstacle to acceptance of evolution. The concurrence of several independent lines of evidence is highly unlikely unless a theory is indeed an accurate explanation of the phenomena it addresses.

It’s important to note that a theory which is supported by all the available evidence, like evolution, is not the same as a “theory” like intelligent design, which will be consistent with any evidence that might turn up. A “theory” that will always be consistent with everything doesn’t really explain anything. It may be an excellent theological doctrine, but it isn’t a scientific theory at all, because no test or observation could ever disprove it.

Although there’s no one smoking gun that proves evolution, there can be a smoking gun that disproves it, as happened to the Steady State theory. A good example would have been Piltdown Man. Creationists constantly cite this famous hoax as a “typical” example of the fraud that sustains evolution. In their supreme ignorance, they imagine that it was universally hailed as “proof” of evolution in hundreds of papers in the scientific journals — until some plucky creationist (never named) dared to challenge the scientific orthodoxy and showed that it was a fake. All of this “history” is wrong.

What the creationists don’t understand is that virtually no competent evolutionary biologist knew what to make of Piltdown Man, because it contradicted the theory of evolution. It was scientists — not creationists — who demonstrated that it was bogus. Evolutionary biologists thought that evidence of man’s ancestors would probably be found in Africa, because that’s where so many non-human primates are found. There are no non-human primates native to England, so it’s quite impossible for man to have evolved there, or on any other island with no ancestral candidates. If Piltdown man were real, Darwin would have been decisively proven wrong.

So our answer to the creationist in search of evolution’s smoking gun is that we don’t have one for you. Instead, we have a constantly-growing mountain of evidence, and that’s what you’ll have to deal with. But if you want a simple way to prove that Darwin was wrong, go out and find your own smoking gun — the one that will contradict evolution. Fame awaits you.

Copyright © 2009. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Texas Education Chainsaw Massacre: Part 3

WE’VE SELECTED the one best of several new press accounts describing what happened at the end of the hearing on 21 January held by the creationist-dominated Texas Board of Education (BOE), which made a number of last-minute changes to the state’s science education standards that no one was expecting. As out title suggests, it was indeed a massacre.

Those concerned with quality science education were focused on whether the BOE should keep the anti-science, anti-evolution, creationism-friendly “strengths and weaknesses” language in the state’s current standards for science education. But the creationists had a Plan B ready for deployment. The science community is now waking up to the reality of what happened.

As we reported in Part 2, the new creationist code words are “analyze and evaluate.” All prior talking points memos issued to their mindless followers by the neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids) about “strengths and weaknesses” seem to be superseded. We can soon expect an outbreak newly revised creationist books designed to confuse students, which will be titled “Analyzing and Evaluating Evolution.”

In the Houston Chronicle we read Scientists: Board proposals undermine evolution teaching. Here are some excerpts. The bold font was added by us:

Texas schools won’t have to teach the weaknesses of evolution theories anymore, but the State Board of Education ushered in other proposed changes Friday that some scientists say still undermine evolution instruction and subject the state to ridicule.

[...]

On Friday, however, the board looked again at the issue and decided students should have to evaluate a variety of fossil types and assess the arguments against universal common descent, which serves as a main principle of evolution — that all organisms have a common ancestor.

The board’s effort to undermine “universal common descent” in public schools will make the state’s science standards “an object of ridicule,” said Steve Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science.

“It’s really unscientific. It promotes creationism. It says that students will be required to learn arguments against common descent or ancestral connections,” Schafersman said. “The only alternative to common descent is creationism in their minds.”

Quite true. The creationists on the BOE did an end-run around the solid front presented by the science community. It’s embarrassing to be out-foxed by a pack of creationists, but that’s exactly what happened. However, given the composition of the BOE, it seems inevitable in retrospect. When one side of the debate plays it straight, and the other side is devoted to duplicity, nothing else can be expected. Your Curmudgeon advocated a boycott of the hearing, but things didn’t play out that way.

Let’s read on:

Also added to the proposed standards by [creationist dentist] board Chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, is an amendment that directs science teachers and students to “describe the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record.”

The kiddies in Texas are being sentenced to a life of dark-ages ignorance. Is it all over? Probably, but maybe not. The article reminds us:

Scientists vowed to fight the plan before the board takes final action in March. New science curriculum standards will influence new science textbooks for the state’s 4.7 million public school children beginning in the 2010-11 school year.

The Discoveroids are celebrating in Seattle. They’ve sent out for an emergency shipment of Kool Aid to restock their usually ample supply.

Copyright © 2009. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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