David Klinghoffer, Meet Paul Nelson

Over at Jewcy, the repulsive David Klinghoffer offers up a defense of intelligent design, in response to Neal Pollack.

Jason Rosenhouse has taken time out from his forthcoming book on the Monty Hall problem to pen this response. As usual, it's incisive and worth reading. But there's one point that Rosenhouse didn't address.

Klinghoffer claims, "No Darwin critic that I know differs from established scientific conclusions about the age of the earth or of the universe since the moment of the Big Bang."

David Klinghoffer, meet your co-worker, Paul Nelson. Paul Nelson is a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture. You know, the same place where Klinghoffer is Senior Fellow? Nelson is also a young-earth creationist; that is, he denies the scientific evidence for the age of the earth and the age of the universe, and instead claims the earth and universe are less than 10,000 years old. Of course, he doesn't do so because of the scientific evidence; he does so because his narrow, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible tells him it must be so.

I suppose Klinghoffer can plead ignorance of Nelson's position. But it's hardly unknown. Nelson even contributed to a book entitled Three Views on Creation and Evolution, where he advocated the young-earth creationist point of view.

Remember when the Discovery Institute claimed "Faith healers and Holocaust deniers are not on the faculties of reputable universities. Scientists who support intelligent design are."? When that was shown to be a lie, did the Discovery Institute issue a retraction? Of course not: if they had to spend time retracting their lies, they wouldn't have the time to issue all those misleading and dishonest press releases.

There's a reason why the DI is called the Dishonesty Institute.

Narad Rampersad's Work on Combinatorics on Words

My student, Narad Rampersad, had a successful defense (or "defence", as they like to say in Canada) of his Ph. D. thesis yesterday. That's a good excuse to discuss some aspects of combinatorics on words.

In combinatorics on words, we are interested in words and their properties. By a word, I mean a finite or infinite string of symbols. The Norwegian mathematician Axel Thue initiated this field a hundred years ago in his study of infinite words avoiding squares and overlaps. A square is a word of the form xx, where x is a nonempty word. For example, the English word murmur is a square, with x = mur. Thue asked, is it possible to create an infinite word over a finite alphabet, such that it avoids squares (i.e., contains no squares)?

Over a two-letter alphabet, this can't be done: the first letter is 0, say. So, the next letter must be 1, otherwise we'd have the square 00. The third letter must be 0, for otherwise 011 would have the square 11. But then whatever you choose for the fourth letter gives a square.

Over a three-letter alphabet, however, it turns out you can construct an infinite word without squares. The construction is quite clever, and it was rediscovered by several people after Thue -- he published his work in a rather obscure Norwegian journal.

Thue also considered another kind of repetition avoidance: avoiding overlaps. An overlap is a pattern that is just slightly more than a square: it consists of two repetitions of a wordx, followed by the first letter of a third repetition. For example, the English word alfalfa is an overlap, because it consists of two copies of alf, followed by the first letter of alf.

Narad's thesis was entitled "Overlap-free words and generalizations", and he made several beautiful contributions to combinatorics on words. To describe one, I need the idea of a morphism, which is just a transformation of words defined by replacing each letter with a given word, and then joining all the results together. For example, consider the morphism μ defined as follows: replace each 0 with 01 and each 1 with 10. If I apply μ to a word like 011, I get 011010. I also need the idea of fixed point; a word is said to be a fixed point of a morphism if, when you apply the morphism, you get the same word back again. Thue discussed a special word

t = 01101001100101101001011001101001...

which is a fixed point of the morphism μ I just described. He proved the following amazing facts: first, the infinite word t contains no overlaps (we say it is "overlap-free"). Second, if an infinite binary word is overlap-free and is the fixed point of a morphism, then it either equals t or its complement, which is obtained by changing every 0 to 1 and vice-versa.

Narad generalized this last result of Thue. To explain his generalization, we need the notion of fractional power of a word. Consider a word like ingoing. We can consider this word to consist of ingo followed by the first three letters of the same word; in other words, it is a 7/4-power. More generally, a word is a k+p/q power if it consists of k repetitions of some block of length q, followed by the first p letters of that block. So the French word entente (which has been absorbed into English), is a 7/3 power.

What Narad proved is the following: the word t defined by Thue (and now called the Thue-Morse word) is the only one, other than its complement, that is 7/3-power-free and is a fixed point of a morphism. The proof is rather subtle and it appeared in International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science in 2005.

This is only one of many results contained in his thesis. I can't discuss them all, but I can't resist mentioning one other result, because it has a nice picture attached to it. Suppose we generalize our notion of infinite words to two dimensions: in other words, with every lattice point with non-negative integer coordinates, we associate some symbol. Then one can ask about avoiding squares in the plane: not just every row, column, and diagonal, but for every word defined by any line with rational slope. It turns out that one can indeed avoid squares in this case, as was shown by the Italian computer scientist Carpi in a beautiful 1988 paper; his construction used an alphabet of 16 symbols. Now instead of avoiding squares, suppose one only wants to avoid sufficiently large squares. Can we use a smaller alphabet in that case? Narad showed that if we want to avoid squares xx with the length of x greater than 2, then an alphabet of size 4 suffices. The construction can be illustrated by assigning each lattice point a square of a particular color, a different color for each symbol. Here's a portion of the result:



In January, Narad will be taking up an NSERC postdoc at the University of Winnipeg, to work with James Currie. Congratulations to Narad for a job well-done!

Debate at Waterloo

Tonight I debated Kirk Durston at the University of Waterloo on the topic, should a scientist believe in god? Eventually I'll post my slides and other information here, but for the moment, you can use this spot to post comments about the debate.

Here's my closing statement. I didn't get to read all of it because of time constraints (we were given only 5 minutes). If you read it, you will see the great debt I owe to P. Z. Myers and Carl Sagan.

Ridiculous Public Warning Signs

The Manifesto Club has a new campaign, Attention Please, to point out the absurdity of some warning signs in public places. Week 1 has a small collection of photos of silly warning signs, including one on a cactus that says "Caution: These plants are covered in sharp spikes that may puncture the skin if touched. DO NOT HANDLE".

I think they could use a much larger set of submissions, so go to it!

On Being Twice a Square

The last time my age was twice a square, I got married.

The time before that, I became of legal age.

This time around, my wife Anna decorated a finite automaton cake to celebrate. I shared it with my 4th year class on formal languages and parsing.

If Only All Theists Were This Modest

I've always been impressed with my colleague David Seljak's honesty and forthrightness. He's a professor at St. Jerome's University, a Catholic "church college" affiliated with the University of Waterloo. He sent me the following comments by e-mail and graciously allowed me to post them here:


"Christians ought to remember that normal, thinking people do not automatically see the sense in their claims. Indeed believers ought to be a minority. Even Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians. "but we preach Christ crucified: ...foolishness to Gentiles". This stuff is supposed to sound crazy to you guys. After all, we Catholics believe that if we eat the flesh and blood of a Jewish zombie who died 2000 years ago, our invisible friend in the sky will save us from death. :) Faith does not come "naturally"; that is why we call it a "gift". We should hardly be surprised when a number of people say, "no thank you, that sounds ridiculous." It seems to me that Christians should be a lot more humble about our truth claims and a whole heckuva lot more charitable to people who don't take them up."

I daresay that if all Christians were this honest and humble, the conflict between theists and atheists would dry up.

Taner Edis visits Waterloo

Taner Edis, a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri, and the co-editor of the anthology Why Intelligent Design Fails? visited Waterloo briefly last Friday. He gave at talk at Wilfrid Laurier University, down the street from me, on "Science and Religion in Islam". This is a topic of his recent book, An Illusion of Harmony.

I've known of his work for quite a while, but had never heard him speak in person. Edis is noteworthy in part because of his Turkish roots, which give him some insight into the Muslim world's flirtation with pseudoscience and creationism. And he is an extremely fair writer, in the model of Ed Brayton, who always tries to understand the other side's position and summarize it accurately.

He started by pointing out that different sciences have converged, through separate paths, on naturalistic explanations for the world. ( If I may quote Stephen Weinberg, "religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centures of experience in the study of nature." ) These explanations cast doubt on the reality of supernatural beings.

Scientific materialism, therefore, is a threat to modern religious belief, although technology itself is attractive. There are two kinds of responses: try to show that science supports religious belief (say, by finding passages in the Koran that supposedly presage modern scientific developments) or argue that "true science" is compatible with religion.

While there are many Christian sects that support a young-earth creationist view, in Islam, the old-earth creationist view predominates. There is a strain of Islamic creationism that originated in Turkey but has become popular world-wide. As an example, Edis passed around a truly revolting tract by Harun Yahya entitled Fascism: The Bloody Ideology of Darwinism.

Edis discussed two science-related "urban legends" that are widely repeated in Islamic communities. One was that Jacques Cousteau became a Muslim after observing that there is a salinity barrier in the Mediterranean which is supposedly mentioned in the Koran.

Edis pointed out that Muslims who advance pseudoscience are not opposed to all science and technology. As an example, he cited the Nur movement, whose followers are very pro-technology.

Edis stated that Darwinian evolution, particular human evolution, is not widely accepted in Islam because a naturalistic process with random elements is unacceptable theologically. Islam differs from Christianity in that Christianity has a large number of moderate sects that view science as a separate domain, while Muslims typically see science as subordinate to the revelations of the Koran. Liberal Muslim views are much rarer than liberal Christian views.

Edis pointed out that Muslim countries are very weak in science, although applied science does better than basic research. Those who point out that creationism is pseudoscience are labeled as "secularist".

Altogether, I found Edis' talk to be informative and well-presented. I can't say as much, regrettably, for the questions that followed. I was startled at how incoherent some of the questions were, and some questioners didn't seem to listen carefully to his replies, apparently preferring to base their remarks on caricatures.

A Muslim woman who said she was a professor of chemistry at Wilfrid Laurier (probably this professor) made two statements. First, she said that, as a chemist, she saw no conflict between science and her religion, because Islam instructs its followers to be seekers after truth. Second, she disputed the title of the talk, saying that "Science and Religion in Islam" was misleading because the talk was not about the true Islam. In other words, she employed the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

In reply, Edis correctly observed that chemistry enjoys a slightly different position than physics or biology. Some aspects of physics and biology (e.g., cosmology, evolution) provide explanations for the world that are significantly at odds with religious claims. Chemistry, however, seems to intrude less significantly into what has traditionally been perceived as religion's domain.

Edis rebutted her second statement by pointing out that, as a non-believer, for him there was no "true Islam", but only a variety of different Islams as practiced by different religious groups. He said it would be arrogant for him to pick one of these Islams and declare it as the true Islam; that was for believers to decide. His concern was to examine Islam as it was actually practiced.

Another Muslim questioner heard Edis' response about chemistry and didn't seem to grasp the distinction Edis was making, saying that he had dismissed chemistry as less important than biology or physics (something not even remotely implied by Edis' reply). The same questioner dismissed the theory of evolution as just one explanation among many.

It was an interesting afternoon, and I only wish I had had more time to discuss with Edis after the talk.

Students Want Me to Do Their Homework

I often get e-mail messages from students in other countries. They pose a problem to me and ask for its solution, and they usually include a note to the effect that this is for their "personal research".

Now, I don't want to be hard on the students. After all, maybe some of these requests are genuine. As a young student, I occasionally wrote to famous mathematicians (or people I thought were famous mathematicians) with questions, and I was often pleased to get a reply. I still treasure postcards and letters from people like D. H. Lehmer and Daniel Shanks. I would have been very hurt and insulted to get a note saying, "Don't ask me to do your homework for you", because my questions always derived from my own adolescent research.

Nevertheless, I'm often suspicious of these requests, because my guess is that most of them come from students who are too lazy to do their own homework problems, and want me to do them instead. E-mail has made it feasible for a student to receive a homework assignment, search the web for people working in that area, pose the problem to a professor, and get a result back, all in less than 24 hours -- in plenty of time to hand in for a homework assignment. That wasn't possible when communication was by postal letters. And there is definitely a different flavor between a genuine research problem (which I often receive from colleagues) and the kinds of questions these students ask.

So what to do? My solution is to respond that I am happy to answer these questions if the students ask the question again in a month. That way, if the question comes from a homework assignment, in a month the answer probably won't do the cheating student any good. If the question is genuine, and the poser really wants to know the solution, waiting a month won't hurt too much.

I throw it open to my audience: what other possible strategies are there for answering these kinds of queries?

The Discovery Institute's Latest Fellow, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad?

First, read this transcript of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia University.

Now, ask yourself: wouldn't he be perfect as a Discovery Institute fellow?

The Discovery Institute wants to allow supernatural causation in science, "to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." (Wedge Document)

Ahmadinejad says "One of the main harms inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical sciences..." and "... the material is just a shadow of supreme realities..."

The Discovery Institute wants us to "teach the controversy" about evolution. Ahmadinejad wants us to teach the controversy about the Holocaust: "...if, given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives?"

I think the Discovery Institute should move quickly to hire him, before Ahmadenijad is offered a position at the Institute for Historical Review.

FaithMB = (Ignorance) + (Intellectual Dishonesty)

Marvin Bittinger is a retired professor of mathematics education and author of many textbooks. From Pharyngula I learned about his new book, The Faith Equation: One Mathematician's Journey in Christianity.

The "Faith Equation", it turns out, is this: Faith = (Mind) + (Heart) + (Will).

Now, after you've stopped laughing, here is my revision of his equation:

Faith_MB = (Ignorance) + (Intellectual Dishonesty)

Now I wouldn't be so arrogant as to claim that everyone's faith is based on the pillars of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty; I know a lot of skeptical, searching, intellectual Christians. Here the subscript "MB" on faith indicates that it only refers to the faith of one Marvin Bittinger.

Why do I say intellectual dishonesty? First, there's the matter of Biblical prophecies. Part of Bittinger's book deals with various prophecies in the Bible. He considers each one, evaluates its probability, and multiplies the probabilities together to get a very small number. He concludes the result shows that the fulfillment of these prophecies is a miracle. I'll point out that claims of Biblical prophecies that can be easily dispelled by reading TIm Callahan's book, Bible Prophecy: Failure or Fulfillment?, but that's not my main point. No, the main point is Bittinger's claim here that "the Bible contains hundreds if not thousands of prophecies which have come true, with none failing".

None failing? How about the prophecy in Matthew 24, where Jesus lists a number of coming events, such as "sign of the Son of man in heaven" and "angels with a great sound of a trumpet", etc., etc. and then says "This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." Well, it's 2000 years later, and none of these things have happened.

The second example comes here, where Bittinger claims "Whether the earth is 10-15 billion years old (old-earth opinion) or 5-6 thousand years old (young-earth opinion) is subject to debate in scientific and theological circles". Here Bittinger shows his ignorance, because nobody claims the earth is 10-15 billion years old. The current best estimate for the age of the earth is about 4.5 billion years, and this is based on multiple lines of evidence.

The intellectual dishonesty comes in because it is not true to say that the age of the earth is "subject to debate in scientific ... circles". There is simply no debate. The evidence for the 4.5 billion year age is so strong, and the evidence against is so weak, that the question simply does not come up any more.

Another example: on page 49, Bittinger claims, "Our nation was founded on the motto 'In God We Trust'". That will certainly be news to historians, who will point out that (a) the Constitution is a secular document that doesn't mention "God" and (b) the unconstitutional motto "In God We Trust" was only approved in 1864, long after the US was founded.

The really depressing thing is that this combination of ignorance and intellectual dishonesty is the norm in Christian apologetic circles. As evangelical Mark Noll once wrote, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." Too bad Marvin Bittinger did not heed his warning.

By Jove, I Think He Doesn't Get It: A Night with Professor Higgins

Michael Higgins is a Catholic religious scholar, author, and local legend who is currently President of St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Last night he delivered the inaugural Michael Higgins Lecture at St. Jerome's University, a church college affiliated with my own university, the University of Waterloo. The title was, "It's Tough Being God These Days", and the main theme was the new atheism.

A night with Prof. Higgins is always entertaining, as he is a witty and erudite speaker. At one point, speaking of atheists, he said, "We used to burn them", which got a good laugh. Despite his wit and erudition, I have always found Higgins' talks unsatisfying. To me, a Higgins talk is best likened to eating at an overrated Parisian restaurant. You are taken with the setting and the opulence and the view of Notre Dame. But then the food comes, and you are disappointed to discover that most of the effort has been expended on the surroundings, and little on the meal itself.

Last night was no exception. There was a bit of chest-pounding against atheism and the usual suspects of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, a rather dispirited defense of religion and an acknowledgment of some religious sins, a brief theological analysis concluding that "God is big", and a limp finish that consisted of quoting some of his favorite religious writers. I left hoping for more.

Unlike some Catholic commentators, Higgins takes the current wave of atheism seriously. He views it as a significant trend, labeling it a "virulent and subcompetent atheism" that is "seismic in its implications". However, he thinks the arguments are nothing new: "everything originated in the 18th and 19th centuries". He denigrates the "industry" of atheist writers such as Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, arguing that their books are "aggressive and vituperative". Their hubris is "stunning". They ridicule "without fear that it is indecorous or unjust".

Higgins is very impressed by John Cornwell, who wrote a reply to Dawkins. He quoted Cornwell as saying that in the past, atheists were content to dispute the arguments of believers, but the current wave of atheists likes to ridicule the believers themselves. (But listen to this interview with Cornwell and Dawkins, where Cornwell is caught blatantly misrepresenting what Dawkins had to say.)

To his credit, Higgins says that religion is partly to blame. The new wave of antipathy is, he admits, "religion's own fault". He cites religion's "capacity for terror" and cites as an example "honor killings". "Religion's capacity to divide is considerable," Higgins concedes.

But it's too easy, Higgins says, to blame the excesses of religion on religion. Honor killlings do not represent religion, but terror. "No holy man" could ever claim terrorist acts as "a life-giving force". The issue, Higgins argued, is not to eliminate religion, but to eliminate the caricature of religion, to delegitimize those who speak on behalf of religion but do so inauthentically.

Atheists have the spotlight now, Higgins says, and so the media interprets religious stories in that light. The recent revelations about Mother Teresa were not interpreted according to the "theology of God's absence", but rather that she was a hypocrite or worse.

Luckily, he observed, theists outreproduce atheists, so there is little danger. The answer to the new atheism is not in "noble silence". "God is bigger than our systems" and "Once we recognize God's bigness we recognize our own fanaticism". There must be "respect between people of faith" and "Catholicism can lead".

Now, my analysis. Higgins claimed that those who attack religion are ignorant of it. He even went so far as to suggest, in answer to a question, that Hitchens was mentally unbalanced. I have a two-word answer: courtier's reply.

Higgins says that the new atheism engages in a "caricature" of genuine religion. My reply: look around you. We have a local Catholic school board actually debating whether to give the HPV vaccine to girls, not because of the cost or the unproven nature of the vaccine, but because it might encourage them to engage in sexual activity. We have Muslims rioting and killing in Pakistan because of a rumor that a Christian had desecrated the Koran, all the while insisting that Islam is a peaceful religion. We have Mother Teresa working with poor and sick people, while refusing to endorse the birth control that might genuinely help them. We have Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on "pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians". It's not possible to caricature religion because, these days, religion caricatures itself.

I'm sure that Higgins would reply with a version of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, because that's what he did in his talk. These kinds of actions, Higgins would say, are not genuine religion. I say, they represent genuine religion for millions of believers, and they find their justification in the holy texts themselves. Look at Kirk Durston, a local religious leader who excuses genocide in the Bible when God does it. Look at Muslims who draw their inspiration for violence from passages in the Koran such as “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal harshly with them.”

I'm not saying all religious believers are of this stripe; far from it. But religion has been treated with kid gloves far too long. Higgins decried the treatment of religion in the media, calling it shallow. But when did you ever see a believer quizzed in the pages of your local newspaper about whether their beliefs are supported by evidence? Or if their beliefs are genuinely beneficial to society? In my local newspaper, faith is always treated as a positive aspect to one's personality. I see skepticism, not faith, as more worthy of respect. "There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds."

There was time for a few questions, and here's the one I asked. I asked why is it, when theists want to attack atheism or science, they often use religious language to do so? As examples I cited this article by a theist who suggested that evolutionary biologists answer criticism of evolution with "Darwin said it, I believe it, and that settles it," which is evidently a reference to the famous bumper sticker with "Jesus" replacing "Darwin". I pointed out that Prof. Higgins himself used this language, when he favorably cited another writer as referring to "evangelical atheists". In reply, Higgins first took exception to my use of the word "theist". (Hey, I was just trying to be inclusive; what word woud he have me use?) Then he denied that this tactic was frequently used. I find it hard to take his answer seriously, as there are many more examples. To cite just one, fellow Catholic writer Denyse O'Leary refers to the new atheism as an "anti-God crusade". Not only do theists use this religious language in attacking atheists, they use religious language that recalls the worst aspects of religion.

In the end, I don't think that Professor Higgins gets it. The new atheists have been emboldened by religion's excesses, but they don't base their arguments on that alone. Fundamentally, the new atheists are simply not convinced by religion's claims. When we hear Higgins assert that "God is bigger than our systems", we want to know, where's the evidence that what you are talking about even exists? We don't see God-talk as helpful in resolving issues; when God-talk is introduced, it moves us away, rather than towards, a solution based on rational consideration of the issues. Higgins wants to appropriate human values, such as compassion and tolerance, to religion's domain, but these values are subscribed to by theist and non-theist alike. In the end, religion doesn't have as many virtues as Higgins claims, nor does the new atheism have as many faults as he would have us believe.

Funding Ontario Religious Schools, Revisited

For comedy, there's nothing better than the protestations of the principals of local religious schools, as they try to assure us that, should they get provincial funding, they'll really be no different from other provincial schools. Previously, I pointed out that Bob Moore, principal of Guelph's John Calvin Christian School, doesn't seem to know what the word "evolution" refers to. He apparently thinks it has something to do with "origins of the universe".

Now, in the September 12 issue of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, principal Julius de Jager of the Cambridge Christian School is the next to demonstrate significant confusion. He states that the Ontario curriculum document "does not require a teacher to teach as fact the Darwinian theory of adaptation". The poor muddled fellow can't even bring himself to use the word "evolution", it seems.

Next, de Jager adds, "Nor does it [the curriculum document] preclude a possible explanation that God created an amazing diversity in plant and animal life." Oh, right. That really sounds like science.

Guys, if you're trying to convince us that religious schools should get funded, you're doing a pretty bad job.

Objective Journalism

The current wave of interest in atheism, fueled by religion's excesses, really does represent something new. For proof, consider the photo below, sent to me by a colleague, from an independent bookstore he recently visited:



This kind of display would have been simply unimaginable at any other time in the history of North America.

And today, Representative Pete Stark (D-CA) will give his first speech after coming out as a non-theist. Again, I can't imagine any congressman having the guts to admit this in the past 50 years. (Maybe in the age of Ingersoll, but not recently.)

To any reasonable observer, these kinds of events do signal some kind of sea change in opinion.

But then, "journalist" Denyse O'Leary isn't a reasonable observer.

My parents were journalists, so I learned something about the proper practice of that craft from them. All journalists have biases, but good journalists learn to recognize them, so they don't say remarkably stupid things like, "the [atheist] crusade exudes an unmistakable air of desperation". Good journalists actually interview people who disagree with them, and summarize their views fairly.

Ahh, but fairness and objectivity mean nothing when God's on your side.

It's All About the Science, Right?

These intelligent design advocates crack me up sometimes. While the leaders furiously insist that 'it's all about the science', the grass roots behind them are constantly giving away the store.

Check out this barely literate solicitation from the elders at Trinity Baptist Church in Norman, Oklahoma, where they are trying to raise funds to bring William Dembski to speak at OU. Could the religious motivation be more clear?

"Our prayer for this entire effort is for God to open doors so the power of His gospel would be made known to groups of people who need to hear the truth."

This group is so intellectually bankrupt that they don't seem to care whether or not Dembski's claims are true -- they only want to use him as an evangelical tool. (And if they really needed $10,000 for the event, they might wind up financially bankrupt, too!)

I want people to understand and accept the theory of evolution because it's true, because it makes a nontrivial statement about the world we live in, because it's essential to understanding HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and other important public issues, because it offers deep insights into why we behave the way we do, but not because it will 'lead people to atheism'. I'd much rather have scientifically-knowledgeable theist neighbors than ignorant atheist ones.

That's a Nice Rack!

Here's a moose with a great rack of antlers. Photo courtesy my graduate student Dalia Krieger, who snapped this on a recent backpacking trip in eastern Canada.

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David Warren's Ignorance

David Warren continues to display that special blend of arrogance and ignorance that could be named after him, if Michael Egnor hadn't already been eponymized.

In this column he writes:

It is because Darwinism has embedded itself so deeply into the assumptions of our age, that it must be attacked frontally. For Darwinian assumptions cloud our view of reality. They subvert our grasp of moral issues. They make it possible for people to be dismissive, not only of art, philosophy, and religion, but of the requirements and limitations of true scientific research. They eviscerate the human spirit, by insisting that, in the last analysis, everything is random and meaningless. Conversely, they justify true fascism (“survival of the fittest”), and all the horrors of eugenics, abortions and euthanasia.

Moral relativism could not stand, except on a Darwinist base, and reason itself is rendered defenceless, by the notion that all nature was randomly contrived.


I don't know why theists like Warren continually trot this nonsense out. Darwinian evolution is a scientific theory about evolution that explains the diversity of life as we see it today. If it has implications that are depressing or repugnant to Warren, then too bad. As paleontologist George Gaylord Simpon wrote, If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

Warren claims "Darwinian assumptions ... subvert our grasp of moral issues". He is foolish and mistaken in two ways. First, Darwin's theory is not an assumption, but a conclusion, based on hard research by hundreds of biologists, theist and non-theist alike. Second, Warren apparently knows nothing at all about current work on the evolutionary origins of ethics. I happen to think that Richard Alexander's book, Darwinism and Human Affairs, is one of the deepest and most profound works ever written on morals. If Warren has read it, I'll eat my hat.

Evolution says nothing like "everything is random and meaningless". Randomness plays a part in evolution, but it isn't the whole story. Randomness is represented by mutations and accidents, but selection -- a decidedly non-random process -- is also essential.

Warren confuses the descriptive nature of "survival of the fittest" with a prescription: this is how we ought to behave. But of course, he knows so little about evolution that he doesn't understand that co-operation is not ruled out by evolution, but rather is a result of it; see, for example, The Evolution of Cooperation.

Warren is the perfect blowhard. Supremely confident in his assertions, and demonstrating his supreme ignorance at the same time. Why the Ottawa Citizen continues to employ him is a mystery.

On Design

Well, since Michael Egnor has sort of answered my questions, it's time for me to try to answer his. I'll try to be less evasive than he was.

One thing I'd like to point out is that Egnor seems to be under the misapprehension that the information theory that mathematicians and computer scientists actually study has something to do with inferring design.* This is simply not the case. Open up, for example, the book on Kolmogorov complexity by my colleague Ming Li, and you won't find a word about inferring design. (It's ID advocate Bill Dembski, of course, who is largely responsible for this confusion.) So, contrary to what Egnor thinks, as a mathematician and computer scientist I have no particular expertise on the general topic of "inferring design". It's just not something we do; maybe he should ask a SETI researcher, or a forensic investigator. But then again, Egnor has no particular expertise on the topic, either.

First, some general remarks about "design". I'll start by saying that I don't know exactly what he means by "designed". One of the favorite games of ID advocates is equivocation, so it's important to pin them down on a precise meaning. ID advocates rarely say plainly what they mean by "design". Do they mean simply that something has a pattern to it (as in "the design of a snowflake"), or do they mean something that has a "function", or must there necessarily be some teleology involved? I think it's incumbent on ID advocates to make clear what they mean. But I'll look at all three possibilities.

If ID advocates intend the first meaning ("pattern"), then the answer is clear: design need not imply a designer. The world is full of patterns that arise from the constrained nature of the physical universe. We can explain the overall pattern in a snowflake, for example, by referring to the symmetry in a water molecule in ice combined with the homogeneity of conditions as the snowflake forms. We don't normally bring in supernatural beings to explain snowflakes.

ID advocates, such as Bill Dembski, have nevertheless tried to rescue this hopeless case by bringing in probability. Dembski has argued that if an observed event fits a pattern, and the probability of this fit is extremely small, then the event must be due to design by an intelligent being. But as Wesley Elsberry and I have shown, his claim is based on incorrect mathematics combined with specious arguments. Dembski likes to say something on the order of 'witnessing specified events of low probability implicates design'. But the correct claim is merely 'specified events of low probability are never witnessed at all; if they are, that is prima facie evidence that your probability estimates are wildly off'.

Here's an example: there's a fellow with a web page who claims to have witnessed at least three independent meteorite falls. (The pictures he shows aren't meteorites, but let's ignore that for a moment.)

Now this page suggests that the probability of witnessing a meteorite land near you during your lifetime is about 1 in 2.5 million. So if the events are independent, we conclude that the probability of a particular person witnessing 3 meteorite falls in their lifetime is about 1 in 16 million million million. Even taking into account the total population of the world, this fellow's claim seems extremely unlikely. Could it have happened? Yes, but if so, we would have to consider some other possibilities: maybe the distribution of meteorite falls is extremely uneven, so that many more meteorites fall at this fellow's location than others. Maybe somebody's having him on, shooting meteorites out of a cannon towards his house. Maybe there's some other explanation entirely. In either case it's not that a specified event of low probability was witnessed; it was that our probability estimates were wrong. Dembski says design must be inferred when all other explanations are ruled out, but if my analysis is followed, inference to design no longer has the privileged place that Dembski accords it.

The second possible meaning of "design" corresponds to the inferred function of some object; this is basically the old argument of William Paley involving the watch found on the heath. While this argument may have been convincing two hundred years ago, it's convincing no longer, for the obvious reason that we know that evolutionary processes can produce function. We have good experimental evidence of this from novel mutations that, for example, allow some bacteria to digest nylon byproducts. As a computer scientist, I must also cite the artificial life experiments of Karl Sims, who showed how nontrivial and novel behaviors could evolve through mutation and selection -- something Dembski claims is impossible. Dembski has never addressed Sims' work.

The third possible meaning of "design" involves teleology; we infer a designer when we see something designed for a purpose. But either this begs the question, or it reduces to the previous paragraph about "function". So in all three cases, I don't think that seeing "design" implies a "designer".

ID advocates are always accusing others of 'wanting to eliminate the design inference from science'. Of course, this is pure nonsense. Archaeologists, for example, routinely attempt to deduce the roles that various objects played in the lives of the cultures they study. But, as Elsberry and Wilkins point out in their article from Biology and Philosophy, there is a huge difference between inferring design based on artifacts for which we have a causal story like human construction, and inferring design based on some causal story lacking any details whatsoever. They refer to this latter attempt, commonly used by ID advocates, as "rarefied design", and characterize it as "based on an inference from ignorance, both of the possible causes of regularities [that might explain the event] and of the nature of the designer."

One more point: I don't think that the question "is it designed?", in the absence of any candidate for a designer, is particularly interesting. That is, in the absence of motive, I don't think that knowing that something is designed tells you anything at all. I can do no better than to quote from Elsberry and Wilkins, who say

The problem with a simple conclusion that something is designed, is its lack of informativeness. If you tell me that skirnobs are designed but nothing else about them, then how much do I actually know about skirnobs? Of a single skirnob, what can I say? Unless I already know a fair bit about the aims and intentions of skirnob designers, nothing is added to my knowledge of skirnobs by saying that it is designed. I do not know if a skirnob is a good skirnob, fulfilling the design criteria for skirnobs, or not. I do not know how typical that skirnob is of skirnobs in general, or what any of the properties of skirnobs are. I may as well say that skirnobs are "gzorply muffnordled", for all it tells me. But if I know the nature of the designer, or of the class of things the designer is a member of, then I know something about skirnobs, and I can make some inductive generalizations to the properties of other skirnobs.

Now to Egnor's question. He wants to know why SETI is different from deducing design in biological systems. Referring to the fictional movie, Contact, where scientists received a blueprint for constructing a mechanical device, he asks, "If the scientific discovery of a ‘blueprint’ would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?"

The answer is that I don't think that these situations are at all comparable. In the case of SETI, the fact that we are receiving a narrow-band signal is already suggestive, since we don't currently know any simple physical process that could produce these signals. This isn't a definite conclusion, though, because we have no idea what the probability of intelligent beings is, and we can't rule out narrow-band signals arising from some other physical process we simply don't know about.

In SETI, we are specifically looking for intelligent beings. These beings presumably live in another part of our universe, and presumably they evolved through natural processes, in much the way we did. This being the case, we hypothesize that, like us, these beings are interested in contacting other intelligent life, and would do so through radio waves. All these are assumptions based on our characterization of the "personality", if you will, of the originators of the signals. If any of these guesses are wrong, or if we are alone, we won't succeed. Our argument is based on analogy with our own thought processes, not "specified complexity" or other ID nonsense.

ID advocates, however, rule out any deductions based on the identity of the Designer. Yet, in real science, questions about intention and identity arise all the time in archaeology. To give just one example: in the 1890's, historian Arthur Evans heard of mysterious seal-stones from Crete. The identity of their creators, as well as the script used, was then unknown. Evans went on to identify the stones as the product of a civilization now called Minoan, and eventually one of the scripts, Linear B, was deciphered. The fact that ID advocates refuse to consider the really interesting scientific questions "who designed it?" and "why did they design it?" shows that they're not doing science.

To say that SETI is like the genetic code means that we have to hypothesize some designer who designed something for some reason. But where's the designer? In SETI, we can pinpoint a place in the universe where the signals are originating from. If the signals encode a machine, we can reasonably deduce that the intention is that we are to build it. But in the genetic code, who is the hypothesized designer? Where did they originate? When did they carry out their design? What is the intention of the design? All the really interesting questions are ruled as 'out of bounds' by ID advocates. Until they really come to grips with these questions, they're doing religion, not science.

As an example of something I'd find convincing, if we were to find a crashed spaceship with plans showing how to build a bacterium, and scientists carried out these plans and found that they really did construct life, then I'd find this very strong evidence that life on earth was designed.

Another point of disanalogy is that we know that DNA changes and evolves through time by processes such as mutation, gene duplication, and selection. There are even some very tentative answers to how the genetic code evolved. So the alternative hawked by ID advocates, that 'somebody made this sometime for some purpose, but we don't know where, when, or how', is not very impressive. In exactly the same way, a theory that lightning is 'caused by some intelligent being, but we don't know exactly how or why' is not very impressive, either.

Finally, DNA doesn't carry any of the hallmarks of human design, the kind of design we are most familiar with. Genes, for example, are often pleiotropic; they have multiple interacting effects. Human design, on the other hand tends to separate systems so they don't interact. Human activities tend to produce texts that are quite compressible; but a typical genome is hardly compressible at all. Biological entities reproduce themselves, but few, if any, human designs have this property. When we consider an analogy, like the one Egnor proposes, to be fair, we have to consider points of disanalogy, too. (For more examples of disanalogy, see Mark Isaak's article in Reports of the NCSE, Volume 23, no. 5-6.)

Let's alter the Contact story. Suppose the signal didn't encode a machine, but rather a sequence of DNA bases S. When we create DNA corresponding to this sequence, and stick it in a cell, we get an organism that tells us all about life on some other planet. Now the analogy is even closer than before; yet I think it is clear that our inference about the origin of S is still different from any inference about our own DNA. Indeed, it is entirely reasonable and scientific to infer that S is designed by intelligent beings on another planet, but our own DNA evolved.

Finally, on an unrelated note, Egnor takes me to task for my lack of civility. This is pretty rich, considering that Egnor's buddies at the Discovery Institute routinely insult the appearance of scientists, call them dishonest, and play games such as adding fart noises to Judge Jones' Dover decision. I say, clean your own stable first. Scientists are angry at the constant misrepresentation and juvenile antics of ID advocates, and we're not going to take it any more.

* Addendum: Because ID advocates have a track record of misunderstanding even the most trivial point, I should add that of course information theory could be used to separate, for example, human-generated text from noise. As I already mentioned, natural language text is quite compressible, while noise would probably not be compressible. But here we are not detecting design per se as some abstract category; rather we are using an empirical distinction between two things we have observed: natural language text, and noise.

Towards a Canadian Republic

Good news for people who find the loyalty oath to the Queen --- a requirement for becoming a Canadian citizen --- to be an embarrassing anachronism inconsistent with Canada's devotion to "freedom of thought, opinion, and expression". Charles Roach and his group, Citizens for a Canadian Republic, are back in the game, thanks to a judge's dismissal of a shameful motion by Canada's Attorney General to prevent the suit.

Should Discovery Institute Spokesmen Be Charged with This Offense?

Excessive mooing.