Last week I noted how much Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell is selling and wondered whether I should start refuting it. This almost instantly triggered a comment from Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, saying, please, please, do precisely that.
Oh well, so much for that idea. If this is what DI wants, this is not what DI is going to get.
There is not much to say about Meyer’s “God of the Gaps” argument anyway, now applied to the origins of life just as it has previously been applied to the bacterial flagellum, the Cambrian explosion, and so on. Research is going on into the origins of life, but we have not yet solved the mystery. It just isn’t scientifically fruitful to invoke “intelligent design” in this context, as if it solves a problem, rather than just raising another one (who designed the super-complex designer, and so on).
However, I do want to comment on one aspect of Meyer’s book that’s really jaw-dropping–albeit not in a strictly scientific area. (more…)
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One of my favorite down home Louisiana songs is one by singer-songwriter Mike West, entitled “Corps of Engineers.” The lyrics are here. I’ll just give you the chorus:
folks round here got the fear of god
everybody say lawdy lawd
there’s only one thing we fear more
that’s the corps of engineers
The words seem particularly appropriate today as we learn that a federal judge has ruled that the Corps is (big surprise) responsible for the levee failures in Katrina–indeed, that the agency is guilty of “gross negligence,” “insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness”, and so forth. The Corps’ poorly maintained Mississippi River Gulf Outlet made the damage from Katrina’s storm surge worse, and the Corps knew it. It’s a sad fact, but can’t be ignored: Katrina was not simply an “act of God.” Neither was it simply an act of global warming. It was a disaster caused as much by human failures as by the workings of nature.
The Knight Program at MIT has a magnificent twice-weekly seminar series, and last week we had our biggest star yet: MIT linguist Noam Chomsky. It was great to hear from the great man in such an intimate setting–particularly about his pioneering work on understanding the origins and nature of language.
But at the same time, we also heard from Chomsky on politics–and this forced me to reflect (as I haven’t in some time) on just how far I am from being able to accept his radical, anti-corporate, anti-establishment positions. I do see a modicum of truth to all of them. But again and again, they’re taken so far that Chomsky loses me along the way.
At the outset, let me explain my basic politics. I’ve always been a liberal, but never a radical. I’ve written at various times for The New Republic, The American Prospect, and The Nation, spanning the spectrum of the mainline political left magazines–and I’ve also occasionally crossed over and written for Reason. Throughout, I’ve felt that I can have a valuable dialogue with readers of all of these magazines, and that all of them have serious things to say.
Especially with the New Republic crowd, but also in liberalism generally, there has been a distaste for the Chomskyite view, which runs something like this: wealthy, powerful interests systematically conspire to keep us down and themselves up. They trick us through the brainwashing of public relations and advertising into wanting their products. They financially enslave us through college loans and credit cards and an inequitable healthcare system and unfair tax structures. And they sell us unethical wars–again through what are fundamentally marketing campaigns–that only serve to preserve existing power structures.
In this view, as I understand it, there is really no major difference between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties are similarly licking the feet of the real folks in power, the rich and the corporate. In our seminar, Chomsky even criticized Obama’s historic election, writing it off as the greatest of marketing campaigns, and so likening it to corporate brainwashing triumphs like getting us to smoke cigarettes or want Macs. (more…)
I just learned his book Signature in the Cell made the top ten list for Amazon science books of 2009. This reinforces a fact that I have long emphasized–conservatives support their authors, promote them on radio (as Michael Medved did yesterday), buy their books in droves, turn them into stars. Liberals and academic scholar and scientists, in general, don’t have the same drive to win the war of ideas. This is why Bjorn Lomborg is always such a big success, for instance, while authors of pro-science climate books regularly struggle to get noticed (unless they are Al Gore with preexisting celebrity).
Now, in the evolution arena, Meyer’s book is clearly drawing a lot of attention and is scarcely being refuted so far as I can see, despite containing some pretty obvious travesties (e.g., in Meyer’s own field, the history of science). So perhaps I had better dive in, as I did on the air yesterday, and describe some problems with Meyer’s arguments and approach. Alas, it is pretty hard to directly refute someone who looks at the currently unsolved question of the origins of life, throws up his hands, and says, it’s so improbable, God must have done it. That’s just not in the scientific spirit. Still, perhaps it is time to take on Meyer’s misinformation, as it is obviously starting to have significant influence…..
I hardly want to lend ammo to those on the other side of the political scientific debates that I so frequently cover. But the new data from Pew are pretty stark: Only 6 percent of scientists describe themselves as Republican. 55 percent describe themselves as Democrats, and 32 percent as independents; which means that scientists skew Dem by a considerable margin when compared to the general population (which claims to be 23 percent GOP, 35 percent DEM).
I think these figures are unsurprising and even justifiable, in that so much anti-science comes from Republicans. I had to deal with one just last night who was attacking both climate science and evolutionary science. And of course, it is not just that Republicans are often anti-science, but that they are often driven by religious motivations to be so. Scientists, by contrast, are a very, very strongly secular group.
Whatever else you may say about these figures, it is unfortunate that they play directly into the culture war. If conservative pundits want to wrongly dismiss science as a liberal atheist plot, I guess I know what they’ll be citing….
Wow. The Medved Show today went very differently than I expected. I was all prepared to talk about evolution and intelligent design; instead, Stephen Meyer of the anti-evolutionist Discovery Institute spent far more time attacking climate science than evolutionary science. In this endeavor, he pulled out all the old chestnuts: the Oregon Petition, cooling during the 1970s, the alleged end to warming in this decade, satellite versus ground temperature measurements…egads.
I’ll have more to say here about what I meant to say there, but for now, just an observation: If I were Meyer, and I wanted to make the case for intelligent design as good science, I would not tie my position at all to global warming denial, much less in such a close way as I heard him doing today. That’s two wildly controversial scientific positions to explain, instead of one; it starts you down the Tom Bethell road of denying almost everything, including HIV/AIDS and even relativity and even even Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays. Not good for credibility….and it makes me wonder, how many folks from the Discovery Institute also attack climate science?
In my 2005 book The Republican War on Science, I wrote somewhat mockingly of ID proponents as follows:
ID theorists, apparently, have a very high opinion of themselves, believing they are fueling a scientific revolution of Copernican proportions. ID proponent Michael Behe has even written that the alleged discovery of design in nature “rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur and Darwin.”
Indeed, ID proponents regularly fling around the idea that they are on the leading edge of a scientific “paradigm shift,” about to dramatically change the course of science by reimporting appeals to a designer into a framework that had previously been dominated by an ideology of “scientific materialism.” Alas, this depiction of IDists as scientific revolutionaries is highly dubious. It’s very easy to for anyone to blithely say they’re causing a paradigm shift, especially as the claim is probably irrefutable except with the benefit of hindsight. The hard part is actually delivering the scientific goods. (more…)
I really enjoy D.J. Grothe’s podcast, and am glad to be back on this week. Here’s the description, which provides a very accurate view of our arguments:
Chris Mooney is a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and author of three books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum.
In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Chris Mooney talks about the growing divide between science and society. He contrasts the issues addressed in The Republican War on Science with the current problems facing society as outlined in Unscientific America. He argues for the unique public policy significance of science for society, and why scientific literacy matters more than other kinds of cultural or historical literacy. He discusses the policy relevance of scientific illiteracy in terms of global warming and biotechnology. He talks about the need for scientists to become better communicators to the public.
He shares his criticisms of the New Atheists and explains why their attacks against religious moderates work counter to the goal of scientific literacy. He recounts his experiences as an atheist activist while in college, and how his views have changed about campus [freethought] activism since that time. He explores other underlying causes of scientific illiteracy, including our educational system, the media’s dysfunctional treatment of science, and growing anti-science movements such as the climate deniers and vaccine skeptics. And he details concrete actions that science advocates can take in order to increase scientific literacy.
You can listen to Point of Inquiry here.
During my diavlog with Michael Specter, we talked a lot about vaccination. And though I didn’t plan it in advance, I blurted out something that I think really does apply here: Vaccine denialism might be considered a form of decadence–one that our society can only countenance in the first place thanks to the tremendous prior triumphs of vaccination efforts. (You can see the segment where I make the point here.)
The case for the decadence interpretation, it seems to me, is bolstered by the fact that it is generally liberal elites and celebrities, rather than poor folks or the disadvantaged, who feel empowered to attack vaccination and try to shirk it. In the context of human history and the past century, these people are surfing atop a wave of prosperity and scientific advancement that has given them marvelously prosperous and pleasant lives. There’s simply no way they could deny vaccination if vaccination hadn’t already delivered a world where the measles, the mumps, polio, and so on, are seemingly nonexistent.
Dictionary.com gives this third definition of “decadence”: “unrestrained or excessive self-indulgence.” I might have added “costly” or even “dangerous” for the vaccine case in particular–but yeah, that’s the general picture.
Of course, it seems a safe assumption that the indulgence will end quickly indeed if vaccine-vanquished diseases start coming back.
