The Orwellian-named “Discovery Institute” is an organization dedicated to the promotion of Intelligent Design (ID), which is little more than a superficial repackaging of long-discredited creationist arguments against evolutionary theory.They do not have a legitimate scientific program, although they desperately try to create the impression that they do.

In my opinion the Disco-Tute is founded on intellectual dishonesty. They are primarily a propaganda machine for pseudoscience. You might recall they funded the movie Expelled – which was an exercise in intellectual dishonesty from beginning to end. They deceived many of the scientists who they interviewed for the film, even going to the extent of creating a dummy production company as a front. The result was a hack-job of transparent propaganda.

Now another example of Disco-tute intellectual dishonesty has come to light, exposed by The Panda’s Thumb blog. This started with a critique of a new Disco-tute video on population genetics. It was noticed that the video is a green-screen shot with the Disco-tute scientician in front of an image of a laboratory. We are apparently meant to assume that she is in the Disco-tute labs where actual research is conducted. However, the image is a stock photo.

OK – this is a small deception, the kind of thing many video producers would do to create the right “look” for the video. It’s part of the culture of film-making – it doesn’t matter if it’s real, as long as it looks good. But this is not a sufficient excuse.

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We have yet another propaganda slogan and strategy by creationists to sneak their religious beliefs into public science classrooms – “truth in education.”  This one comes from state senator Dennis Kruse from Indiana. He had previously introduced a bill (in 2011) that would have required the teaching of “creation science” alongside evolution. The bill died a quick death, largely because the Supreme Court has already declared such laws unconstitutional (in the 1987 Edwards vs Aguillard case).

Kruse’s approach has since “evolved.” It seems that after his failed and naive attempt to introduce a creation science bill, he has been connected with the Discovery Institute and is now up to speed on the latest approach to anti-evolution strategies.

Creationist attempts to hamper science education when it comes to evolution go back to the beginning of evolutionary theory itself. By the turn of the 19th century evolution was an accepted scientific fact, and opposition to its teaching was forming among certain fundamentalist sects. The first big confrontation between the teaching of evolution and creationist ideology came in the form of the The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, or the Scopes Monkey Trial. This resulted from the first creationist strategy to limit the teaching of evolution in public schools – they simply banned it. This strategy was killed when such laws were found unconstitutional in 1968 (Epperson v. Arkansas).

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Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has a YouTube video that is part of the Big Think series, in which he makes the argument that teaching children creationism rather than evolutionary theory does them a great disservice. He makes a very good point with some supporting arguments. The Creation Museum has decided to put out a response video that is, as you might guess, fantastically lame and both logically and factually challenged. As I am fond of pointing out, the denial of evolution by creationists is so profoundly at odds with reality, they have no choice but to play it loose with facts and logic. It does occasionally make for an entertaining spectacle, and is a target-rich environment for “teaching moments.”

The video begins with Dr. David Menton, who has a PhD in Biology and works at Brown University, addressing Nye’s opening statement. Nye, unfortunately, did begin his video with a poor choice of words – he said that denial of evolution is unique to the United States, which is not true. It is clear from what he says next the point he was trying to make. There is an interesting dichotomy in the US in that we are a technologically advanced country with great intellectual capital in science and technology, and yet evolution denial is very prominent in the US. The US may be unique for the extent of this contrast, and I think that’s what Nye was going for. (Only Turkey has a greater percentage of the population that denies evolution.)

Menton uses Nye’s statement as an opportunity to make what is essentially an argument from popularity, detailing how many people around the world deny evolution (including, apparently, mooslums, whoever they are – perhaps some cow-worshipping sect? I know, too easy.). Popular support or denial of evolution is completely irrelevant to whether or not evolution is scientifically valid. If anything, the popularity of evolution denial supports Nye’s position that teaching children pseudoscience is a real problem.

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This is a wonderfully ironic story from South Korea involving the presentation of evolution in science textbooks. Three months ago we learned that there was a clever effort by South Korean creationists to remove references to evolution in a major science textbook. Nature reported at the time:

A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has alarmed biologists, who say that they were not consulted. “The ministry just sent the petition out to the publishing companies and let them judge,” says Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University.

This was the result of efforts from a group called STR - the Society for Textbook Revise (I assume it doesn’t translate well), an offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research.  I have to admit that their strategy was very clever. School textbooks are notoriously low in quality, especially science textbooks, which can be riddled with errors, bad examples, and poor explanations. The STR apparently realized that they could complain about the poor quality of information related to evolution in South Korea’s high school science textbooks and petition that the bad science be removed from the books.

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Bill Nye recently produced a video as part of the Big Think series on YouTube, this one arguing that creationism is not appropriate for children. The video has sparked some debate, but not just about evolution and creationism – more so about tone and strategy. What is the purpose of the video, and is it successful?

One of the interesting corners of this discussion is two articles on Scientific American taking two very different views of the video. The first is an interview with Patrick Donadio, “a professional speaker and a communications coach to the leaders of Fortune 500 companies.” The second is essentially a rebuttal by Kyle Hill, which takes a more scientific view. Naturally, I related better to the second article.

Hill points out that there is actually some published evidence on communication that might inform this discussion – something missing from Donadio’s interview. I have had some experience with corporate-style communications “experts” and I have had the same reaction as Hill appears to gently be stating – that there is a culture of corporate speaking and self-styled experts that is not exactly compatible with scientific communication.

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Science makes predictions. That is inherent to the scientific process. It’s what makes hypotheses testable – they make predictions about what will be observed in nature, about the outcome of experiments, and about future trends and events. Scientific theories are really models that allow us to predict the behavior of the world, and they are judged on their utility for making such predictions, rather than whether or not they are objectively “correct” (because we can’t know that).

This was a simple point I was trying to make, with respect to evolutionary theory, in a recent post on feathered dinosaurs. Egnor, who fancies himself an evolutionary gadfly, has tried to counter my arguments but only manages to create a confusing mess. In my original post I made the point:

After Darwin published his theory of evolution one of the early challenges to the idea of evolution, which includes the claim that all life on earth is related through common ancestors, was that there were significant gaps between major groups of living creatures. Birds, for example, seem to be their own group without a close connection to any other group. They are, of course, related to vertebrates. But if evolution were true then there must be fossil evidence connecting birds to another group, such as reptiles.

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This came to my attention through Orac at Respectful Insolence and I thought I would pig-pile on – the platform of the Texas Republican party. Mine is not a political blog and I will try to refrain from expressing any purely political opinion. Rather I do often address the science that informs politics and the intrusion of politics into science or the denial of science by political activists – all of which is evident in the platform.

Orac does his usual great job of addressing the evolution denial, anti-vaccine sentiments, and promotion of alternative medicine in the platform. Unfortunately, promoters of unscientific medicine and opponents of science-based medicine find allies on both sides of the political aisle. On the left they tend to appeal to anti-corporate and new age sentiments. On the right it’s all about freedom – health care freedom, freedom from mandates, and freedom from regulation. The platform specifically opposes regulation of vitamins and supplements, stating: “We support the rights of all adults to their choice of nutritional products, and alternative health care choices.”

I have written about the health care freedom movement before.  Essentially it is an attempt to undermine rational and reasonable measures to establish a minimum standard of care in medicine. You can’t have a standard without some criteria and some method of enforcing the criteria. The current standard is largely science-based, transparent, and fair, but proponents of unscientific methods that fall below the reasonable standard want to abolish it so they will be free to practice witchcraft as medicine. Health care freedom is presented as consumer freedom, but it is really anti-consumer and all about the freedom to sell pseudoscience and bad medicine.

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Earlier this week I wrote about paradoxes in science, about how they are good things pointing the way toward new research and possibilities. Science deniers, however, exploit them to cast doubt on established science, without creating a viable scientific theory of their own. I gave as an example the solar neutrino problem – the fact that in the 1980s and 1990s neutrino detectors were detecting 1/3 to 1/2 the solar neutrinos than the standard model of particle physics predicted. Creationists used this to argue that the entire nuclear fusion model of stars was wrong.  It wasn’t long, however, before the missing neutrinos were discovered and the paradox resolved.

Recently I was asked about another sun-based paradox that creationists use to argue for a young earth – the faint young sun paradox. This was first pointed out by Carl Sagan and George Mullen.  Our models of stellar evolution indicate that the sun has been getting steadily brighter and hotter over the last four billion years. As hydrogen is fused into helium and helium therefore builds up on the core of the sun, it has to burn a little hotter in order to maintain equilibrium. The sun is burning about 30% hotter today than it was four billion years ago.

The sun is the major source of heat for the earth’s surface, and therefore a colder sun in the past would mean that the earth was colder, by about 25 °C.  By this factor alone the earth should have been mostly a ball of ice and snow up until 1-2 billion years ago. However the geological evidence points strongly to there being liquid water on the earth even when it was young.

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Paradoxes exist in science for a very good reason. Science is a human-wide effort to understand how the universe works. When functioning properly it is therefore transparent and open. Further, science is describing one reality, and therefore all of the various scientific models for how bits of the universe work must all be compatible with each other. Science needs to all mesh into one big model of reality. Science also follows rules of evidence, logic, and cause and effect. You cannot invoke magic or arbitrarily suspend laws of physics as needed.

When one bit of evidence or scientific model contradicts another (they both cannot be correct at the same time) we have a scientific paradox. Since our models of reality are incomplete (and arguably always will be) scientific paradoxes pop up all the time.

How one responds to a scientific paradox reveals a great deal about how they approach science and knowledge. Those who crave certainty are made uncomfortable by paradoxes because they point to uncertainty. To a scientist, however, paradoxes are nothing less than awesome, the holy grail, the best thing since sliced bread. To a scientist an apparent paradox (really all scientific paradoxes are temporarily “apparent”) is a bright neon sign proclaiming, “This way for discovery!”

Paradoxes do not exist in reality, only in our current models of reality, and so they point the way to flaws in our current models. They therefore also point the way to further research to improve those models, fix errors, or fill in missing pieces. In short, scientists love paradoxes.

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I wrote two weeks ago about the latest state bill attacking the teaching of evolution, this one in Tennessee. This particular bill has perhaps attracted more media attention than other similar bills because Tennessee was the location of the famous Scopes Monkey trial. At the time the bill had passed the state house and senate, and we were awaiting the decision of Governor Bill Haslam on whether or not he would sign the bill.

Now our waiting is over. Haslam did not sign the bill, but neither did he veto it. He allowed the bill to pass without his signature.

I had speculated that perhaps Haslam was looking for a politically acceptable (for Tennessee) justification for vetoing the bill, as he stated publicly that the bill might represent legislative intrusion into an area reserved for the board of education. It now seems that speculation was overly optmistic, but not entirely without merit. Haslam indeed did not want to appear to be supporting the bill, but also did not want to veto a bill that is apparently popular in his state. About his decision he has officially stated:

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