Yglesias sees the light of reason
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Pirate modeHe has retracted his earlier indifference to the threat of Intelligent Design creationism. One down, a hundred million to go.
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Pharyngula has moved to http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Comments:
Not only am I impressed that he was willing to re-think his position, I'm also impressed with his link to the transitional fossils, detailing how the synapsids are a pretty clear link between reptiles and mammals.
What someone (with the knowledge to do so) needs to do is create a web page or a PDF or a book, called "I got yer transitional fossils right here, babe" that spells this all out in easy-to-read English and with pretty pictures. This kind of thing sits in dusty museums (MAYBE) and dry technical documents, but rarely makes it out to the public. People want to see this stuff. People NEED to see this stuff. And leave out the damn references until the bottom of the document. My eyes glaze over big blocks of non-info in the middle of sentences.
If anyone wants to create such a thing, I'd be more than happy to make the corresponding web pages and/or PDF to make it nice and public. Websites is what I do.
I don't know if you have this link, but it's a good source of info for arguing against the whole creationist thing.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
I have a concern about the rhetoric in the article that Yglesias linked to, posted at Tech Central Station, Faith-Based Evolution By Roy W. Spencer Published 08/08/2005
"Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist [meteorologist, from his bio], I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years [and this is odd, because I don't believe that the ID concept existed 20 years ago]. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism." [My comments in square brackets.]
Note the phrase, 'theory of origins'. At first, I thought that he was confusing evolution with the origin of life. Reading the article, I found that I was never clear if he meant 'origin of species' or 'origin of life'. Confused writer or deliberately confusing rhetoric? You be the judge!
I'm very familiar with TalkOrigins. It's quite good, but it's still obviously written by people who are used to writing technical documents for technical people. IMO, that is. A big block of text (usually interrupted by lists of names, page numbers and dates) with some diagrams just isn't good enough to show to lay people. Hell, I'm very interested in all this stuff and my eyes definitely glaze over when I read it.
http://www.gcssepm.org/special/cuffey_05.htm
That has some very cool info in it, I'm sure. But it's an absolute bitch to read. And there are lots of pretty pictures, but I didn't have a clue what they were of or why they were noteworthy. Yeah, they kinda maybe look sort of like some other things I've seen before but... Show something that came before and something that came after. Point out what's similar in all of them and different in all of them.
A web page would be a perfect way to do it because all the information is interconnected. Right now it's one big image that shows everything (but less than I'd like to see) followed by some very dense text that refers back. Did the author even try to do that referencing himself? I'm getting carpal tunnel scrolling down... then up... then down... then up... then down... bugger that. And all I get from it is names and dates.
With interconnected web pages you could look at the big picture or focus on one set of bones and their detailed information. Put a few together to show the progression. Contrast with other skulls - reptile and mammal. Put the #$^%ing references and dates and names in a hidden block that can pop up IF people want to see them. When you have to ignore 50% of the text in a paragraph...
The thing with TalkOrigins is it's all a lot of text. I mean, you can say "there have been lots of transitional fossils found" all you like. You can even put in lots of parenthetical names and dates and page numbers. But if there are pictures that can SHOW people these transitions, showing is worlds better than telling. The people who don't believe scientists already don't believe scientists. They're not going to take your word for it.
Show us the bones. Show us the synapsid that's most like a reptile. Show it beside the reptile it's most like. Give details on when it was found and what the age of the rocks were. Then move on to the next. Show the changes. Show the dates involved. Then the next, on and on until you get to the synapsid most like a mammal. Show it beside a mammal and point out what the similarities are and when they both were alive.
It's not just facts; it's also presentation. There's a reason why nerds accomplish amazing things. There's also a reason why non-nerds find nerds dull and uncompelling. I'm a geek. Let me sit halfway between the two groups to translate!
I should probably note that this website tends to have excellent articles, in terms of design and readability. So maybe I should just leave it to PZ to make the reptile to mammal docs, but I do think that it should be multiple pages and not just a single article. Multiple pages or else DHTML to hide and show blocks of information.
FYI Pough, one of the best presentations of how scientists go about their work was a NOVA program titled "The Missing Link". For my money, it is the best layman's explanation as to how the fossil evidence helps to confirm Darwin's theory of evolution.
Link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/link/
In politics, what is important is where you stand - for or against us - and not the why. But I am no politician and the reasons of Yglesias to reconsider its position and accept that it is an issue of importance make me feel uneasy, they are non-kosher reasons. He writes,
...if ExxonMobil, the American Beverage Association, and their ilk think it's worth lending financial support to this sort of nonsense, I can start to see why pushing back may be important.
Yglesias can start to see why evolutionary biology is right only when ExxonMobil says it is not so. That is being right for the wrong reason, and it doesn't count at least for me.
For one thing, I don't think ExxonMobil and its ilk are automatically always on the wrong side, secondly, I can't imagine it has any strong conviction except in the field of the oil business and of course, about the beauty of profits. Exxon is in great need of qualified engineers, and I cannot imagine they are for teaching bullshit in science classes. If teaching of real science has allies, it is in the corporate world, whose very survival depends on the availability of qualified manpower. They know it and they are worried because American schools are failing in their mission.
Quod natura non sunt turpia
Off-topic, I apologize. BUT, does anyone know why Panda's Thumb has been down for parts of yesterday and this morning? Something to do with the new tag system? Fiendish creato-designo plot?
Also, political scientist/Dis. Int. guy John West has a defense of Divine Design guest op-ed in today's Seattle Times. Didn't get a chance to read it before I had to head for work...
I lied, sorry. Ahem, I subscribe to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, not the Times, but I have some very nice people staying with me who are job-searching, house-searching, etc., so for SOME reason I thought I was looking at the OTHER paper when I happened to glance across the West op-ed on my way out. Proves you can come down on the side of evolution and still be a pinhead at times, I guess--whence the avatar.
Anyway, here's a long form link to the West thingie, which I STILL haven't had time to read.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/235729_idesign09.html
Yglesias sadi:
"Fair enough, except Gould wasn't the leading evolutionist of our time, and that's not what punctuated equilibria theory says. For that matter, there are plenty of transitional forms. You've got your reptile-bird, your reptile-mammals (see also duck-billed platypus), your fish-amphibians, etc."
What is a transitional form? Is not every form "transitional"? This notion of some select group of transitional forms that can be found just does not make sense to me. For ancient fossils, it seems even more useful to think of everything as a transitional form on some branch of the tree. Mapping out the tree is a fascinating endeavor.
"Yglesias can start to see why evolutionary biology is right only when ExxonMobil says it is not so. That is being right for the wrong reason . . ."
At the very least, it's pointing to very different ways of looking at things. Within a political frame, the issue matters insofar as it relates to politicking, so for him, it *is* the right reason.
Of course, we generally live in a intellectual house with more than one window - and Matt's peering out of the political-strategy window based on the view from another part of that house, the one that opens up on a broad and sunny Democratic vista. (maybe tools would have been a better metaphor...) The science-related window, though, has stuck shutters, or really dirty glass, or is boarded up, or simply wall . . .
So how to we talk to him?
(I would think that, say, anti-global-warming products and anti-evolution products are each part of "broader conservative attack on science," with lots of overlap between players, organizations, etc., but different motives and all. Anti-global-warming is for industry, anti-evolution is for the religious cultural warriors. And hey, isn't that Thomas Frank's whole point - throw those folks a bone that (they imagine) won't lead to anything, while helping corporate, etc. interests? But that doesn't make sense: the only way that helps Republicans is by . . . well, heating up the culture war, so maybe . . . And granted, muddying understandings of science is good for industry in the short run, but as jaimito points out, long term, it's nonsense.
But assuming long-term rationality, not always a good idea. And different interests: as Frank and then Matt pointed out, you get the Republican segment pushing anti-evolution, and another segment trying to stop it . . .
"Off-topic, I apologize. BUT, does anyone know why Panda's Thumb has been down for parts of yesterday and this morning? Something to do with the new tag system?"
Well, posting became incredibly slow from the moment the new KwickXML showed up, and it went downhill from there, so I suspect that it's down because they're trying to fix it. OTOH, perhaps goddidit.
Ygliesias writes:
"One counterargument I heard a lot was that opposition to evolution is of a piece with the broader conservative attack on science, including many more obviously policy-relevant topics. And perhaps that's right."
I am assuming he is in the process of getting that message.
He does not need to know biology, but as a person with a lot of readers he needs to understand that IDC is just one out of many well-coordinated elements of the Right-wing attack on reason and rationality.
Also, Transitions is a new blog that is attempting to present evolution in a more fun way, geared at the high-school level, so if Talkorigins is too hard to read, go to Transitions. Over time, it will probably get big enough to contain the answers to all of the typical IDC questions.
geez, sorry, my editing is getting - well, it isn't getting, really . . .
"but it's still obviously written by people who are used to writing technical documents for technical people . . . A big block of text . . .with some diagrams just isn't good enough to show to lay people. "
Major point here, I think! Not in the geez-these-folks-are-dumb way, but people are generally good in what they train for and practice a lot. A lot of folks producing these things are either working academics or at least fairly intellectual folks. It's familar. One of the interesting things about teaching is that it forces you to realize (even if one already, hopefully, has a decent idea) that no, that's *not* obvious to them, and no, that *isn't* clear, and so on.
And try doing something (in a different field, sport, social practice, etc) that has different expectations, means of communications, skills . . . it's really tough, and if it didn't seem all that interesting/vital/valued by peers/etc. anyway, well . . .
DarkSyde has put up some very readable posts like this one
http://brentrasmussen.com/log/node/79
(the H.erectus reconstruction looks a lot like a relative of mine . . . a contemporary relative . . .)
for example, and there have been all sorts of other great posts (by these criteria) from lots of people, but they seem scattered. There's Transitions (http://afarensis.blogsome.com/Transitions) , which is often really good, if not entirely consistently (well, it is a blog!), but well - at least on this browser, the font is teeny! Etc.
Here's a site I just grabbed off yahoo about readability and school science textbooks . . .
http://www.timetabler.com/reading.html
I just blogged about the way people think (and come to think) and some ways that relates to the evolution/ID - teach 'em both silliness.
http://onelongargument.blogspot.com/
I know, I know, it's so vulgar to self-promote, but I haven't posted for a long time, and do hope someone will read it . . . Plus, it's a good example of bad writing. (There, that will get them over! How could anyone resist? Almost as good as "Eww, this awful! Want some?" Although that never seems to work as well as it should . . .)
Also poison froggies up top of it . . .
That John West article is very interesting. He keeps referring to ID as a theory. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Also, I may be getting my history muddled but isn't there a pretty clear record of DI trying to get ID into schools, followed by a sudden reversal of that for purely PR reasons?
I really like how scientists telling teachers not to teach pseudoscience as science is a witch hunt, but creationists telling teachers to point out (invalidated) flaws in a very well-supported group of theories is simply in the best interests of everyone. And painting thousands of the world's smartest people as immoral and evil for following the evidence is in no way a witch hunt; it's just good science.
Mapping out the tree is a fascinating endeavor.thus spake George. i sometimes wonder if this isn't more a limitation of our minds than anything else. i mean, we're using to thinking in terms of continuity as in continuous motion. our visual cortex works that way. it's okay if the path is sufficiently well sampled by discrete points, but when there are jumps we try to imagine there must be intermediate things in between.
that's sometimes useful, as in doing two dimensional interpolation on image rasters. yeah, there are no pixel values at "(125.3,534.2)", but it sure it useful computationally to pretend there are. let's you do things like numerical derivatives and such.
but in other cases, like the hop-skotch of one biological variant emerging from some other, it's a nice organizational thing, but there's no basis. there's just that genome difference and that measure is about as close to comparability as anyone's gonna get.
Dan S. and Jaimito - you are incorrectly stating Matt Yglesias' point. His point is *not* that he now believes in evolution because Exxon Mobil is against it. He clearly believes in evolution, as he stated in this post and his original post. His point is that the fact that Exxon Mobil cares about disproving evolution is why we should care about supporting evolution. That is totally different, and comports with his statement that seeing the evolution/ID debate in a context of a general Republican effort to discredit science. Exxon Mobils funding of numerous studies has done just that.
What is a transitional form? Is not every form "transitional"?
Precisely! Touche! Bingo!
Everything is in motion
Everything is changing
No still point in the Universe
No still point to observe
No still point
Plenty of parking, however
+++
the last time i tried this at PT i got shat upon bigtime but ill try again. what exactly is a turtle evolutionarily? in an article in Nat Geo within the last 6 mos or so and in the AMNH 6th floor exhibit and in the talkorigin website it is clearly identified as a 'parareptile" or a "pariasaur" or an "anapsid", but according to the big guns at PT it is a diapsid reptile closely allied to crocodiles whose skull structure has evolved to "look like an anapsid"..clearly to test our faith. This then asks further questions that PZ could answer... what is the difference between a sauropsid and a diapsid? what happened to the basal anapsid reptiles such as mesosaurus? Did they die out leaving no descendants or are all diapsids and synapsids their descendants?
"Dan S. and Jaimito - you are incorrectly stating Matt Yglesias' point."
Sorry. The point is - well, there are two.
One is that because he lacked both a wider appreciation of evolutionary bio's importance and an understanding of the ID movement, he was pretty slow putting the pieces together - and he seems like a pretty bright guy.
Two, the more inclusive one: most of us here have at least a decent feel for what evolution means - it's practical value, significance for science as a whole, and role in expanding our understanding and appreciation of the natural world. (I specifically use "feel" because it does have an emotional, etc. component to it, something I've read some marvelous posts on. Hey, we're science-lovers*, not robots!) A number of very smart liberal/left people don't. (don't know about the other folks.) I had no clue about this until January of this year, when Nathan Newman ran a series of posts urging a "strategic retreat" (http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/002076.shtml) - and Matt added that we would have no problem winning as long as we get our strategy straight, and break out of our lazy judicial dependence (http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/01/evolution_and_t.html).
Now, I don't know strategy. When I play chess, I just push my pieces around the board trying to kill things 'til I lose. So maybe it's just cause I don't grasp all the strategic concerns an' all, but to me it sounds like somehing more fundamental. It sounds like they don't get why it's important. Look at the retraction post, and you see that it's pretty much *because* it's a piece of a broader war on science, one item on a list. It's importance is mostly from political/strategic concerns. Which is where he's writing from, but it's like dealing with, say, abortion, or education, just from a strategic perspective. Which is politics . . . but still . . .
forgot the footnote
* geez, I hope that doesn't end up as a spittle-filled sneer. 'Science-lover! Science-lover! Why don't you go back to . . ..to . . .wherever you belong!'
someone remind me, how do you do links here?
"Dan S. and Jaimito - you are incorrectly stating Matt Yglesias' point."
Dan S. did a good job of answering that observation, but I want to make sure the point is clear. Evolution is not a political issue, it is an idea based on the observation of Nature, an explanation of how nature works. It is science. It may be true or wrong in all or in parts, it may be superseded by better explanations or new observations, but it has nothing to do with American politics of August 2005.
Yglesias is a political person and sees everything in the light of current politics. He approaches the question of evolution like another social-economic issue in public debate, like say health-coverage or funding of NASA. I think evolution and natural sciences in general are unconnected to politics, and every time somebody made the connection, it was disaster for both sides. For example, when the Catholic Church took a position on how astronomical objects move, the Galileo case, it harmed science and itself. Of course those objects continued to move around as they didsince Nature does not care about what we think or believe about it. Another notorious case was Yephim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist and political activist who took a position against Mendelian genetics and caused to plant lemon trees in the Artic and the wrong variety of corn in South Russia. Lysenko was in the right political side, but again, Nature cared not and the crops failed and Russians starved. In summary, it is irrelevant what politicians think of evolution, it is not a political issue. If they make it political, be ready for vaccines manufactured according Creationist doctrines, ID-correct drugs and for Creationist medicine.
On the other hand, it is difficult for me to believe that Exxon is funding anti-science movements. I have no information on the subject, it may be true, even if seems to me that it would be against their interest. But people do act against their best interest.
Quod natura non sunt turpia
Jaimito, I wouldn't doubt that Exxon-Mobil is funding global warming deniers; some sorts of anti-science are in their short-term interests.
Yglesias is a bright young guy, but he's unreliable, and that's one of the reason's he's fun to read. He's trying to become a more effective policy wonk by thinking about what battles to fight. The fact that he's admitted he was wrong about Intelligent Design shows that there's hope for him yet.
Mitch Berg from the Northern Alliance of Bloggers has a post about the conflict. It's full of straw men and the usual creationist claims. Mitch isn't a creationist - he really is just fooled by Discovery Institute talking points.
http://www.shotinthedark.info/archives/006242.html
Next entry: Med/Sci carnival notice!
Previous entry: Cindy Sheehan
What's disturbing is that he made the "ID is no big deal" comment after reading Chris Mooney's book:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/8/3/19543/88363
But one article on Tech Central Station somehow made him see the light??
I think it has to do with looking for that orginal "cutting edge" viewpoint to be a hot path-breaking pundit, but then pulling back when you realize just how idiotic everyone that it was.