PZ Myers. 2005 Nov 21. Witt in the Seattle Times. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/witt_in_the_seattle_times/>. Accessed 2008 Aug 30.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Monday, November 21, 2005
Witt in the Seattle Times
In an opinion piece in the Seattle Times, Jonathan Witt is in high dudgeon over those intolerant "Darwinists" who want to suppress the Truth. Sadly, his piece is one half-truth after another, all misleadingly twisted to give an overwhelmingly fraudulent impression. You would think that someone who honestly wants to address a scientific issue would not resort to such distortions and propaganda…but that's the Discovery Institute for you.
He begins with the outrageous action by certain Dover citizens to hold their school board accountable for diluting the science content of the classroom.
In short order, the School District was dragged into court by a group insisting the school policy constituted an establishment of religion, this despite the fact that the unmentionable book bases its argument on strictly scientific evidence, without appealing to religious authority or attempting to identify the source of design.
What don't they mention? Well, that the Discovery Institute abandoned Dover and would not help with the defense of the book, and the book itself (strangely unmentionable in Witt's article, for reasons I don't understand; are they ashamed of it?) is Of Pandas and People. As has been amply demonstrated by the testimony of its publisher and any examination of its contents, it is not based on scientific evidence, but is creationism warmed over, plain and simple. I'm afraid all of Witt's claims of scientific legitimacy for the book are false, and I suspect that he knows it, or he wouldn't have been reluctant to mention the title.
Witt also singles out a comment I made on the Panda's Thumb (I have to mention, since Witt names me in my home town newspaper, an important message: Hi, Mom!):
Our only problem is that we aren't martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians.
Of course, he excludes all the context to claim that it's all about defending dogma. I've already discussed this ID claim in a post titled, "While we're at it, let's also fire the math teachers who can't do algebra"—it's not about dogma, it's about competence. Witt wants to pretend it's a sign of a "growing controversy," but it's not. If we fire math teachers who can't do basic algebra, does that mean that algebra is a concept under attack from a growing body of educated critics, or that we've got standards that teachers are expected to meet?
Witt's next complaint is to bring up the "martyrdom" of Richard Sternberg, who apparently was under attack by the PZ Myers Playbook.
The most prominent victim in the story was Richard Sternberg, a scientist with two Ph.D.s in evolutionary biology and former editor of a journal published out of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. He sent out for peer review, then published, a paper arguing that intelligent design was the best explanation for the geologically sudden appearance of new animal forms 530 million years ago.
Sternberg promoted the publication of an exceptionally poor paper and rightly enough elicited the disgust of competent scientists. Witt recites the complaints received by the US Office of the Special Counsel from Sternberg, but doesn't bother to mention that the OSC dismissed his complaints, and that he's still working at the Smithsonian…some martyr!
He also neglects to mention how the NCSE recommended handling the issue:
However, one particularly entertaining part of the opinion occurs when NCSE’s advice to Smithsonian staff is discussed. Among the Smithsonian staff, there was evidently a fair bit of outraged email discussion of Sternberg’s actions — Sternberg had, after all, just involved the PBSW and the Smithsonian in an internationally-noticed scientific scandal, and had guaranteed that the PBSW and Smithsonian would now have their good names put on Discovery Institute bibliographies and talking points for the foreseeable future. In NCSE’s limited contact with individuals at the Smithsonian, we gave our usual advice (also found in the PT critique of Meyer’s paper), namely: don’t overreact, and instead focus on criticizing the scientific problems with Meyer’s article and Sternberg’s editorial decisions. In the OSC complaint, this gets portrayed as some kind of scandal.
This can't be emphasized enough: Meyer's paper was shoddy work, and Sternberg shepherded it through peer review in a shifty manner. What Witt actually wants us to do is shut up when his fellow travelers try to publish bad science; it's not about some mythical Darwinian dogma at all.
Witt dives into the quote mines, again.
One cause for their insecurity may be the theory's largely metaphysical foundations. As evolutionary biologist A.S. Wilkins conceded, "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."
If anyone is familiar with A.S. Wilkins work, they'd know that this was a very peculiar comment, one that perhaps must have had something more to it. Yes, it did, as the rest of the paragraph shows:
Yet, the marginality of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology, from diverse questions about human nature to the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting evolutionary events. A spate of popular books on evolution testifies to the development. If we are to fully understand these matters, however, we need to understand the processes of evolution that, ultimately, underlie them.
That was from the Panda's Thumb, in August. Here it is in November, and the DI is still shamelessly promoting this dishonest partial quote. And he compounds it this time!
And in the September issue of The Scientist, National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell argued that his extensive investigations into the matter corroborated Wilkins' view.
Philip Skell is not a credible source. This is a guy who argues that discoveries of hominid fossils are not informed by or contribute to our understanding of evolution. His whole obsessive schtick is to claim that biologists (he is not one) do not use evolutionary concepts at all, and that the whole field would be unchanged if we abandoned it. Need I add that this is not in corroboration of any view held by A.S. Wilkins?
It's all more fireworks and smoke from the Discovery Institute, a recycling of tired old lies into yet another press release that a gullible media will print without verifying anything in it. John Lynch also finds Witt's article appalling—isn't it about time for newspapers to realize that the Discovery Institute is all spin and no substance, and to start roundfiling their submissions in the same way they would press releases from the Flat Earth Society?
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It has taken me longer than I admit but my standard routine now is to check all quotes from the ID creation crowd, senior or junior fellow or.... When I can't find them I withhold judgement, remaining suspicious and doubtful.
"They" have made this easier, though, in that they use the same ones over and over, practicing I suppose a couple of the "Rs" of solid waste: recycling and reuse. Now, if they could learn "refuse" or "reduce" or "rethink".
Ah, science by the column, one after another and all smoke and mirrors.
Thanks for your comments.#: Posted by on 11/21 at 01:08 PM -
Johnny TWitt can't help but spread Lies for Jesus about the world's scientists. The Johnsonite Christian cult which Johnny Twitt's employer promotes demands this repugnant behavior from Johnny.
Surely Johnny's newest student, Little Lyin' Casey Luskin, is busy right now working on his own anti-science smear piece.
And get ready: Lyin' Luskin has managed to pass the California bar exam so we can all look forward to reading his inevitable misrepresentations about Constitutional law in addition to his well-documented utterly bogus claims about "intelligent design research programs" and the like.
http://members.calbar.ca.gov/exam/search.aspx?ln=luskin&fn=casey#: Posted by on 11/21 at 02:38 PM -
a scientist with two Ph.D.s in evolutionary biology
My knee-jerk response to boasts of multiple PhDs is "what, you didn't get it right the first time?"
When I did mine, not very many years ago, my understanding was that the PhD is basically an academic 'driving test' - a recognition that you're competent to do original research and to assess others' competency. If you can pass it once, passing it twice doesn't say anything new.
There might be a case for doing a second PhD if the first one isn't from a recognised institution, or in a different discipline where basic research methodologies are significantly different. But doing two in the same discipline seems superfluous; after you've got the first, why not just publish subsequent research like everybody else?#: Posted by Geoffrey Brent on 11/21 at 04:19 PM -
Bah! Why is it that my fair city, Seattle, has to be home to these dishonest wackjobs. Time to write another letter to the editor.
#: Posted by Dave Bacon on 11/21 at 05:08 PM
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But doing two in the same discipline seems superfluous; after you've got the first, why not just publish subsequent research like everybody else?
But everyone else only has one Ph.D.
He has two.#: Posted by on 11/21 at 05:26 PM -
Neat! PZ is now a famous defender of science! And may I point out a correlation? When I was a postdoc at at the University of Waterloo (in Canada), I went to a couple of parties at Jeff Shallit's house, and he has since became famous (among this crowd, at least) for his elegant debunking of Dembski's nonsense. I hang out at PZ's blog, and he likewise becomes a celebrity.
#: Posted by Jonathan Badger on 11/21 at 05:28 PM
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Nigel "But everyone else only has one Ph.D."
Not everyone. the only recently late John Maynard Smith had zero -- and he was a Crafoord Prize winner for his work in evolution, and his "Evolutionary Genetics" is a pretty standard undergrad textbook even now. But he was probably among the last of that breed of great scientist without formal qualifications.
I do of course realize, given your handle, you were referencing "but this one goes up to 11"#: Posted by Jonathan Badger on 11/21 at 05:37 PM - Well, heck, Jonathan...when are you going to stop by my house for a beer so I can get really famous?
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Dmbski has gone after you on the same quote Witt uses.
#: Posted by on 11/21 at 05:52 PM
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i thought of you immediately pz, when i read that piece.
#: Posted by dread pirate roberts on 11/22 at 12:00 PM
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Youc all those hlaf-truths? You should have heard the whoppers Behe regurgitated on CNN yesterday morning. Happily, Michael Chapman did a pretty good job of reality-checking the idiots who phoned in with questions during his segment.
#: Posted by on 11/22 at 01:21 PM
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Also meant to add, it doesn't seem to be widely reported, but Richard (occasionally 'von') Sternberg has worked for some years now as a *taxonomist* at the National Center for Bioinformatics Information (NCBI) -- the folks who bring you Genbank.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/taxonomyhome.html/
Disturbing, no?#: Posted by on 11/22 at 01:34 PM -
PZ's treatment of the Sternberg affair is wrong.
The Office of Special Counsel has *fully confirmed* Sternberg's complaints of workplace harrassment against the Smithsonian, and has found no evidence that there was anything unusual in the way Meyer's paper was published.
As for the Panda's thumb article critiquing Meyer's paper: four professionals with five Phds between them disagree, apparently, and feel that it was good enough to print.#: Posted by on 12/11 at 01:39 PM -
The OSC under Bush-appointee James McVay did drop the whole case. What they had discovered was that a great majority of the scientists at the Smithsonian found Sternberg's creationist leanings execrable, and the report agreed that that would make for a hostile work environment.
I agree. Incompetence does tend to irritate one's peers.
However, even though the OSC said they had "preliminary" support (and conceded that the SI had further documents that they had not reviewed), they decided not to pursue the case.
While James McVay may not have found anything unusual in the way the paper was published, most practicing scientists would find it suspicious and deplorable. The OSC is a hotbed of hackery right now, thanks to Bush, and McVay himself is scarcely competent: he is "a former Marine drill sergeant and insurance attorney with no experience in employment law, whistleblower law, or federal-sector work" who refused and was unable to respond to the scientific issues in the Meyer paper. -
And of course we still don't know who did the peer review for the dubious Meyers article, and what rationales the reviewers used to recommend publication. Without that information, we can't know whether anything unusual happened to get this rather unusual paper published. The OSC isn't a trustworthy authority on this one.
#: Posted by on 12/11 at 04:35 PM