creationism

There's a long article by Amy Harmon about Florida biology educator David Campbell and his struggle to get better evolution standards in Florida. It's a good article with lots of elements that give the flavor of high school biology education and the struggle teaching evolution -- both with students and with other biology teachers who have creationist leanings.

This is outrageous:

Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, "I think God did it."

Mr. Campbell was well aware of her opinion. "I don't think we have this great massive change over time where we go from fish to amphibians, from monkeys to man," she once told him. "We see lizards with different-shaped tails, we don't see blizzards --- the lizard bird."

The parts about standards are important, but the good parts of the article are the ones that describe Campbell's time in the classroom with skeptical students. I think that anyone who has ever taught evolution, at any level, will recognize some of the problems he faces. Harmon's talent is that she illustrates both the successful approaches and the not-so-successful ones.

For example, I see where the teacher is going with the Mickey Mouse example...

Mr. Campbell smiled. "Mickey evolved," he said. "And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way. That is 'selection.'"

...but it's a bad example to start with. It's not selection at all. It's intelligent design. Mickey Mouse never lost money for Disney, and there were no dying Mickeys limping along through third-string theatre circuits. Also, the variations in Mickey-art were hardly random; Walt deliberately directed them in response to audiences and other animators. All in all, the example might help to get the students thinking about gradual change in phenotypes, but it's a poor analogy.

Now, if we were actually going to discuss intelligent design, and set it apart from natural selection, Mickey Mouse might help to make that distinction clearer. It's also a good example of another mystical (and false) hypothesis, orthogenesis. Remember Garfield, Homer Simpson, Bugs Bunny; they all get cuter over time. But I think the lack of seriousness just allows the die-hard creation believers to not take any of the rest seriously, either.

The end of the "Mickey" episode:

Some students were nodding. As the bell rang, Mr. Campbell stood by the door, satisfied. But Bryce, heavyset with blond curls, left with a stage whisper as he slung his knapsack over his shoulder.

"I can see something else, too," he said. "I can see that there's no way I came from an ape."

Wow. I admire high school biology teachers. I've been in the same situation with students, and the obvious response for me (knock the students hard over the head with Australopithecus) simply isn't an option in most high school curricula. Which sucks.

The article describes the following day's discussion, touching on the distinctions between science and religious faith, and it's clear that is a better way to get through to the students. It also reveals that some students are learning about science from watching NBC. (Yes, that's right, NBC, it's going to take a lot to make up for your "Mysterious Origins of Man" and other garbage).

In any event, when Campbell actually does tackle human origins, you can tell that the students were waiting for it all along. They know that if evolution were only about dogs and horses, their pastors wouldn't bother handing out leaflets and preaching against it. The article describes how well Campbell dispels many myths about human evolution.

I wish that all biology teachers were as well prepared. Human evolution should be a mandatory part of their training: if for no other reason than that so many of the important applications of evolutionary science, such as microbial evolution, drug discovery, agricultural science, and disease genetics, are human-directed. Evolution is important as a basis for biology, but it is worth learning in high school because of its impact on other fields as well.

A lot of academic-oriented bloggers write about what they do in their classes. I don't often blog about my teaching. Mainly, I like to keep my class activities between me and my students -- I don't want them to think they'll be reading about themselves outside of class. If I discuss questions I've asked in class and the students' responses to them, I don't want to have to stop and think whether I've presented things the same way, or inhibit people from speaking up and participating in class in any way. And participating in class is the most important thing -- if a student thought he could read my blog instead of going to class, that would be really bad for my pedagogy!

But I'm going to make some exceptions in the next few months.

An essay by Michael Berkman and colleagues in the current PLoS Biology reviews the results of the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers as relevant to evolution and creationism. The study has gotten some press, for example this New Scientist article:

The researchers polled a random sample of nearly 2000 high-school science teachers across the US in 2007. Of the 939 who responded, 2% said they did not cover evolution at all, with the majority spending between 3 and 10 classroom hours on the subject.

However, a quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% -- about 12.5% of the total survey -- said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species".

The first paragraph of the essay's conclusion summarizes the reason for concern.

Our survey of biology teachers is the first nationally representative, scientific sample survey to examine evolution and creationism in the classroom. Three different survey questions all suggest that between 12% and 16% of the nation's biology teachers are creationist in orientation. Roughly one sixth of all teachers professed a "young earth" personal belief, and about one in eight reported that they teach creationism or intelligent design in a positive light. The number of hours devoted to these alternative theories is typically low -- but this nevertheless must surely convey to students that these theories should be accorded respect as scientific perspectives.

It does seem surprising to me that a sixth of biology teachers would express views consistent with young earth creationism -- I mean, what drew them to biology? But I don't think that the proportion by itself is alarming. I mean, it's a lower percentage than the general public. And I'm not persuaded by the idea that students will have "positive role models" for developing the idea that creationism is a scientific theory. They have plenty of positive role models already.

What really does concern me is the absolute minimal amount of time that high school biology courses spend on evolution. Without evolution, biology really lacks any mechanism to talk about cause and variation -- dissecting a fetal pig may help show you how the body works, but it can't show you why different individuals should vary, or why drugs should have different reactions in different people, why genetic disorders shouldn't happen very often, but why they sometimes happen anyway, why hybrid corn works but hybrid dairy cattle don't, and why oil just broke $130 a barrel and is still rising. In other words, important stuff -- the sort of basic consumer knowledge of biology that we want future citizens to know.

Here's what the study revealed about time spent on evolution:

We followed most previous studies in asking teachers to think about how they allocate time over the course of the school year. We went a step further in also asking whether evolution serves as a unifying theme for the content of the course. Over the entire year of high school biology we found substantial variation among America's high school teachers (see Table 1). Not surprisingly, we found that those who take most seriously the advice of NSES to make evolution a unifying theme spent the most time on evolution. Overall, teachers devoted an average of 13.7 hours to general evolutionary processes (including human evolution), with 59% allocating between three and 15 hours of class time (see Table S1). Only 2% excluded evolution entirely. But significantly fewer teachers covered human evolution, which is not included as an NSES benchmark. Of teachers surveyed, 17% did not cover human evolution at all in their biology class, while a majority of teachers (60%) spent between one and five hours of class time on it.

That's two and a half weeks of classroom time on evolution, out of a year-long course in biology.

What actually scares me is the number of practicing biologists -- especially geneticists -- who are working only on the knowledge of evolution they got in high school biology. Because university genetics, biochemistry, and biology curricula often require no coursework in evolutionary biology. They need no coursework at all in human evolution. So you wonder how they get to be practicing researchers while knowing nothing at all about the number of people who built the pyramids. Here it is. And high school biology teachers may have only a smattering of evolution in their collegiate biology training. It's no mistake that many teachers don't see it as a central issue -- neither training programs nor state standards tend to require any substantial knowledge about evolution.

Some teachers have a much better idea -- make evolution a central theme, and spend nearly four weeks on it. These are balanced by others who think that no evolution at all is necessary:

Those teachers who stressed evolution by making it the unifying theme of their course spent more time on it. Overall, only 23% strongly agreed that evolution served as the unifying theme for their biology or life sciences courses (Table S2); these teachers devoted 18.5 hours to evolution, 50% more class time than other teachers. When we asked whether an excellent biology course could exist without mentioning Darwin or evolutionary theory at all, 13% of teachers agreed or strongly agreed that such a course could exist.

This is a deep division, which also exists at the university level. There are a large group of "science-friendly" people who do not understand evolutionary biology, and who do not have a practical idea of its importance. These people are without a doubt against teaching creationism in science courses, but they cannot be for evolution except in the most nebulous sense, because they have no more than a nebulous idea of what evolution is. Unfortunately, some professional biologists, geneticists, and other scientists are among this group.

We're entering an age in which health decisions will be made based on genetic information -- when everyone may know their own gene sequences if they want to. New diseases are emerging, new crops are being developed, and new organisms are being transplanted from one continent to another. Decisions about the economic development of entire regions -- perhaps entire nations -- are now subject to the evaluation of biodiversity, including threatened and endangered species.

The people making these decisions ten to twenty years from now will have an average of 13.7 hours of education on evolution.

References:

Berkman MB, Pacheco JS, Plutzer E. 2008. Evolution and Creationism in America's Classrooms: A National Portrait. PLoS Biol 6(5): e124 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060124

...please reconsider, because it is an absolute waste of your time. Spend the time watching Nova's Judgment Day" documentary instead, which actually conveys both evolution and Intelligent Design creationism in a more intelligible way.

But if you absolutely, absolutely cannot ignore it -- for example, because you have students asking you what you think about it -- then you could do worse than Arthur Caplan's review of the movie. Caplan takes the focus off the distraction of the movie's premise, and back on to the movie's shortfalls in accurately describing Intelligent Design creationism, the historical context of the Holocaust, and the role of evolutionary theory in explaining life's diversification as opposed to its origin:

What is it that devotees of intelligent design believe that gets their colleagues in such a rage? Do they just want to invoke god as the starting point of the universe? Do they see god's hand in the design of every creature? Are they asking us to see the gods of every faith and tradition -- those posited in Catholicism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Rastafarianism, etc. -- in our DNA? Do they believe that competitive accounts of creation based on the Bible need to be in every American classroom? Do they see empirical proof of god in every molecule, plant, animal, rock, vegetable and fungus? "Expelled" never really tells us.

One suspects that sympathy for those portrayed in the movie as hapless pariahs might be reduced if the movie spent more time describing what it is this tiny handful of Ben Stein-proclaimed martyrs actually believe.

This paragraph seems to have the filmmaking style down to a T:

The movie's faux tale of an evolutionist led Inquisition is followed by Stein interviewing a short parade of self-avowed atheists who also are fervent Darwinians as they mock intelligent design in particular and religion in general. They also look frumpy. As an antidote we get deep, sincere ruminations mainly from some monumentally pompous thinker no one has ever heard of who is nevertheless stylishly attired and living in a gorgeous apartment in Paris. He assures what is hopefully an increasingly irritated audience that god and science can live together in peace. They can but for no reasons ever articulated by this fellow or in this film.

Maybe they're just saving the real explanations for "Expelled 2! The Wrath of Dawkins" or something?

Ron Bailey at Reason magazine gives an accounting of the beliefs about evolution and creationism of all the major party candidates for U. S. President. This is worthwhile for a couple of reasons -- first, he includes analysis of candidates from both parties (Democrats having been questioned on this issue much less often than Republicans), and second he provides a different but complementary perspective from the one provided by Science earlier this month.

All of the candidates say they believe in God. So even those candidates who accept biological evolution as the scientifically valid way to describe how living things came to be are theistic evolutionists. They believe that God has somehow guided the process of evolution to create us (perhaps by intervening undetectably at the quantum level). It looks as though all of the Democratic presidential candidates are theistic evolutionists. Among the Republicans McCain, Giuliani, and Romney also appear to be theistic evolutionists. Both Huckabee and Paul say that they don't know how God created the world, but they both say that they don't accept biological evolution as the explanation. They, along with Hunter and Thompson, apparently would allow creationism/intelligent design to be taught in public school science classes.

If you're interested in U.S. politics, it seems like now is the important time to become aware of these issues -- in the primary season while there is a broad choice among candidates with different positions. It is certainly an educational article, focused on evolution specifically instead of science generally. You may be surprised by the positions taken by some of your favorites.

(via Gene Expression)

From Reuters:

BOSTON - A Christian biologist is suing the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, claiming he was fired for refusing to accept evolution, lawyers involved in the case said on Friday.

...

[Nathaniel] Abraham, who was dismissed eight months after he was hired, said he was willing to do research using evolutionary concepts but that he had been required to accept Darwin's theory of evolution as scientific fact or lose his job.

The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination dismissed the case this year, saying Abraham's request not to work on evolutionary aspects of research would be difficult for Woods Hole because its work is based on evolutionary theories.

Saying it would be "difficult" is an understatement. It is hard for me to understand how you could rationalize the use of a model organism like zebrafish (this person's subject) without an evolutionary framework.

Religion writer Hanna Rosin has an article in the New York Times Magazine on the creationist "avant-garde": trained geologists arguing that Noah's flood can explain the fossil record.

The point of departure is the Creation Museum:

The museum expected about 250,000 visitors in the first year. Instead, despite its $20 entry fee, it has had that many in six months, according to Michael Matthews, the museum's content manager. Almost every day, minivans and buses from Christian schools fill the parking lot, sometimes after 10-hour road trips.

Rosin attended a meeting of geologists committed to establishing creationist doctrine as a scientific inquiry. She does not explain the obvious barrier to doing so: creationist doctrine disregards all evidence that rejects its assumptions; such a practice cannot be reconciled with the scientific method. Still, they meet and try to hash out working hypotheses for the flood and post-Noahic biogeography. You can see the agenda for the "First Conference on Creationist Geology" here. The meeting attended by Rosin included some of the Creation Museum's geological consultants, who promote Young Earth Creationism as a necessary tenet of Christian belief.

The article describes the increasing successes of Young Earth Creationists -- they are dominating the Christian publishing industry and increasingly training students at Christian colleges to be "make their creationist logic more consistent" -- as long as "consistency" means the earth is less than 10,000 years old. I thought the quoted reaction by Stephen Moshier, a geologist at Wheaton College who qualifies as an "old-earther" according to the article, is profound:

These numbers [about the effectiveness of Young Earth Creationists in changing students' ideas] make Moshier cringe. "It can get so frustrating," he said. "Many of us at Christian colleges really grieve at what a problem this young-earth creationism makes for the Christian witness. It's almost like they're adding another thing you have to believe to become a Christian. It's like saying, You have to believe the world is flat to be a Christian, and that's absolutely unreasonable."

But probably the most illustrative section is the anectodal portion where Rosin describes her perception of these creationists' attitudes:

Like any group of elites, they were snobs about their superior degrees. During lunch breaks or car rides, they traded jokes about the "vulgar creationists" and the "uneducated masses," and, in their least Christian moments, the "idiots on the Web." One leader of a creationist institute complained about all the cranks who call on the phone claiming to have seen dinosaurs or to have had a vision of Noah's ark. (How Noah fit the entire animal kingdom onto the ark is a perennial obsession.)

Yet, the conference program on the Answers in Genesis site lists a presentation on "The housing and care of the cargo on Noah's Ark".

I wonder how they got the weta just to New Zealand and nowhere else. And amazing how none of those mimic butterflies got confused for each other...

John Scalzi's readers ponied up for him to visit the Creation Museum and post his reactions. Well, he's done it, and it's darned funny. Funny, but not pretty:

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that's on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as "Intelligent Design," which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look.

That's the paragraph that didn't need censoring. Don't go over there if you're a creationist; you won't like it.

Oh, and if you're home-schooling, don't send your kids there either, unless you can handle many repetitions of the word "horse***t".

Don't say I didn't warn you...

I just watched the new Nova documentary, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial." The documentary examined the background of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. A short summary: A Pennsylvania school board, led by a majority of creationist members, decided to impose an "evolution disclaimer" in biology classes, claiming that intelligent design (ID) is an alternative scientific theory. The statement directed students to the intelligent design creationist book, Of Pandas and People, 60 copies of which had been anonymously donated to the district. Science teachers in the district refused en masse to read the statement, and a number of parents sued in federal district court, claiming a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

More on the trial and the "Judgment Day" documentary may be found at the National Center for Science Education website, including the NCSE's archive of documents related to the trial.

As a viewer, I found the documentary interesting -- it went behind the story to interview people in Dover on both sides of the case. They interviewed the science teachers who decided as a group to oppose the school board's statement. They talked to the teacher who left the district because he couldn't teach in an environment where he was required to discuss creationism, but then ran for school board to try to fix the schools his kids would still attend. They related the stories -- most offensive, the people who called the Sunday-school-teaching school board candidate an "atheist" because he wanted evolution taught properly.

Most important, the documentary showed the extent to which the trial itself was a science lesson for the attendees. The witnesses for the plaintiffs, including Ken Miller and Kevin Padian who were featured in the film, presented clear expositions of the success of evolution as a scientific theory, featuring its accurate predictions about transitional fossils and molecular genetic findings. These kinds of presentations clearly show the importance of learning evolution as the central foundation of biology.

I take this as the most important message of the film: One of the witnesses (I forget who) related a story that a journalist asked, incredulous, why he hadn't been taught such examples in biology classes. The response: the extent of creationist feeling on school boards across the country means that today's biology textbooks are watered down, with a bare minimum of evolution content, to make them sell more widely. The film includes an interview with school board member Bill Buckingham, who -- when evaluating the new biology textbook coauthored by Ken Miller -- found "literally 16 or 17" references to evolution. Personally I found it astounding that there would be so few in a huge biology textbook. I suspect he missed some, but the point remains: high school biology curricula do not include evolutionary biology in any substantial way. That jibes with my experience teaching: my undergraduates find some of the most elementary facts surprising, because they have never heard them before.

Yet, as a teacher, I found the documentary very unsatisfying. Although it gives a valuable perspective on the trial, and on today's ID movement, it is much too long to show in my courses. The information about evolution in the film is inspirational, but it is ultimately very superficial. Not only the existence of the examples, but also their details are important to understanding why evolution explains them. Yet, Nova was really not able to explore these details,

In a now-standard science-doc trick, they introduce Darwin's theory with a clever 3-d graphic of the "tree of life," quickly zooming over various parts. They return to this image again and again through the film, quickly zooming over pretty much the same parts. It's repetitive, redundant, and very uninformative. Yes, Darwin predicted that all life forms are related, and that there should be transitions between different kinds of organisms. Yes, the "transitional fossil" concept was important to the trial. But repeating the icon of the tree of life hardly reinforces that message, and it provided no new information at any point in the film where it appeared.

I was surprised that the documentary had such trouble showing the concept of transitional fossils. The film makers chose to devote a 5-minute segment to Tiktaalik. It is surely one of the best recent examples of transitional fossils, but it is entirely irrelevant to the trial because it hadn't been published at that time! They mentioned the long list of other transitional forms discussed at the trial; I can't believe that they couldn't have done a better job of presenting this evidence. If they had used the same time to discuss 4 or 5 transitions in moderate detail, they would have made a segment that could be used effectively in courses.

The film highlights just how foolish the ID witnesses were made to appear by the plaintiff's lawyers -- remarkably, Michael Behe admits that astrology would be taught as science by his definition of the term. But it leaves the likely impression with many viewers that this foolishness is "a lot of fancy lawyer tricks."

For many, the facts of the case will stand by themselves -- the school board had only to demonstrate that ID was a credible scientific theory, and that they had no religious intent when they decided to require the ID statement in classes. That they failed on both of these simple counts shows that ID is simply a scam. This point is showed to great effect during the film with the testimony of Barbara Forrest, who had painstakingly tracked editorial revisions in Of Pandas and People, showing the botched text replacement of "creationists" in early drafts with "cdesign proponentsists". This ludicrous episode more than anything else demonstrates the dishonesty at the core of the ID movement.

So I can recommend the film for anyone who didn't get a chance to see the first version. It documents the great chicanery of ID, still foisted on school boards across the country by scoundrels preying on religious feeling and misunderstanding of science. It gives a good feeling to see the truth about evolutionary biology's successes so effectively portrayed. And yet, it is really not suitable for showing in the forum that matters most: to students of biology.

On November 13, most PBS stations will be showing a Nova episode called, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial." The film mixes interviews with re-enactments of courtroom testimony.

The Nova website has some background materials including an interesting interview with Nova producer Paula Apsell. Here's a quote explaining the use of re-enactments:

Q: NOVA is a documentary series. Why do dramatic recreations at all?

Apsell: We are always cautious in making the decision to use recreations. Kitzmiller v. Dover is a landmark case that we wanted to cover, and there simply isn't any footage of the trial since cameras and recording devices are banned from federal courtrooms. We decided that the best way to tell the story was to provide direct, verbatim access to the trial through court transcripts. Dramatic reenactment allowed us to do that.

It will be interesting to see how they tell the story.

New York Times reporter Cornelia Dean writes about a unique retraction by 84-year-old chemist Homer Jacobson:

Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. But today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want - from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.

So after 52 years, he has retracted it.

Wow, can you imagine how much time it would save us if people would retract old papers more often? I mean, there are a lot of scientists who are open and honest when new results overturn their old papers, and that is always refreshing. But even then, it can be hard to figure out which earlier results were shown to be definitely wrong, and which were just forgotten. A good retraction, linked to the original, would make everything much clearer.

Still, most papers don't deserve retracting. Most papers are full of good, logical ideas, even if some of the empirical results were later shown to be wrong.

Tracing the history of these old ideas is a very fruitful source of new ideas. I was telling a student just today that reading the literature supporting old, discredited ideas is much more intellectually demanding than reading about the new, trendy ideas, and often leads to more new thoughts.

I'm not sure that's universally true, but it certainly seems to be the case in paleoanthropology. The modern human origins problem emerged, more or less in its current form, more than 60 years ago. Old papers in this area sometimes seem quaint, and of course we have many more empirical points now in support of various arguments, but the basic themes have hardly changed.

These themes were established 20 years before any substantial molecular information about human evolution, purely on the basis of skeletal comparisons. Better, if you strip away much of the recent empirical evidence, the basic claims are often clearer and more succinct in old publications.

So, I think retractions should be limited to cases where genuine errors were made -- the point and power of a retraction is to prevent a real mistake from propagating itself. A retraction may help stop some high-profile misinterpretations, but it is almost never worth it.

In Jacobson's case, he identified what he considers to be genuine errors in the paper; errors that tend to support the misinterpretations he now rues. So, I suppose a retraction is appropriate. But it will hardly stop misinterpretation.

In paleoanthropology, misinterpretation usually rules the day!

The paper Wisconsin Dells Events has a story about Bill Mielke's efforts to bring a creation museum to the Dells:

What Mielke found was government-recognized artifacts that he believes seriously challenge evolution by depicting dinosaurs and humans living side-by-side. Now, after several years of collecting artifacts and models, Mielke hopes to bring an intelligent design museum to Wisconsin Dells.

"Everybody is getting one side of this," Mielke said. "We're going to show another side to what people believe about dinosaurs. And showing through science that science has not disproved deity."

When the reporter on the story, Trevor Kupfer, contacted me for comment, I sent him back a statement and he was kind enough to include many quotes. You can read the whole story at the paper's site to find out more about Mielke and his aims.

I had heard that Mielke was pushing Intelligent Design creationism, but from reading the whole story it looks like there is a healthy dose of Young Earth creationism in his message. I think some Young Earthers just like to use the word "intelligent."

I'd like to pass along the whole statement that I wrote, for those who might find the story and want to see a response from an evolutionary scientist:

Intelligent design creationism has no scientific credibility whatsoever; it is not science. There is no aspect of our biology that is inconsistent with an evolutionary explanation. Evolutionary biology today has generated a revolution in understanding human variation and genetics; it is the source of our insights into treatments for dread diseases, our ability to enhance the production of our crops and livestock, and it helps us to understand our close ties to other people and the natural world. Wisconsin is a world leader in evolutionary genetics, and our students are at the very forefront of today's breakthroughs in evolutionary science.

So I think it's unfortunate that people are willing to spend their money to support the intelligent design falsehoods, which threaten to keep Wisconsin's kids from leading the way to tomorrow's advances. Outside the Flintstones, dinosaurs and humans never lived together, and kids who are taught such outrageous lies will be be be three steps behind in their future education.

Certainly, between the upside-down White House and Ripley's Believe It Or Not, the Dells has a great reputation for fantasy entertainment. But Intelligent Design Creationism goes well beyond fantasy into the realm of delusion.

WordPress.com has been blocked by the government of Turkey, according to WordPress, who have commented on the blockage and reprinted cease-and-desist letter from international creationism nexus Adnan Oktar. Oktar, who writes under the pen name Harun Yahya, is recently known for sending the high-production-quality Atlas of Creation to scientists throughout Europe and the U.S. As quoted on the WordPress site, Oktar's lawyers claim that several WordPress blogs have defamed him.

Sciam Observations also comments on the blockage.

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article by Evan Goldstein about ways that evolutionary theory have been embraced by some Jewish traditions:

"It is the power of the Torah that all theories can be included," wrote one Montreal-based Orthodox rabbi in the summer of 1925, at the time of the Scopes trial. A few years earlier, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, chief rabbi of pre-state Palestine, assured his followers that evolution, "more so than all other philosophical theories, conforms to the kabbalistic secrets of the world."

...and denounced by others:

Rabbi Slifkin's work has been publicly denounced by 23 prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbis who attacked his beliefs as "nonsense" and ordered that Rabbi Slifkin himself "burn all his writings." The basis for the rabbinical protest differs from that of most Christian fundamentalists who oppose Darwin. Whereas Christian creationism is based on a literal reading of the Bible, most Orthodox Jews who reject evolution tend to do so because they find it incompatible not only with the Torah, but with other Jewish texts and centuries of rabbinic commentary.

Well worth a read for an alternative perspective on religious attitudes toward evolutionary science.

American Scientist has an article by Gregory Graffin and William Provine on scientists' self-described religious beliefs. They conducted a poll of "prominent" evolutionary biologists and found that the vast majority (79 percent) describe themselves as "naturalists". That's in line with previous surveys.

They suggest that a second finding of their poll is more interesting: that a similar majority (72 percent) view religion as an adaptive product of human evolution. Only 3 percent voice the Stephen Jay Gould position, that religion and science are "non-overlapping magisteria" (although, despite Gould's incessant repetition of the phrase, it is quite possible that the usual response to this idea is, "magic-what? You mean, like cafeteria?).

After some discussion of Darwin's changing public attitude toward religious explanations, they claim an analogy:

Eminent evolutionists are now caught in a bind that reminds us of Darwin in 1859. They worry that the public association of evolution with atheism or at least nonreligion will hurt evolutionary biology, perhaps impeding its funding or acceptance. Asa Gray's gloss and that of the evolutionists in this poll, however, differ fundamentally. Gray offered a theological synthesis with natural selection that Darwin carefully used for a few years before extracting himself from it. Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths. A recent informal poll of our religious acquaintances suggests that they are not pleased by the thought that their religions originated in sociobiology.

Well, that does seem like a problem for the "non-overlapping magisteria" idea...

The rest of the article discussed the fact that some 90 percent of the evolutionary biologists believe that humans have free will, even though Provine doesn't. At least, that's the way it seems:

In other words, although eminent, our respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes. Evolutionary biology is increasingly applied to psychology. Belief in free will adds nothing to the science of human behavior.

I think if a pool is worded in such an abtruse way that 90 percent of scientists answer in the opposite way from the pollers' expectation, then "eminence" probably doesn't have anything to do with it. Probably there is something more to this "free will" idea than one might expect. I mean, these days, even fruit flies are supposed to have it.

(via Sandwalk)

Scientific American has put online a long discourse between Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins, about how scientists should approach religion.

I very much like some parts of the discussion that didn't make it into the print version, and they give an impression of the personalities of the two men. Krauss takes on the "good cop" to Dawkins' "bad cop" very ably

Krauss: Indeed, I have argued that questions of purpose in the universe are generally not a part of science, and the best example I know is that of Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who was also a physicist, and the first person to realize that Einstein’s General Relativity implied there was a Big Bang origin to our universe (a claim initially much derided by Einstein). Following this realization Pope Pius XII issued a statement that said science had proved Genesis. Lemaître responded appropriately. He wrote to the Pope and urged him to stop saying that. The theory in question was a scientific theory whose predictions could be tested. What religious implications one took from the theory depended upon one’s metaphysical leanings. One could take it to validate Genesis, by implying that the Universe had a beginning — a revolutionary scientific claim at the time. But one could equally well take it to imply that there is no need for a God, that the laws of physics are all that are required to understand the universe right back to the beginning. The point is that the science is accurate in describing how the universe works, independent of the metaphysical implications one derives from it. The same is of course true for evolution, which happened and is happening, whether or not one chooses to believe in God.

In another section, Krauss suggests that religion may have arisen as a necessary way for humans to deal with an irrational world. Dawkins' reply:

Dawkins: If [religion] is a central facet of what it means to be human, so much the worse for humans. The world is not irrational. The world may be unfair but it is not irrational. The rational response to an unfair world is to recognize that we have no right to expect it to be fair. If that sounds callous, I’m sorry, but it is the business of science to understand the way the world is, not to try to derive comfort from it. All we can do is take political and other human action to make fairer that small part of the world over which we have control. As it happens, I think there is a poetic consolation to be found in science, and I tried to give expression to it in Unweaving the Rainbow.

In the end the two don't really disagree about anything, but their exchange helps to clarify and draw out the major points of their mutual point of view.