Salon.com > Gordy Slack

Texas on evolution: Needs further study

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:43:00 +0000

Language matters. And we are lucky that some people will go to the mat over a few words. In Austin, Texas, this week, scientists and creationists battled over whether to include the words "strengths and weaknesses" in the state's official statement about evolution. The words would influence how evolution is taught in Texas classrooms and would be immortalized in Lone Star textbooks. As the largest textbook market in the country, the decision could pressure other high school textbook publishers to conform to Texas standards.

Dan McLeroy, the Texas State Board of Education chairman, a dentist and self-described creationist, led the charge to mandate teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of the theory of evolution. After three days of high-pitched argument on both sides, the 15-member board, by a vote of 8-7, rejected the language, relieving textbook authors and publishers of the pressure to insert what opponents called "junk science" into their pages. But in a compromise that alarms and dismays many science education advocates, the board did adopt language that attempts to cast a shadow of doubt over the validity of the central evolutionary concepts of natural selection and common ancestry.

You are not your brain

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:24:00 +0000

For a decade or so, brain studies have seemed on the brink of answering questions about the nature of consciousness, the self, thought and experience. But they never do, argues University of California at Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, because these things are not found solely in the brain itself.

In his new book, "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness," Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick wrote, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." While Noë credits Crick for drawing popular and scientific attention to the question of consciousness, he thinks Crick's conclusions are dead wrong and dangerous.

Noe's conversational style is gentle, attentive and easygoing. But, in true philosopher fashion, he also picks his words deliberately, as if stepping off the path of right thinking would result in some tragic plummet into the abyss of illogic.

Expel, expelling, expelled!

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:24:00 +0000

A soon-to-be-released Ben Stein movie, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," which attacks evolutionary theory and its defenders in the culture war, has been screening to hand-picked audiences around the country for the past couple of weeks. Yesterday, PZ Myers, an evolutionary biologist and blogger, says he was politely waiting to take a look at the film when he was hand picked by a policeman to leave the theater. The cop told Myers that the producer had ordered him to leave.

Myers, who is well know both for his defense of evolutionary biology and his attacks on creationism, had a special reason to see the film; last year he was interviewed by its producer, Mark Mathis, who'd told him it was going to be called "Crossroads" and that it was going to be about science and religion. Myers agreed to the interview, only to find out that the film is actually a pro-creationist documentary accusing the academic community of unfairly "expelling" scientists who support intelligent design from their academic departments. Intelligent design is the hypothesis that there is evidence in the natural world for the existence of a supernatural designer. A federal court in 2006 deemed it a form of creationism.

The evolution of creationism

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:03:00 +0000

Two years ago, Pennsylvania federal Judge John Jones III handed down a stunning decision that many said would take down the intelligent design movement. But American creationism doesn't die. It just adapts.

Decades earlier, when the courts deemed creation science -- proto intelligent design -- a religious view and not constitutionally teachable as science in public schools, it adapted by cutting God off its letterhead and calling itself "intelligent design." The argument for I.D., and for "scientific creation theory" before it, is that evolution isn't up to the task of accounting for life. Given biology's complexity, and natural selection's inability to explain it, I.D. thinking goes, life must be designed by a, well, designer. I.D.ers skirted any mention of God, hoping to avoid getting snagged on the First Amendment's prohibition against promoting religion by arguing that I.D. was just a young and outlying science.

In the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Judge Jones ruled that if you want to teach intelligent design in science class, first you have to show that it is a distinct species from its earlier, creationist form, not just a modified type. You've got to show us the science part, he said. Besides, Jones declared, your intelligent designer is obviously God.

I feel your pain

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:40:00 +0000

A young woman sat on the subway and sobbed. Her mascara-stained cheeks were wet and blotchy. Her eyes were red. Her shoulders shook. She was hopeless, completely forlorn. When I got off the train, I stood on the platform, paralyzed by emotions. Hers. I'd taken them with me. I stood there, tears streaming down my cheeks. But I had no death in the family. No breakup. No terminal diagnosis. And I didn't even know her or why she cried. But the emotional pain, her pain, now my pain, was as real as day.

Recent research in neurobiology would explain my response as the automatic reaction of a kind of brain cells known as mirror neurons. On Nov. 4, neuroscientists announced that mirror neurons had for the first time been directly identified in humans. Previously their existence had only been inferred from primate research and the observation of human brains through fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging).

Enthusiasm among scientists has been spreading as growing evidence suggests that "mirrors" may explain the roots of human empathy and altruism as well as provide insight into such disorders as autism and even schizophrenia. But that's not all. In the past few years, dozens of studies have linked mirror neurons to the emergence of language, abstract reasoning and even self-awareness or consciousness. "The self and the other are just two sides of the same coin. To understand myself, I must recognize myself in other people," says Marco Iacoboni.

Inside the Creation Museum

Thu, 31 May 2007 11:41:00 +0000

The Creation Museum swung open its stegosaurus-guarded gates to the public Monday, and I have to say it's out of this world. For those of us raised in natural history Meccas like the American Museum in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, or the Field in Chicago, the beautifully designed museum induces an eerie vertigo. All the familiar characters are here: T. rex, giant skeletons of triceratops and apatosaurus, a pterosaur spreading its wings above the crowd, live exhibits of birds, amphibians and reptiles, and the dripping, hooting and chirping soundtrack of the primeval forest. There are also a couple of unfamiliar faces, for a natural history museum, in the tan and finely muscled bodies of Adam and Eve.

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. "It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom," Ham says. "We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."

Dissecting God

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 11:08:00 +0000

Daniel C. Dennett is a big man with a big appetite for intellectual fights. A celebrated philosophy professor and the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, he is best known for his arguments that human consciousness and free will boil down to physical processes. When theologians, New Agers and other philosophers and scientists complain about scientific reductionism -- the effort to reduce everything, including human behavior and spirituality, to material properties -- they are complaining about Dennett. To which he retorts: "'Reductionism' has become a meaningless code word for 'I don't like that theory.'"

In 1995, with "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Dennett provoked a firestorm of controversy for insisting that Darwin's ideas are a "universal acid" that "eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view." Dennett exposed his own worldview in 2003, when he outed himself in the New York Times as a "bright," a fancy new term for atheist. "We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny -- or God," he wrote.

Survival of the unfittest

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 11:00:00 +0000

In a remarkably unequivocal decision Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that teaching intelligent design in public science classrooms in Dover, Pa., is prohibited by the constitutional separation of church and state. In the decision, Judge John E. Jones III declared that the school district's claim that I.D. is a scientifically valid alternative to evolution is simply wrong. "Intelligent design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism," he writes.

The judge's ruling was not a surprise to those of us who had spent time at the trial, which had earned the nickname Monkey Trial II, a reference to the famous 1925 court case in which Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution. In the Harrisburg, Pa., courtroom, we could see from the first week that the trial was going badly for I.D. proponents. That the school board intended to promote their religious views was evident, as was the strong scientific consensus that the basic tenets of evolution were unimpeachable.

Intelligent designer

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 13:00:00 +0000

Richard Thompson has a startling habit of thrusting his fist to his mouth and biting his index finger between the first and second knuckles, as if trying to keep himself from saying too much. But as quickly as it goes in, the finger comes out again and his words begin to flow. He cannot help himself. He must tell the truth. As he sees it.

Thompson is the founder, president and chief council of the Thomas More Law Center, a nonprofit group in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Law Center is representing the Dover School Board pro bono in the current landmark case that pits the theory of evolution against "intelligent design," the theory that some features of the natural world are best explained as the products of an intelligent cause or designer. The Law Center describes itself as "the Sword and Shield for People of Faith," and was originally funded by ultraconservative Domino's Pizza millionaire Thomas Monaghan, who is, like Thompson, a Catholic.

On Sept. 26, the first day of trial, Thompson, in an elegant dark suit, is standing on the steps of the U.S. Middle District Courthouse in Harrisburg, Pa. The trial has adjourned for the day. It is expected to continue through the first week of November.

The atheist

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 18:29:00 +0000

Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely "gene survival machines," he asserted in the book.

Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as "The Blind Watchmaker," "Unweaving the Rainbow" and "Climbing Mount Improbable." His recent work, "The Ancestor's Tale," traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.

Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, "You, sir, are an ignorant bigot."