I spent a long evening at the SDB meetings with Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute, who was presenting a poster on "Problems with characterizing the protostome-deuterostome ancestor." It's difficult to write about, because Nelson is actually a pleasant, personable fellow, but…

(Yeah, you know it was coming, an immense, insurmountable, horrendous "but".)

…but the poster was just plain bad.

The first gigantic problem is that there was absolutely no data on the poster. I hope everyone who has read my summaries of the SDB meetings would be getting the strong idea that every talk was data-centered. People are making observations and doing experiments and presenting the results, and in the process giving their interpretations, placing it in the context of other people's work, etc. Strolling through the posters is a technicolor experience, with huge photos of in situs and blots and gels and details of embryonic anatomy all around. This particular meeting wasn't big on theory and modeling, but I talked to a few old pals who were doing that sort of thing, and it was all math and charts and simulations.

Nelson's poster was all words and speculation. There was no substance there, no details to grapple with. It was awkward to discuss, because there really was no handle to grasp. My usual strategy when going through a poster with the author is to find the interesting detail that is relevant to my particular research interests, ask questions about it, and let the discussion spiral from there to the author's context. I just couldn't do that here.

What was it about? Well, the gist of it, as near as I can tell (and I would hope Nelson will chime in with comments to correct anything) was the usual creationist argument from personal incredulity. The center of the poster was a drawing, a simple oval. We were supposed to imagine that this was the egg of the hypothetical pre-Cambrian common ancestor of both protostomes and deuterostomes. Next, we were supposed to imagine what the adult of this organism would look like. Then Nelson had a few photos of an adult fly, nematode, and sea squirt. Finally, we were supposed to imagine that modification of the development of modern organisms was impossible, that the modification of the development of the protostome/deuterostome ancestor was similarly impossible, and therefore, evolution was impossible.

That's it.

No data. No experiments. No predictions. Just a request to build up a model of evolution and development in our imaginations. I'm sure it works for creationists, and being liberated from demands for evidence makes it easy to compound one's biases and come up with the answer Nelson wants, but in this mob of good practical naturalists who expect at least a nod towards some data, it fell flat. I'm afraid that when I was free to just imagine the adult protostome/deuterostome ancestor that would arise from his evocative, all-powerful Oval of Infinite Potential, I had no problem scribbling up a cartoon of a crude triploblastic worm, and saw no obstacle to incremental specialization of it's component parts in development and evolution.

Now you could argue that that's just compounding my atheistical, materialistic biases, and is as meaningless as Nelson's assumption of a conclusion. I would make two arguments against that, though. One of the purposes of a scientific presentation is to share the evidence and logic that leads to a particular conclusion in such a way that there isn't much room for argument, and that argument is at least directed towards constructive, alternative hypotheses. An open thought experiment that encourages unfettered guesswork is not science. For another, I wasn't alone in the conversation. Another passing scientist joined in, and she was also baffled by the point of the poster, and saw real power in evolutionary explanations. And, it turns out, she is an evangelical Christian, a regular and active church-goer (yes, such things exist with significant frequency in science; religious sensibilities are not automatically antithetical to good scientific thinking, no matter how desperately the Discovery Institute tries to dichotomize and polarize.) She wasn't rejecting the work out of the prejudice of an atheist, but out of our shared commitment to good scientific thinking.

I do have to commend Nelson for having the guts to expose the hollow vacuum at the heart of anti-evolutionary thinking to the critical eyes of a swarm of practicing scientists, but there is another troubling problem here. This presentation is going to go on a list at the Discovery Institute of Intelligent Design forays into mainstream scientific venues. You know it's going to be presented to some school board or court someday, with the disingenuous claim that "See? We really are doing real science, really!" It isn't. It's non-science. It's bad science. One thing we have to make clear is that placing something under the banner of the Society for Developmental Biology and getting it published in the offical program of an international meeting does not automatically make it scientific—especially since the conference presentations were not peer-reviewed for admissibility, and anyone willing to pay the conference fees could put up a poster for anything they want. And even the imprimatur of the magic words "peer-review" should never be assumed to be a guarantor of quality.

I wouldn't propose changing the open nature of conferences, and would actually encourage more creationists and other wild-eyed weirdos to try and attend scientific meetings. The purpose of these meetings is to throw out new ideas and get input from the scientific community on what to do next, and the real measure of success is not the presentation, but what follows from it.

Nothing will follow from Nelson's presentation. There won't be any research done as a consequence of his poster—there's none that can be done. He may be a nice guy, but niceness doesn't count in science. And the absence of substance is what has to be emphasized to school boards and courtrooms where this kind of work will get cited.