The K Expanse

Brief Notes on Books

2006-03-26T18:58:00.000-08:00

Currently reading: Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Next up, or in parallel: Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett.

I saw yet another new anti-evolution book in the bookstore today. Or more precisely, an anti-human evolution through a messed up and naive understanding of "Darwinism" book by a philosopher way out of his depth. More later.

An Urban Outfitters opened in town recently. Last week the local chapter of the Girls Shouldn't Want To Have Fun Brigade protested them because along with the clothing and accessories they have the audacity to sell Books!On!Sex! The odd thing was that they didn't have signs about what they were protesting, just identical printed signs with just a website address. According to Technorati and Google, they have no inbound links at all.

Technorati Tags: books, religion, evolution, darwinism

Housekeeping

2006-03-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

Time to update the sidebar a bit. Google Reader unveiled a new feature, sharing your reading lists. It allows you to publically share your "starred" items or items with a certain label (tag). I've decided to share my starred items in the sidebar, making a no-fuss recommened reading list. Google Reader has some interesting bells and whistles and could be a great RSS reader instead of a mearly good one if they could work out some of the interface and backend kinks.

The blogroll also badly needed an update, as a lot of my favorite blogs have moved around the past few months.

Technorati Tags: blogging, google reader

McCarthyism at UCLA

2006-01-18T18:36:00.000-08:00

There was a time when Red-hunting John Birchers had to be surreptitious in taping teachers when looking for dirt, and face embarrassing national exposure when caught. Today, they openly solicit their narcs by offering them beer money, and the national media gives them free advertising. A recently formed UCLA alumni association has named a "Dirty 30" professors they're targeting. Their crime is being liberal and allegedly indoctrinating their students. Sounds more like a bunch of crybabies who don't like being exposed to contrary opinions.

Technorati Tags: Bruin Alumni Association, UCLA, McCarthyism, college, professors, politics, liberal

El Tejon Case Settled

2006-01-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

The El Tejon school district has settled the lawsuit against it and has agreed not to offer a Young-Earth Creationism slanted "Philosophy of Design" class, or any other class that endorses creationism.

Americans United press release

Technorati Tags: El Tejon, Creationism, Evolution, Church and State, Philosophy, Intelligent Design

Monkey Business on My Mind

2006-01-17T00:23:00.000-08:00

If humans evolved, it's obvious that evolution shaped our brains as well as the rest of our bodies. But some people can't get over the monkey connection. Joe Carter argues that natural evolution can't explain why "monkey minds" are reliable. It's basic presuppositionalism, which is a standard issue Joe Carter argument.

But what they fail to realize is that non-teleological evolution is, as Roy Clouser says, self-assumptively incoherent:

Being able to trust our belief-forming capacities is an assumption necessary to believing in the theory of evolution. Unless we can trust our perceptions and belief-forming capacities to reveal reality, there are no reasons to believe the theory of evolution at all. In fact, if we can’t trust our perceptual beliefs, there is no reason to believe that there are such things as brains or life forms to be explained. [emphasis in original]

This is not to say that that the relation between evolution and our capacity to acquire truth is outright false. It just means that the claim undercuts its own justification: If we believe we have reliable belief-forming apparatus then we have reason to believe that non-teleological evolution is false. Likewise, if we believe that non-teleological evolution is true then we have no reason to believe the theory since we would have no reason to trust that our belief-forming apparatus is reliable.

But isn't our ability "to trust our belief-forming capacities" necessary to believeing that anything is true? Replace "theory of evolution" with X and it's obviously applicable to any belief at all. This hardly makes for an argument against evolution, or against anything else unless you're shooting for a postion of universal skepticism. It just begs the question to say that a reliable mind is evidence that evolution is false.

Joe lists what he consideres four errors in "naturalisitc epistemology". In summary:

It's circular reasoning to assume rational beings are produced through non-rational processes
It's wrong to assume that all true beliefs are adaptive, and vise versa.
Material processes can't explain beliefs in non-material things.
Naturalists are too emotionally attached to their theory to notice that it's absurd.

The last is just typical mud-slinging from Joe. He just gets upset when others don't appreciate his obvious brilliance. The first is confusing arguing from evidence that evolution occured with a "circular argument".

Joe makes a major error in shifting from "reliable mind" to "true beliefs" as the thing being selected for. It is not the beliefs themselves that are advantagous, it's the ability to accurately interpret and respond to the environment. Let's say that a monkey is looking for some fruit to eat. She has learned from prior experience that green fruit make her sick, but red fruit don't, so she'll act on her beliefs and look for red fruit. And of course she has to have an accurate means of determining which fruit are red, and so on.

Simply fixing true beliefs through evolution implies a hodgepoge, not the ability to reason, and sounds akin to a distorted version of divine revelation. It sounds like Joe is viewing naturalism through his presuppositionist glasses, and his criticism is suffering for it.

There is another point. Any standard of "reliable" is not the same as "perfect". It is acceptable, indeed unavoidable, that some of our beliefs are mistaken. This isn't a flaw, but something any epistomology has to deal with. Atheistic naturalists, such as myself, see the whole history of belief in spiritual entities as mistaken. What counts is that there be a process to correct errors in our beliefs and reasoning. Atheistic naturalists do so by turning the many of same tools proven on the natural world to the spiritual world and have found it lacking.

Moreover, it could be argued, ala Carter, that since the immaterial is not a part of the environment, and therefore beliefs about the immaterial are not adaptive, that beliefs about the immaterial are inherently less reliable.

Carter's criticisms don't stand up, and his main thesis, like much presuppositionalism, is simply begging the question.

Technorati Tags: Intelligent Design, Creationism, Evolution, Joe Carter, Atheism, Philosophy, Presuppositionalism, Mind

Is Intelligent Design legit as a philosophy class

2006-01-15T00:55:00.000-08:00

The latest creationism case involves El Tejon Unified School District ("The Grapevine" in Calif.) and the attempt to teach a "philosophy" class in creationist doctrine. Pro-evo blogger wonders if this is a good fight to get into.

nightlight: Creationism in California - Lawsuit and revised syllabus

What is less clear, to me at least, is that this class should not be taught in conjunction with a public school. It should be plain that I am in favor of opposing the spread of "Intelligent Design" pseudo-science, but I also favor a method of resistance that considers the probable benefit to the effort.

In other words, is this class so egregious - legally, politically and scientifically - that it must be addressed in the courts? Or is it small potatoes, something that taking action against will, in sum, diminish the reputation and resources of those who oppose pseudo-science?

Yes, it's egregious. Simply labeling it as a philosophy class doesn't get around the fact that they're promoting a religious viewpoint. As I commented on the post, there is no constitutional requirement for scientific purity. There is one for the separation of church and state. It's quite clear from the history of this course that the teacher is advocating creationism.

In fact, labeling it as philosophy makes it less legitimate, legally. In Establishment Clause cases, one criteria examined is whether there is a legitimate secular purpose. The aim of Scientific Creationism in the 80's and Intelligent Design today is to provide what appears to be a scientific reason to teach it in public schools. The courts found their scientific legitimacy lacking, just a thin veneer over religious doctrine, and failed that criteria. By abandoning even the veneer of science, no secular justification is even possible for advocating creationism.

This is not to say that it should be censored outright. After all, theology is a legitimate branch of philosophy. But, this class is more appropriate for Sunday school than public school.

Technorati Tags: El Tejon, evolution, creationism, intelligent design, church and state

Brief Notes on Books

2006-01-09T00:35:00.000-08:00

Browsing in B&N today I see that Marvin "Compassionate Conservatism" Olasky jumps into the Intelligent Design fray with a new book: Monkey Business: The True Story Of The Scopes Trial with co-author John Perry, reiterating a non-sequiter argument every other ID advocate has committed to print.

Shorter Olasky and Perry: The Hollywood version of the Scopes Trial fudged the history, therefore Darwinism is an empty religious philosophy, and ID is the real deal, and any attempt to portray us as the anti-intellectual know-nothings we are is just bigotry fostered by the secular-liberal-media-elites.

In the same vein is A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion by Pamela Winnick. I've read a few chapters in the store, and I have to say it's exceedingly difficult for her to come to any sort of coherent point in the evolution chapters. (e.g. Some scientists are "celebrities"? How horrible!)

On to books worth purchasing. I'm close to finishing Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science. It's been a good read and I'll be posting a full review later.

Four months till the new Vinge novel is out.

Christian quote of the day

2006-01-01T21:42:00.000-08:00

Someone clicked the "Next Blog" button from purposedrivenforchrist and ended up here. I just had to check it out when I saw it in my referers. Blogger reads Biblical porn poem and gets hot.

I also I have been reading in Song of Solomon it is a really great book it real comforting that God could love me as a husband could that our relationship is that intimate. link

Lordy...And there's more where that came from.

A bit of maintenance for the new year

2006-01-01T18:35:00.000-08:00

It's a new year so it's a good time to do a little template/blogroll maintenance. I did find an oddity or two that may have resulted from Blogger helpfully updating it for new features, even though I've tweaked the original a bit. The standard Tic Tac Blue didn't handle text scaling well (old monitor was going fuzzy), so I changed some of the measurements to be font-relative. Plus I moved the about text from sidebar to header, and added the requisite blogroll and buttons. I've added the new RSS icon for feed links.

My blogroll is pretty much all the blogs I'm currently reading minus inactive and comment feeds. It's generated from an OMPL file from my local feedreader. I've also dethroned Slashdot from my 10 Best catagory in favor of Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory. He's been doing a fantastic job analyzing the whole warrantless wiretapping scandal, and rebutting the thin defenses from the Bush administration and its blogger supporters. The 10 Best catagory stems from the fact that I needed a way to get my ruthlessly alphabetical feedreader to prioritize my must-reads, and I'm too lazy to edit them back to whatever catagory they belong. Just take it as my personal recommendation for great writers.

Enough meta stuff for now. Hopefully I'll actually write more on this blog this year than last.

Reflections on Rain

2005-12-31T22:04:00.000-08:00

We finally got our first really good rain storm of this winter today, the last day of the year. We just keep catching the tails of storm fronts as they plow through north of us lately. That means scattered, light showers at best. But this latest one was apparently a "100-year storm" for the Bay Area and we got a fair amount of rain here as a result.

I like the rain. I love the sound on the roof, especially at night when I'm going to sleep. I find it very relaxing. I like the smell of it too; during and after. I like going out in it on occasion. And today I did. It's neat to go downtown and watch the swollen creek rush by.

Growing up in Northern California, we got decent rainstorms often in the winter (occasionally even snow!). Here in SLO, not so much, and it was one of the first differences that struck me with winter here. It all has to do with the jet stream. Some years, it carries the storms to the north of us, other years it dips down and we get hit. Our latitude places us right on the fringe.

My oddest rain experience (for a Californian): I was in Houston for a student conference when a tropical storm hit. The group I was with were all standing under the hotel's carport waiting for our airport shuttle. We were all standing outside quite comfortably in t-shirts and shorts (for our flight back to LAX) while globules of rain fell not more than a few feet from us. It was a torrent of big fat drops that were warm to the touch when I held out my hand to them.

Creationist Letter Fisking

2005-12-29T22:33:00.000-08:00

Bruce Curtis' letter appeared alongside mine in the local alt-weekly. Bruce is a frequent letter writer in these parts and quite a wingnut. As one can expect he weighs in on the side of intelligent design.

Despite his lazy research, thanks to Jeff Hornaday for his willingness to at least discuss the debate over intelligent design.

Instead of searching the Internet for scholarly publications offering theories to explain the challenge of irreducible complexity - virtually none exist -

In his own search Bruce must have missed this page, which lists over a dozen such articles. Granted, if you restrict yourself to peer-reviewed science journals addressing IC directly, the pickings may be slim, but that also holds for pro-IC articles, so there hasn't been much of a challenge to explain. IC itself is little more that a recasting of Paley's old Watchmaker argument with smaller parts.

he looks up the same tired urban myths, those old transitional species chestnuts that have been revealed as hoaxes or products of nonscientific extrapolation.

You always know you're dealing with an open-minded person when they reject evidence out-of-hand like that. Archaeopteryx, the species Hornaday references in his article, is not a hoax, though some evolution deniers have claimed so. I'd have to say that Bruce is the one pedaling the same tired urban myths. It's absurd to contend that all the transitional fossils in this list are hoaxes or unscientific extrapolation.

For us who grew up in the 1950s on depictions of simple living cells, recent strides in molecular biology have only begun to reveal the vast complexity with which even a simple virus or white cell operates. Lehigh University biology professor Michael Behe, in his book "Darwin's Black Box: the Biochemical Challenge To Evolution," reveals the fantastic odds against even the simplest building blocks inside cells forming spontaneously.

As I've pointed out above, Behe's thesis has been roundly criticized. Despite the fundamental premise that evolution works through incremental changes, some critics insist that the improbability of spontaneous leaps is an insurmountable problem. Such spontaneous leaps are unnecessary.

Now I'll grant that Behe attempts to show that such spontaneous leaps are necessary, but he fails at it. Behe says that a biochemical system is "irreducibly complex" when it requires all of it's parts working together to preform its function, such that removing any part will cause the system to fail. The system therefore, couldn't evolve by incrementally adding parts step by step, since it couldn't function without all of them.

There are many problems with that argument. The main one is that when Behe looks at biochemical systems with their functions and parts today and pronounces them IC, he fails to account for how their functions and parts have themselves changed as they evolved. An efficient IC system could have evolved from a non-IC system that did the job sloppily, for example. A system could have had a different function in the past and was co-opted into a new one. This is not juct an academic objection. There are many examples where variations on the same basic parts preform a variety of different functions in molecular biology.

Put simply, you don't have to believe in God to question the validity of Darwinism, but whenever you do, you get attacked as some kind of theistic thinker,

No. A) There are some evolution deniers that aren't, the late Fred Hoyle for example. B) That said, the vast majority of evolution deniers are. C) In discussing intelligent design, you simply can't deny the theistic nature of the alleged designer. D) Concerning you specifically, Bruce, you have too much written history to suggest that you aren't.

and that itself reveals the tremored paleontological, archaeological, and scientific ground on which macroevolution tries to stand.

This is an epic non-sequiter. Pointing out the obvious theistic underpinnings of ID says nothing at all about evolution.

Why Hornaday didn't do his homework on the fundaments of the ID debate is perplexing.

Hornaday's piece may not have been the best on ID that I've ever read, but when he says, "The operative expression is abracadabra, also known as hocus pocus, and it consists of a supernatural being...," I'd say he got the fundamentals down

When you anger supporters of Darwinism merely by questioning the science behind it, you reveal it to be a creed, a statement of faith and not legitimate science.

No, you simply reveal that we're tired of the long refuted denials that pass as questioning the science behind evolution.

As North County Christian school principal Bob McLaughlin rightly recognizes, open debate is the one thing that distinguishes education from indoctrination.

Open debate is no substitute for getting the facts straight.

Letter on Intelligent Design Published

2005-12-29T18:37:00.000-08:00

I got a Letter to the Editor published today in the New Times on their ID story (2nd one down). They published two others on it as well, one from a creationist. I'll fisk Mr. Curtis' letter a bit latter.

Cato Fellow on Dover

2005-12-25T13:55:00.000-08:00

The Cato institute has nothing to do with the Intelligent Design issue or the Dover case. Then why are they quoted in the Knight-Ridder wire story about the case? In an opinion piece (also K-R)Cato Fellow Andrew "Why does ID get all the press? What about my pet issue?" Coulson uses the Dover decision to promote "school choice".

The problem is that his ruling can do little to end the battle over evolution versus creationism, because it doesn't address the root cause of that battle: our monolithic government-sanctioned schools.

It's that simple. By combining a pluralistic society with a one-size-fits-all education system, we have created a perpetual conflict machine.

It's so terrible that we have to fight ignorance and promote proper science education, so we should just get rid of the education system altogether! It's caused nothing but trouble!

His identification of the "root cause" is pretentious and self-serving. There already are private Christian schools that teach creationism/ID, so it's not like there is no place to go. This hasn't stopped the conflict in the public school arena. I also fail to see how locally based school districts equals monolithic or one-size-fits-all.

The root cause, if anything, is a misguided religion-vs-science dispute where any factual description of our origins is unfairly seen as showing that God is irrelevant, with a health dose of anti-intellectualism in the culture.

By offering tax relief to middle-income families, and tuition scholarships to those with lower incomes, we could bring independent schooling within reach of every family.

Such a system can be designed, using tax credits for both personal use and for donations to private scholarship funds, in such a way that no government money is spent on education. [Emphasis mine]

Somehow, I think the lower classes are going to get shafted in this deal.

Others argue that some areas of knowledge are simply too important to be left to parental discretion, and that the (presumably all-wise and all-knowing) state must step in to ensure that these are taught to all children.

[...]

In addition to being patently un-American, such an authoritarian approach to education is both ineffective and shortsighted.

Requiring science education to stick to, ya know, science is just too much for some people. I have no problem letting scientists decide what the scientific consensus is, and leave non-scientist parents out of it. This isn't authoritarian. It's consulting experts who know what they're talking about.

Evolution has been the official government curriculum for several decades, and only a third of Americans think it is well-supported by the evidence. Slightly more than half adhere to the biblical creation story. So we've tried the official knowledge thing, and it doesn't work.

More defeatism...But it does put the lie to the claim that we're forcing people's beliefs on the issue.

What you won't get in the paper: Coulson's disdain of reality.

After all, does it really matter if some Americans believe intelligent design is a valid scientific theory while others see it as a Lamb of God in sheep's clothing? Surely not. While there are certainly issues on which consensus is key -- respect for the rule of law and the rights of fellow citizens, tolerance of differing viewpoints, etc. -- the origin of species is not one of them.

Consensus on reality isn't key? Science is what helps us make sense of the natural world. This goes far beyond the issue of origins, and touches on many issues important to Coulson's Cato Institute, such as environmental issues. And environmental issues is another hot button area where partisans try to dispute the science, when the real disagreement is over policy/ideology.

In Coulson's world, people should exist in their own little bubbles, and never have their children deal with any disagreement with their views, or, *gasp*, that those views might be factually wrong.

Nothing is gained, for instance, by compelling conformity on school prayer, random drug testing, the set of religious holidays that are worth observing, or the most appropriate forms of sex education.

We can't have sex-education based on reality either. Nope, we have texaggeratete condom failures, keep girls from getting vaccinated against a cancer-causing virus, knowledge of effective birth control and safe-sex measures out of their hands (if not the actual measures themselves), and hope that scaring them out of sex will both prevent them from doing it, and see it as a wonderful act on their wedding night.

Coulson's plan would be a complete disaster.

Update: NEVER use Blogger's spell check. That is all.

New Times On ID

2005-12-22T18:21:00.000-08:00

The local alt-weekly on Intelligent Design. It isn't much of a story, despite being the cover story this week and occuping two full pages. But it was written by thier Arts editor, and isn't as bad as some of their other forays into science writing. He does ramble on quite a bit, but he doesn't seem too impressed with ID. Even though he doesn't interview any scientists, he does undermine ID in several places.

The most glaring omition is the lack of any mention of the Kitzmiller decision two days ago. You publish a story about ID and fail to mention the major drubbing it recently took in federal court?!

Immigration Restriction is Enviromentalism?

2005-12-17T22:36:00.000-08:00

I read the local paper today, which I haven't done in a while. With The Triviune one doesn't miss much, but today they did something that irritated me. Several actually (NSA Listens In: A4?!), but in their Voices section they ran three pieces under Perspectives on Immigration. One would think they would publish three divergent views, but no. Not only do we get three identical views, but it's quite clear from the first that all three were members of same meeting with our local Assemblyperson to lobby on this issue (and that he's doing a swell job, too). The editor thought we needed to be triple-teamed on this issue.

The editorials assert that controling immigration is an environmentalist position. They claim that getting population growth under control is essential to solving our environmental problems. How do they jump from population growth to immigration?

More than 90 percent of California's population growth is caused by immigration and births to recent immigrants -- a million new people every two years.

Unfortunately such racist overtones are present in parts the environmental movement. The Sierra Club has recently been involved in a fractious fight over whether to take a stand on immigration policy. It's a shame that not all environmentalists are progressive in other areas as well.

My Nerd Score

2005-01-11T11:49:00.000-08:00

Dang it! I just missed the top 10 percentile. I think I'll hang my head in shame now.

Via Pharyngula

Should "Blog" be Banned?

2005-01-02T23:50:00.000-08:00

Every year a committee publishes a list of words they think should be banned. This year the word "blog" made the list. I agree.

I have a big problem with the word. Even though I like them, and now have one myself, I find "blog" linguistically unappealing at best. It's not a word that rolls nicely off the tounge. It gets spit off. That's why I'm personally in favor of banning it.

That's not how language works though. In general, it is usage that dictates language, not vice versa. The original term weblog got contracted into 'blog, and that is what were stuck with.

Welcome!

2005-01-02T21:16:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the K Expanse, my blog.

I've taken some time before deciding to start my own blog. I've been participating on the nets for years (and I'm talking pre-WWW). Still, I've looked on the blog phenomenon with a bit of suspicion. It's taken a while for me to get over it and come to enjoy blogs. What it took was discovering a core set of blogs that I enjoyed reading, largly authored by people I've crossed electronic paths with in the past.

Likely subjects of pontification will be:

Evolution/Creationism (taking the pro-evo side)
Books (big on both science and sci-fi)
Freethought/Atheism
Separation of Church/State