#36955: — 08/22  at  02:31 PM
I had the epiphany that, I guess, most of the readers here had a long time ago.

The NYT articles don't look bad to me, just... too subtle, maybe. I thought it over, and decided that maybe the NYT is taking the right approach--trying to preach to critical thinking tyros, as opposed to the choir.

Then I got around to reading the Diane Carman editorial linked here yesterday, and I had my epiphany. That's why we need the PZ Meyerses and Carl Zimmers and Richard Dawkinses of the world; it's possible to be clearly and precisely in opposition to the ID fundies (and anti-intellectualists in general) without giving the think-tanks equal space.

I'm sorry I doubted, guys. NYT--get off your butts and do this right.

#36957: — 08/22  at  02:33 PM
Well, the NYCrimes has been going downhill for a while, especially on scientific issues. Their last two op-eds on science have been 1) the Archbishop of Vienna arguing that "overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science" (not sure he knows the meaning of either ideologr or science) and 2) "In Defense of Common Sense," which was just sad, since the author is apparently a science journalist.

#36960: KathyR — 08/22  at  02:55 PM
Yes, I agree that it was a pretty nauseating way to start the morning.

#36963: — 08/22  at  03:08 PM
I was appalled by the story today. I'm expecting "balanced" series on phrenology,voodoo, and Lysenkoism in the coming weeks.

#36964: — 08/22  at  03:14 PM
I think the earlier report today about ignorance was so very true. With even a slight familiarity with scientific (or statistical) methods, it should be obvious that pinning a number on the odds of penicillin evolving is an entirely bogus excercise. Perhaps we should ask for estimates on taxol or Ect-743? Then maybe we could see their heads spin....!
I was always so pleased with the NY Times' science section.... sad really.

#36965: — 08/22  at  03:15 PM
The old grey lady is failing fast, as this second article shows.

My response to the first article was: These ID-ots may be scientific morons, but they are marketing geniuses. They know how to get mega-moolah from fundy donors and from donors like Bill Gates - ostensibly a non-religious person; and they know how to get favorable print space in prestigious newspapers.

My little town has no secular bookstore, but has three Christian bookstores, each chock full of creationist propaganda targeted ever so appealingly to children of all ages - even pre-school tots. Most dentist offices here have the same crap in waiting rooms.

The rationalists are not winning the PR part of this war.

#36971: — 08/22  at  04:01 PM
I'd say the BBC's credibility is at an all time low too for reporting uncritically on things like Bi-Aura mixed in with genuine medicine. Though this didn't really come as a surprise to me. They had already ruined their Horizon programme over the past few years while still (fraudulently in my view) advertising and selling it (abroad or on video/DVD) as their flagship science programme. Once upon a time I think it was run by pretty competent people. Then (in a slow rotting process) they probably hired a bunch of meejah studies people instead of the original engineers etc.

#36976: — 08/22  at  04:14 PM
What I find particularly frustrating is that the TIMES illustrated a peculiar blind trilobite, AMPYX, in today's story on the jump page which in the SCIENCE TIMES in December 1987 was reported to show gradual evolution in an exceptionally complete set of Ordovician strata in (I believe) some part of Great Britain, which would have been a telling point to make in today's coverage of the I.D. vs. evolution story. Why didn't the reporter, Kenneth Chang, check the archives by a quick terms search?
I happen to have a number of silicified larval and adult sclerites of AMPYX which I have etched out of the Edinburg limestone of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the Strasburg area. The Virginia fauna does not show the gradual changes cited in the 1987 SCIENCE TIMES article, to the best of my ability to tell, and the analysis is complicated by the fact that the Virginia fauna almost inevitably occurs as isolated sclerites, whereas the fauna profiled in the 1987 SCIENCE TIMES story contained many complete exoskeletons. It was a disappointment for me to see todays's photo and not find any text about my old buddy, AMPYX.

#36979: decrepitoldfool — 08/22  at  04:40 PM
Yet another example in the argument for eliminating "journalism" as a college major. Newspapers should hire people who majored in, or have experience in, real subjects.

#36980: — 08/22  at  04:52 PM
Since my excommunication from talk.origins, I don't feel like I play on the evolutionary team. I just throw spitballs from the stands occasionaly. But it looks like the evolution side is getting rolled lately, and you don't seem to understand how bad it is.

For about 70 years since the Monkey Trial, Creationism wasn't a respectable topic for a paper like the Times. It just wasn't done. There was some snobbery in this, because anyone who read Mencken's accounts knew the Creationists didn't go to good schools. But there was also respect for the Enlightenment idea that there is a single objective reality, discoverable by the methods of science. If the editors in the pre-neocon days had any questions about a scientific matter, they'd consult the best professional opinion.

The Times has been drifting away from this principle of journalistic integrity for some time. They've run at least one op-ed piece by Behe. Recently, Keller said they would attempt to "engage" evangelical Christians, i.e. increase circulation in the Red States. This strikes me as an excuse for letting neoconservatives dictate their agenda. They want us to think they're whores, when eht truth is worse. As someone pointed out above, there is a relationship with the way they reported, or rather sponsored, the war on Iraq.

#36983: — 08/22  at  05:17 PM
I emailed chang. maybe he'll show up here and discuss the article.

#36985: ekzept — 08/22  at  05:19 PM
i don't know if the Times piece is good or bad per the big picture. it certainly gives Behe credibility and that can't be good. but it also repeatedly presents ID as a new kind of anthropocentrism, thrusting homo faber out there as the template for the Deity. for embrace of ID is as much a failure of imagination and what i judge to be an excessive adoration of human abilities as anything else.

what i missed was, one, a classic review of how and why science works the way it does, per classical experimental physics and theories and then, two, holding ID up to those standards.

i'm not sure it matters how and what the Times says. very many fundamentalist Christians (and some Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, for that matter) don't accept that psychology has anything at all to offer our understanding of ourselves.

what's an article in a major paper against such reckless ignorance?

#36986: ekzept — 08/22  at  05:21 PM
should have written:

many fundamentalist Christians (and some Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, for that matter) don't even accept that psychology has anything at all to offer our understanding of ourselves.

instead.

#36991: Arun — 08/22  at  05:44 PM
Yes, today's NYT installment was a sad excuse of an article. I too was disappointed. The article failed to make clear that Intelligent Design does not have a prima facie case; and that it is easily dismissable without having to do a real deep dive first.

#36993: — 08/22  at  05:52 PM
The NYT is clearly populated with lazy scientifically-illiterate journalists and editors who don't want to offend their lazy scientifically illiterate readers.

Remember that strange article about so-called "prayer studies" that danced round and round the fact that scientific evidence for the beneficial effects of distant third prayer DOES NOT EXIST and NEVER HAS EXISTED but U.S. taxpayers are nevertheless paying charlatans to "look for" those effects? (Hint to those scientists: the effects are nestled in my buttcrack, please contact me for a free viewing).

The only way -- I repeat, the ONLY way -- for this situation to change is if every scientist who is interviewed about the subject of "intelligent design" provides the same response: the charlatans who are peddling this shit to the American people are rotten disgusting liars who don't give a crap about the truth.

That is the thesis. That is the conclusion. Any facts which do not directly, pungently and incontrovertibly address this thesis are irrelevant and will be spun to the disadvantage of scientists.

Someday the current crop of weak-lipped self-proclaimed "representatives" of scientists like Nick Matske and Eugenie Scott will figure this out. Hopefully it won't be too late.

#37005: AV — 08/22  at  07:17 PM
(Begging everyone's pardon for this off-topic announcement)

Australian talkback radio tackles ID:

Monday to Friday at 6pm (4pm in WA), repeated at 3am

Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In Our Schools
Tuesday 23 August 2005

The theory of intelligent design has reignited debate about evolution by challenging Darwin’s theory. US President George Bush wants it taught in schools. And here it’s won the qualified backing of education minister Dr Brendan Nelson. Should intelligent design be taught in our schools?

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/a...s/s1443378.htm)

For those of you interested in contributing, the contact details are:
Fax: 07-3377-5171
Toll-free phone: 1300 22 55 76 - 1300 CALL RN

(They're Australian numbers, so you may need to add an area code or something.)

#37007: AV — 08/22  at  07:22 PM
TinyURLed version of link published in previous post:
http://tinyurl.com/bpgnv

AV

#37020: — 08/22  at  09:57 PM
Umm.. Let's follow the penicillin resistance question for a bit.

So, if antibiotic resistance in pathogens is evidence of a creator, isn't also a rather damning indictment of that "intelligence"? What kind of a son of a bitch would act deliberately to enable virulent organisms to attack innocent people? Doesn't this make god a bioterrorist?

-jcr

#37021: coturnix — 08/22  at  10:10 PM
The Third Part is up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html

#37023: coturnix — 08/22  at  10:15 PM
...and the third part is not as bad as the second.

#37026: — 08/22  at  10:52 PM
Hmmmm. Go look at the lesson plan the NYTimes has on the topic. I'm not impressed: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20050823tuesday.html

#37027: — 08/22  at  11:04 PM
All I can say about this NY times series is that H.L. Mencken is sorely missed.

#37028: — 08/22  at  11:14 PM
Thinking of Carl Zimmer, here's a link to his spot-on post about the current NY Times apologia on "unintelligible design"

http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/08/21/the_big_picture.php

#37030: Dan S. — 08/23  at  12:14 AM
My dream is that every future journalistic mention of ID will start with some version of "Intelligent Design, which virtually the entire scientific community currently views as being somewhere between pet psychics and spoon-bending in terms of credibility . . .

I was trying to defend the article over in comments at Demski's blog, but geez, there was not a lot to work with!

(and whatever I write there seems to have a roughly 50% chance of actually appearing in the comments, with no apparent rhyme or reason . . . )

On the plus side, I ended up finding some neat stuff on cat evolution responding to a fisker who claimed that the crossing of cougars from florida and texas 1) defeated 'Darwinian' expectations with their (mystical?) hybrid vigor (??!) and 2) proved those silly scientists wrong about species, since the two species (!!!!) weren't supposed to be able to have (fertile?) young . . . (unless somebody split Puma concolor into two species when I wasn't looking?)

Apparently researchers extracted DNA from 13,000 year old North American sabretooth and 'cheetah-like cat' bones and compared 'em to modern cats: turns out that cheetahs didn't evolve in North America and migrate to Africa, like people had been thinking - instead, it seems the 'cheetah-like cat' is actually split off from ancestral pumas - probably when the prairie was expanding, ~3mya - and adapted to life in the fast land in an astonishing display of convergent evolution. Another paper finds low diversity, etc. across all North American cougars, suggesting that previous North American cougar populations got wiped out with the rest of the fun megafauna, with subsequent repopulation from South America. (oh, and jaguarundi split off ~ 4.2 mya - first across the land bridge to South America, maybe?)

There you go - your early Tuesday morning cat family evolution blogging. Meanwhile, my little Felis is curled up apparently asleep on his 'bed' - a soft carry bag on top of a big box . . . (and while I pretty confident as to the species, besides the nomeclatural juggling (silvestris, now?) we did find him as a stray kitten, and sometimes I'm not entirely sure . . . )

Little article about the DNA research: http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/po/news/2004-05/aug/09.shtmlLittle article about the DNA research

Actual article, for anyone with fulltext ScienceDirect access http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VRT-4GTVWB4-B&_coverDate=08%2F09%2F2005&_alid=306310628&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=6243&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=b58bc9b913c2957d0751731bcccd5498

Genomic ancestry of the American puma (pdf): http://www.coryi.org/Florida_panther/Miscellaneous_Panther_Material/Genomic ancestry of the American puma.pdf

#37031: Dan S. — 08/23  at  12:16 AM
oh darn.
that's My dream is that every future journalistic mention of ID will start with some version of "Intelligent Design, which virtually the entire scientific community currently views as being somewhere between pet psychics and spoon-bending in terms of credibility . . .

I was trying to defend the article over in comments at Demski's blog, but geez, there was not a lot to work with!

(and whatever I write there seems to have a roughly 50% chance of actually appearing in the comments, with no apparent rhyme or reason . . . )

On the plus side, I ended up finding some neat stuff on cat evolution responding to a fisker who claimed that the crossing of cougars from florida and texas 1) defeated 'Darwinian' expectations with their (mystical?) hybrid vigor (??!) and 2) proved those silly scientists wrong about species, since the two species (!!!!) weren't supposed to be able to have (fertile?) young . . . (unless somebody split Puma concolor into two species when I wasn't looking?)

Apparently researchers extracted DNA from 13,000 year old North American sabretooth and 'cheetah-like cat' bones and compared 'em to modern cats: turns out that cheetahs didn't evolve in North America and migrate to Africa, like people had been thinking - instead, it seems the 'cheetah-like cat' is actually split off from ancestral pumas - probably when the prairie was expanding, ~3mya - and adapted to life in the fast land in an astonishing display of convergent evolution. Another paper finds low diversity, etc. across all North American cougars, suggesting that previous North American cougar populations got wiped out with the rest of the fun megafauna, with subsequent repopulation from South America. (oh, and jaguarundi split off ~ 4.2 mya - first across the land bridge to South America, maybe?)

There you go - your early Tuesday morning cat family evolution blogging. Meanwhile, my little Felis is curled up apparently asleep on his 'bed' - a soft carry bag on top of a big box . . . (and while I pretty confident as to the species, besides the nomeclatural juggling (silvestris, now?) we did find him as a stray kitten, and sometimes I'm not entirely sure . . . )

Little article about the DNA research: http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/po/news/2004-05/aug/09.shtm lLittle article about the DNA research

and I give up with the other ones. Is there anyone out there kind and patient enough to explain both how to link in comments here and how to use tinyurl goodness, again?