Discovery Institute: Absolute Desperation

THESE are desperate times for the neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute‘s infamous Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids, a/k/a the cdesign proponentsists — described here: Missing link: “cdesign proponentsists”).

The latest entry at the Discoveroid blog is by John West. It’s in his honor that this post is adorned with our jolly Buffoon logo. If you already know who West is, you can skip the next two indented paragraphs:

West is a winner of the Curmudgeon’s Buffoon Award. He’s a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute (the DI), where he is Associate Director of their Center for Science and Culture — the creationist public relations and lobbying operation that consumes almost half of the Discoveroids’ $4 million budget (see Their 2007 Tax Return). That makes West one of the chief Keepers of their wedge strategy.

West can be counted on most years to attempt Another July 4th Hijacking. He also seems to have a history of making — let us say — somewhat exaggerated claims. See: Wild Charges of Evidence Suppression. Then see Brave Struggle Against All Odds. See also: Censored by Vandals!

Okay, that’s who he is. Now let’s see what West has written. We present to you, dear reader, some excerpts from Behe Critic on Bacterial Flagellum: No Intelligence Required Because “Natural forces work ‘like magic’”, which appears at the Discoveroid blog. The bold font was added by us:

Over at BioLogos, biologist Kathryn Applegate has offered what has to be one of the more creative alternatives to the intelligent design of the bacterial flagellum: Magic. I’m not kidding.

Magic? Come on now, Westie. Is that the best you can do? Let’s read on:

Applegate readily concedes biochemist Michael Behe’s point that the flagellum “looks and functions just like the outboard motor, a machine designed by intelligent human engineers. So conspicuous is the resemblance that it seems perfectly logical to infer a Designer for the flagellum.” But, wait, she says: “The bacterial flagellum may look like an outboard motor, but there is at least one profound difference: the flagellum assembles spontaneously, without the help of any conscious agent.”

That’s right, Westie. Any biological structure can appear — to the uneducated observer — as if it were designed. That’s the ancient viewpoint which Darwin successfully explained away. You still don’t get it, do you? We continue:

Acknowledging that “the self-assembly of such a complex machine almost defies the imagination,” Dr. Applegate assures her readers that this is not really a problem because “Natural forces work ‘like magic.” Presto, chango, something appears!

Okay, at this point it’s necessary to go to the source. This is Kathryn Applegate’s article: Self-Assembly of the Bacterial Flagellum: No Intelligence Required. She says, with our bold font:

Despite the strong appearance of special design, most scientists, myself included, believe the evidence points to a gradual development for the bacterial flagellum.

[...]

The bacterial flagellum may look like an outboard motor, but there is at least one profound difference: the flagellum assembles spontaneously, without the help of any conscious agent. The self-assembly of such a complex machine almost defies the imagination. As I showed with an earlier blog on the self-assembly of viruses (much simpler contraptions by comparison), all such phenomena seem astonishing and counterintuitive.

[...]

Scientists are pretty clever at teasing out the workings of microscopic machines like the flagellum. The general order of assembly was meticulously worked out …

[...]

It is tempting to think the spontaneous formation of so complex a machine is “guided,” whether by a Mind or some “life force,” but we know that the bacterial flagellum, like countless other machines in the cell, assembles and functions automatically according to known natural laws. No intelligence required.

[...]

It’s the very nature of proteins to interact in specific ways to form more complex structures, but Behe makes it sound like each interaction is the product of special design.

So where does Westie get “magic” out of that post? We had to search, but we found the only mention of the word in a sub-title to one of the article’s sections: Natural forces work “like magic.” That’s it. Applegate even put the word in quotes — to indicate that it’s being used sarcastically. That‘s what West quoted. Snatching at that sub-title, as a drowning man clutches at a straw, Westie constructed his entire sneering blog post. Amazing, isn’t it?

How far is Westie willing to go in order to carry on this forlorn little game of his? Here’s more from his blog article:

One wonders whether Dr. Applegate draws the same conclusion every time she opens a spreadsheet program and discovers that it “magically” adds and subtracts sums — no intelligence required. Or when her word processing program “magically” checks the grammar and spelling of her blog posts — no intelligence required. One further wonders whether Dr. Applegate has ever visited a modern assembly line, where robotic equipment “magically” assembles any number of amazing products — no intelligence required.

Westie likes his inappropriate analogies, doesn’t he? One last excerpt:

Of course, intelligence is required for each of these actions; the intelligence simply happens to be pre-programmed into the computer operations and assembly instructions. Similarly, the so-called magical assembly of the bacterial flagellum requires massive amounts of genetic information encoded in DNA, and as Stephen Meyer has persuasively argued in Signature in the Cell, that information cannot be accounted for simply as the product of a blind physical law. It requires intelligence.

West isn’t a stupid man. We suspect he knows exactly what he’s doing. And that tells you all you need to know about the Discoveroids.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Reflections During a Creationist Ceasefire

WE interrupt this blog to step back and take a look at the big picture. This moment of reflection is the result of something we’ve been wondering about lately: Why does writing our first post in the morning take us longer than it used to?

When we started this humble blog back in April of 2008, everything seemed easy. Finding blogable news stories was no problem at all. The neo-theocrats at the Discovery Institute‘s creationist public relations and lobbying operation, the Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids, a/k/a the cdesign proponentsists) were extremely active.

The Discoveroids had their useful idiots in various legislatures pushing their Academic Freedom Act in several states, and the Ben Stein movie Expelled was being released in a coordinated effort to goose up popular support. Ronda Storms was running wild in Florida. Louisiana’s legislature was considering an anti-science “academic freedom” bill of their own — which eventually passed. By midyear, things were heating up in Texas, which would result in the Texas Science Chainsaw Massacre.

In retrospect, it was a golden age for blogging about The Controversy between evolution and creationism. News stories were abundant, finding one or two we could use was easy, and our posts almost wrote themselves. We could do a day’s blogging early in the morning in less than an hour, and then go about our business. But it’s different now. Everything takes more time — and we’ve been wondering why.

Part of the answer is that we’ve been doing this for a couple of years. The longer we blog, the more we realize that it’s not enough to find a current news story and write about it. News doesn’t spring up fully formed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Most of the interesting stories have a long tail. In all likelihood, the people and their organizations have a history of creationist activity. More and more, the story involves people we’ve written about before, so we need to review our growing archives in order to put the news in context. That takes time. We don’t mind, because the result is a better blog article; but it means we can’t write our posts as quickly as we could in the beginning.

Our real problem, however, is that news stories we can write about are becoming increasingly difficult to find. Unlike the old days, a Google search on “creationism” or “intelligent design” produces far fewer new hits than when we started, and our daily news sweeps sometimes completely fail to bring us an interesting story. In part that’s because most of the state legislatures aren’t now in session; but relatively few of them have ever considered creationism bills, so that’s far from the whole story.

Google is telling us something and we think it’s really quite simple — there’s a lot less going on that generates our kind of news.

There are still loads of creationists out there, and they’re still committed to their beliefs, but their story has been told. The science side of the story has also been told — and the creationists don’t look very good in the comparison. Most of the press have figured it out and they’ve lost interest. The Controversy is an old story that they’ve already written about — there’s little left to say. The result is that journalists won’t pay any attention to The Controversy unless their legislature is going berserk or a candidate for high office reveals that he’s crazy.

The press may be bored, but we understand what’s at stake better than they do, and therefore we haven’t lost any of our enthusiasm. When we can’t find anything newsworthy with a Google search, that doesn’t stop us — we’re going to write anyway. That sort of writing takes more time then merely commenting on a news story, but we like the extra effort required. To show you that you that nothing can keep a blogger down, we’ve decided that the scarcity of news is itself a story, so we’re going to write about what it means.

The absence of news is actually good news. It tells us that creationism — in all its forms — doesn’t command any serious press attention these days. Oh, theologians still write about it, but we don’t write about theology — we write about The Controversy. Okay, what else is the news shortage telling us?

We think it means that the Discoveroids are losing their public relations campaign. Whatever ability they once had to command press attention is slipping away — and they probably know it. They’ve failed to make their big breakthrough — both in science (where they never had a chance) and also in the arenas of legislation and school board action. It isn’t entirely over, but it looks like we may be arriving at the end-game.

The Discoveroids’ brief triumph in Kansas back in 2005 — the Kansas Evolution Hearings — vanished with the next school board election. The recent lunacy in Texas may fade for the same reason. In between those two events, intelligent design was utterly humiliated in a Dover courtroom — that’s the Kitzmiller case. Louisiana’s 2008 creationist legislation has entered a phase of self-destruction, caused by the uncontrollable stupidity of the school boards it was designed to empower (see: World-Class Idiocy). So at least for the moment, the creationist political movement is in a lull. That makes for difficult blogging, but it’s great news that ought to be recognized.

Before we start celebrating, we shouldn’t forget that these things are cyclical. The history of creationism prior to our blog (see Creationism Past and Present) reveals that there have been quiescent periods in the past, which always seem to end with a new burst of creationist activity. It may be that we’re in yet another temporary pause, during which the creationists are working out their next campaign.

What we find in our Google searches shows us only what rises to the surface. Whatever horrors may be bubbling up from below are, for now, hidden from sight. We have no idea what the Discoveroids may be plotting. Maybe they’re just waiting for a new (and dumber) generation of journalists and judges.

The Discoveroids’ old programs still exist, but they’re bogged down. Their wedge strategy has been blunted. At the moment, all they seem have going for them is a few pieces of litigation that are probably destined to go nowhere, but there are no guarantees. Meanwhile, they continue to promote their version of creationism by calling it anything but creationism. They are the champions of the dogma that dare not speak its name.

So we’ll continue searching for news and blogging about The Controversy — with a special attention to activities of the Discoveroids and their woeful crusade to bring down the Enlightenment. May their failures and disappointments be numerous and never-ending!

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Are Evolution and Christianity Incompatible?

WHAT would you do if you learned that your church officially rejected reality? We don’t dispense spiritual advice here, and we won’t start offering any now; but those affected by today’s news certainly have an interesting situation on their hands.

We usually avoid blogging specifically about religion, whether pro or con, but we certainly discuss creationism, and today’s story really needs to be mentioned. At the website of the Associated Baptist Press, where the “About Us” page says that it’s “the first and only independent news service created by and for Baptists,” we read Seminary president says evolution ‘incompatible’ with Christian faith. Here are some excerpts, with bold added by us:

According to the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, evolution and Christianity are not compatible.

There you are then. According to Wikipedia, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, located in Louisville, Kentucky, “is the oldest of the six seminaries affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).”

Let’s see what else the Associated Baptist Press says:

“The theory of evolution is incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ even as it is in direct conflict with any faithful reading of the Scriptures,” Albert Mohler, head of the Louisville, Ky., school, wrote in his blog.

This is Mohler’s blog article where that appears: On Darwin and Darwinism: A Letter to Professor Giberson. That was Mohler’s response to something Karl W. Giberson had posted at the Huffington Post, which is this: How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth. Gilberson, a Baptist, had written:

I have naively assumed, until recently, that respect for the truth is deep in the DNA of Baptists. I have assumed that when a Baptist speaks or writes, they do their best to be truthful. I am thus quite alarmed that America’s leading Baptist, Al Mohler — widely read author, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and, according to Time, the “reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.” — does not seem to care about the truth and seems quite content to simply make stuff up when it serves his purpose.

About two months ago Mohler spoke to a group of leading fundamentalists at a prestigious venue. His topic was why Christians must believe that the earth is just a few thousand years old. …

In this talk Mohler made false statements about Darwin. …

Very provocative. Mohler’s blog article replied:

You make quite a shocking list of accusations. You suggest that I do not “seem to care about the truth” and that I seem “quite content to make stuff up when it serves [my] purpose.” Those are not insignificant charges. You say that I “made false statements about [Charles] Darwin.” I would not want to do that, so I have once again looked carefully at the evidence.

That’s the background. It’s quite a food-fight. Let’s read on in the Associated Baptist Press:

In his June speech [to which Gilberson objected], Mohler argued for the “exegetical and theological necessity” of affirming the universe is no more than several thousand years old and was created in six 24-hour days as recorded in Genesis.

We don’t want to get deeper into this, because it’s not about science. It’s about theology — which is not our specialty. But what this illustrates (to us) is the validity of our position that The Controversy between evolution and creationism is denominational, not scientific. Further, the resolution of this issue is best left to the denominations themselves.

Therefore we express no opinion about the dispute between these two men. The situation speaks for itself.

Updates: See Mohler v. Giberson: Klinghoffer Butts In. And then see Science and Southern Baptists Agree on Something.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Creationist US Senate Candidate from New York?

WE ran across this story yesterday, but it was so incompetently reported that we had no idea what office was being sought. We assumed it was just another school board election so we ignored it. That journalist will probably be a science reporter one day.

Today we’ve learned a bit more. The race is for the New York Republican primary to determine who will run for the US Senate in November. The current office-holder, Kirsten Gillibrand, was appointed last year to fill the vacancy left by Hillary Clinton. Now Gillibrand will have to earn that position the hard way, by winning an election in November.

The Republicans will choose their candidate to run against Gillibrand in a primary election on 14 September. The three GOP contenders for that nomination are: (1) Joe DioGuardi, a former congressman from Westchester County; (2) Bruce Blakeman, a local politician from Long Island; and (3) David Malpass, a former Bear Stearns chief economist.

You’ve probably guessed why your Curmudgeon is writing about this. That’s right — one of the Republicans is a creationist. Let’s look on the bright side — it’s only one of them.

In the New York Times we read In Debate, 3 Republicans Vie for Chance to Oust Gillibrand. Here are some excerpts, with bold added by us:

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — The three Republicans competing for Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand’s seat promoted their credentials as fiscal conservatives, praised the Tea Party movement and attacked the incumbent in a televised debate on Tuesday night.

Exciting, huh? We’re going to skip over most of the story because we already know where the candidates stand on the usual issues. For example:

The candidates spent much of the hour criticizing Washington for profligate spending and promising to rein it in if elected.

[...]

All three said military commanders should weigh in before a decision is made on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military. They supported the death penalty. They each said the Tea Party was constructive.

We told you — nothing surprising there. Now let’s get to the creationism:

Mr. Blakeman differed from the other candidates in saying that creationism should be taught in public schools.

Truly, the man is a fool. Wikipedia has an article on him: Bruce Blakeman. This is his campaign website — but be warned: It starts with a sound track. He’s not only a fool, he’s a boorish fool.

That’s all the Times says on the subject. Oh, wait — there’s also this:

On global warming, Mr. DioGuardi said he believed in it, Mr. Blakeman said the jury was still out, and Mr. Malpass said he did not believe carbon dioxide created from human activity was warming the planet.

They have three different positions on that one, and Blakeman — the creationist — sounds almost reasonable by saying the jury is still out; but he doesn’t explain what he thinks is in doubt — the fact of warming or the issue of human causation. The slightly more hard-core positions are held by the other two — one believes in global warming (with no mention of whether it’s caused by human activity), and the other doesn’t think humans are causing it (presumably he doesn’t doubt that warming is going on).

So there you are, dear reader. New York may have a full-blown creationist running for the US Senate this November. We’ll be watching that Republican primary on 14 September.

Copyright © 2010. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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