Evolutionblog

EvolutionBlog is Dead. Long Live EvolutionBlog!

2006-05-14T19:27:00.000-05:00

This will be my last post at this site. The new site can be found at the link below. This site will remain active indefinitely, but it will no longer be updated. This seems like a good time to thank the folks at Blogger for hosting and housing this blog, free of charge, for the last two years. Thanks!

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE NEW BLOG

EvolutionBlog is Moving!

2006-05-09T17:30:00.000-05:00

As some of the commenters have previously surmised, EvolutionBlog will be joining the gang over at Science Blogs! I'm rather excited about this, and am currently working on getting the new site up and running. Regular blogging will resume shortly. I thank you for your patience.

Brief Blog Break

2006-04-20T15:09:00.000-05:00

I will be taking a blog vacation for the next two weeks. End of the semester and all that. That's the bad news. The good news is that when I return I expect to have big things to report about the future of EvolutionBlog. Stay tuned!

Let me take this opportunity to thank everyone who stops by to read my ramblings, and to the commenters, who usually manage to say something thought-provoking (even when they have the nerve to disagree with me). As I've said before, it is only lack of time that keeps me from replying to more of the comments.

Heddle on ID

2006-04-19T13:04:00.000-05:00

Here's something I never thought I'd write: I agree completely with David Heddle's latest post. Well, almost completely. But the few nit picks I have pale in comparison to the points where I agree with hin. He is expressing his disagreement with various strategies used by ID proponents in promoting his views. He writes:

The first strategy I disagree with is proclaiming ID as science. Philosophical discussions aside, I will accept ID as science when I read something like this:

A scientist at (some respected research university) has been awarded a grant to do experiment X. ID predicts the result of the experiment will be Y. Non-ID predicts the result will be Z.

And don't tell me this cannot happen because the secular scientific community would never allow it. I was a practicing scientist before I was a believer, and we never had any secret meetings where we discussed our true agenda of destroying Christianity in the guise of science.

And later:

The second strategy I disagree with is attempting to get ID placed in the science curriculum.

And later still:

The third strategy I disagree with, and this is the most germane to this post, is to deny that ID is religiously motivated. I don't personally know any ID advocate who is not religiously motivated—and I don't know one (personally) who is a strong ID proponent based solely on the physical evidence, although I am told such people exist.

Couldn't have said it any better myself. Expect the ID folks to whip out David Berlinski or Antony Flew in response to that last statement, but Heddle's point remains valid.

Heddle goes on to discuss what he thinks ID is, since he evidently does not consider it to be science:

[ID] is a scientifically-based apologetic. It is part of God’s general revelation. That’s what I think ID is, and that is where I think it is most effective: bringing glory to God, and showing men how they are without excuse. It can be an effective form of witnessing—it worked for me, and I have seen it work for others. Not because it proves God, but because it suggests God.

This is admirably forthright, but it also contradicts the the following statement, from elsewhere in the same post:

Also, anecdotally, when I look at fine tuning I see design because I believe God designed the universe, while someone else sees multiverses because they don't share that belief. (Emphasis in religion).

As far as I know, the fine-tuning argument is the only ID argument Heddle endorses. He describes this as an effective apologetic, one that leaves people without excuse for atheism. But he also asserts that fine-tuning suggests design to him only because he already accepts God's existence. If that is the case, then fine-tuning is not a reason for an atheist to change his views. Moreover, it makes it hard to understand the sense in which fine-tuning was an apologetic that “worked for him.”

I would also reject the idea that an atheist “sees multiverses”. Speaking personally, what I see is an interesting question about why the fundamental constants of the universe have just the properties they ought to have to make life possible. I note that one possible explanation is based on the idea that we are just one small part of a larger multiverse, in which case the apparent fine-tuning is explained via simple principles of probability. I note that physicists have been talking seriously about multiverses for decades, and that such ideas have a pedigree going back well beyond anyone's use of fine-tuning as a religious argument. Finally, I observe that multiverses can claim some support from currently popular theories in physics. That is evidentially slim, but it is an improvement over the nothing at all that God belief can claim. For these reasons, I believe that multiverses are a better explanation than God belief for fine-tuning.

As far as I can tell, Heddle has no reason beyond his prior faith commitments for finding the God hypothesis more reasonable than the multiverse hypothesis for explaining fine-tuning.

In the past, Heddle has been linked to favorably by other ID bloggers. I predict that this post will not be treated so kindly.

Is Evolution a Problem for Jews?

2006-04-19T12:31:00.000-05:00

David Klinghoffer, writing in The Jerusalem Post, says that it is. Of course, he comes to ths conclusion only by completely distorting what evolution is all about:

Maimonides was saying that though parts of the Bible's text may indeed be interpreted in other than a literal fashion, there are philosophical reasons that make an eternal universe incompatible with the God of the Torah. Simply put, Aristotle makes God's role in the world, as a creator and guide, superfluous and impossible.

AND DARWINISM does the very same thing, ascribing all creation to blind material processes, as Darwin himself wrote: “I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of natural selection if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.”

All creation? Please. Darwin is explicit in The Origin of Species that he is not even interested in the origin of life, much less all creation. And the Darwin quote Klinghoffer provides is perfectly explicit that the issue is miraculous interventions in the course of descent. In other words, natural selection would not be a plausible mechanism of evolution if it required divine intervention to explain specific trajectories through the tree of life. It says nothing about divine intervention in other aspects of natural history (like, say, how the universe got itself created in the first place).

Later Klinghoffer writes:

In practice, however, there is simply no way to reconcile an idea with its precise negation. The premise of Judaism is that God commands us on the basis of his having created us. The question before us, therefore, is not a simple-minded one of whether the universe was made in six calendar days, but rather of whether the universe has a need for a God, period.

In the philosophical system elaborated by Darwin and his disciples, there is no room for a creator in any sense. To explain the existence of life without reference to a deity was Darwin's entire purpose.

Since Klinghoffer has chosen to repeat himself, we conclude that his sole argument for the irreconcilability of Judaism with evolution is the latter's completely eliminaion of any reasonable possibility of God's existence. That point is ridiculous, as I have already shown. But we shouldn't let slide the casual reference to the “philosophical system elaborated by Darwin and his disciples.”

There was no philosophical system elaborated by Darwin in his scientific work. There is only a large collection of biological facts coupled with a theory for explaining them. That theory has passed countless furhter experimental tests undreamed of by Darwin, so that today it is accepted by all reasonable people. And Darwin does not have “disciples.” There are only scientists who find his ideas useful in their professional work.

Klinghoffer includes some of the usual blather about cellular complexity and the Discovery Institute's list, but rather than addressing those cliches let me close with a brief consideration of whether evolution and Judaism are compatible.

I see three potential points of conflict between the two:

Evolution deals a severe, perhaps fatal, blow to the argument from design.
Evolution contradicts the creation story in Genesis.
The idea that God's chosen mechanism of creation is the violent, bloody, wasteful process of natural selection runs counter to our intuitions about how an all-loving, all-powerful God would behave.

If your faith in God is not based on natural theology, and if you do not believe that every word of the Bible should be taken literally, then I don't see why the first two items should trouble you. Both of these viewpoints (rejecting natural theology and biblical literalism) certainly have a long history in Jewish thought. Item three is just a variant on the problem of evil. If you had previously managed to resolve that problem to your satisfaction, then it should pose no difficulty either.

Therefore, I do not see how evolution poses any particular challenge to Judaism (or Christianity for that matter).

Klinghoffer can only defend his views by baldly distorting what evolution actually is. For some reason, evolution deniers find it almost impossible to be truthful about scientific issues.

The Simplest Explanation?

2006-04-17T14:59:00.000-05:00

Let me suggest that Lerner advise his atheist-fearing congregants that they spend more time worrying about people like the Reverend Mark Creech. The last time we saw Mr. Creech he was calmly explaining that only someone who was insane could be a liberal.

This time he's lecturing us about the simplest explanation for the Biblical account of Jesus walking on water:

Nevertheless, not to be outdone among the skeptics, Professor Doron Nof of Florida State University claims it may have been ice Jesus stood on and not water. According to a recent article by Reuters, “Nof used records of the Mediterranean Sea's surface temperatures and statistical models to examine the dynamics of the Sea of Galilee, which Israelis know now as Lake Kinneret. Nof's study found that a period of cooler temperatures in the area between 1,500 and 2,600 years ago could have included the decades in which Jesus lived. A drop in temperature below freezing could have caused ice -- thick enough to support a human -- to form on the surface of the freshwater lake near the western shore ... it might have been nearly impossible for distant observers to see a piece of floating ice surrounded by water.”

It's hard to believe any such theories are ever taken seriously. Yet they often are. Why? Why is it so incredibly hard for some to believe the obvious -- a miracle took place?

As a graduate student I once attended a debate hosted by a Christian student group on the subject of whether God existed. During the debate, the theist made much of the assertion that Jesus' tomb was empty. This, he claimed, was a strong piece of evidence in favor of the resurrection.

The atheist, who was a philosophy professor at Dartmouth (where I went to grad school), replied roughly as follows: “But let's suppose my opponent is right. Suppose that Jesus' body was placed in the tomb and then three days later the tomb as empty. Then we have two choices. We can either believe that roughly two thousand years ago one particular dead body behaved in ways no dead body before or since has ever behaved. Or we can believe that somebody moved the body.”

I don't understand a person who could seriously say that a two thousand year old account of a man walking on water is best explained by the assumption that a man really did walk on water.

Creech isn't finished:

Moreover, apologist Josh McDowell writes: “[W]e must remember that scientific laws neither dictate events nor do they explain them. They are merely a generalization about observable causes and effects .... The proper way of determining if something happened is not whether we can explain it. The first question to be asked is not can it happen, but rather did it happen .... If an event can be determined as having happened, yet it defies explanation, we still have to admit that it happened, explanation or not. The evidence for biblical miracles is as powerful historically as other historical events (such as the fall of Rome and the conquests of Alexander the Great). Just because miracles are outside our normal daily experience does not mean they have not occurred and do not occur.”

Still another reason why some people have a hard time accepting the miracles described in the Bible is because they compare them to Greek and Roman mythology -- tales of pagan miracle accounts that are clearly superstition. The difference, however, between the miraculous events recorded in the Bible and those in pagan religions are the firsthand accounts. In the Bible, miraculous events are always validated by the testimony of eyewitnesses.

But when a person comes to us with a story that stands in stark defiance of all natural laws as we know them, surely we are entitled to think that the person is mistaken about what he witnessed. A person seeing a magic act for the first time might return with fantastic stories of elephants disappearing from the stage, women being sawed in half, and rabbits appearing in hats that were previously shown to be empty. Something more than an alleged eyewitness account is required if we are to accept such stories, especially when we are separated from the events in question by thousands of years.

For that matter, I routinely see magicians perform feats that I can not explain. Is it just my naturalistic bias that leads me to believe there is a non-miraculous explanation for what I saw? I suspect neither Creech nor McDowell believes that it is.

We skeptics have a saying: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Two thousand year old hearsay testimony doesn't count.

Lerner on Scientism

2006-04-17T14:20:00.000-05:00

Via P. Z. Myers I came across this essay, from The Nation, by Rabbi Michael Lerner. The good Rabbi makes the familiar argument that the electoral problems faced by liberals and progressives stem from the antics of mean old secular relgion-haters. They scare away religious people who might otherwise care about basic social justice and vote accordingly, you see.

Lerner writes:

In my research on the psychodynamics of American society I discovered that the left's hostility to religion is one of the main reasons people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off. So it becomes important to ask why.

I suspect that Lerner's psychodynamical reasearch consists mostly of anecdotal evidence. But more to the point is that Lerner's assertion paints a very dim picture of religious believers.

To see how ridiculous his claim is, simply turn it around. If an atheist in the nineteen sixties argued that he would like to be involved in the civil rights movement, but he's turned off by the role that churches are playing within it, no one would be sympathetic to him. Likewise for Lerner's religious believers. He's effectively saying that it's the fault of atheists and secularists that more religious people can't be moved to fight for basic social justice. It is possible that this claim is true (though I'd like to see some evidence for it). But if it is true it reflects very badly on religious believrs.

But that's just a warm-up. Lerner's real point is to wag his finger and yell J'accuse! You secularists think your soooooo rational and unemotional. Well, take this:

Science, however, is not the same as scientism--the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured. As a religious person, I don't rely on science to tell me what is right and wrong or what love means or why my life is important. I understand that such questions cannot be answered through empirical observations. Claims about God, ethics, beauty and any other face of human experience that is not subject to empirical verification--all these spiritual dimensions of life--are dismissed by the scientistic worldview as inherently unknowable and hence meaningless.

Scientism thus extends far beyond an understanding and appreciation of the role of science in society. It has become the religion of the secular consciousness. Why do I say it's a religion? Because it is a belief system that has no more scientific foundation than any other belief system. The view that that which is real and knowable is that which can be empirically verified or measured is a view that itself cannot be empirically measured or verified and thus by its own criterion is unreal or unknowable. It is a religious belief system with powerful adherents. Spiritual progressives therefore insist on the importance of distinguishing between our strong support for science and our opposition to scientism.

If Lerner scoured the Earth I suspect he'd be unable to find even one person who accepts scientism the way he describes it. Absolutely no one believes that only things that can be empirically observed (as opposed to unemprically observed?) and measured are real. In fact, scientists seem pretty solidly united behind the idea that science has little directly to tell us about morality and ethics (thought it can bring to light facts that might be relevant in answering moral questions.)

Om the other hand, truth claims have to be defended on some basis, and if Lerner can't provide any actual evidence for his relgious beliefs that surely it is unreasonable for him to expect the rest of us to take them seriously. And if he further agures that his religious beliefs are in some way relevant to setting the publi policy of the country, then we have the right to actively oppose him.

Now let's see if we can help Lerner out. He's trying real hard, but doggone it, he just can't seem to figure out why secularists are so hostile to religion. The best explanation he can come up with is that they are in thrall to an absurd worldview that no one actually believes. I mean, what else can it be?

Let me suggest that secular hostility to religion comes from exactly one cause: The various truth claims made by Lerner and his fellow theists have no rational foundation at all. The assertions they make about God and His will have no more basis in fact than a child's beliefs about the monster in his closet.

That's it! That's the reason. Nothing more complicated than that. Lerner even tacitly concedes this, by lumping God's existence in with other areas he believes are not open to empirical investigation. Doing so allows him to sidestep the unoleasnt fact that there is ample reason for rejecting the idea that the world is superintended by an all-powerful, all-loving God (the problem of evil).

Lerner blathers on at great length about people's spiritual needs, even preposterously arguing that it is the Democrats and the left that have become too enamored of the view that all concerns are economic. Democrats understand perfectly well that people have spiritual needs, they simply reject the idea that the political system is the proper venue for satisfying them. It is not the job of government to attend to whatever religious needs people are said to have. Rather, the government should be providing the environment in which people are free to attrend to their own needs in whatever way they see fit.

Near the end of his essay lerner offers this:

I don't mean that the secular left ought to give up its secularism. I am not suggesting that a secularist should convert to some particular religion in order to garner popularity and win votes. What I do mean is that a leftist secularist ought to approach other belief systems with a greater spirit of humility, recognizing that secularism is one possible answer among many to the question of how to understand the universe and how to live one's life. Secularism is not “the rational approach” but “a rational approach” among other rational approaches. To be effective, a social change movement will need to make a place for everyone who shares the same political values, even though they may belong to different religious traditions or hold different philosophical positions. Speaking from a religious perspective should be normal in political meetings or at public events sponsored by the left--and the left should work as hard to create an inclusive feel for this as it does to include any other constituency.

For some reason I'm reminded of Stephen Colbert's line: I know the Pope's infallible, but that doesn't mean he can't make mistakes.

First of all, Lerner is unfairly conflating secularism with atheism. In a political context, secularism is effectively equivalent to the separation of church and state. That is a principle all religious people should be able to get behind. Secularism is not a statement about how to understand the universe.

Secondly, by his own admission God belief is not rational. Not if by rational you mean, “based on sound lines of evidence equally available to everyone.” By what possible definition of “rational” does it make sense to say that the world is run by an all-powerful, all-loving God who wants us to do certain specific things, and we know this because an ancient holy book tells us so?

Next, elsewhere in the essay Lerner implies that he supports the separation of church and state. If he really believes this, then he should also recognize that people's religious beliefs have no relevance to public policy. Consequently, casting policy discussions in religious terms makes no sense. If I walked into a church meeting and started giving a lecture on mathematics, no one there would take kindly to it. Would that mean that the church is hostile to mathematicians? It is not excluding religious people to say that the minutiae of their beliefs is not relevant to questions of public policy.

There are many liberals who are not fond of religious belief (I am one of them). There are many others, like Lerner, who are not fond of atheism. That really shouldn't be of any relevance in the fight for social justice, or in the fight for people to be free of government intrusion in their daily lives. It's that simple. Instead of trying to blame others for the failure of religious liberals to do their part in supporting liberal and progressive candidates, he should be chastising his own flock for being “turned off” by the thought of having to share space with people who don't share their religious beliefs.

Intercessory Prayer

2006-04-14T12:00:00.000-05:00

In Tuesday's post I responded to an op-ed by Episcopal priest Raymond Lawrence on the subject of the recently completed study on intercessory prayer. The study showed that such prayer had no positive impact on the recoveries of recent bypass patients. Lawrence argued that this was welcome news for sincerely religious people, since the whole idea of intercessory prayer was theologically suspect.

One point I made in reply was that Lawrence can talk all he wants about how “credible theologians” (his phrase) think about intercessory prayer, but virtually every religious group of any influence in our society was perfectly happy to promote prior, discredited studies claiming to establish its benefits.

Charles Colson's website Breakpoint has just provided a useful case in point. Consider this commentary, from Breakpoint contirbutor Mark Earley, on the subject:

Naturally, some observers were delighted at the results. They think the study proves conclusively that prayer doesn’t work, and it’s time for men of science to “stop dabbling in the supernatural,” as one academic put it.

But wait a minute. The researchers acknowledged that they could not control for the fact that many “unauthorized” people may have interceded for loved ones in the so-called “unprayed-for” group. And plenty of other studies indicate that intercessory prayer does have an impact. (Emphasis in original)

Lawrence's op-ed argued that the interest in prayer studies seemed to come entirely from scientists, and that this was evidence of their arrogance and lack of recognition of their proper place. But it is not people like Lawrence and his cadre of “credible theologians” who advise the modern Republican party. It is not the moderates who have the ear of the President, or control of numerous Southern and Midwestern state houses. It is people like Colson, and groups like Breakpoint, that set the terms of religious discussion in this country. And they do not share Lawrence's dim view of intercessory prayer.

Incidentally, when I wrote Tuesday's post I was unaware that the funding for this study came from the Templeton Foundation, which devotes itself to projects aimed at reconciling science and religion. It wasn't some arrogant, scientific society that put up the money. You can be sure the Templeton folks were hoping for a different result.

More Transitional Forms

2006-04-13T15:07:00.000-05:00

Thursdays are busy days for me, so I'm afraid I'll have to blog and run. Check out this article from today's New York Times:

In following the fossil tracks of human evolution, scientists have for years searched for links between Australopithecus, the kin of the famous “Lucy” skeleton, and even earlier possible ancestors. Now, they think they have found some connections in Ethiopia.

An international team of paleontologists is reporting the discovery of transitional species superimposed in sediments in the neighborhood of a single site. The findings appear today in the journal Nature.

Tim D. White, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a team leader, and his colleagues said the 4.1-million-year-old fossils were anatomically intermediate between the earlier species Ardipithecus ramidus and the later species Australopithecus afarensis, the Lucy family. The newfound bones and teeth are the earliest remains of the most primitive Australopithecus, known as anamensis.

I love it. The ID folks boast about their fruitful scientific reasearch program, but spend most of their time desperately trying to prop up the same bad arguments they were making a decade ago. Scientists, meanwhile, seem to make significant discoveries on almost a daily basis.

Presenting Evolution, Part Two

2006-04-12T12:53:00.000-05:00

I had intended to get back to the Monty Hall problem today, but then I made the mistake of reading this article from today's New York Times.

The article is about evolutionary biologist Randy Olson, and his recent film Flock of Dodos. The article begins as follows:

If a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist makes a film about creationism's cousin, intelligent design, and calls it “Flock of Dodos,” you know who he's talking about, right?

Maybe not.

The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design's embrace of a supernatural “agent” puts it outside the realm of science.

But when he watches the advocates of intelligent design at work, he sees pleasant people who speak plainly, convincingly and with humor. When scientists he knows talk about evolution, they can be dour, pompous and disagreeable, even with one another. His film challenges them to get off their collective high horse and make their case to ordinary people with — if they can muster it — a smile.

Otherwise, he suggests, they will end up in the collective cultural backwash just like the dodo.

Later we have this:

“Flock of Dodos” does not attack intelligent design. Dr. Olson just lets its adherents talk. His view, expressed as a Latin motto at the start of the film, is “res ipsa loquitur” — the thing speaks for itself.

But he also lets the scientists talk. Asked to come up with a slogan to match intelligent design's “teach the controversy,” they fumble. Asked to make the case for evolution, they get into arguments or discuss it in terms so fancy they require on-screen definitions. (“I did not realize 'mendacity' was a 50-cent word,” Dr. Olson said. “That's what academic life has done to me.”)

Where to begin? The case for evolution has been laid out in countless books and at countless websites. It is a long and detailed case, and requires a certain amount of effort to fully assimilate. But the facts are readily available to anyone who wants to take the time to learn them.

So the issue is not that scientists need to get off their high horses and present evolution to the public. What Olson is really saying is that scientists need to dumb down their message so it can compete with pre-digested ID pabulum. Of course scientists fumbled when asked to come up with a slogan to rival “Teach the Controversy!” After all, that slogan is a fraud designed both to conceal the religious motivations of those who promote it, and to obscure simple scientific facts. Even the best slogans exist to reduce complex issues to simplistic and memorable catchphrases. Scientists, who tend to see subtlety in everything, are especially ill-suited to that activity.

If Olson is simply making a crass political point, then I might be willing to go along with him. If he is saying that it is frustrating that things have to be dumbed down so much when presented to the public, but that is simply what must be done to promote evolution effectively, then he might have a point. But I get the impression that he sees himself as being on the side of the angels against the arrogant, pretentious scientists.

For example, take his casual remark about the word “mendacity.” He didn't know it was a fifty cent word! That's what academia had done to him! But of course, it's not a fifty cent word. It's a perfectly good word that everyone should know how to use in a sentence. Dictionaries are readily available for those who do not know the word but are willing to invest thirty seconds in educating themselves.

Obviously, there's no shame in not knowing a particular word. The shame comes in pretending that it is the person who used the word who did something wrong. Olson's casual remark about what academic life had done to him is standard anti-intellectualism. It is very disappointing that a scientist would say such a thing.

Scientists, you see, tend to have large vocabularies. They use this vocabulary to express theselves with a level of precision that is foreign to everyday life but essential if one is to think clearly about complex issues. That so many lay people prefer cheap sloganeering to careful thought is a maddening fact of life, not something to sympathize with.

And what about that part about ID advocates being charming, pleasant people? Well, again, if Olson is saying simply that ID folks are good at PR then we have no quarrel. If he's saying that ID folks have to be good at PR because of the emptiness of their arguments, then I agree completely. But it sounds to me like he's saying that the charm offensive ID advocates put on in public is not a facade, but rather a genuine reflection of who they actually are. If my interpretation is correct, then I can only shake my head sadly at his naivete.

ID advocates are perfectly happy to level outrageous charges of fraud and deceit towards scientists. When someone like Jonathan Wells writes a book called Icons of Evolution, in which evolutionary biologists are likened to mafia kingpins and whose every major assertion is demonstrably false, he becomes a hero of the movement. ID advocates present laughable caricatures of scientific work, routinely quote scientists out of context, are perfectly happy to lay Nazism and other horrors at evolution's doorstep, and defend their position with arguments that are flatly wrong.

Apparently none of that matters to Olson. In public, ID advocates smile a lot and tell a lot of jokes. What pleasant fellows they are! If only scientists could be more like that!!

Of course scientists should be more skillful in presenting their arguments to the public. I said as much myself in Monday's post. But the solution isn't dumbing down the subject to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It likewise isn't pretending that ID advocates are charming folks who just want to have an engaging discussion about science, while ignoring their breathtaking sleaziness as soon as they get away from the camera.

If Olson really believes that ID speaks for itself, then why all his emphasis on scientists presenting themselves more effectively? It's precisely because ID does not speak for itself that we have the problems we do. ID presents itself as one thing but is really something else entirely. Its advocates are sufficiently skillful at this that many lay people, already sympathetic to the basic message of ID (that God exists), find it difficult to pierce the fog.

Instead of making a commercial film chiding scientists for sometimes seeming like fuddy-duddies and criticizing them for not dumbing down their message sufficiently to appeal to people who refuse to educate themselves, why not make a slick, mass-market film pointing out the flaws in ID?

Actually, I think I know the answer to that one. A film pointing out the flaws in ID would be difficult to market. Promoting crass stereotypes of scientists by making them look clueless and aloof on the other hand...

That Prayer Study

2006-04-11T15:16:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times has has this interesting op-ed from Raymond Lawrence, an episcopal priest and director of pastoral care at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. The subject is that major, recently completed study that showed that intercessory prayer is ineffective. William Saletan provides a useful summary of the basic facts of the situation here.

Lawrence gets off to a good start. Early on he writes:

The results of the study, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, came as welcome news. That may sound odd coming from an ordained minister. But if it could ever be persuasively demonstrated that such prayer “works,” our religious institutions and meeting places would be degraded to a kind of commercial enterprise, like Burger King, where one expects to get what one pays for.

Historically, religions have promoted many kinds of prayer. Prayers of praise, thanksgiving and repentance have been highly esteemed, while intercessions of the kind done in the Benson study — appeals to God to take some action — are of lesser importance. They represent a less-respected magical wing of religion.

In fact, many theologians reject out of hand the notion that any person or group can effectively intercede with God in any respect. Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, the two major Christian theologians of the 20th century (and certainly no opponents of prayer) would have scoffed at the idea. The Lord's Prayer, the central prayer of Christendom, contains no plea for God to influence specific events in people's lives.

Pretty good. I'd point out, however, that while many theologians dismiss intercessory prayer out of hand, many others do not. We will return to this in a moment.

Lawrence also includes this:

Doctors in particular should be pleased that the Benson study demonstrated no benefit from intercessory prayer by strangers. Recently, a colleague told me about a devout, well-educated woman who accused a doctor of malpractice in his treatment of her husband. During her husband's dying days, she charged, the doctor had failed to pray for him. If prayer could be scientifically shown to help, every doctor would be obligated to pray with patients, or at least provide such service, and those who declined to do so would properly be subject to charges of malpractice.

I would assume the accusation did not go anywhere, but these days you can never tell.

Of course, since this is a priest talking he can't resist a comment to the effect that theologians know things that scientists don't:

We should note that the impetus for this recent research has come almost entirely from scientists, not from religious leaders. It seems that no credible theologian has been involved in planning, directing or even consulting on such studies. But scientists who conduct research on religious practice should at least consult reputable theologians. Had they done so to begin with a considerable amount of money could have been saved. Scientists who undertake the work of theologians are as reckless as theologians who pretend to be scientists.

Nonsense. Many of the most important Christian organiations in this country routinely extol the virtues of intercessory prayer. For example, here's Agape Press praising an effort to pray for the protection of Mayo Clinic patients from the pernicious influence of the Dalai Lama's forthcoming visit. When prior, less-rigorous studies seemed to show that there was some health benefit related to intercessory prayer, outfits like Focus on the Family and the 700 Club were crowing from the rooftops. The fact is that every Christian organization of any influence in this country was perfectly happy to tell its flock about how science has proven that prayer is effective. That was the impetus for carrying out research like this.

And, frankly, even many of those “credible theologians” were happy to take a limp, fence-sitting position with regard to those earlier studies. Sure, the whole idea is theologically suspect. God makes decisions about a person's health based on what another person asks Him to do? But the fact remains that such things are good for business. I don't have any quotes handy, but I certainly recall plenty of people like Lawrence going on television to express skepticism about the study on the one hand, while simultaneously using it to promote the value of their religion on the other. Furthermore, scientists were not undertaking the work of theologians. They were putting to the test a specific, testable claim endoresed by many of America's most important religious leaders.

If this study had turned out the other way Lawrence would not be writing articles for the Times telling us about how worthless the whole undertaking was. He would be prattling instead about how now even arrogant scientist types had to concede there was something to all this religion stuff. Since that's not how things turned out, he fell back on the other standard bit of theological blather. The one where they desperately explain away the inability of anyone to detect a tangible effect of God's alleged dominion over the world.

New CSICOP Column

2006-04-10T18:04:00.000-05:00

My new column for CSICOP's Creation Watch website is now available. It's my take on the latest version of the thermodynamics argument against evolution.

If you're really keen on this subject, you should also have a look at Mark Perakh's evisceration of some of the same arguments. Enjoy!

Snakes on a Plane

2006-04-10T17:47:00.000-05:00

Three words: Opening night, baby.

Presenting Evolution

2006-04-10T17:44:00.000-05:00

The last two weeks have been very good ones for evolution. First, there was the discovery of the fossil Tiktaalik. This fossil is so clearly transitional between ancient fish and land-dwelling tetrapods that it is probably destined for a permanent place in the biology textbooks. It is one more in a long line of stinging rebukes to creationist claims about the paucity of transitional forms in the fossil record. Nick Matzke provides this excellent post showing how the creationist textbook Of Pandas and People makes gaps in the fossil record a major part of its case, and specfically cites the gap between ancient fish and amphibians as especially significant.

Then came word that another complex biological system has now yielded to an evolutionary explanation. Ian Musgrave has all the details here.

Evolutionists have been handed two major coups in as many weeks, both of which are receiving signficiant media attention. So how would we capitalize on this bout of good publicity?

Not too well, I'm afraid. Two recent events have left me once again vexed at the inability of some on my side of this issue to present themselves effectively.

The first came on Friday night's installment of the MSNBC show Countdown. This show is unique among cable news chat shows in being vaguely left-leaning. It's regular host, Keith Olbermann, is the only cable news host worth watching. Friday's show featured a segment on Tiktaalik. Also on tap was the claim by one exceptionally ignorant person that a recently publicized photo of a kitten born with only one eye and no nose represented evidence for creationism. Evolution says animals are getting better, but this unfortunate kitty was clearly worse, you see.

And what guest did they get to discuss these issues? Bill Nye! The science guy! I was giddy. Like all sensible people, I'm a big fan of Bill Nye. It's hard to imagine someone who has done more to popularize science in innovative ways. Surely, I thought, Nye will hit it out of the park.

So here we had a segment with a stand-alone, articulate, pro-science guest being interviewed by a sympathetic host (not Olbermann, but his guest host Brian Unger). How often does that happen?

Sadly, Nye didn't hit it out of the park. In fact, for much of the interview I couldn't figure out what he was talking about.

The first minute or so of the intervew was wasted on a discussion of Nye's run-in with some unruly audience members at a recent public presentation. P.Z. Myers discussed the incident here. Nye remarked that he didn't feel like he had been heckled, but it was impossible to discern from the ensuing conversation what actually happened.

Finally they got around to Tiktaalik and that's when this exchange took place.

UNGER: Was this still a fish?

NYE: No. It may have been. But the thing is it's going to be a big deal fossil, like the famous archaeopteryx, the feathered bird. It's going to be, as we look through history in the fossil record, this is going to be a significant discovery, because tiktaalik has some fancy feet. There's the famous archaeopteryx, or one of them yeah, it's where they found—we found feathers on an ancient dinosaur, which is a big deal. A significant thing. It tells you a lot about what happened in history in the history of life on earth. And the same will be of this tiktaalik. It's got some unusual wrist bones and unusual crossover between paws and feet and fins.

UNGER: Bill, I know that men of science love pedestrian observations like the one I'm going to make right now, but it kind of looks like a crocodile to me. Could it be a relative of the crocodile that we just didn't discover until now?

NYE: It certainly could be.

UNGER: Why are we calling it...

NYE: You're on your way to becoming a naturalist. That's right. It looks kind of like a crocodile.

UNGER: I am? That sounds obscene, Bill?

NYE: But if you look closely—it sounds obscene if you were somehow embarrassed about nature.

UNGER: But is it a missing link, because it looks sort of like a crocodile? It takes a .

NYE: Well, the word missing link is charged with connotations that you may not want to carry with. But what it is is it's something that's very fishlike, very land animal-like, but has aspects of both and it was discovered on a remote island in the Arctic. I don't know what you do with your day, but I don't go looking for fossils in the Arctic. There are people who do.

If you were learning about this fossil for the first time from this segment, would you have any idea what Nye was talking about? They're well into the conversation before Nye finally gets around to mentioning that Tiktaalik is transitional between fish and land-dwellers, though even here his explanation is hard to follow. And he never gets around to saying that the fossil was found in rocks of exactly the right age, in exactly the right kind of environment. Meanwhile, he kept talking about Archaeopteryx wihtout ever really saying clearly why that particular fossil was so significant. And he never pointed out that actually this is just one more in a long line of transitional forms.

From here the conversation turned to that deformed kitten. Nye did better here, but it was still difficult to ferret out his main points. Opportunity missed.

How about that excellent paper showing, at an unprecedented level of detail, how a particular complex molecular system evolved? Sadly, the press release from the University of Oregon (where the work in question was done) sounds entirely the wrong note:

Using new techniques for resurrecting ancient genes, scientists have for the first time reconstructed the Darwinian evolution of an apparently “irreducibly complex” molecular system.

The research was led by Joe Thornton, assistant professor of biology at the University of Oregon’s Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and will be published in the April 7 issue of SCIENCE.

How natural selection can drive the evolution of complex molecular systems—those in which the function of each part depends on its interactions with the other parts—has been an unsolved issue in evolutionary biology. Advocates of Intelligent Design argue that such systems are “irreducibly complex” and thus incompatible with gradual evolution by natural selection.

“Our work demonstrates a fundamental error in the current challenges to Darwinism,” said Thornton. “New techniques allowed us to see how ancient genes and their functions evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. We found that complexity evolved piecemeal through a process of Molecular Exploitation—old genes, constrained by selection for entirely different functions, have been recruited by evolution to participate in new interactions and new functions.”

Oh, brother. The fundamental error(s) in current challenges to Darwinism have been laid bare for about a decade now. Behe's “irreducible complexity” argument was a total nonstarter. It was faulty as a matter of logic, since it is a triviality to imagine scenarios whereby known evolutionary mechanisms lead to IC systems. And it was wrong biologically, since there are quite a few complex biological systems whose evolution has been unravelled.

Yet here comes these fellows from the University of Oregon to tell people that Behe used to have a good point, but not any more because of this new work. I don't think that was their intention, but that was the message this silly press release sent.

In his Commentary (I'm not sure if a subscription is required to read this) for Science magazine on this subject, Christoph Adami did a better, though still inadequate, job of putting things in perspective. Here's his closing paragraph:

The Bridgham et al. and Lenski et al. (4) studies are of particular scientific interest, given the political attention given to intelligent design lately. Although these authors have not directly addressed this controversy in the discussion of their work--because the work itself is intrinsically interesting to biologists--such studies solidly refute all parts of the intelligent design argument. Those “alternate” ideas, unlike the hypotheses investigated in these papers, remain thoroughly untested. Consequently, whatever debate remains must be characterized as purely political.

It's good that Adami makes it clear that this work was not motivated by anything the ID folks are saying. The proper way to present this story is to state the results obtained, that the evolution of a complex molecular system has been explained at an impressive level of detail, and add as an afterthought that this puts yet another nail in the ID coffin.

But why oh why is Adami saying that ID ideas have not been thoroughly tested? They have been, at great length, and have been shown to range from false to worthless. Behe's arguments were wrong on the day he first made them, a fact that was obvious to anyone who knew a little biology and could think clearly for a few minutes. Dembski's arguments were vague and worthless from the day he introduced them. Likewise for every other ID proponent.

And Adami's article appears under the headline “Reducible Complexity,” thereby repeating the error from the U of O press release.

Very aggravating.

Dunford on Pianka

2006-04-07T14:11:00.000-05:00

Mike Dunford has writeen this excellent post pointing out the manifest distortions in the coverage of the Pianka situation provided by the Texas newspaper The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise. Dunford's conclusion:

The article in the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise contains numerous misquotes and out of context quotes. All of them err in the same direction - making Pianka look bad. It is almost impossible to believe that this is the result of anything other than deliberate effort on the part of the paper.

Now follow the link and read all the gory details.

Another Transitional Form Found. Yawn.

2006-04-06T21:29:00.000-05:00

Meanwhile, science marches on. Paleontologists have found a clear transitional form linking ancient fish to land-dwelling animals. The New York Times provides this decent run-down of the basic facts of the situation.

P. Z. Myers has more details on the subject, and he includes links to places where you can learn still more. I particularly liked this quote, taken from a review article about the finds published in Nature:

First, it demonstrates the predictive capacity of palaeontology. The Nunavut field project had the express aim of finding an intermediate between Panderichthys and tetrapods, by searching in sediments from the most probable environment (rivers) and time (early Late Devonian). Second, Tiktaalik adds enormously to our understanding of the fish-tetrapod transition because of its position on the tree and the combination of characters it displays.

This fossil is an impressive find and certainly helps to fill in some gaps in our knowledge of the fish to land-dwelling animal transition. But the mere fact that it is unambigously transitional really shouldn't be such big news. After all, there are droves of such fossils already known.

The Real Problem

2006-04-06T21:09:00.000-05:00

Since I'm in high dudgeon today, let me also comment on another annoying tidbit.

During a brief car ride this evening, I heard about two minutes of The Michael Reagan Show on the radio. Reagan had the night off and there was a guest host in his place.

Apparently some time before I turned on the radio the subject of evolution arose. A caller identifying himself as a scientist called up to object to what had been said previously. Since Reagan, and presumably any guest host sitting in for him, is a typical member of the brain-dead radio right, I think I can guess what had been said previously.

To my suprise the caller began by saying something like, “Claiming that evolution is just a theory misses the point,” and started to go into a pretty good explanation of theories and models and how science works. Along the way he remarked that everything in science is a theory.

The host took this as an opportunity. “That's not true!” he thundered. “For example, there's the second law of thermodynamics! That's a law, not a theory! One's a law and one's a thoery!! Why would you say that everything in science is a theory when some things are described as laws!!!”

Considering the slow, patient, and sadly ineffective way in which the caller was presenting his views, I gather that he probably was very knowledgeable indeed about science. But it didn't matter. Every time he got three words out the host cut him off to reiterate his blather about the differences between laws and theories.

The point? The next time someone tells you that insensitive, overtly atheistic remarks from Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are a major source of the problem for evolutionists, I encourage you to laugh in their face. Viewing things that way gives way too much credit to the anti-evolution side. It implies far too much thoughtful consideration and sober reflection.

The real problem is that if you did a poll in which you asked people whether discussing the second law of thermodynamics versus the theory of evolution indicates that the former is on solid evidential ground whereas the latter is not, I think you would have upwards of 70% of the people answering yes. And that idea is so jaw-droppingly pig-ignorant that it pretty much defies response. How is it that so many people can reach adulthood holding such delusional views about science?

Is hostility towards evolution caused by a few insensitive remarks by people like Dawkins and Dennett? Or is it caused by having a large segment of the population that doesn't know anything about science? You make the call.

The Governor's Office on Pianka

2006-04-06T20:43:00.000-05:00

The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise has also posted this article on the Pianka situation. Among other interesting nuggets, it contains the following reaction from Kathy Walt, press secretary for Texas Governor Rick Perry:

The very same day TAS declared its stance, Kathy Walt, press secretary for Gov. Rick Perry, expressed disdain over what Pianka calls his “doomsday talk.” Walt called the scientist’s viewpoints “abhorrent” and likened them to Hitler’s “hate-filled Third Reich.”

Golly! Walt must really have racked her brains coming up with that comparison.

I also found this interesting:

“He praised diseases such as Ebola for being efficient killers, and he showed a slide of rows of skulls to drive home his point,” Mims wrote in one of three petition letters to TAS. “I recall that one skull had flashing red eyes and that [Pianka] expressed his views about mass death and disease in good humor.”

That's pathetic. Apparently if you are discussing Ebola it's very important constantly to furrow your brow and express your disdain for the virus. If Mims is in the audience, be careful to add, “Bad Ebola! Bad, bad Ebola!” every few sentences.

Pianka Transcript

2006-04-06T19:02:00.000-05:00

The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, which I gather is a newspaper in Texas, has posted this transcript of a talk given by Dr. Pianka at St. Edwards University in Texas. It is not the talk given to the Texas Academy of Sciences, which is the one that is drawing all the attention. But it covers the same material and one suspects it is essentially the same talk.

The whole thing is a bit long, but it is worth reading in its entirety. I say that both because most of what he says is pretty interesting, and also because it confirms in every particular what I said yesterday. Folks, have no illusions about what is going on here. The reaction to Dr. Pianka's talk is standard issue phony outrage. It's what the right-wing fanatics and the ignorance peddlers always do. They make their living being in a perpetual state of righteous rage. The substance of what Pianka said holds no interest for them. Nearly all of the talk presented here is given over to a listing of basic facts about the ecological damage humanity has been causing over the past few decades. You have to look pretty hard to find anything that is remotely contrvoersial.

But facts and calm argumentation mean nothing to the zombies who are coming after Dr. Pianka. They see only another opportunity to promote their favorite sterotype; that academe is a hotbed of godless monsters set on indoctrinating your kids with a lot of hateful nonsense. They operate unencumbered by any sense of decency, integrity or conscience.

Which is not to say I agree with everything Dr. Pianka is saying. There were several places where I would have liked to have asked him precisely which creature comfort he'd be willing to give up to mitigate all the environmental damage we are causing. But the basic facts are now completely obvious. Absolutely nothing Dr. Pianka is saying deserves the condemnation that it is getting. Anyone who continues to parrot the insanity about Pianka calling for the extermination of most of the planet does so in complete disregard for the truth.

The Pianka Affair.

2006-04-05T17:56:00.000-05:00

On March 31, young-Earth creationist Forrest Mims posted this account of a talk given by ecologist Eric Pianka before the Texas Academy of Sciences. According to Mims:

But there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

Mims' account can be dismissed out of hand. There is no way a prominent scientist would call for mass murder by Ebola (both because no one would actually wish to see such a thing, and because anyone who did wouldn't be dumb enough to say it publicly). And if someone did advocate such a course, he would not receive a standing ovation for it from an important scientific group.

In the days following Pianka's comments it became clear that what he actually believes is that it is inevitable that overpopulation and overexploitation of the Earth's resources will lead to a catastrophic event for humanity, probably via a major outbreak of some disease. For example, he spells out his views very clearly in this brief essay. Also enlightening is this short article posted at the site of an NBC affiliate in Austin. It is also clear that he occasionally expresses himself a bit inartfully, but that there is no doubt about what he believes.

If you think that's the end of it, then you haven't fully appreciated just how thoroughly rotten many ID proponents are. William Dembski, for example, has done a slew of posts at his blog in which he slavishly accepts Mims' account in complete defiance of all evidence to the contrary. In this post, for instance, he boasts of calling the Department of Homeland Security to invesitgate Pianka. One suspects that Dembski doesn't believe for a second that Pianka is any threat to anyone. But in his sick little world such considerations are irrelevant.

According to this article from the Austin American-Statesman, Pianka is being interviewed by the FBI. It is unclear whether Dembski's antics had anything to with that. The article does contain this interesting nugget, however:

[Pianka] is particularly troubled by the recent explosion in the human population. He says we now take up about 50 percent of all livable space on Earth and that people should have no more than two children. Humans, and the way they've multiplied, are “no better than bacteria,” he says.

Such talk makes Forrest Mims' skin crawl.

Mims, an author and amateur scientist who heard Pianka speak in early March before the Texas Academy of Science, said Pianka's remarks were degrading and that he was deeply disturbed by Pianka's comments comparing different diseases and their potential to decimate the human race. He's one of dozens of bloggers who have expressed displeasure with Pianka's point of view.

A Gazette-Enterprise reporter who heard Pianka speak Friday on the same topic quoted him saying disease “will control the scourge of humanity. We're looking forward to a huge collapse.”

“It was 'Twilight Zone' material. It was like sitting in a science-fiction movie,” Mims said Tuesday, adding that he is worried young doctors and scientists with access to deadly diseases might take literally what he claims is a call by Pianka to control population growth through the spread of disease. “The big concern is this professor is instilling this in the minds of students.”

Let's take the comments of that unnamed reporter first. Even the little out-of-context snippets presented here seem perefectly clear. The scourge of humanity refers to the incredible overexploitation of the Earth's resources by short-sighted people. And Pianka is not looking forward to a huge collapse in the same way that my students are looking forward to summer vacation. Rather, he is saying that such collapse is inevitable unless we change our ways.

Don't believe any blogger or commenter who claims to interpret those phrases to mean that Pianka hates human beings and longs to see them die horrible deaths. Everyone understands that Pianka does not believe that.

As for Mims, he's rather given himself away here. Pianka speaks bluntly about subjects that make him squeamish and uncomfortable. So Mims writes a dishonest hatchet job about Pianka's talk, and spins ridiculous scenarios about young medical students moved to mass murder by Pianka's ideas. Right. And Pianka's the crazy one?

Meanwhile, in the comments to this post by P.Z. Myers, we find this:

I took Evolutionary Ecology from Dr. Pianka a few years ago. He'd frequently get sidetracked onto:

Cool Australian lizards.
His buffalo.
How much he disliked his neighbors who kept killing rattlesnakes.
How some horrible disease is going to wipe out huge chunks of the population any year now, and how pleased he will be when that happens.

So, yep, sounds like Dr. Pianka to me. The quotes in the article all sound pretty familiar.

Similar comments have been posted elsewhere.

Does point number four contradict what I have said previously? Of course not. You see, we simply start from the premise that Pianka is sane and reason to the conclusion that he will not be happy when civilization as we know it collapses for lack of people to keep it going.

So why would he make statements that could be interpreted otherwise? It has been suggested elsewhere that Pianka was joking, but I don't think that's really the best way of putting it. I suspect that in context Pianka was expressing his frustration at the dominant political culture in this country. The tone with which he made these statements is lost when you see them printed on the page. I'm willing to bet that no one who actually heard him make such a remark really pictured him happily eating popcorn on his front porch while his neighbors were dropping dead around him because of some dread disease.

We live in a society in which expressing the perfectly sensible opinions that we are havresting the Earth's resources at an alarming rate, and that if we don't control our numbers nature will find a way of doing it for us, immediately gets you branded as an environmentalist wacko or a left-wing extremist. You are called anti-capitalist, and probably anti-American. If in addition you happen to be a college professor while making those points, you will be accused of indoctrinating impressionable students (who apparently should be taught simply that unchecked, voracious consumption is a marvelous thing). You will be used as an example of the insanity of modern academe.

I'd bet real money that on those occasions where Pianka appeared happy about the looming downfall of humanity he was merely expressing his frustration at the unwillingness of people to think about the unsustainability of our way of life. What pleasure he was expressing was at the thought of arrogant, short-sighted people getting their comeuppance for not heeding his warnings.

Which leaves only one question. Is he right? Is humanity headed for a major population “correction”? Will it come in the form of a plague?

I don't know. But it looks to me like in much of the world famine, tsunamis, violent weather, genocide and war are already doing their part to control the world population. We may not need a virus to force us to change our ways.

The Monty Hall Problem, Part Two

2006-04-04T14:36:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid I'm very pressed for time today, so only brief blogging.

The answer to Variation One of the Monty Hall Problem, given at the end of yesterday's post, is that it now makes no difference whether or not you switch. Really.

The answer to Variation Two is that your best strategy is to stick with your initial choice until there are only two doors remaining. No other strategy will give you as high a probability of winning.

I'll go into some of the mathematical aspects of these problems in later blog entries, though some of my commenters to the previous post have already done an excellent job of it (note particularly Micahel Ralston's excellent comment explaining the difference between the situations where Monty Hall does, or does not know where the car is.)

Richard Wein points out that the Times version of the problem, quoted in yesterday's entry, is rather vague, since it is not stated explicitly whether Monty Hall knows where the car is. He's right about this, though I think it's stronlgy implied in the Times version that Monty Hall does know where the car is and therefore always reveals a goat.

If this is the point Somerby had in mind in saying that in the Times version it makes no difference whether or not you switch, then I will be very impressed. I don't believe that to be the case, however. Somerby's reply was so snide and harsh towards the Times reviewer that I think he was treating it as obvious that after Monty Hall opens one of the doors there is a 50-50 chance of winning. I don't think he was making subtle points about what Monty Hall does and does not know.

As of this writing Somerby has not revisited this problem.

Anyway, there's lots more to say about this problem, and I'll try to get around to it in the near future. Let me thank all the commenters to the previous post for their thought-provoking replies.

In the meantime, you can have a look at Wikipedia's entry on this subject. It contains several other variations in addition to the ones I mentioned.

The Monty Hall Problem

2006-04-03T15:02:00.000-05:00

The Monty Hall problem goes like this: You are presented with three identical doors. Behind one of them is a car and behind the other two are goats. You want the car. Monty Hall tells you to choose one of the doors. Regardless of which door you choose, at least one of the two remaining doors will have a goat behind it. Monty Hall, who knows where the car is, then opens one of the doors that has a goat behind it. He then gives you the option of either sticking with the first door you chose, or switching your choice to the other unopened door.

Question: What should you do? Should you stay where you are? Swtich? Does it make a difference?

This problem is a staple of courses in elementary probability theory. Virtually everyone, upon hearing this problem for the first time, reasons as follows: After Monty Hall opens one of the doors, there are only two doors remaining. Therefore, regardless of which door you choose you have a 50-50 chance of being right. So it doesn't matter whether you stay where you are or switch to the other door.

This argument is clear, convincing and wrong.

I suspect that every mathematician who has ever presented this problem to a lay person has had the following experience: Mathematician explains problem. Lay person reasons as above. Mathematician explains that, actually, you double your chances of winning by switching doors (more on this in a moment). Lay person gets annoyed, agitated and belligerent. Lectures mathematician on the subtleties of the problem. Repeats, ad nauseum, that after Monty Hall opens one door there are only two, equally likely, doors left!.

I was reminded of this when I came across this blog entry, from The Daily Howler, posted on March 31. The blogger, Bob Somerby, was commenting on this review of a new book about probability theory intended for nonmathematicians. The reviewer wrote:

Before scoffing, chew on the now famous Monty Hall problem, named after the host of “Let's Make a Deal.” A contestant knows that concealed behind three doors there are two goats and one new car. The contestant chooses Door No. 1. The beaming host opens Door No. 3 to reveal a goat, and then asks the contestant if he would like to change his choice to Door No. 2. Two doors add up to a 50-50 proposition, obviously. So why bother? Because the odds have actually shifted. The chances are now two out of three that changing to Door No. 2 will obtain the car. (Emphasis Added by Somerby)

Somerby replies:

Say what? We don’t know what the Kaplans wrote to provoke that highlighted sentence. But for the record: If the contestant changes to Door No. 2, he’ll obtain the car half the time—and “half the time” is not “two out of three.”

Ugh. That's totally wrong, I'm afraid.

The following day Somerby revisited the topic. Apparently some e-mailers informed Somerby that he was mistaken. Sadly, Somerby decided to dig in deeper:

Many e-mailers wrote to insist that there is a counterintuitive “Monty Hall problem” of the type we discussed yesterday (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/31/06). We haven’t had time to review this in detail, but:

We didn’t dispute that there’s some such effect—an effect which the Kaplans describe in their book. What we said is this: Whatever that counterintuitive “Hall effect” might be, the Times review doesn’t seem to describe it. We’ll persist in our statement about the situation as described in the Times review: In that situation, it just isn’t true that the contestant would gain an advantage from switching his guess. We’ll grudgingly try to sort through the matter. But what a bad time for this storm to reach land—on a weekend when tyrannical guvmint allows us just 47 hours.

Oh my. The description of the problem given in the Times may not be a model of clarity, but it is clear enough to make the point. Somerby is wrong and the reviewer is right.

I don't know about any counterintuitive “Hall effect”, but the mathematics of the situation are not especially complicated. When the contestant makes his initial choice he has a probability of 1/3 of being right. In other words, he will get it right 1/3 of the time and get it wrong 2/3 of the time. Nothing Monty Hall did in opening one of the doors changes that simple fact. By sticking with your initial choice you will be wrong 2/3 of the time. By switching, you will win 2/3 of the time.

Or think of it this way: Your initial choice is correct 1/3 of the time. Does it really make sense to say that when Monty Hall opens one of the remaining two doors your chances of having made the correct choice magically jump to 1/2?

Or try it this way: Suppose you choose door number one, and Monty Hall opens door number two. The choice Monty Hall then gives you is not really Door Number One vs. Door Number Three. Really the choice is Door Number One vs. Not Door Number One. Since door number one is only correct 1/3 of the time, surely it makes sense to swtich.

Still not convinced? Okay. Suppose you had 100 doors. The doors conceal one car and 99 goats. You choose door number one. Monty Hall then opens 98 goat-bearing doors. Are you seriously claiming that in this situation it makes no difference whether you switch or not? If you are not seriously claiming that, then explain to me how this situation differs from the original version. (In my experience, this way of putting it usually gets people to realize that things are not as simple as they originally thought. One time, though, I had a student in my office who was absolutely convinced that it made no difference whether or not you switched. No matter how I tried to explain it he woudn't give in. So I whipped out this example and smiled. Without missing a step he informed that even in this case it would make no difference whether you switched. I stopped smiling.)

Want more? Try this computer simulation. Do it many times and keep track of your statistics.

Think the computer simulation is rigged? Fine. Get out a pad and a pencil. Make a list of every possible scenario. (For example: Car behind door number one, you choose door number one, Monty Hall opens door number two.) It's a little tedious, but there aren't that many possibilities. Then put a little mark next to all the scenarios in which you will win by switching. I think you will find that by switching you will win 2/3 of the time.

Somerby's a smart guy, and I suspect he will eventually come to realize that he has made a mistake here. I've been a big fan of his blog, which is mostly devoted to exposing the blatant, jaw-dropping insanity that spews forth from our nation's press corps and political pundits, for a while now. But lately he's been annoying me a bit by hammering various liberal pundits for what strike me as pretty minor sins. So consider this brief essay a small measure of payback.

Let me close with two amusing variations on the Monty Hall problem.

Variation One: Monty Hall does not know which of the three doors contains the car. You choose one of the doors. Then Monty Hall chooses one of the remaining doors and opens it. It contains a goat. He then gives you the option of sticking with your original door or switching. What should you do?

Variation Two: This time there are five doors, concealing one car and four goats. You choose one of the doors. Monty Hall, who knows where the car is, opens one of the remaining goat-bearing doors. He then gives you the option of switching. You make your choice, after which Monty Hall again opens a goat-bearing door. Again you have the option of switching. This process continues until there are only two doors remaining. What is your best strategy?

Answers in a subsequent blog entry.

Teenagers Being Arrogant - So What Else is New?

2006-03-31T14:03:00.000-06:00

Today's Los Angeles Times has this vaguely annoying article. The subject is high school biology students parroting creationist talking points they don't understand and generally making obnoxious pests of themselves in the process:

Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.

As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection — in a word, by evolution.

The challenges begin at once.

“Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?” sophomore Chris Willett demands. “'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn't.”

Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but Willett isn't listening. “I feel a tail growing!” he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.

Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He's about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: “How are you 100% sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon.”

From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: “Those are real bones that someone actually found? You're not just making this up?”

Pretty standard stuff, these days. I know I should probably be angry at these kids, but mostly I just feel sorry for them. Consider this:

Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has spilled over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling to respond. Loyal to the accounts they've learned in church, students are taking it upon themselves to wedge creationism into the classroom, sometimes with snide comments but also with sophisticated questions — and a fervent faith.

As sophomore Daniel Read put it: “I'm going to say as much about God as I can in school, even if the teachers can't.”

Or this:

Daniel Read, for instance, considers it his Christian duty to expose his classmates to the truths he finds in the Bible, starting with the six days of creation. It's his way, he said, of counterbalancing the textbook, which devotes three chapters to evolution but just one paragraph to creationism. A soft-spoken teen with shaggy hair and baggy pants, Daniel prepares carefully for his mission in this well-educated, affluent and conservative suburb of 28,000, just outside Kansas City, Mo. He studies DVDs distributed by Answers in Genesis, a “creation evangelism” ministry devoted to training children to question evolution.

Other students gather ammunition from sermons at church, or from the dozens of websites that criticize evolution as a God-denying sham. They interrupt lectures to expound on the inaccuracies of carbon dating; to disparage transitional fossils as frauds; to show photos of ancient footprints that they think prove humans and dinosaurs walked side by side.

How is it that these kids hear a preacher say something in church, and it never occurs to them that maybe the preacher doesn't know what he is talking about? When their science teacher tells them something that conflicts with what they hear in church, they not only assume the teacher is wrong but apparently feel the need to get snarky and obnoxious as well. Even for a teenager it's pretty arrogant to think they've already solved all the mysteries of existence.

I think the reason is that from a very young age they are told not simply the basic assertions of their religion, but also that the whole idea of questioning those assertions is dangerous and immoral. That sort of relentless indoctrination is very hard to shake off. And that's why I feel more sorry for them than angry at them. We're talking about kids who have no higher ambition in life than to parrot the ignorant talking points they receive from the frauds at Answers in Genesis. Kids who have been raised in an environment that praises blind obedience to undeserving authority figures, rather than open-mindedness and education. Kids who have no idea how to distinguish between reliable sources of information, and unreliable sources of information. These kids are victims of their parents' ingorance. And once you appreciate that, some of Richard Dawkins' more florid statements likening religious indoctrination of children to child abuse suddenly don't seem so unreasonable.

Of course, let's not go overboard with our sympathy. Victims they may be, but the fact remains that they are also snotty ignoramuses who don't know anything about anything. Ultimately, they have to be dealt with aggressively and contemptuously. For their own good. They have to have it explained to them in no uncertain terms that their preachers frequently don't know what they are talking about, and that science should be learned from scientists, not clerics. Sadly, it is unlikely that any public school teacher could both administer the requisite tongue-lashing and also hope to keep his job.

Anyway, the whole article is worth reading. But not if you're currently in a good mood.

Wise Words from the RTD

2006-03-29T13:56:00.000-06:00

The Richmond Times-Dispatch (that's Richmond, VA), is no one's idea of a liberal newspaper. Today's edition featured this brief, but excellent, editorial. The Williams being referred to is the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams:

Williams makes two essential points:

Creationism (or its derivative, intelligent design) does not belong in public classrooms.
Supporters of creationism distort the scientific meaning of “theory” when they sneer at the “theory of evolution” even as they diminish the Bible and religious faith when they describe creationism and ID as theories in competition with Darwinism.

The Archbishop of Canterbury may not be infallible, but in this instance he has it exactly right.

Well said.

Chess in Staunton, Part Two

2006-03-29T00:10:00.000-06:00

For the first part of this tournament report, go here.

Round Three saw me move a little higher up the food chain. Happily, my opponent let his guard down and blundered away a pawn in the opening:

JR (1932) - Edward McLoughlin (1700)

Position After 9. ... Bc8-b7

This came out of an unusual line of the Sicilian Defense. I played 10. Nxb5! which pockets the pawn, thanks to the double attack on the black queen on c7 and the unprotected bishop on b4. This wouldn't have worked a move ago, because at that time my king was on e1, meaning that black could have played Bxd2 with check.

Dismayed by this development, my opponent tried to get his pawn back with 10. ... axb5 11. Bxb4 Bxe4 12. Bxe4 Nxe4, but now it's curtains after 13. Qg4! Black tried 13. ... Qc6 14. Qxg7 Qf6 15. Qxf6 Nxf6 16. Re1. Since black is about to lose the e-pawn, and probably the b-pawn shortly thereafter, he resigned after a few more moves. I was rather pleased with myself, until the computer pointed out to me that 14. Re1 is an even cleaner win.

This set up my final round game against the one master in the event. The game was filled with errors from both of us, and it ended somewhat appropriately with the following double blunder:

JR - Thomas Magar (2200)

Position After 32. ... e5-e4.

This position came after a very complicated middlegame which computer analysis showed was played, well, less than perfectly by both of us. We both had under ten minutes on the clock and we were consequently moving very quickly.

My opponent had just moved his pawn to e4. Play continued 33. dxe4 Qxe4??, which overlooked the reply 34. Re3!, which I promptly banged out. At this point my opponent noticed that the bishop on c5 is covering e3, providing yet another example of the old adage that backward diagonal moves are the hardest to spot. Black had no choice but to go for 34. ... Qxe3 35. Bxe3 Rde7 and now it was my time to return the favor. Incredibly, in my haste I overlooked that 36. Qa2+ gets out of the pin and wins easily. Instead I played 36. Qf3?? and after 36. ... Rxe3 37. Qf7+ Kh8 38. Qd7 R3e7 we agreed to a draw.

This gave both of 3.5 points. Another fellow won in the last round to catch up to us, and the three of us tied for first place.

All in all, a successful weekend. My thanks to the organizers for putting together such a pleasant tournament.