Anti-Evolutionism – The Questionable Authority

How many blue lobsters does it take to start a business?

mikedunford June 4, 2011 Anti-Evolutionism / Arthropods / Intelligent Design / Science

Uncommon Descent, for some reason, just posted a link to an article about a blue lobster. This isn’t the first time that a blue lobster has been found, and there are even rarer yellow and albino variants that are known. Since there is, as the UD article points out, a trade in blue crayfish, it’s reasonable to assume that the blue coloration in lobsters is a heritable. All that leaves me wondering something: exactly why did the folks at Uncommon Descent decide to highlight this example?

The UD article contains the following gem:

Apparently, there is a trade in blue crayfish for aquariums, but any similar trade on blue lobsters depends on finding another one, of the opposite sex.

Does it really?

I didn’t take a lot of time to research the genetic mechanisms underpinning lobster coloration (frankly, it’s not a topic that fascinates me). I did find, however, that there’s reason to suspect that the blue coloration is the result of a recessive trait (a paper I found noted that a prior study had found that blue offspring only occur when two blue lobsters mate). If that’s the case, does a would-be purveyor of blue lobsters really need two blue lobsters to get the business off the ground?
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“ID theory” hasn’t been “reduced to” a tool in the Culture Wars – that’s what it was designed as.

mikedunford November 30, 2009 Anti-Evolutionism

Over at The Austringer, Wes Elsberry has been engaging in a bit of debate with BeliefNet blogger David Opderbeck over Opderbeck’s views on the Dover Intelligent Design case. The bulk of their disagreement seems to center on the appropriateness of Judge Jones’ decision to rule that Intelligent Design is not a scientific concept. Opderbeck thinks Jones should have avoided the topic; Wesley disagrees.

This is long-familiar ground, of course. The Discovery Institute has been complaining that Jones should have stayed a long way away from the question of whether or not ID is science for years now – despite the fact that they themselves submitted an amicus brief in the Dover case that seems to ask Jones to address that topic. Given that the plaintiffs and defendants both asked the court to rule on whether or not ID was science, I think that Wesley is on much firmer footing than Opderbeck.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about right now.

When I was looking at Opderbeck’s side of the argument, something he said about the Intelligent Design movement caught my eye – mostly because it seems to reflect a certain ignorance of the Intelligent Design movement as it actually exists:

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Armor in Freshwater Sticklebacks: Selection Against, or Just No Selection For?

mikedunford January 12, 2009 Anti-Evolutionism / Biology / Science

The marine populations typically have a line of over 30 bony plates along their sides. The freshwater populations typically have only 6-9 of these plates. Why this is the case is a classic evolutionary biology question: do the freshwater populations lose the armor because there is a real advantage to losing the plates, or do they just lose them because there's no real disadvantage to losing them.

Egnor shoots! He scores!

mikedunford November 29, 2008 Accidental / Anti-Evolutionism / Biology / Humor / Intelligent Design / Religion / Science

Egnor has, in short, provided another example of why an understanding of evolutionary biology is essential to the medical field known as epidemiology.

Today’s required reading

mikedunford August 24, 2008 Anti-Evolutionism

If you're going to read anything today, you should read Amy Harmon's article on teaching evolution in Florida. I haven't taught high school, but I've had similar experiences teaching evolution…

It’s a bought and paid for bragging point, but it’s still a bragging point.

mikedunford April 22, 2008 Anti-Evolutionism / Public Perception of Science

On Sunday, Chris Mooney and Randy Olsen both tried to make the case that Ben Stein’s “Evolution Caused the Holocaust” movie was a success at the box office. Both of them have been rather spectacularly condemned for calling Expelled a success, but I’m not sure that they’re entirely wrong. I just don’t think that they took a hard enough look at some of the issues involved.

Let’s start with the basic facts. Expelled hit theaters on Friday. It was aggressively marketed prior to release, and opened on 1,052 screens – the most ever for any documentary. On Sunday, estimates suggested that the movie would bring in well over $3 million for the weekend, but the actual figures were not quite that high. That’s probably because (Randy Olsen’s assertion notwithstanding) ticket sales fell off rapidly over the course of the weekend. (Expelled brought in $1.2 million on Friday, but only $990,000 on Saturday, making it the only movie in the top 50 in theaters this weekend to drop from Friday to Saturday. The slide continued on Sunday, when the movie brought in $775,000.)

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Richard Sternberg, Casey Luskin, and Gross Dishonesty

mikedunford April 17, 2008 Anti-Evolutionism

Casey Luskin is currently in the middle of a multi-part “rebuttal” to Michael Shermer’s review of Expelled. In the latest installment of his whine, Casey (again) brings up the case of Richard Sternberg. Sternberg, some of you might remember, orchestrated the publication of a pro-Intelligent Design paper near the end of his term as editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

As punishment for this heinous crime, Sternberg suffered the indignity of not getting fired from the unpaid editorship that he had quit months before the paper actually appeared. His punishment further included the cruel and unusual steps of not dismissing him from his unpaid position as a Smithsonian Research Associate, not declining to renew the unpaid position when the term expired, and not firing him from his paid job at NIH. The draconian nature of the consequences that he ultimately suffered – some of his colleagues said bad things about him – obviously makes him the ideal example of an open-thinking scientist railroaded by the Darwinian Inquisition.

I’m not going to deal with the vast majority of Casey’s attempt to obfuscate the real events that surrounded the whole Sternberg affair. He raises absolutely no new points, and all of the points that he does raise have been rebutted before. Instead, I’m going to focus on two points in Luskin’s post where he massively misrepresents things that other people wrote.

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Summary Judgment in California Creationist Case: Behe Shoots, Scores, We Get Point (Part 3 of 3)

mikedunford April 1, 2008 Anti-Evolutionism / Church/State / Religion / Religion in Schools

It would seem that Mike Behe has, once again, managed to shoot an own goal in the courtroom.

Summary Judgment in the California Creationist Case: The Lawyers for the Creationists Argue Like Creationists (Part 2 of 3)

mikedunford April 1, 2008 Anti-Evolutionism / Church/State / Religion / Religion in Schools

After so much time spent working on behalf of creationist groups, it probably shouldn't be surprising that Judge Otero spotted many of the same argument tactics in the Christian schools' legal filings that we see when we look at the day to day output of anti-evolution groups such as the Discovery Institute.

Summary Judgment in California Creationist Lawsuit: Bottom Line, and What’s Next (Part 1 of 3)

mikedunford April 1, 2008 Anti-Evolutionism / Church/State / Religion / Religion in Schools

On Friday, Judge James Otero of the Central District of California issued a ruling granting the University of California’s request for partial summary judgment in the California Creationist Lawsuit. I’ve written about this case several times before now, but it’s been a long time since the last update, so before I get into the details of the ruling, I’m going to quickly review the details of the case.

In 2005, a group of plaintiffs that includes the Association of Christian Schools International, Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murietta, and the parents of several students filed a lawsuit against the University of California. In their suit, they claimed that UC unfairly and unconstitutionally refused to accept a number of courses taught at Christian schools as meeting UC’s admissions criteria. The courses in question covered a range of topics, including English, history, religion, and government, but I’ve mostly focused my attention on the biology courses that failed to make the grade, because that’s the area that I know the most about.

One of the specific issues that the Christian Schools are challenging in their lawsuit is UC’s decision to reject any course that uses either the A Bekka Books or the Bob Jones University Press biology textbooks as the primary text for the course. As I’ve said before, this decision makes perfect sense to me. Even the most cursory look at some of the things that these books claim is enough to show that the unfortunate students who are forced to use this text are being taught things that are totally incompatible with science. The Christian schools, it should go without saying, disagree with my assessment.

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