Jeebus!

This is why I don't normally watch TV. I don't need to be constantly reminded of the idiocy of powerful people.

Mike Pence, Chairman of the House Republican Council, refuses to answer Chris Matthews' simple question whether he believes in evolution. Instead, he keeps talking complete gibberish.

It is the Retarded Party. How can anyone respect it?

The Constitution Commandeth: Thou Shalt Not Call Creationism "Superstitious Nonsense"!

I woke up from blogging hibernation because another Bush-appointed judge decided that we've always been at war with Eastasia.

As Orwell said, freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If a teacher is not allowed to say that creationism is "religious, superstitious nonsense", then we are in deep trouble. And, as of last Friday, a teacher is not allowed to say that, at least not in the Central District of California.

Briefly, James Corbett, a high school history teacher and adviser for the student newspaper, was found liable for Establishment Clause violation because of the comment he made in reference to John Peloza, a biology teacher who has been fighting (and suing) the school district for his "right" to teach creationism in his science class.

The most important reason this ruling is appalling is that it prohibits telling the truth. PZ Myers nails it:

First of all, he told the truth: creationism is religious, it is a product of superstition, and it is nonsense — it doesn't fit any of the evidence we have about the history of the world or life on it. We have to have the right to tell students not only that something is wrong, but that it is stupidly wrong.

And the judge's reasoning is mind-boggling (emphasis mine):

The Court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement, even when considered in context. The statement therefore constitutes improper disapproval of religion in violation of the Establishment Clause.

Hello? The context, as described by the judge himself, was Corbett's opposition to Peloza's attempts to teach creationism. Not only is creationism false, but teaching it in public schools - especially in a science class - is illegal. Pointing this out obviously has a secular purpose.

So much for one prong of the Lemon test; the judge sours the next one just as badly:

The Court finds that Corbett’s statement primarily sends a message of disapproval of religion or creationism. As discussed above, Corbett states an unequivocal belief that creationism is “superstitious nonsense.” Corbett could have criticized Peloza for teaching religious views in class without disparaging those views.

This is wrong on several levels. First, it is beyond dispute that, in the context of science, which is what Peloza was supposed to teach, creationism is superstitious nonsense. If it weren't, the fact that it is illegal to teach it would be hugely problematic. If those views did not deserve disparaging, Peloza would be a victim of persecution by the Capistrano Unified School District, the US District Court for the Central District of California (the same one that decided this case) and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. There is a reason creationism is not allowed in the science curriculum.

(And, to preempt the argument that it has nothing to do with truth or falsehood, but only with favoring religion, let me ask if teaching some claim that came from a religion - and, to make the case harder, was denied by another religion - would still be prohibited if the claim turned out to be true. Let's say science discovered that it really was turtles all the way down; would it make any sense to proclaim that teaching that violates the Establishment Clause?)

Furthermore, if so many non-fundamentalist believers and conciliatory non-believers have been trying to convince the public that religion is compatible with evolution, how come disparaging creationism is equated with disparaging religion? Again, I'll outsource this to PZ:

[W]e are being told over and over again that Christianity is not equivalent to creationism. This teacher has specifically said that creationism is nonsense, and this judge has equated a dismissal of a weird anti-scientific belief with making a rude remark about Christianity. So…where are all the Christians rising in outrage at the slander of their faith?

Finally, this suit was not brought by Peloza, but by a student, Chad Farnan. It is a mystery why Farnan should have standing to sue over a disparaging statement one teacher made about another teacher.

Ed Brayton wrote about the decision as well, but he seems terribly confused for a normally staunch free speech proponent. While Ed seems to tepidly agree that the creationism comment did not violate the EC, he also seems to think that some of Corbett's other comments, which the judge found not to have violated the EC, were more problematic:

Again, this is really strained reasoning. If he really wanted to make the nuanced point that the court thinks he was making, he could certainly have done it in a much more scholarly and serious way. Instead, the statement he made was inflammatory and insulting. There just isn't any place for that kind of hostility in a public school classroom.

The way I read it, Ed would have found Corbett liable at least for the "Jesus glasses" comment. That is very disappointing, even more so because he stops at hand-waving and makes no attempt to argue with the Court's actual reasoning. Not surprisingly, a lot of Ed's commenters agree with him, many of them flaunting their ignorance of the facts (e.g., implying that Corbett was a science teacher). I will reproduce my comment here:

Why would the "Jesus glasses" comment be inappropriate? Jesus (if he existed, or other people in his name) promoted a certain set of moral rules that are demonstrably impossible to follow without acting against one's best interest, as the vast majority of Americans understand "one's best interest". It should be a history teacher's duty to explain why a certain group acted against its own interests - at least as it would appear to us. Unless there is evidence that "they were blinded/manipulated by religion" is not a fair explanation, i.e., not one widely accepted by historians, the teacher should be free to teach it.

As for the Mark Twain quote, as long as it is a true quote, it ought to be fair game for a teacher to use it. After all, Twain is arguably the greatest American writer ever (certainly the most acclaimed word-wide), and is (hopefully) well-represented on the syllabus of some required courses. Shouldn't students learn that the greatest American writer was an atheist?

But don't take my word for it, go to the source and read the decision.

UPDATE (5/5/09): As usual, Digby gets it.

This Just In: Pregnant Women Don't Tip Over!

We'd never know, but this article reports it is so. More seriously, the source is in the Dec 13 issue of Nature, and it's all about spine curvature. Well well...

Anecdotally, most men find something attractive about a pronounced curvature of a woman's lower back, just above the buttocks. If I understood this article correctly, that's another evolutionary marker of an efficient "baby-making machine". Other such markers I've heard of before are full lips and a high hips/waist ratio; all of them are correlated with fecundity, as well as universally considered attractive.

We men may be pigs, but it is in the noble function of propagating the species. Our tastes evolved. Guys, when women tell you to evolve, you should retort, "I already have. This is the final product." (So far, of course, but the same is true of women.)

A Third of Americans Disagree with Themselves

I am finally getting around to commenting on this poll, but I will not dwell on high numbers of Americans who reject evolution (alas, I already know that) or the particularly high numbers of Republicans who do so (gee, whoda thunk). What caught my eye was this table:
(Scroll down if you see a big white space, I haven't figured out how to eliminate it.)

View of Evolution and View of Creationism Numbers Represent % of Total Sample
		View of Creationism
		Definitely true	Probably true	Probably false	Definitely false
		%	%	%	%
View of Evolution	Definitely true	3	1	2	11
	Probably true	5	14	12	3
	Probably false	6	8	1	1
	Definitely false	24	3	*	1
* Less than 0.5%

I commend Gallup for publishing this 2-dimensional table. In press releases, pollsters rarely show data along more than one dimension at a time, which makes it difficult to discern any correlations. And there are some amazing finds in this table.

If you sum up the numbers in the four cells in the top left quadrant, you find that 23% of Americans say that both evolution and creationism are definitely or probably true. (Actually, Gallup states the fraction as 24%, probably correcting for rounding errors.) It is logically possible to disbelieve both (e. g., one can believe that non-divine space aliens brought us to Earth), and 3% of respondents took that position, but how do you believe both theories? Was the question asked in a way that presented them as compatible? Let's see:

Next, we'd like to ask about your views on two different explanations for the origin and development of life on earth. Do you think -- [ITEMS ROTATED] -- is -- [ROTATED: definitely true, probably true, probably false, (or) definitely false]?
A. Evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life
B. Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years

While the question does leave a lot to be desired (introduction talks about the origins of life on earth, but both options mention the development of human beings), it is impossible to interpret the two options as logically compatible. You can't say both are true without violating the laws of logic. So, 24% of respondents made no sense!?

It is worse than that, actually. If you consider one of the theories to be "definitely true", you must, logically, consider the other "definitely false". So everything above and to the left of the diagonal is logically inconsistent. That is 6 cells, not just 4, and the percentages add up to 31%. Almost a third of respondents couldn't answer the two questions without contradicting themselves!

Much to my chagrin, the evolutionists, as a whole, did no better in the logic department than the creationists: in both camps, about a third of "definitely true" supporters and more than half of the "probably true" supporters violated logic. Worse yet, as there are fewer "definitely true" evolutionists, the total percentage of logic violators is actually somewhat higher among evolutionists (49% to 45%).

What could be the reasons for such massive inconsistency?

Some people may genuinely contradict themselves, but I doubt that they account for a significant part of the 31% logically challenged.

A lot more people could have misunderstood the questions. Too much information may have been packed into those two questions, and a rather narrow version of creationism is described (young-earth creationism). A lot of people actually believe in both evolution and creation to some extent, just not in the variants described. (More about those people in a bit.) If they didn't listen to the questions past the first words, they might have thought they agreed with both.

The results could be biased if people tend to give answers they think will please the investigator or sound agreeable. Since there was no neutral option (distinct from "no opinion") given, those who really think that "the jury is still out" had to choose between a weak positive and a weak negative opinion. And the actual responses break overwhelmingly in favor of weak positives: 35-16 for evolution, 27-16 for creation. As for the options available to true fence-sitters, double "probably true" beats double "probably false" 14 to 1. I think this bias accounts for something, but it is hard to believe that there could be so many people sitting on the fence without even leaning to one side.

Finally, the explanation may be in the people whose views differ from either option, but have something in common with both:

A separate Gallup Poll trend question -- also asked in May -- gave Americans three choices about human beings' origins. Responses to this question found that 43% of Americans choose the alternative closest to the creationist perspective, that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." A substantial 38% say human beings evolved, but with God guiding the process. Another 14% favored an interpretation of evolution arguing that God had no part in the process, leaving a total of 52% who say humans evolved with or without God's direction.

52% is remarkably close to the 53% who, in the two-way poll, say evolution is definitely or probably true, and one would expect that theistic evolutionists would choose one of those answers. On the other hand, the two theistic views (creation and theistic evolution) account for 81% of respondents, which far exceeds the 66% that said creation was definitely or probably true. But that, too, is to be expected, because theistic evolution and young-earth creationism are mutually exclusive. The surprising result is not that the support for creationism doesn't gain 38% from the 3-way to the 2-way poll, but that it gains anything substantial, let alone 23%.

So, do the theistic evolutionists explain the supporters of both views? Not entirely - for example, fewer people are in the "definitely evolution, definitely not creation" corner than support non-theistic evolution in the 3-way poll - but a reasonable case can be made that most of the strange, illogical answers are due to theistic evolutionists. If about 60% of them didn't pay attention to the full description of creation, and heard only the part they agreed with ("God created human beings"), practically all of the double-support puzzle would be explained.

If it is implausible (and even offensive to the theistic evolutionist group) that 60% would have attention span shorter than 5 seconds, there is an almost equivalent, but more plausible and, possibly, less condescending explanation. Most people have a really hard time thinking in terms of probabilities, and a statement like "A is probably true" means to them something very different from what it means to me or to Gallup pollsters. I would automatically read it as "The probability that A is true is between 50% and 95%". (The upper limit of the range is the only unclear piece - should it be 90%? Or 99%? Maybe 99.99%?) But such numerical probabilities would mean nothing to many people; to make sense of the original statement, they may need to reinterpret it as "I somewhat agree that A is true." Of course, it means something quite different, but if your language doesn't have words for certain concepts, you make do with the best translation you can find (or make up).

If I am on the right track, there was a miscommunication between the pollsters and a substantial number of respondents. Those respondents changed the meanings of the answers: "definitely true" became "I agree strongly", "probably true" became "I agree somewhat" and so on. Such people could hold any of the substantive views probed by the poll; in most cases, there won't be any effect on the results. But take a theistic evolutionist who has to evaluate creationism. He believes that God created humans, by guiding the evolution process or intervening in it, but doesn't believe it happened as recently as literary interpretations of Genesis suggest. If he understands the options given by the poll, he will say that creation is definitely false (or probably false, if he is not so sure that Genesis is not literally true). But if he reinterprets the options as I think is likely, he can easily choose the option that, to him, sounds like "I agree somewhat", even if he is absolutely sure that the earth is billions of years old and that humans have emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago. After all, how significant are some numbers compared to God's act of creation?

To summarize, if 60% of all people can't think probabilistically, and that percentage is about the same among theistic evolutionists, the misunderstanding between pollsters and respondents can account for most of the anomalous result in the 2-way poll.

It's still depressing. A third of Americans contradict themselves, and most of those are unaware that they do.

Maolution

On my last trip to the library, I picked up Slavoj Zizek's presentation of Mao Zedong. I hope that Dawkins and other promoters of reason whose primary background is evolutionary biology are aware of Mao's ridiculously ignorant idea of evolution. If not, they should be; it would make it easier to answer the O'Reillys of the world that those purported atheist supervillains are as good as religious fundamentalists. Or, conversely, that the fundamentalists are as good as Communists. According to Mao,

I don't believe that men alone are capable of having two hands. Can't horses, cows, sheep evolve? And can it be, moreover, that of all the monkeys only one species can evolve, and all the others are incapable of evolving? In a million years, ten million years, will horses, cows and sheep still be the same as those today? I think they will continue to change.

So, Mao held the Joe Sixpack view of evolution: it is all about becoming intelligent, hair-challenged apes. It may be unremarkable that Mao, as a non-scientist born in 1893, was ignorant about Darwinian principles, but given his near-divine authority, those words must have compelled many Chinese to accept pseudoscientific garbage as unquestionable truth. At the time, it probably didn't have the disastrous practical consequences as Lysenkoism in the USSR, but it was philosophically similar and equally anti-scientific. (Of course, Lysenko was Stalin's favorite "scientist".)

What do we have here? The two scariest "atheists", each responsible for deaths of millions, both favored ideas born of navel gazing over science. That is incompatible with the atheism which Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris advocate. Any system of ideas that does not reject theories contradicted by scientific evidence doesn't deserve to be called atheistic, regardless of how loudly its proponents proclaim non-existence of gods. Stalin and Mao were much closer to faith healers than to non-believers.

If you are concerned about the creationist movement's assault on the scientific world view, you need to be aware of the related anti-scientific positions of the worst Communist leaders. The side that wields the "Stalin and Mao" weapon in that battle must change: instead of conservative pundits asserting the atheists' "connection" with the psychopatic dictators, the defenders of science should point out that the fundamentalists are in an "unholy" alliance with the hard-line Communists when it comes to rejecting neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.

Time 100 Follies

Moonflake contemplates the absurdity of Time magazine's entrusting Michael Behe with writing the profile of Richard Dawkins for the 100 Most Influential People list:

I can only imagine what the next Time 100 is going to look like:

• Tony Blair, profiled by Robert Mugabe


• Sir Ian McKellen, profiled by Fred Phelps


• Michael J. Fox, profiled by Rush Limbaugh


• Jon Stewart, profiled by George W. Bush


• Neil Armstrong, profiled by Bart Sibrel


• Noam Chomsky, profiled by Paris Hilton

Why Dawkins Matters

PZ Myers shows that Dawkins is right on matters that matter: the sophisticated theologians whose arguments he (according to his critics) fails to address do not get invited on national TV; ignorant buffoons do.