At the last BASS meeting, I made a presentation called  “Quantum Mechanics for the skeptic: How to recognize quantum nonsense without being a physicist“.

Quantum Mechanics for the skeptic

Featuring appearances by: Professor Farnsworth, Professor X, the Great A’Tuin, Richard Feynman, and Deepak Chopra.

Wellness remedies can work best in tandem
UCLA Center for East-West Medicine fuses integrates alternative, conventional medicine for better treatment

Fellow BASS member Daniel sent a letter to the Daily Bruin in reply, and it appeared today.

Alternative medicine requires scrutiny (scroll down to second letter)

Congratulations to Daniel for getting it published!  Writing letters like these is one of the easiest ways to be an effective activist.  Let’s do it more often!

I heard a rumor that next Friday, March 13, there will be pizza at our meeting.  But you’re all skeptical, so you probably want to verify this for yourself by coming to our next meeting.  Ackerman 2408, 5:00-6:50 PM.

Meeting discussion

Our official discussion topic this meeting was SETI vs UFOlogy: why is one science and the other not? SETI, if you didn’t know, is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by searching for transmissions from far away stars. Spencer disagreed with the premise of the topic, saying that he did not in fact consider SETI to be science, because it cannot falsify any hypotheses. Matt took an opposing position, saying that it’s worthwhile to search for extraterrestrial life, even if we do not believe that it exists nearby. Of course, that was only the starting point, and we wandered off in many random directions from there.

Someone in the group has in fact seen a UFO! She said that in Granada Hills, there was a giant floating triangle of lights. Eventually, the lights zoomed off in different directions. There were several witnesses. I don’t have any explanation for that one. Andrew mentioned that there is something called Project Blue Book, which studied many UFO reports. The project concluded that there are no alien UFOs, though there are several cases that they couldn’t fully explain.

Another question: What is your favorite skeptical topic (not counting religion)? A few of the answers: conspiracy theories, mainstream economics, homeopathy. Mine, of course, is anything physics-related.

Speaking of physics-related skeptical topics, have any of you seen the LaRouchians (aka the LaRouchebags) on campus? They’re a very politically oriented personality cult surrounding Lyndon LaRouche, and I think they prey on college dropouts. Among other things, they believe Newton, who may or may not have even existed, stole all his ideas from Kepler. Newton’s laws are plagiarized from Kepler’s laws. Joe tried showing them a physics problem involving friction, and asked them to solve it using only Kepler’s laws (which only deal with orbital motion). Their reaction was to question his credentials, and then promptly ignore him. They literally turned their back towards him, even while trying to talk to someone next to him.

And has anyone seen that guy on Bruin Plaza who yells out random words? Apparently, he’s the Universal Philosophical Genius. Supposedly, he read a book about quantum mechanics, and then decided that hanging out at UCLA was good times. A sample argument: How can distance exist if points have no size? Yeah… At least he doesn’t have a history of harassing people on campus like the LaRouchians do.

Incidentally, LOGIC, the Objectivist club, debated the LaRouchians years ago. And the LaRouchians won! The LaRouchians basically said that Ayn Rand wrote some good fiction arguing Objectivism, but where is the real evidence? Joe’s analysis was that LOGIC seemed more interested in just talking about Objectivism than actually calling out the LaRouchians on all their BS.

Meeting minutes!  The following discussion is from last week’s meeting on February, Friday the 13th.  Please note that this week’s meeting is not in the usual room of Ackerman 2408.  Looking carefully, we instead have the room Kerckhoff 152 reserved.

I’ll let you all in a little secret.  If you stick around after meetings, you’ll find that we often have social activities, like eating out and watching movies.  It is a Friday night after all.

Meeting discussion

We began the meeting with a sample from the manifesto of Jim David Adkisson, the guy known for shooting up a Unitarian Universalist Church. Apparently, the Unitarian Universalists are Ultra-Liberals who hate America. They’re all part of a sinister cult of Secularizm [sic]! Hey, wait, I think he might also be talking about us!

Shifting topics, there has been a lot of recent news about the vaccine/autism controversy. If you were not previously aware of this controversy, the story is that autism usually appears in kids around the same age that they get the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. The scientific evidence tells us that two events are completely unrelated, but there is still a movement which seeks to promote a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The source of this claim is a 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield which showed a link between the two. The results of the paper have not been replicated by other scientists, and according to recent news, Andrew Wakefield’s research was fraudulent. Also very recently, a US court ruled that there is not sufficient evidence supporting the link between the vaccine and autism.

I would not be surprised, however, if the anti-vaccination movement still survives. This movement even includes the celebrities Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, because as we all know, actors are whom everyone goes to for medical wisdom. That said, the pro-science side also has actress Amanda Peet among their supporters, and I’m told that she even made a commercial. That’s cool. As Ben noted, if less then about 90% of the population take vaccines, it endangers so-called herd immunity, and thus endangers public health.

Our second topic was nominally Theistic Evolution and Intelligent Design. Theistic Evolution (TE) is the idea that God created the whole process of evolution, rather than tinkering around with the details. Intelligent Designers (ID) tend to dislike TE because, as Ana said, it’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But from a theological standpoint, one could also say that ID is simply insulting to the creator, as if God could not orchestrate such a grand process.

Getting sidetracked into some thought-provoking tangents, we talked about the irreducible complexity argument (favored by ID), which says that there exist complex systems which could not function if they were missing any parts. Spencer talked about the example of blood clotting, which requires a group of proteins. It seems that blood clotting would be nonfunctional if it were missing any of those proteins, but scientists have discovered organisms in water environments which require as little as two proteins.

Matt brought up the question: would we have done all this science if it weren’t for ID? Is ID driving a lot of funding to paleontology to find transitional fossils? Kwame thought that the major benefit was that it drives scientists to be more involved in politics. More science is always good, right? Lest any stone go unturned, Matt started talking about how we need science funding before we get more scientists. Fun times.

Derren Brown is an English magician and mentalist, and he is part of the great tradition of skeptical magicians. Watch: he’s really good.

I shall begin this by saying we should all be careful of thinking that we know what is going on. I’ve heard that magicians often have a much easier time fooling people with more education. This is because people with more education tend to think they can figure out the tricks, when really they’re no better than anyone else. Therefore, it’s best if I admit right away that I have no clue how Derren Brown does it.

But watching the above video, I was rather dismayed. I still don’t understand how he did it, even after he explained it. I’m not convinced that he’s doing this the way he says he is. Just because he drops a bunch of hints doesn’t guarantee that the person will think he wanted a BMX bike. I know I didn’t want a BMX by the end of the video. I guess he could have thoroughly pre-screened the person, or shown the single successful attempt out of many failed ones. But still, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had simply dropped a bunch of subliminal hints to make it look like that’s how he does it, while using some entirely different trick.

Of course, the Youtubers are claiming that his method is NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), which I really don’t believe. Derren Brown is actually critical of NLP, and has never claimed to use it (see Straight Dope). More generally, I think NLP is New Age bunk. On the other hand, something like hypnosis is much more plausible to me, since it’s empirically a real phenomenon. Many of Derren’s tricks look like they could be hypnosis, not that I know how to recognize it.

That was a single example where Derren Brown explained his trick. Usually, he doesn’t bother explaining (see more examples here, here, and here). It’s maddening. Derren says he mixes “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” and the only things he doesn’t use are actors and stooges. But I cannot figure out for any single trick whether he’s using some crazy psychology, some crazy conjuring, or a combination of both. I guess Derren intended it to be ambiguous. But because it’s ambiguous, there are so many unanswered questions. Obviously, the tricks don’t attest to anything supernatural, but do they attest to any naturalistic amazingness? Or are they the kind of tricks you’d slap your face over? Do the tricks require conscious knowledge of the performer? Or is it like cold reading, in that the performer can fool even himself into thinking he’s psychic?

Personally, I think this is what’s going on:

There’s an article in the latest issue of Skeptic Magazine called “A Climate of Belief” by Patrick Frank. It says that the case for Global Warming being caused by CO2 is severely hurt by the fact that computer models of the climate are uncertain. At first, I thought it had raised a fairly good objection, at least good enough that I, mostly clueless about climate science, would have no idea how to refute it. But it turns out that the article fails at basic statistics.

The main argument of the article goes like this:

Computer models of climate show error bars in their results, but these error bars only show one kind of error: the variation between multiple runs of the simulation. What the error bars don’t show is the “physical uncertainty”, the measure of difference between the predicted and actual.

How do we estimate the physical uncertainty? We use the climate model to “retrodict” past climate, and then compare to the actual climate we had during that time. Frank shows that such retrodictions only calculated the total cloud cover with 10% accuracy. Of course, to show this, he uses retrodictions of the 1979-1988 period, and compares them to observations of 1983-1990. I have to wonder if it’s good practice to compare different decades.

He goes on to say that 10% cloud cover has a huge impact on global temperature. How big? 1.1°C a year. That means that after a hundred years, the uncertainty is 110°C! See the graph below of the uncertainty as it increases with time.

This graph is what really set my skeptical bells ringing. Yes it’s true that if the uncertainty is very large, we can draw no conclusions. But how can the error be so large? Intuitively, it does not make sense. If all your results are accurate within, say, 10°C, but the error bars are 100°C, that either means you’ve overestimated your error, or you got really, really lucky. Even global warming deniers will grant that the models are accurate within 10°C. Are they feeling lucky?

So where does his estimate of uncertainty go wrong? Frank’s problem is pure statistical innumeracy. Unfortunately, statistics is not common knowledge, so this sort of innumeracy can go right over some people’s heads. Allow me to explain.

Problem 1: Uncertainties do not add! If you have 1.1°C uncertainty in the first year, and 1.1°C uncertainty in the next year, what is the cumulative uncertainty? You might guess 2.2°C, but this assumes that both uncertainties are always in the same direction. Half of the time, they will be in opposite directions and partly cancel each other out. The result when you work out the math is a total uncertainty of 1.56°C after two years. Sure, it’s possible that it will be off by 2.2°C, but error bars are only supposed to cover the most likely data. The uncertainty does not increase in a straight line. It should be proportional to the square-root of time. That is, it will increase more slowly after a little while. I was extremely shocked at such an egregious error. Has Frank never taken a statistics class?

Problem 2: Uncertainties are reduced in a stable system. The environment is a mostly stable system. That is, it doesn’t swing wildly in temperature every century. If the temperature is a little higher than average one year, something will push it towards normal temperature. For instance, higher temperature might increase cloud cover, which reflects more of the sun’s light away from Earth. Therefore, a temperature uncertainty this year may not survive to the next year. When I said the uncertainty is proportional to the square-root of time, I assumed that the system has no stabilizing mechanisms. In fact, the uncertainty will increase much more slowly than that.

Problem 3: What’s the difference between Frank’s uncertainty and the already reported error bars? Frank asserts that they are different, but I’m not so sure. Frank bases his uncertainty estimate on the predictions of cloud cover. But is this uncertainty different from the uncertainty between different runs of the simulation? I imagine each time the simulation is run, it gives a slightly different prediction of cloud cover in the same way that it gives a slightly different prediction of temperature. So not only is Frank calculating the uncertainty incorrectly, it may have already been accounted for.

Frank seems incredulous that we can estimate the temperature decades from now when we can’t even estimate next year’s temperature accurately. But actually, this makes sense. We can’t predict the whether next week, but we can predict overall trends between seasons. Large, overall trends are easier to predict than year-to-year fluctuations!

I only spot the statistical errors, because that’s the part I know. Given the kinds of errors I see, I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of it were also riddled with flaws.

But these instances do not constitute the only time the military junta has screwed over its own people. Of all the megalomaniacs, it is perhaps only General Ne Win and his successors who relied heavily on astrology and other superstition to chart out national policy…

A relatively harmless example of this is the practice of yadaya – a practice loosely resembling voodoo where a person essentially dresses up and impersonates an enemy to “steal” his or her powers. Thus on numerous occasions Burma’s generals have been known to dress up in drag as pro-democracy advocate and elected leader of the country Aung San Suu Kyi.

However, this story takes an ugly turn as, when told by his astrologer and numerologist that his lucky number was 9 and that he would live to be 90 if he “surrounded himself” with such auspicious digits, General Ne Win appeared before his country in 1987 and informed them that most of their money was now worthless. New money would be issued… not on the metric scale but rather in 45 and 90 kyat bills – since (for example) 45 is a product of and its digits add up to 9.

Yes, it’s a real 90 kyat bill. General Win was really that fucked up in real life.

The result to the country was catastrophic. While 5 and 10 kyats remained legal tender, the now-invalid 50 and 100 kyats that were the mainstay of most of the middle class’s savings in the nation resulted in a collapse in purchasing power and Burma being named least developed nation in 1987. Perhaps the saddest part of the story is that Ne Win’s astrologer was right – the good general lived to be 91 years of age. Maybe this article should be titled “Brutal Narcissistic Military Dictator Proves that Astrology Works!”

1:00:52 – Hitler’s views on superior races mirrors Darwin’s own theories, and a necessary pre-requisite to Nazism was Darwinism. At the time, many eugenicists used Darwin’s theory to justify the slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and infirms en masse.

The Anti-Defamation League respectfully disagrees -

“The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.”

It’s sad that Stein resorts to Godwin’s Law to bring his points across. Persons of all walks of life supported the Nazi Regime because, like the fascist regime in Italy, it promised to get the economy back on track and the trains running on time. Genocide is not linked with atheism – in fact, the Bible details and supports the genocide of the Caananites in Deuteronomy of the Old Testament, and the arrogance and superiority complexes of many Christians played a major role in the near-genocide of the Native Americans. There have been so many genocides that have taken place since even before Darwin came up with his theory, and many of those have been committed by people claiming to be Christians as well as persons of other religions.

1:13:21 – Stein quotes from Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, and seems to make the claim that Darwin was for weeding out those “undesirables” in society just like Hitler and the Nazis after him.

James Watson is a racist, but one cannot discount his research on the double helix because he was, just as one cannot discount Martin Luther’s claims that the Catholic Church of the time needed to be reformed because he was an anti-Semite. That’s not to say that Darwin was even a eugenicist; Stein conveniently omits the next passage in the book (this taken from Expelled Exposed) -

“The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”

1:25:27 – Richard Dawkins doesn’t know how the first self-replicating molecule (life) came to be. How could the exemplar of Darwinism not know? Surely Intelligent Design has won…

He’s evil and communist. How could Stein’s righteousness not prevail?

While there is no hard evidence, see Tom Cech’s Experiments under Part II of my refutation. While definitely more experiments need to be conducted, especially in finding an evolutionary basis for an RNA-based polymerase, but there is already far stronger evidence for abiogenesis than Intelligent Design.

1:25:55 – Dawkins claims that an advanced civilization evolved through Darwinism and then could have “seeded” this planet with life. Dawkins is only against God as an intelligent designer.

It’s an entirely plausible explanation that requires no supernatural forces that we can’t prove exist or don’t exist. In any case, this was not the crux of Dawkin’s argument and more of an aside; the film again disingenuously exploits this quote to try to push through the supposed ignorance of the evolutionists.

1:28:33 – In a speech, Stein says that “America is all about freedom”, and that the freedom to impose intelligent design as a legitimate theory in the scientific community is an essential right of the people!

We’re not out to squelch your personal views; you could be a Young Earth Creationist and I wouldn’t particularly care. But to say that ID is legitimate science when it doesn’t even follow the scientific method and instead basically says “I give up, God did it” is something that the film overlooks.

1:28:53 – Stein basically mirrors his own staged speech with Reagan’s memorable speech at the Berlin Wall.

I’m not particularly a fan of Reagan, but that speech did take political courage and was definitely one of his better moments. But to mirror where Ben Stein basically paid pro-ID people to give a seemingly spontaneous standing ovation after the speech is ridiculous.

If you don’t believe me, see for yourself (it’s a vidcap, so quality is terrible) -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4TQlljLfhM

31:22 – A cell could not have been the result of Darwinian evolution because it is a machine of at least 250 perfectly ordered proteins, each of which has to work to maintain a lifeform. Therefore there must be an intelligent design to make something this ordered and precise.

That’s assuming that proteins have all-or-nothing function, which is COMPLETELY false. There are countless mutants of even just one protein and different mutants of different proteins have different catalytic efficiencies. Most mutations don’t even have an effect on fitness, and are silent due to the degeneracy of the genetic code (multiple codons encode for the same protein). And different cellular structures can be analogous but not homologous, meaning that they have different evolutionary bases but the same function, just as with the flagella of the archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes – demonstrating that there are multiple pathways to adaptations that essentially do the same thing.

Furthermore, the longer back a protein’s lineage is, the more conserved (unlikely to change over time) it is since said protein has undergone selective pressure and any new non-silent mutations would be even more likely to be catastrophic to function. This can lead to some very inefficient proteins, such as Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase (Rubisco), which has enzymatic activity of only 4 molecules per second (most enzymes have activities of hundreds or thousands per second) but is critical for the carbon fixation cycle. If everything were so intricate and intelligently designed, Rubisco would be far more efficient and not have to consist of 40% of total proteins in the cell NOR would it be sensitive to something as simple as oxygen.

Rubisco. If it were intelligently designed, God must really have been on something.

Life can loosely be defined as a structure that is capable of metabolism, can self-replicate, and can regulate its own environment. There is strong circumstantial evidence that all three can occur individually even through very simple, immediate phenomenon; lipids, which were created by the Miller-Urey Experiment, can spontaneously form into micelles given a certain concentration of lipids (the Critical Micelle Concentation). These micelles are enclosed structures capable of forming a basis of a micro environment.

Abiogenesis Goes Far Beyond “Lightning Striking a Mud Puddle” – Thomas Cech’s Experiments

Nobel Laureate Thomas Cech showed through a fragment assay where he stripped away various portions of the bacterial ribosome that if 95% of all proteins were stripped away, the ribosome would still be capable of peptidyl transferase activity. He also found that the protein did not exist around the active sites of the ribosome. Through this and various other experiments, Cech demonstrated that RNA functions as both an encoder and a catalyst (a catalyzing RNA is referred to as a ribozyme).

Cech further demonstrated that such an RNA molecule can be relatively simple and can form through a variety of pathways. Cech sequenced random RNA sequences and found that out of a total of 10^85 possible molecules with just 172 bases, around one per 10^15 molecules was capable of some peptidyl transferase activity. Thus there are 10^70 different molecules with different bases capable of PT activity – and just for those molecules with 172 bases! Thus, one does not need a intricately and intelligently designed ribozyme to perform seemingly advanced metabolic activities – random polymerization and then selective pressure for those molecules best able to self-replicate will suffice.

39:31 – Ben fawns over Capital Hill town idiot Congressman Mark Souder (R-IN), who has proposed a bill preserving “academic freedom” at the Smithsonian in response to Sternberg’s “persecution”. This is just one of many examples of “The Academy”, a shadowy organization dedicated to eliminating God from the science lab.

Congressman Souder’s admits that he is from a district where the Democrats need to be conservatives to survive and the Republicans are even more far to the right. Belief in the literal truth of the Bible hardly makes him some sort of nonpartisan arbiter in the Evolution-ID debate. Oh, and parroting the Expelled movie ON his house website doesn’t really help.

41:29 – The National Center for Science Education is at the forefront of keeping Darwinism in power. They are one of many watchdog organizations, along with that demonic ACLU, which is in cahoots with The Academy.

And there are numerous watchdog organizations that do exactly the opposite. To imply some sort of liberal conspiracy theory is one of the many disingenuous claims this movie makes.

James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family and more guilty of spamming peoples’ e-mails than half of Nigeria

43:35 – Darwinism turns goodly, God-fearing Christians into Atheists! Just look at Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers! Beware!

(See 57:22 for more)

Although the percentage of Americans who believe evolution stand at an appallingly low 40% (only several percentage points above hardcore creationism), almost 80% of Americans consider themselves Christians… meaning that even if we assume that everyone in the remaining 20% believed in evolution, 50% of evolutionists would have to be Christians. I’m sure that they are Christians In Name Only, because they probably belong to some liberal church that supports gay marriage or is maybe just a front group for *gulp* humanism.

44:18 – Ben uses the example of the Abrams Report on MSNBC (now Verdict w/ Dan Abrams), who absolutely dismantled a lawyer from the Thomas More Law Foundation representing the defendants of the Dover School District Trial to show that the media is firmly in the hands of Big Science.

Kudos to Dan Abrams; he called out the IDers for what they really are – closest creationists. And while Abrams, Keith Olbermann, and maybe even Chris Matthews on MSNBC lean to the left, there have always been more conservative pundits on cable TV. Right-wingers Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck all gave the Expelled movie itself glowing reviews. I also have yet to see an unabashedly far-left organization that masquerades itself as “News”, just as FOX News does for the right.

45:41- Pamela Winnick “refused to take sides” in an article on the evolution-ID debate. But the Darwinists still persecuted her because she refused to show enough deference to evolution.

This is actually one area where Ben Stein gets it partially right. Winnick’s original article does try to set a neutral tone between the evolution-ID debate… although it does make the false assumption that ID is a serious theory that needs to be debated. But Stein gives no examples of how she was “persecuted”. And now Pamela Winnick cannot be considered a non-partisan journalist – her new book “Science’s War Against Religion“.

46:36 – Darwinism has infiltrated the courts in a last-ditch attempt to stop Intelligent Design. Representing the vanguard of the effort is the ACLU.

A court is a forum where all the evidence for or against Intelligent Design and/or the Theory of Evolution can be debated, discussed, and refuted. Oh wait, I forgot you don’t have any evidence – maybe that’s why you’re so afraid of the judicial system.

49:44 - Darwinists have given up on defending their own theory, and have simply resorted to attacking their opponent (religion and intelligent design) like a dirty politician.

On the contrary, this film and the IDers do the very same thing you’re decrying, and I have the liveblog to prove it.

53:12 – There have been plenty of religious people who are also scientists like Isaac Newton and Galileo. Darwinists don’t have a monopoly on good science.

No one said they did except the film, which is just used to build up a persecution complex. Francis Collins is a relatively conservative evangelical Christian and a very accomplished scientist who worked on the Human Genome Project – but the difference between him and the ID people is that the ID people use religion to manipulate science despite the overwhelming evidence.

57:22 – PZ Myers was not only converted to atheism through Darwinism, but now also actively seeks to marginalize religion, bring it down, and make it irrelevant in the public sphere.

Just one in a long line of fear-baiting arguments that this film makes. There are plenty of religious people who believe in the Theory of Evolution; even the Catholic Church and the very conservative Pope Benedict XVI’s doctrine (while not altogether rational) claim the theory as valid and leave it up to the (real) scientists.

Furthermore, Stein is insinuating that atheists are out to overthrow Christianity or something, which is completely false. This is to suggest that atheists are one monolithic force that is “out to get religion”, whereas in reality atheists are just as diverse in world view as the various Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other religious denominations. There are atheists like myself who are more or less content with keeping the separation between Church and State, and more radical atheists who seek actively to challenge the views of religious people just as Christian evangelicals do the same to nonbelievers.

The EVIL ATHEIST CONSPIRACY is coming! Watch out, or you may become one of “Them”.

There is also no conflict between religion and the Theory of Evolution as long as one sees The Bible and other holy books as a damned (pardon my language) allegory rather than word-for-word truths – as many moderate and liberal Christians have… not to mention that France during the Enlightenment experienced an upsurge of atheism up to a point in time where even the famous Cathedral of Notre Dame ceased to be a religious institution for a time – all of this before Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle.

Finally, the context of the question posed to PZ Myers is also severely lacking – if you were to ask an evangelical Christian what would be their ideal world, it would almost certainly be a monotonous one where there might not be homosexuality and every single individual were an evangelical Christian who adhered to the same brand of Christianity and was “saved”. It was obvious that PZ Myers would say that he preferred a world where scientific research would marginalize in all aspects of life.

Here is Part II and Part III of my grand exercise in poor time management.

00:42 – Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.

According to the Biological Society of Washington which had to bear the shame of that particular article being in their publication, Sternberg did not follow conventional procedure when deciding to publish the article, which was to have a board consisting of councilors, former and current presidents, and officers. But knowing that the Meyer article would not survive the rigors of peer review, Sternberg decided to personally fast-track the article to publication.

04:05 – Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDers are being persecuted.

I’ve already argued that Sternberg basically fell on his sword to look like a martyr.

05:11 – Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning – not promoting – intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.

Yes. She wasn’t promoting intelligent design. I’m sure some non-partisan independent source like… oh say the Washington Post will back her up…. right? The fact is that Crocker was pushing intelligent design in the classroom, and anything short of screaming at the top of your lungs “GOD DID IT” would be considered “neutral” in the eyes of Ben Stein.

“[...] this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.”

She even resorts to Godwin’s Rule during the very lecture TO HER STUDENTS. No wonder she was disciplined; This was indoctrination and even if she wasn’t playing the victim card and crying “persecution!”, George Mason was completely justified in what it was doing. -

“The students sat stunned. But Crocker was not done. From this ill-conceived theory, she concluded, much harm had arisen. Nazi Germany had taken Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, the credo that only the fittest survive, and followed it to its extreme conclusions — anti-Semitism, eugenics and death camps. ‘What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science, that some genes and some people should be killed,’ Crocker said quietly. ‘My grandfather had a genetic problem and was put in the hospital and killed.’”

06:35 – Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.

Right. The study of evolutionary biology in doctorates varies… and within that range is little or none at all. In any case, we’ve already shown in the case of Richard Sternberg how IDers love to play the victim card… and since Egnor still retains his post and cannot substantiate any of his claims, he’s probably just pissed off at a few bloggers.

07:20 – Professor Marks of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.

First of all, Marks is a professor of electrical engineering, not evolutionary biology – just to make things clear. And Baylor University did offer to keep the site hosted on the university as long as Marks changed the title from “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” to something less deceiving and if he disassociated the site from being affiliated with the university; even this evangelical magazine lauded Baylor’s compromise. But Marks, determined to be a martyr, refused, and the site is now hosted on non-university servers.

08:53 – Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” – no pun intended.

[If there are any astronomy majors who would like to add to this, please e-mail me at robinrzhang@gmail.com - you can probably refute this better than I can]

“By assessing the elements that compose our planet, they argue, we can tell that it was designed for multicellular organic life. The presence of carbon, oxygen and water in the right proportions makes it possible for organic life to exist; and this combination of minerals and chemical elements exists only on Earth. [...] our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also to give us the best view of the universe, as if Earth were designed both for life and for scientific discovery.”

So not only organisms now, but the Earth itself? So no chance through naturalistic properties a planet in the Goldilocks Zone and of the right size could have formed in the Sun’s accretion disc? And I suppose that stars are incapable of generating heavier elements that are later expelled via a supernova or that the proportion of chemical elements can change on this planet or on other planets has changed over these billions of years to one of more or less accommodation towards multicellular life? This guy deserves to get laughed out of the scientific community, not just potentially reprimanded.

By the way, there is a video version of The Privileged Planet on Google Video narrated by none other than John Rhys-Davies, AKA Gimli and Treebeard of Lord of the Rings. And just when I thought I couldn’t lose any more respected for him after his appearance in the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie “Chupacabra: Dark Seas” -

Yes, it’s El Chupacabra. On a fucking cruise liner. It’s that bad.

15:02 – Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator.

I suppose posting the image of your organization’s former logo won’t exactly help -

20:17 – As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.

On the contrary, Classical Darwinism was based on very flawed Lamarckian principles that basically assert that if a physical adaptation confers an advantage, an organism’s offspring will have that adaptation enlarged or lengthened. This of course is ridiculous and was supplanted as the “engine” of natural selection by genetic mutations caused by environmental hazards and errors by the cell’s DNA polymerases. This mechanism is far more plausible than Lamarck’s, and only serves to strengthen the Theory of Evolution.

21:50 – Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.

That’s like saying that we should give the flat-earth “theory” equal time too… because the round-earthers have been monopolizing the science world, you know.

22:54 – Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.

I wonder which group is going “hm, this looks too complex to undergo gradual genetic mutations, so I’m not going to attempt to try to find out how” and ignoring the scientific method.

25:15 – Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.

There have been debates over the definition of species that lie well outside the realm of Darwinism; in fact, there are at least ELEVEN different ways to define and differentiate a species, and evolution directly involves only one of them. A straw-man argument… although this vagueness can allow for inter-species breeding can be a huge source of genetic variation which only works more to the detriment of ID/Creationism.

27:04 – Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.

A low-blow character attack that I wouldn’t put past this movie – not to mention that Darwin observed finches and not humans. No matter Darwin’s supposed arrogance, scientists are allowed to make bold hypotheses IF they are grounded in reality, but the latter element would be missing from the Creationist’s mind.

28:13 – Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”

Nonspontaneous, or thermodynamically unfavorable reactions such as the formation of the various compounds in the Miller-Urey Experiment (see below) NEED energy to work. Lightning is a perfectly good source, and Stein’s incredulousness stems from his own ignorance.

28:45 – The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.

A visual representation of the Miller-Urey Experiment

This is such a common straw man argument used by many IDers/Creationists. The objective of the Miller-Urey Experiment was NOT to create life, but to see if a simulation of Earth’s early atmosphere consisting of simply inorganic compounds along with an energy source (lightning) could generate organic compounds. It was NOT a failure, and in fact after just one week, amino acids along with sugars, lipids, and nucleic acid precursors formed. It is impossible to have this happen in today’s atmosphere because oxygen turns the atmosphere from neutral to reducing – of course, oxygen was nonexistent due to the lack of photosynthetic organisms on the early Earth.

The many simple organic molecules formed by the Miller-Urey Experiment in just a week

29:35 – Ben Stein mocks Michael Ruse’s hypothesis that “life was jumpstarted on the backs of crystals”, stating that he would not bet Ben Stein’s Money on it (haha).

First of all, Michael Ruse is a philosopher of science, not a scientist. To imply that he is some sort of paragon of the Darwinist research scientist who is always up-to-date and completely knowledgeable about evolution, as Ben Stein strongly implies, is both disingenuous and intellectually lazy. But back to the argument – at first it looks inane and I admit I was bemused by his claims of “evolution jumpstarting on the backs of crystals”. However, while Ruse described his claim inartfully and the film probably took him out of context, he does actually make a valid point.

According to this article, reordering of liquid crystals into different mesophases can induce changes in embryonic development. Some biologists have even proposed that the protoplasm and contained mesophiles are the base determiner for metabolic activity while others have argued that a living system is simply a collection of mesophiles wrapped around by a membrane. If this is what Michael Ruse was referring to, the aforementioned evidence shown by various researchers and the implications it has on genetics possibly on a molecular level makes his claim much more auditable than “Ok, God did it”.