Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 9^th of December to the 16^th of December, 2011.

It’s nearing Christmas, and here in Australia the weather is heating up, causing the ground to bake beneath our thong-covered feet - and a kind of cognitive dissonance sets in as the “White Christmas” imagery fed to us by popular culture and jolly old Christmas tunes conflicts with the harsh reality of Summer in December. Such is the Southern Hemisphere.

Of course I could, at this point, easily compare that tale with the cognitive dissonance present in the intelligent design movement as they wiggle around, both in cyberspace and in the real world, evading effective criticism and being ambiguous about many a topic. But I won’t.

That would be a bit forced, wouldn’t it?

No, I just wanted to let you all know about the wonderful Christmas we Australians will be having. Enjoy your Winter Wonderland, Northern Hemispherians: I’ll be cooking sausages, avoiding swarms of flying insects and trying my best not to get terribly sunburnt.

Anyway, this week we have blog posts about biomimetics, the potential predictive powers of Judaism/Christianity when it comes to the origin of humanity, using my words to pump money into the ID movement, and Richard Dawkins brainwashing poor, poor children.

As I noted in October, 2011, John Freshwater’s termination by the Mt. Vernon City Schools was appealed to the Knox County Court of Common Pleas. That court denied Freshwater’s request for additional hearings and ruled that “…there is clear and convincing evidence to support the Board of Education’s termination of Freshwater’s contract(s) for good and just cause,…”.

Subsequently, the Rutherford Institute announced that it would support Freshwater’s appeal of the Common Pleas Court’s decision to the Ohio 5^th District Court of Appeals. Now the brief supporting that appeal is available on NCSE’s site.

The brief purports to be from R. Kelly Hamilton, Freshwater’s lawyer, “in conjunction with The Rutherford Institute.” Having read way too much of Hamilton’s prose over the last three years, I’d say that Rutherford Institute staff wrote the brief and Hamilton’s main contribution was to sign it.

More below the fold

The superintendent of schools of Hart County, a small county in the middle of Kentucky, has written to the Kentucky Board of Education, complaining about the emphasis on evolution. Specifically, Ricky Line, the superintendent, writes in a long and somewhat rambling letter,

Photograph by James Rice.

Bonneville Salt Flats, Great Salt Lake Desert, Utah. The bird in the foreground is a Warthog .

Intelligent design news, commentary and discussion from the 2^nd of December to the 8^th of December, 2011.

It’s well and truly holidays now, and after getting all the fiddly, tricky things out of the way first - such as doing a domain transfer and dealing with responses from the Discovery Institute - it’s time to get back into TWiID and see what the online presence of the intelligent design movement has been like over the past seven days.

What are the notable posts about this week? Why: multiverses; responding - again - to me; the identity of the Designer; and why design in nature may not be so easy to detect after all.

In spite of adverse outcomes in the administrative hearing on his termination, in federal court, and in the County Court of Common pleas, John Freshwater is still pleading his case in the Christian media. On November 30, he was interviewed on David Barton’s Wallbuilders Live radio program. Ed Brayton has posted on some aspects of that interview, as has Wheat-dogg’s World.

My interest is in what Freshwater now says he was teaching about creationism and evolution in his 8^th grade science classes as contrasted with what he has claimed in the past. There was a good deal of testimony about that in the administrative hearing on his termination. His stories ranged from ‘I didn’t teach creationism’ (see his testimony here) to ‘I may have used creationist materials, but it was to illustrate bias and lack of objectivity in the interpretation of good science’ (see his testimony here). Now he has a new version: he taught “robust evolution.”

More below the fold.

Photograph by Michael Roberts.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.

Cwm Idwal, a hanging valley in North Wales.

Mr. Roberts adds, “Darwin’s favourite place. This is looking down into Cwm Idwal in Snowdonia, which Darwin visited several times in the 1820s and in August 1831 just before he received the invite for the Beagle and in 1842 when he was studying glaciation.

“In 1831 Darwin studied the rocks, which are mostly Ordovician volcanics, but was a bit confused by them. He was on his own and wrote to Sedgwick for advice. In 1842 (halfway through writing his first draft on “his Theory”) he returned and found clear evidence of glaciation. To the right of the lake (Llyn Idwal) was an ice fall which Darwin called a vomitory. The dark cliffs on the left are Ordovician volcanics, which he thought were basalt.”

You may find Mr. Roberts’s article on Darwin’s fieldwork here, but you will not find it cheaply..

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.

~ Cersei Lannister, HBO’s “Game of Thrones”, Season 1, Episode 7

Bit of a dramatic quote, isn’t it? But for some reason it entered my mind when I read what David Klinghoffer wrote about me and my views on the dismissive rhetoric of the scientific community towards the intelligent design movement (which I maintain is understandable, given the history of ID and creationism), in his Evolution News & Views post “A Darwinist Worries about Darwinian Rhetoric”.

You see, I didn’t write the post for a pro-ID audience - it came about because I felt I had some helpful advice to give scientists and science communicators for when they are asked to comment on ID by the media (or in other public outlets). That’s why I didn’t justify or explain, for example, my opinion that the movement is largely motivated by religious sentiment: I was talking to a group of people who already have that point of view.

Obviously I wasn’t thinking very clearly though, because I was writing about why ID proponents love to twist, distort and spin sentiment about themselves into energy for their day-to-day operations, yet forgot to consider how the post being written would appear to those very people. How legitimately foolish of me.

Everything is a rhetorical game to the Discovery Institute! And like the medieval-fantasy political game of thrones referenced in the above quote, when you play the game of rhetoric, you win or you die a (rhetorical) death. Much like gambling, the best way to win is not to play at all, especially when facing down masters like David Klinghoffer. I mean, look at what he wrote - he twisted a post about not giving the ID movement rhetorical nourishment into rhetorical nourishment.

But while I’m undeniably now locked into a PR pact with David - wherein everything I write is now open to dramatisation and being milked for points - I’d still like to focus on the issues that are at least vaguely objectively defensible.

Jonathan Smith, VP of Florida Citizens for Science, will be interviewed by RadioExiles about teaching good science in schools, what is bad science, and the knowledge (or lack thereof) of the presidential candidates. The program “The seven day challenge” will be here at 11:30 am Eastern on Friday, December 2. It looks like the podcast will be available a bit later.

Photograph by Richard Hughes.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.

Tabanus subsimilis – striped horsefly, likely a male who landed there to drink juices from the surrounding berries, Jackson, Tennessee. For more images of bug eyes see http://www.metro.co.uk/news/picture[…]-close-ups/1

From the NCSE:

Evolution: Education and Outreach – the new journal aspiring to promote accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience – will be freely available through December 31, 2011, thanks to the generosity of its publisher, Springer.

Get ‘em while they’re hot!

The eminent biologist Lynn Margulis has died at 73. Dr. Margulis is best known for promoting the theory, now generally accepted, that organelles such as the cell nucleus mitochondrion (I knew that!) and the chloroplast are the result of symbiosis between different species. You may read the Times obituary here.

I just found out that Gobind Khorana died November 9 at his home in Concord MA. Khorana won the Nobel in 1968 (along with Nirenberg and Holley) for deciphering the genetic code. Before his work, nobody knew how a DNA sequence could “encode” the information necessary to make a protein macromolecule. His experiments were carried out in the classic bacterial system Escherichia coli. The realization that the genetic code in a single-celled bacterium is the exact same code used in humans is what finally convinced the biological community that all life, from trees to bacteria to elephants, shares common ancestry.

Khorana was also the first person to artificially synthesize a synthetic gene and use it to make a protein. It is not an exaggeration to say that these twin feats form the basis of all modern work on proteins.

Later, Khorana went on to use these techniques to investigate in detail the structure and mechanism of bacteriorhodopsin, which has to be one of the darn coolest proteins in the biosphere (full disclosure — I’m biased, since my lab now studies the evolution of bacteriorhodopsin). Photosynthesis evolved twice, with two very different mechanisms: plants use chlorophyll, and many bacteria use bacteriorhodopsin. While chlorophyll wins in terms of efficiency, bacteriorhodopsin is much simpler and more elegant.

Photograph by Marilyn Susek.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention

Phalacrocorax carbo – cormorant, dolomite stone quarry at Stainton, near Tickhill, S. Yorkshire, UK.

Oh no! It’s Granville Sewell again. At Uncommon Descent he has posted his 2^nd law of thermodynamics argument against evolution, yet again. I have twice pointed out that (here and here) that, if true, it would prove that plants can’t grow.

Is Sewell’s argument unanswerable? No, because long before I made those posts, Sewell’s argument had been thoroughly demolished by Jason Rosenhouse and by Mark Perakh. Game over, even if you don’t know that plants can grow.

But Granville Sewell’s argument over at Uncommon Descent is unanswerable. At least there … because he has the comments turned off.

Ford’s Theater National Historic Site has banned removed from sale Bill O’Reilly’s book on the Lincoln assassination from its bookstore because the book is not historically accurate. Can it be any worse than Grand Canyon: A Different View, which is still on sale at the Grand Canyon National Park Bookstore?

According to a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the book has been moved to an apparently ad hoc Inspirational section of the bookstore, and the National Park Service has delayed issuing instructions on how to deal with creationist questions.

Is pseudoscience based on religion somehow privileged over pseudohistory? Apparently, yes.

Thanks to Walter Plywaski for the link to the Post article.

We just received the following letter from calligrapher Kelly Houle:

I am a natural history artist and calligrapher, and I’m creating a large-scale illuminated manuscript based on The Origin of Species. I’m looking for ideas and advice from biologists and evolution experts like you who might be willing to offer feedback on the scientific accuracy of my illustrations and possibly contribute to the project. I am designing each page as an individual work of art, writing out the entire text by hand and illuminating the realistic natural history illustrations with iridescent watercolors and 23-karat gold. The Illuminated Origin of Species will be nearly 300 pages, each measuring 22x30 inches, with over 500 illuminations. I would appreciate any constructive advice that will help make The Illuminated Origin of Species as good as it can be. Please contact me if you would be willing to serve as a science advisor for the project.