Two Online Courses

You have a choice. You can either shell out some unspecified amount of bucks to take a online course on "Darwinism & Intelligent Design" run by ID hack Tom Woodward.

Or you can take a free online course about genetics and evolution run by an actual biologist.

I doubt that Woodward could even pass a final exam in an evolutionary biology course. Of course, that doesn't prevent him from prattling on ignorantly about it.

Cashill on Sternberg

It's interesting to compare this screed by creepy far-right loony Jack Cashill on the Sternberg affair with this one by Ed Brayton. Sternberg, as you may recall, was the editor who published Stephen Meyer's lousy paper on intelligent design in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

Note the differences: Cashill claims Sternberg "learned first hand the lengths that establishment will go to suppress dissent", while Brayton observes that "The evidence does not support the conclusion that Sternberg was discriminated against in any material way".

Cashill claims Meyer's paper was "tightly argued" but somehow fails to mention the fact that the paper's claims have been rebutted in detail. Cashill also somehow fails to mention that the Biological Society of Washington issued a disclaimer about the Meyer paper.

Cashill claims that "hell ... rained down upon" Sternberg after the publication of the paper. But Brayton points out that, in fact, "Sternberg has grossly exaggerated several alleged instances of “retaliation” in the early days of the scandal."

But when you're a far-right loony commentator, the facts don't really concern you. All that matters is making points against those damned godless liberal evilutionists.

Dover Trial Reunion

I attended the reunion for the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial over the weekend, which was held at Lauri Lebo's house in York Haven, PA. Lauri was a reporter for the York Daily Record at that time, and wrote the most intimate account of the trial in her book, The Devil in Dover. It is a terrific book, funny and sad at the same time, and definitely worth reading.

(As you may know, I played an extremely small role in this historic event - I had been asked to testify as a rebuttal witness against William Dembski. But Dembski withdrew from the trial, so my testimony was never needed.)

Lauri Lebo lives with the folk-rock-country musician Jefferson Pepper in two houses in rural Pennsylvania. I stayed in the famous beer can house, which houses the world's largest collection of beer cans. (I stayed in the German room, in case you want to know.)

I got to meet some of the important figures of the trial for the first time, including Vic Walczak of the ACLU, Richard Katskee of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and some of the plaintiffs, including Bryan Rehm, Cynthia Sneath, and Steven Stough. (There were others, but I'm bad with names.) And I got to see old friends, including the NCSE's Genie Scott, superstar biologist Ken Miller, and Behe-destroying lawyer Eric Rothschild.



Above: me with Genie Scott and some beer cans.



Above: Ken Miller.

In the evening there was a concert at the very cool Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, PA. (If you are ever in the area, this is definitely a place to visit. I picked up three books about snakes for my youngest son, who is a snake enthusiast, and two books about intelligent design for my anti-evolution & pseudoscience collection -- all at very reasonable prices.)



Above: ironic sign in the bookstore.

The concert featured a brief reading by Genie Scott, some terrific music by Jefferson Pepper and the Varmints of Heaven, a lecture by Kenneth Miller, and evolutionary rap by Baba Brinkman.



Above: Baba Brinkman and Eric Rothschild.



Above: rockin' out with Jefferson Pepper and the band. At right, on rhythm guitar, is York Daily Record columnist Mike Argento, who wrote some of the funniest newspaper columns about the Dover trial; he also has a blog.



Above: Baba Brinkman.

All-in-all, it was a fun weekend. Thanks to Lauri, Jeff, and the others who made it possible.

Google.ca Celebrates Darwin, Google.com? Not So Much

My kids pointed out to me that this morning Google.ca has this logo in honor of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, but Google.com doesn't. Strange.

Addendum: UK Google and French Google both have the Darwin logo.

Ten Reasons Why Darwin's Birthday is Better than Christmas

Charles Darwin's 200th birthday is today, and 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of his most famous work, The Origin of Species. In honor of this event, I've put together the following list of reasons why Darwin's birthday is better than Christmas:

10. There's no pressure to buy anyone a gift on Darwin's birthday.

9. Nobody puts a tacky copy of The Mount in Shrewsbury on their front lawn on Darwin's birthday.

8. Understanding evolution doesn't make you feel morally superior to everyone else.

7. Nobody sings "The Little Drummer Boy" on Darwin's birthday.

6. Darwin wasn't conceived by deity rape.

5. Nobody thinks Darwin was right about everything.

4. Supermarkets stay open on Darwin's birthday.

3. You can actually learn something by reading Darwin's writings.

2. The Pope stays quiet on Darwin's birthday.

And the number one reason why Darwin's birthday is better than Christmas:

1. Charles Darwin actually existed and was born on February 12, 1809.

Dishonoring Darwin

When it comes to inane and credulous reporting about religion, my local newspaper, the Waterloo Region Record, is unsurpassed. Reporter Mirko Petricevic has never met a religion he doesn't like. His "reporting" consists mostly of taking dictation from believers, without ever challenging them.

This Saturday the Record published a full-page article about the Canadian chapter of "Creation Ministries International", formerly known as Answers in Genesis. Petricevic gives these anti-science crackpots a full page of free publicity, while not asking them a single hard question.

Reading the article, you wouldn't really understand how overwhelming the weight of evidence against the creationist case is. Petricevic gives the scientific point of view short shrift, mentioning only that "Scientists generally believe the world we know formed about 4.5 billion years ago" and "Many scientists accept that dinosaurs lived about 60 million to 225 million years ago and that humans emerged in Africa between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago". Many scientists? How about saying forthrightly that the scientific consensus is supported by the vast, overwhelming majority of paleontologists and anthropologists?

Defenders of science get only four column inches out of 36, and the defense is rather tepid. As if underlining the reporter's bias, the article closes with two pointers to creationist web sites, but not a single pointer to any website countering creationist claims.

With the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth coming up, I'm fully prepared to see additional shoddy journalism from the Record.

Addendum: Compare Petricevic's article with this article in the Toronto Star. Neither article is very good, but at least the Star article talks about what scientists actually believe, as opposed to what creationists believe.

Test Your Knowledge of Information Theory

Creationists think information theory poses a serious challenge to modern evolutionary biology -- but that only goes to show that creationists are as ignorant of information theory as they are of biology.

Whenever a creationist brings up this argument, insist that they answer the following five questions. All five questions are based on the Kolmogorov interpretation of information theory. I like this version of information theory because (a) it does not depend on any hypothesized probability distribution (a frequent refuge of scoundrels) (b) the answers about how information can change when a string is changed are unambiguous and agreed upon by all mathematicians, allowing less wiggle room to weasel out of the inevitable conclusions, and (c) it applies to discrete strings of symbols and hence corresponds well with DNA.

All five questions are completely elementary, and I ask these questions in an introduction to the theory of Kolmogorov information for undergraduates at Waterloo. My undergraduates can nearly always answer these questions correctly, but creationists usually cannot.

Q1: Can information be created by gene duplication or polyploidy? More specifically, if x is a string of symbols, is it possible for xx to contain more information than x?

Q2: Can information be created by point mutations? More specifically, if xay is a string of symbols, is it possible that xby contains significantly more information? Here a, b are distinct symbols, and x, y are strings.

Q3: Can information be created by deletion? More specifically, if xyz is a string of symbols, is it possible that xz contains signficantly more information?

Q4: Can information be created by random rearrangement? More specifically, if x is a string of symbols, is it possible that some permutation of x contains significantly more information?

Q5. Can information be created by recombination? More specifically, let x and y be strings of the same length, and let s(x, y) be any single string obtained by "shuffling" x and y together. Here I do not mean what is sometimes called "perfect shuffle", but rather a possibly imperfect shuffle where x and y both appear left-to-right in s(x, y) , but not necessarily contiguously. For example, a perfect shuffle of 0000 and 1111 gives 01010101, and one possible non-perfect shuffle of 0000 and 1111 is 01101100. Can an imperfect shuffle of two strings have more information than the sum of the information in each string?

The answer to each question is "yes". In fact, for questions Q2-Q5, I can even prove that the given transformation can arbitrarily increase the amount of information in the string, in the sense that there exist strings for which the given transformation increases the complexity by an arbitrarily large multiplicative factor. I won't give the proofs here, because that's part of the challenge: ask your creationist to provide a proof for each of Q1-Q5.

Now I asserted that creationists usually cannot answer these questions correctly, and here is some proof.

Q1. In his book No Free Lunch, William Dembski claimed (p. 129) that "there is no more information in two copies of Shakespeare's Hamlet than in a single copy. This is of course patently obvious, and any formal account of information had better agree." Too bad for him that Kolmogorov complexity is a formal account of information theory, and it does not agree.

Q2. Lee Spetner and the odious Ken Ham are fond of claiming that mutations cannot increase information. And this creationist web page flatly claims that "No mutation has yet been found that increased the genetic information." All of them are wrong in the Kolmogorov model of information.

Q4. R. L. Wysong, in his book The Creation-Evolution Controversy, claimed (p. 109) that "random rearrangements in DNA would result in loss of DNA information". Wrong in the Kolmogorov model.

So, the next time you hear these bogus claims, point them to my challenge, and let the weaselling begin!

I'm Really, Really Glad That Alva B. Weir Isn't My Physician

At Prof. Kenyon's talk on Monday on "Myths About Atheism", he mentioned a study I was not very familiar with: a paper by Curlin, Dugdale, Lantos, and Chin in Annals of Family Medicine 5 (2007), 353-360. In this paper, the authors studied to what extent the religious beliefs of doctors influenced their decision to work in underserved areas. Their conclusion was "Physicians who were more religious in general, as measured by intrinsic religiosity or frequency of attendance at religious services, were much more likely to conceive of the practice of medicine as a calling but not more likely to report practice among the underserved."

It's an interesting study, and it's one of several that suggest that religious people aren't more ethical or socially responsible than non-religious people. What I found most interesting, however, was Prof. Kenyon's citing of this response to the Curlin study by one Alva B. Weir, a physician from Bristol, Tennessee, and affiliated with the "Christian Medical and Dental Associations". You can read the whole letter at the link; I'll excerpt two paragraphs below:


First, the article is an indictment of physicians who follow the great faith traditions, each of which mandates a responsibility for the poor. Though the most spiritual doctors do serve the poor more, the majority of doctors practicing their faith do not seem to take the mandate seriously. There seems to be a disconnect between the teachings of their faith and this selected practice of their faith. This suggests a contagion of a secular culture’s philosophy, “Each man for himself.”

On the other hand, the care documented for the undeserved by physicians of little faith suggests an influence of the faith traditions they deny. A culture completely dominated by a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mentality would find it difficult to embrace care for the underserved except through very twisted social Darwinian theory. It is the great faith traditions of the world that have taken a religious mandate to care for the poor and imbedded it into our social conscience.


Did you get that? The only reason that religious doctors don't do more is that they have been contaminated with the "contagion" of secular culture. And the reason that non-believers do as much as they do is because they have been influenced by "faith traditions they deny". The contortions of reasoning required to come to these conclusions boggle the mind.

Long before Jesus ever existed, human beings cared for the sick and the poor. They did so not because of the injunctions of some religious faith, but because humans are social animals who are able to comprehend the suffering of others.

Denying the truth claims of religious traditions, such as the divinity of Jesus, does not mean one has to embrace "social Darwinism", a philosophy that has little to do with evolutionary biology and everything to do with selfishness. Nonbelievers can do good, and do it without religion. One can accept evolution as the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life, and still help one's fellow man.

I am really, really glad that Alva B. Weir isn't my physician, because his response displays bigotry against nonbelievers, and suggests a willingness to twist the results of the study to fit preconceptions.