PZ Myers. 2005 Jan 04. Creationist e-mail: Phil Skell. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/creationist_e_mail_phil_skell/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 01.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Creationist e-mail: Phil Skell
I get e-mail. I've mentioned before that I refuse to waste time with creationists in private e-mail, and tell them I'll take it to this website and address it publicly if they want, but otherwise, they can stuff it. Well, I screwed up.
I got a friendly note from an .edu address, asking me what I thought of a couple of quoted paragraphs. I assumed it was someone asking for assistance in dealing with a creationist, so I sent them back a brief critique.
If I'd looked a little closer, I would have discovered that the author was a third rate creationist, one Phil Skell, a chemist at PSU. He's one of these guys who frequents various web-based fora, and whose only routine is to dogmatically declare that biologists don't use evolution. Over and over. He's a kind of pedantic creationist screed machine, who generates these tedious declarations and never, ever responds to any criticism.
Anyway, I sent him my complaints about the creationist boilerplate noise without recognizing who he was, and he bounces right back with another message. He completely ignores what I'd written (which, I've since found, is entirely typical) and throws another set of demands at me. Now I wised up, and told him no, unless he's willing to do it publicly.
He refused. The coward.
I'm usually willing to just let these bozos go with that, but in this case, I'd already invested some time in, I thought, helping him out. So that's tough for him, I'm going to give you, the loyal readers of Pharyngula, a look at the kind of garbage I regularly find in my mailbox.
It's pretty bad. When I first saw it, my impression was that just about every phrase was muddle-headed nonsense, and that it could practically be torn apart word for word. It almost was. Follow the superscripts to see my criticisms.
The purpose of Darwin’s theory was to explain the happenings within the living domain over the past 3.5billion years1. There is precious little that survived over that period2 and thus little to explain3. That opened the door to wild speculations4 based on the worldviews of a tiny minority of the population5, which have been raised to the level of dogma5, which is forced on the unsuspecting students6, even to the point of labelling it as Fact7.
This theory is sold to the public as the source of all the greatly valued results from the admirably successful modern biology8--the study of structure and function of living organisms with all the new instruments and methodologies9. The suggestion is clearly false and misleading10. The modern biology has no use for the theory11, and manages very well by ignoring it12.
This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers13. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology14. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning the structure of DNA15, the discovery of the complete genomes of many living organisms16, the discovery of antibiotics17, the discovery of resistance to antibiotics18, the discovery of pesticides19, the discovery of toxicity and resistance to pesticides20, the discovery of medications21, the discoveries of problems with use of those medications22, the improvements in food production23, in sanitation24, in new surgeries25, how the nervous system works25, how our eyes function26, what happens during ageing27, the discovery and function of hormones28, how an embryo develops29, how to detect and cure cancers30, etc., etc.. The only honest31 answers are: no relevance for the theory32. The only things to which the theory is relevant are speculations about matters largely lost in deep time33, and the indoctrination of children to the worldviews of those true-believers34.
This does not mean that the theory is wrong, or right35. There is insufficient evidence for either conclusion36, and the discussion of it is best done in a non-science class devoted to speculations about ancient ancient history37.
There's a strong element of the ol' Gish Gallop in here. Look how much stuff he just throws out, demanding that the biologist explain it all to him. Imagine being confronted with that in a public debate: you might be able to discuss one topic in a brief and superficial way, and then he'd just turn around and trumpet that you'd failed to answer his eleventy-seven other points, and therefore he was victorious.
I'm not going to try to address them all in detail here, either. Here's a brief rundown; my general impression is that the man is a babbling idiot.
1I have no idea where this 3.5 billion comes from. Darwin thought the earth was several million years old; physicists tell us now it is about 4.5 billion years old.
2We have lots and lots of rocks. We have a respectable fossil record beginning, oh, about 600 million years ago, not counting bacterial traces.
3The whole planet and the diversity of all life on it is "little to explain"?
4Evolution is built on a foundation of evidence, acquired by informed individuals. He's just waving his hands and trying to dismiss solid evidence as "wild speculation".
5It is true that only a minority of people invest the time and effort to understand all the details of any scientific theory. That's why we should listen to them.
6Well, yeah…education involves taking students who don't know something and teaching them something new, not confirming what they already believe.
7The observations that Mr Skell dismisses as not existing are the 'facts' that must be accounted for by any theory.
8No, not quite. Evolution is the theory that explains, informs, and integrates a very large body of information. It is not the theory that generates the information, although it can lead us to productive questions.
9Biology is more than that. We also study relationships and origins, something we can't do without evolutionary theory. We study processes and interactions. Mr Skell has a rather static and descriptive idea of what biology is about.
10That's what I was going to say. Since Mr Skell is making this suggestion, I will defer to his characterization of it.
11As a modern biologist familiar with the literature in my disciplines of development and neurobiology, this is more nonsense. Open up an issue of Development or Developmental Biology, and article after article will discuss evolution and its importance to our discipline.
12Since biology doesn't ignore evolution, this is a most peculiar claim.
13Blatant mischaracterization of a scientific field by people who are clearly ignorant of it will cause people who do know something about it to protest, yes.
14I think taking normal breaths is sufficient.
15Geez, how much history can I cram into a footnote? What drove the interest in the structure of DNA was a long term desire to understand the mechanisms of heredity and the inheritance of variation, and Darwin invested much time and effort in trying to understand it (and got it wrong, unfortunately.) Biologists were trying to puzzle this out in the 19th century, as you can see in this quote from EB Wilson from 1895.
…the chromosomal substance, the chromatin, is to be regarded as the physical basis of inheritance. Now, chromatin is known to be closely similar to, if not identical with, a substance known as nuclein (C29H49N9P3O22, according to Miescher), which analysis shows to be a tolerably definite chemical composed of nucleic acid (a complex organic acid rich in phosphorus) and albumin. And thus we reach the remarkable conclusion that inheritance may, perhaps, be effected by the physical transmission of a particular chemical compound from parent to offspring."
After Mendel, the various factions wrestling with the problem of genetics were all deeply concerned with how it was to be incorporated into evolutionary theory, and the questions of replication, fidelity, and heritable error were all of great interest and importance to evolutionary biologists. Watson's and Crick's discovery fit elegantly into a grand story that had been building for a century.
16Evolution is taken for granted by the scientists sequencing genomes. The whole process builds on principles of common descent; all genome sequencing is done in reference to other genomes, using molecular tools derived from other organisms. The human genome could not have been done without the prior work of scientists using C. elegans and Drosophila, which was consciously done with the idea of developing general probes for studying other organisms.
17Mr Skell is no doubt thinking of the serendipitous discovery of penicillin, and assumes all antibiotic work is the result of luck. But no, it actually requires understanding of evolutionary relationships. Finding useful antibiotics requires knowledge of the properties of the branch of the evolutionary tree that you want to kill, and the other branch of the tree that you want to keep alive.
18He's got to be joking. The story of acquisition of antibiotic resistance is a perfect example of evolution in action.
19Like the work on antibiotics, developing pesticides requires knowledge of evolutionary relationships. If you want to kill mosquitos but not cats, you try to puzzle out what properties have evolved in the two lineages to distinguish them, and you target those.
20How does Mr Skell think mosquitos acquire resistance to DDT? An arthropod angel flits down from heaven and blesses the most righteous mosquito family, or that it evolves?
21You can go a long way in finding new medicines using simple, blind trial and error. I can sort of see the simple minded position Mr Skell is taking: because Fleming discovered a useful medicine by just looking at a fortuitously exposed petri plate, any idiot can do it and you don't need any deep knowledge of the underpinnings of the discipline to succeed. It's like saying that because I found a quarter in the parking lot the other day, I really don't need to engage in that unpleasant "work" stuff to make a living.
22A perfect example of why medicine doesn't rely on lucky finds: you need to dig deeper to understand why bacterium A is affected by your antibiotic, but bacterium B isn't.
23Does Mr Skell think that practicing botanists do not value phylogenetics in identifying new food plants, or that the principles of genetics, central to our understanding of evolution, are unimportant in breeding new plant and animal varieties?
24I'll give him this one. Garbage men really don't need to know evolutionary biology to do their jobs (just wait, though, somebody working on developing sophisticated sewage treatment facilities is going to complain that they need a broad knowledge of biology to do their job.)
25Hmm. Without knowledge of evolution, someone might think it's a good idea to use baboon or pig organs for heart transplants.
25Big mistake there. I'm personally very interested in knowing how the nervous system works, and by golly, evolution helps. You can study ion channels in single-celled paramecia, for instance, and look at the relationships between those channels and the ones used in our neurons.
26Like this, you mean?
27See Cynthia Kenyon's work on the role of insulin/IGF-1 pathways in aging…in nematodes. This is a regulatory system that she plainly argues arose early in metazoan evolution and is therefore relevant to humans.
28Mr Skell keeps making the same mistake. We don't usually discover hormones using evolutionary theory, we understand them. Evolutionary biology explains why fish would have prolactin, for instance.
29Yeesh. That's what I'm mostly interested in, the relationship between development and evolution. It's one of the hottest fields in biology today. And Mr Skell thinks evolution doesn't help us understand development? What about this?
30Has Mr Skell ever thought about what cancers are, what causes them, or what strategies organisms have evolved to prevent them? I mean, considering these questions requires that you get into cell cycle control, signalling, and the origins and mechanisms of multicellularity, all issues where evolution is important.
31I don't think Mr Skell knows what this word means.
32This is the assertion of a fool with no grounding in any of the various topics he flung out. It's an argument from raw ignorance. I think the reason he told me to take a deep breath was so he could take it away when he mentioned something as stupid as that my field, developmental biology, does not find any relevance in evolution.
33No. Darwin formulated the theory to explain phenomena he observed right there in his own time, and we use it now to explain the greater detail we can see right now. Even simple questions, like, "Why do we have five fingers?" are matters that we need evolutionary biology (and other disciplines!) to explain.
34Has anyone else noticed this absurd relativism of creationists, that they try to claim observations about the material universe are just "worldviews" or "opinions?"
35We need a philosopher of science to weigh in on this (Wilkins?), but I at least don't usually think about scientific theory in these kinds of black and white terms. It either works adequately to explain the phenomena I'm seeing, or it needs revision. Evolutionary biology is a vast collection of ideas, some of which have been discarded, some that will be discarded, some that will be changed, all gathered under a broad framework. If sympatric speciation proves to be an unusual special case, it doesn't mean evolution is "wrong", but that a piece of it needs to be tweaked.
36Again, Mr Skell doesn't understand what he is talking about. Evolution has been tested over and over again, and it has held up extremely well—the evidence suggests strongly that it is a good explanation for the phenomena we observe.
37I teach a course in modern developmental biology that tries to explain how modern plants and animals are formed. This is not "ancient ancient history", people have babies all the time. If you want to know how animal embryos know which side is dorsal, you kind of have to explain decapentaplegic (as one piece of the puzzle) and its homologs, and talk about the relationships between flies and humans. Otherwise, why are we messing with all this Drosophila crap in order to discuss how Homo sapiens genes interact?
I told you my disagreements with the substance of his arguments sailed right over his head, and were just ignored. I'm sure he'll continue echoing them over and over again. But here's his next request:
With regard to the literature, I invite you to do a gedanken experiment. Put one of those papers on your computer and ask it to substitute for the evo words something ridiculous such as Creationism, or Buddhist Cosmology, and then, if it is a paper with experimental content(not historical biology), re-examine it. I found the work had lost none of its value. That is consistent with my conversations with many modern biologists(you excepted) who responded to my question "Would you have done your research any differently if you had been convinced Darwin's theory was wrong, or insufficiently evidenced for what it claims?", by allowing that in their work it would have made no difference, but they were certain it would for others. Remarkably, all said the same--always others.
You know what, gang? I don't need to do this. You can all have fun with it yourselves! Here's the abstract from the Fondon and Garner paper I described yesterday. Try it. Take all the important words about evolution, like "evolution", "variation", "selection", "comparative", and "mutations", and replace them with random terms from Buddhism or a Batman comic book or whatever. Does it still make sense?
Mutations in cis-regulatory sequences have been implicated as being the predominant source of variation in morphological evolution. We offer a hypothesis that gene-associated tandem repeat expansions and contractions are a major source of phenotypic variation in evolution. Here, we describe a comparative genomic study of repetitive elements in developmental genes of 92 breeds of dogs. We find evidence for selection for divergence at coding repeat loci in the form of both elevated purity and extensive length polymorphism among different breeds. Variations in the number of repeats in the coding regions of the Alx-4 (aristaless-like 4) and Runx-2 (runt-related transcription factor 2) genes were quantitatively associated with significant differences in limb and skull morphology. We identified similar repeat length variation in the coding repeats of Runx-2, Twist, and Dlx-2 in several other species. The high frequency and incremental effects of repeat length mutations provide molecular explanations for swift, yet topologically conservative morphological evolution.
Skell is playing games with his own ignorance. I'm sure all of modern biology looks like gobbledygook to him, so replacing words he doesn't care for with random nonsense doesn't change a thing…for him. For those of us who know something about the subject, though, the words and concepts matter. This is a paper that makes no sense except in the light of evolution.
- Holy smokes PZ ... I'm trying to still get past the first paragraph.
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There must be something about <a href=http://www.kemibe.com/pace/2004/10/faus-next-addition-charles-h-keating.htm>chemists at state schools and creationist blather</a>.
As usual, the skill and erudition with which you dismantled this fool is somewhat mitigated by the excoriating fact that the enlightened must constantly waste time and effort beating back Skell and others like him.#: Posted by Duddits Cavell on 01/04 at 11:18 AM -
A little pedantry: In the first edition of Origin, Darwin estimated 300 million years for the 'denudation of the Weald' (as I understand it, that would take us back to somewhere in the carboniferous). He got a lot of abuse for his trouble, and withdrew the calculation in later editions. But he was always a strong supporter of Lyell, whose work on Etna made it clear that even a recent tertiary volcano was many millions of years old.
I smell a lot of facile skepticism about the past in Skell's remarks. There are good responses to that kind of nonsense in the philosophy literature, but I've never seen a creationist respond (or reply seriously) to them-- they tend to just repeat the same old silly stuff.#: Posted by Bryson Brown on 01/04 at 11:34 AM -
24 I’ll give him this one. Garbage men really don’t need to know evolutionary biology to do their jobs
True. In fact, very few of us need to know evolutionary biology to do our jobs. Learning something about it, though, makes us (garbage men included) richer.
Over and above all the political annoyance, this is what mystifies me most about creationists (and about the rather larger group who simply aren't interested one way or the other): how could one not want to know about this? It's amazing - much more amazing than anything one could make up.
In this I envy scientists and others whose fields are of interest even to those who earn their bread elsewhere. I need to know about things like Directive 2003/71/EC of 4 November 2003. Most of you don't, and should be grateful for it.#: Posted by Mrs Tilton on 01/04 at 11:44 AM -
Number 3 is a real jaw-dropper to be sure, and that's about all the time I have to waste on such drivel. I thought part of a good old-fashioned liberal arts education was the boilerplate class on the use and abuse of rhetoric, and it seems that Skell only made it to the lessons on abuses.
#: Posted by on 01/04 at 11:45 AM
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Another creationist chemist - I believe that negative publicity is a good way to handle these people. Hopefully informed colleagues will notice and attempt to educate.
http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/schaefer.html
I continually puzzle over why physical scientists often have a hard time with evolution. Is it difficulty in dealing with past events? Is it difficulty in dealing with probabilistic events with large p(0)s? Any other ideas? -
Maybe it's just because I'm an English major, but I was struck by his use of the definite article in front of "modern biology." The modern biology? Who talks like that? I mean, of course his nonsensical arguments are the real issue, but you lose a lot of credibility right off the bat if you don't even seem to know how to talk about science. And he's a chemist?
#: Posted by Stephen Stralka on 01/04 at 12:16 PM
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About the 3.5 billion...probably means he was either in school in the 50s or is using textbooks that date back that far.
Scientists had had the age of the earth a bit wrong. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but I think the problem was actually with physics or chemistry, and not a mistake by geologists.
Once the physics or chemistry got sorted out, the geologists redid their calculations and 4.5 billion popped out. -
He's an emeritus chemist.
It's sad. He's way out of his depth here -- I know just enough chemistry to know I'd have to be a real idiot to try and argue with a real chemist about the subject, but it's bizarre how so many people can think they understand biology better than biologists.
I think I'll try it.
"These electrons are not real. They are concepts for which chemists and physicists have no evidence. Chemists who study redox reactions have no need for them. Organic chemists who study resonance in polycyclic ring compounds do not use them. Electrochemists admit that they can just substitute "Jesus" for the word "electron" in all of their papers, and it doesn't change the meaning."
I suspect that with minimal effort I could dig into a few chemistry journals and dig up with some more buzzwords that I don't understand, and come up with a longer load of tripe that would make electron-haters happy, and leave real chemists thinking I was a nutcase...but they'd have to write a couple of books to rebut me to a lay audience. -
"I was struck by his use of the definite article in front of “modern biology.” The modern biology? Who talks like that?"
Yeah, sstralka, I'm sure I wasn't alone in seeing visions of Mr. Trump's extraordinarily bad pompadour dancing before my eyes as I took this verbiage.
"I continually puzzle over why physical scientists often have a hard time with evolution."
If Christianity had somehow come to exist in the absence of the Bible, I am certain that none of these benighted souls would have any problem whatsoever with the tenets of evolution. Simply put, evolution renders the Bible a fable in a way that few other aspects of science do with such force and certainty, and Christians simply can't abide by this. (Well, you'd also have to be pretty open-minded to believe stuff about yammering snakes and donkeys, flying scrolls, dragons, unicorns, etc. but you get the point.)
Only when doctrine runs afoul of fact do Evangelicals take up arms, and unfortunately nothing will shut them up, especially now that the recent election results have them more emboldened than usual. Religion as it stands is a pox on humankind and is its surest eventual route into the shatcan of history.#: Posted by Duddits Cavell on 01/04 at 12:26 PM -
And, if this hasn't convinced ya'll that evolution is a bogus theory, try my little experiment:
Take all the "evolution-related" words in a scientific paper, spell them backwards, and re-read the text.
There's no difference!
You scientists kill me with your belief in the Evolution God.
Um, uh, and please don't reply by asking me to replace - in the Bible - the words "Jesus" and "God" with the words "Poop" and "Testicle" to see if it then makes sense.
That is way different, because, um, my Testicle says so. Oops! I meant because my God says so.#: Posted by on 01/04 at 12:29 PM - Nice try PZ. But next time try hitting yourself in the head with a claw hammer a few times first. You were still making some sense here and there, and that claw hammer technique will never let you down.
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Dr. Skell is quite a confused Chemist. I have heard of his query to National Academy members:
“Would you have done your research any differently if you had been convinced Darwin’s theory was wrong, or insufficiently evidenced for what it claims?”
If he means Darwin's theory of natural selection, then many evolutionary biologists could still do their work if evolution was driven by selectively neutral causes. As an example, many systematicians (or researchers constructing phylogenies) do not need the evolution they are describing to be driven by natural selection (in fact, most evolution is neutral). He is asking a loaded question (he may or may not realize this), and it would be more relevant to ask, “Would you have done your research any differently if you had been convinced evolution did not occur, or there is insufficient evidenced for evolution?”
I am a student at Penn State, and Dr. Skell frequently attends our department's seminars on evolutionary biology. I'm not sure if he understands all of the "modern biology," but he rarely (if ever) comments. This could be a sign that he does not fully understand modern evolutionary biology (and specifically molecular genetics), but I've heard his primary argument against evolution is that it's not an experimentally testable theory, and therefore not true science. No, we cannot recreate millions of years of evolution via a laboratory experiment, but we can observe the natural world, generate a testable hypothesis, and test the hypothesis with data. Countless such experiments have been performed, and they support evolution. -
Mayr spent an awful lot of effort trying to justify the historical approach to skeptical physical scientist types.
Yo either buy his approach or you don't, but if you don't, what do you do then? Throw up your hands and say, 'Well, we cannot repeat the events experimentally, so we just won't take any interest in it at all?'
Only a few physical scientists get all bent out of shape about this, I think, but the bent ones do tend to be noisy about it.
The Skells are beyond reasoned argument, so DS's suggestion, in context, makes as much sense as anything else.
The great success of experimental investigation probably has resulted in overvaluing it. It isn't the scientific method itself, just a part of it.
And since all sorts of darwinian ideas can be tested experimentally, the objection boils down to 'insufficient experimental verification,' not 'none at all.'
An engineer prof of my acquaintance likes to say, 'In engineering, you never have all the information you need. The good engineer is the one who knows when he has enough to go ahead anyway.'#: Posted by on 01/04 at 12:57 PM -
It really is true though that for some freaky reason Joe punchclock from any field feels suddenly qualified to speak out on certain subjects when in the presence of someone who's spent their life learning the complex ins and outs of that respective area of study.
I can kinda relate to what PZ means when he says gets real tired of people telling him about evolutionary biology and torn between amused and depressed when their knowledge is so abysmal he can't even begin to explain how hopelessly uninfrmed they are. I'm an investment pro, and I'm a personal trainer as a hobby. Most of the time when a layman meets someone who has some serious experience and education under their belt, the layman has enough sense to avoid trying to dazzle the pro with their own brilliant understanding of that pro's field. They instead try and pick the pro's brains for whatever they can get. And generally that's how it goes and that's how it should go. If I meet a neurosurgeon at a party, I sure as hell don't try and and dazzle him with my self taught brain surgery skill or A & P prowess, even though neurophysiology fascinates me.
Unfortunately I don't get that treatment in the case of my own profession[s]. Whenever I meet some over amped financial wizard wannabee at any kind of social function, and they find out I'm into working out big time or that I trade stocks and bonds for a living, instead of asking me what I think, I swear to God the first they do is to try and tell me the secrets of four percent body fat, or their fool proof 'theory' on how to make money in the stock market. Usually with a lot of flippant disdain oozing out the whole time that the 'pros' don't know nearly as much as these self proclaimed diva's do.
And I'm sure along the lines of what PZ has to suffer through in his version of that same crazy phenomena, they reveal they barely know enough to lose thir ass, or enough to kill themslves on a drug/workout regimen, with the first ten words out of their mouths.
There are certain subjects where certain high ego folks just have to be experts at even if they haven't paid a fraction of the dues the experts had to pay to aqcuire that knowledge. And they seem hell bent on charging in and proving to the expert what utterly incomptent ignoramuses they are and expect to be taken as a professional equal right off the bat. It's really really weird. -
Skell was formerly a frequent contributor to Australian IDer & former hospital administrator Stev(ph?)en Jones' Yahoo ID discussion group. Skell struck me as the classic example of an elderly, egotistical obsessive with an idee fixe about the uselessness of evolutionary biology -- completely impervious to rethinking his opinions which were set in stone decades ago. He did not come across as necessarily pro-ID or religiously motivated.
BTW, the retired Jones - a ID quoteminer, evangelical ideologue, and egomaniacal control freak, who just recieved his undergraduate degree in biology (shades of Johnny Wells), has authored a new book entitled something like Problems of Evolution.
Prediction: It will be in the ID literature pantheon shortly.#: Posted by on 01/04 at 01:21 PM -
"primary argument against evolution is that it’s not an experimentally testable theory." Wrong. It is perfectly testable and it is being tested all the time in lab and in the field. Agriculture depends on evolutionary theory (and as Lysenko proved, the wrong theory brings disaster). I think that the undefeatable resistance that the concept of evolution encounters (150 years since Darwin!) springs from what it means for us human beings. There are things some people will never accept, such as death, and they will fight against anyone suggesting the reality and universality of death (Not that opposing ever nature changed anything).
#: Posted by on 01/04 at 01:28 PM
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I also wonder about all those laymen who think they can do the job of someone who has spent decades learning it. Michael Crichton comes to mind. He thinks he knows climate science because he talked to some climate scientists. Then he talked to some contrarians, and he liked what they said better. So that means what they said was true.
I like what the Bible says, so it must be true. You know, the part about loving your neighbor and taking care of widows. Not the part where god tells the Israelites to commit genocide. I also like where Jesus says, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."#: Posted by on 01/04 at 01:30 PM - I have heard long ago that "nobody tells a violinist how to play a violin, but everyone tells a horse-trainer how to train a horse". As I used to be a horse trainer and riding instructor, I can definitely attest to that half of the phrase and wonder why people feel so ashamed of NOT being experts in some things, like riding horses or evolution. Is it something inherent in the field, or does it say something about the person, or a combination of both, e.g., a guy anxious about his masculinity has to prove his expertise in something that proves his manliness, or a snob has to prove his erudition and scholarship, or a guy with a bad case of reverse physics envy [physicists secretly admiring biologists for the sheer guts of tackling such a complex system], or something along those lines?
- What makes it irritating is when they go at it with a 'gotcha!' kind of angle. You can almost hear a clown like Skell doing the 'gotcha!' thing.
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I'd like to apologise on behalf of all chemists everywhere, we're not all total idiots. Honestly, the man comes from a good department too. Tell him to go down the corridor and talk to Benkovic or Weinreb, I've seen them both lecture, know and enjoy their work, they are far from total morons. I am suffering from field associated shame!
#: Posted by on 01/04 at 02:13 PM
- Don't worry, I know plenty of chemists, and they are smart people. If you won't hold that pseudo-developmental biologist J. Wells against me, I won't blame you for Skell.
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Part of it, I think, is that Darwinism (PZ says the word is oldhat, but I guess I'm an old guy) can be stated so succinctly.
So can Einstein's equation on mass/energy.
Therefore, people seem to think they've got all of it because they can state the core dogma, more or less.
You don't often encounter the inexpert offering their own version of how much loading a beam can stand.#: Posted by on 01/04 at 03:22 PM -
"You don't often encounter the inexpert offering their own version of how much loading a beam can stand."
Actually, I did that a few months ago.
I guessed that compression strength was proportional to cross-sectional area... was I right? Don't worry -- it was just a thought experiment, not a real bridge. ^_^
#: Posted by on 01/04 at 05:45 PM -
There are certain subjects where certain high ego folks just have to be experts at even if they haven’t paid a fraction of the dues the experts had to pay to aqcuire that knowledge. And they seem hell bent on charging in and proving to the expert what utterly incomptent ignoramuses they are and expect to be taken as a professional equal right off the bat. It’s really really weird.
I don't really have a shortage of ego, but if I don't understand something that someone does, and I have even the slightest interest in it, I tend to want them to talk about it. I might offer some thoughts along the lines of "My understanding is ... is that even close?" but mostly I see it as an opportunity to learn something new.#: Posted by paperwight on 01/04 at 06:24 PM -
Had a thought a while ago. Does anyone maintain a longitudinal database of claims/misrepresentations and subsequent debunkings, indexed against the specific fraudster involved? Seems to me since a principal creationist technique seems to rely on an audience's not being aware the con's previously been called, there might be some serious damage could be done to these yutzes with such a tool. And it could save some labour.
I mean, currently, it's usually pretty easy to point the putz to Talk Origins' FAQs (since yes, the creationists do tend to recycle their own and their compadres old material at a frequency even the most jaded of washed-up nightclub comics would find criminal, even long after it's been utterly demolished by anyone competent who's seen it go by, so pretty much anything they clipboard over to you's already been done there), but this only points out that the claim's a dud. What would be sweeter would be to be able to say hey, twit, not only is it a dud, but you had to know it's a dud before you sent it my way. Seein' as we can both see in the DB you've already been called on this particular canard, you can no longer even claim ignorance here, which would make you a fraud. Oh, and I'm putting this in the DB too. Have a nice day.
Just a thought. -
aj - now that's a brilliant idea, not only for this, but for a lot of things.
#: Posted by paperwight on 01/04 at 08:52 PM
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"...substitute for the evo words something ridiculous such as Creationism, or Buddhist Cosmology..."
Any competent grad student should be able to build a great drinking game out of this.#: Posted by John McKay on 01/04 at 09:38 PM -
[Evolution] is forced on the unsuspecting students, even to the point of labelling it as Fact.
At least we (scientists) wait until the students have enough neo-cortical maturation to form opinions of their own!
That is, we don't start shoving it down their throats from the time they are born.
Nor do we tell them that if they don't believe it (evolution), they will undoubtedly spend an eternity in the flames of Hell, or that no one will ever love them because they are horrible people.
With science, one has a choice in the matter. If you don't belive something that has been established empirically, then maybe it is wrong. One then has the opportunity to prove everyone else wrong.
With religion, there is no such opportunity.#: Posted by on 01/04 at 11:31 PM -
I have to admit, I'm rather surprised that a purported academic would sound so much like a peeved junior high kid in a class he doesn't like. "Genome mappers don't hafta know about evolution, antibiotic makers don't hafta know about evolution, pesticide scientists don't hafta know about evolution, garbagemen don't hafta know about evolution, etc." I can tell you from personal experience (in junior high, natch) that this argument will not impress the teacher.
#: Posted by on 01/05 at 12:11 AM
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With regards to:
"This does not mean that the theory is wrong, or right."
If I remember my philosophy of science, the interesting descriptor is "useful." Is the evolutionary framework useful? Does it provide the simplest possible explanation for a broad range of phenomena? Is that explanation cohesive with the current body of biological knowledge? Does it fail to account for any phenomena we know about? And so on. Frameworks die when they stop being useful. Either that, or they get integrated into bigger, better frameworks. As far as I'm concerned, evolution passes all of the above tests with flying colors.
This has much to do with the "gedanken" experiment. I guess I could search the mouse and human genomes for conserved intronic regulatory areas with sequence consensus for known transcription factor binding sites without believing in evolution, as long as there was a better theory to take its place. Unfortunately, giving a response like this is an easy way to get mischaracterized by unscrupulous people.
In general, I think the philosophical approach to this argument is a good one to take. I've had some limited success with it, anyway, and it's easier than teaching biology to someone with little experience in the subject.#: Posted by on 01/05 at 12:47 AM -
PZ, I have to reiterate something I brought up in a previous comment -- dunno when.
These people are signaling, not trying to communicate. This sort of rhetoric is part of an ornate (but commonplace) social construct developed to identify like-minded people and reinforce social connections with them, not actually engage the supposed "enemy". It's instinct, not reason. reason is not the answer in response.
By responding this way, you're merely reinforcing his own world-view and demonstrating that his utterances were effective in grouping him with the people he wants to be grouped with.
I invite you to do a gedanken experiment: What will happen if you tell him you agree 100%, though perhaps with minor concerns over specific wording?
#: Posted by Bill Tozier on 01/05 at 09:18 AM -
Thanks, paperwight:
Figure I should avoid hijacking the comments thread, so I'll drop this (here) after this post, but thought I'd mention, just in case anyone's interested or has ideas as to execution that I think I will pursue the longitudinal DB idea a bit further--at least as far as running it by someone at the NCSE and a few other folk I know who might be able to comment on practicality or provide material. I can imagine a large number of complicating factors when it gets actually to implementing such a scheme, but I think particularly in this area it might be worth the trouble. Because the creationists tend to be so very blatant about the reuse of ploys already clearly demonstrated to be deceptive, concerns re ambiguity of what comprises a sufficiently damning debunking are greatly ameliorated, leaving even the avenue of pleading 'oh, that didn't really answer me' probably ineffectual against many audiences. Might be a larger concern using the same approach in other fields (against, for example, people who actually demonstrate detectable trace amounts of intellectual honesty); I doubt, however it's likely to be as much trouble here. The end goal--of getting them appropriately jeered off the stage as obvious frauds, methinks, is well within reach for a reasonably capable critic armed with a record of their previous showings.
The ultimate goal, in my mind, is eventually to arm folks facing the systematic frauds in live debate. It's my observation that these people are actually pretty much already clay pigeons for competent critics in a written/online forum, where there's a running record of the exchange, and a bit of time for consideration of responses, and where there's a lot of material already available to demonstrate relatively concisely where the deceptions lie. Live debate, however, I hear, can be a different story; the dynamics of such venues--the often quite limited time frame, the relative effectiveness of charismatic/emotional/rhetorical appeals, the relative ease with which relatively poor arguments can be presented and then abandoned if they go ill--can be played to great effect by the more sophisticated frauds. Though hardly a silver bullet on its own, my thought is having such material would open up many new opportunities for a reasonably skilled debater to demonstrate to the audience the nature of the con. Further to the above: getting folk with tape decks into such speakers' debate performances and talks before friendly audiences might also have some utility; I'm sure there's stuff they'll try on the gullible and the obviously friendly they know they don't want to try before more competent critics. If true, it would be lovely to be able to call them on this stuff too.
I personally take a great deal of delight in evolutionary biology; before a live audience, I'd far rather be talking about some of the beauty of the science, rather than engaging in what, essentially, is a forensic exercise: demonstrating the culpability of transparently shameless intellectual criminals (and note I use the term 'intellectual' here only as a modifier to qualify the nature of the crime involved; the only sense in which such speakers have earned the use of the term). But I think this is a big part of the nature of the beast. Debate with these Soapy Sams is not particularly related to an open-ended discussion with honest folk who share genuine curiosity about how the world really works. I think, probably, demonstrating more and more frequently why it's so very different, and shining some light on the nature of the fraud being perpetrated is a necessary activity.
And hell. It could be a bit of fun. -
Bill, I agree. He's posturing, not thinking, and he's certainly not open to discussion -- he wants biologists to disagree with him.
I think that if I were to say I agreed with him, though, I would just become a new icon that he would use to flash to his peer group. And honestly, I can't agree with him: honesty, not simple affirmation of our dogma, is one of those things my peer group values. -
PZ -- So, you see, if you agreed with him (gedanken experiment, only), you would be affirming his tacit declaration of affiliation and reaffirming a constellation of opinions he has about the world. If you disagree with him, you do the same.
#: Posted by Bill Tozier on 01/05 at 10:55 AM
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I invite you to do a gedanken experiment : What will happen if you tell him you agree 100%, though perhaps with minor concerns over specific wording?
I imagine PZ's name would end up on a list of "scientists who doubt evolution." -
I've had a few debates with Skell and friends, and not friends, recently but quit after the same frustrations described above. However it was an interesting experience to see how some people can have such a twisted view of the scientific process. By the way, they are not ignorant fools and know plenty of facts, it just seems that they believe different rules apply to them.
You can join or lurk at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign/messages/
if you are interested.
For the time being at least they, the moderator, are allowing infidels to post.#: Posted by on 01/09 at 08:00 PM