The Austringer

Today, Nelson Alonso turned up on AtBC and turned in an amazing performance that has to be seen to be believed. Alonso is a long-time second-tier “intelligent design” creationism cheerleader; I’ve had experience in online discussions with him since the late 1990s. Some of his braggadocio touched upon having a long history of online discussion. I had a look back at the archives of the Calvin “evolution” email list, where I had some exchanges with Nelson. And I found one such discussion that had an end-point. It even has to do with “irreducible complexity”. I pointed out that the mammalian middle ear ossicular chain is an IC system providing an impedance-matching function, and that the impedance-matching goes away if you remove any of the parts. Nelson tried to deny that this qualified as IC, at least in part because the fossil record is clear that the system evolved. I’ll quote this last part of the exchange.

Nelson Alonso wrote:

[...]

NA>Wesley wrote:

I’m going to put it in one block here before moving on to
responding to Nelson’s post.

MI>People have given examples: The Krebs cycle and the human
MI>inner ear are IC systems (as defined by Behe and asserted by
MI>me) for which means of gradual evolution have been given.

It’s the impedance-matching function of the mammalian *middle*
ear that is proffered as an example. I saw someone today
saying that it is unnecessary to mammalian hearing. This
ignores the fact that every piece is absolutely necessary to
the impedance-matching function. That function goes away
(with about a 30 dB re 1 microbar decrease in sensitivity, or
about 1 / (2^10) the original sensitivity) if any of the parts
are removed. The human blood clotting system, one of Behe’s
examples of IC systems, is not *necessary* to circulation in
much the same way.

WRE>”It’s the impedance-matching function of the mammalian
WRE>*middle* ear that is proffered as an example. I saw
WRE>someone today saying that it is unnecessary to mammalian
WRE>hearing. This ignores the fact that every piece is
WRE>absolutely necessary to the impedance-matching function.

NA>This isn’t true, as I have stated above, one can remove the
NA>entire 3-bone system and I would still hear when pressure
NA>waves hit the oval window.

It is true. The impedance-matching function is lost if any of
the components is removed. As I develop below, there is a
characteristic and significant loss of sensitivity due to the
loss of the impedance-matching function.

My point was not that impedance-matching in the middle ear is
*necessary* to any amount of hearing, but rather that trying
to dismiss the impedance-matching function on the basis that
hearing itself is not completely eliminated is a digression.
One can simulate the loss of sensitivity involved in a gross
manner by donning a good pair of hearing protectors. Trying
to argue that the difference in sensitivity is not a
functional difference seems ludicrous to me.

I suggest that Nelson pick up any good basic text on
audiometry, which will explain about impedance mismatches
going from pressure changes in air to movement of the oval
window.

WRE>That [impedance-matching] function goes away (with about a
WRE>30 dB re 1 microbar decrease in sensitivity, or about
WRE>1 / (2^10) the original sensitivity) if any of the parts
WRE>are removed.

NA>Mere observation can tell us this is false, the one-bone
NA>system of reptiles make them hear quite well.

No, actual experimentation has shown this characteristic loss
of sensitivity in terrestrial mammals to be the case. The
topic of discussion is the function of impedance-matching in
the mammalian middle ear. Normal hearing in another taxon is
not responsive to the point. But Nelson’s digression to
reptilian systems does him no favors. When the middle ear of
lizards is removed, their hearing likewise decreases by 35 to
57 dB in sensitivity, showing the importance of
impedance-matching to acute hearing even outside mammalian
species. See
.
Also, Nelson’s digression shoots him in the foot on another
point, which is that such systems help establish the utility
of simpler systems in accomplishing the same function, which
is a point in favor of evolutionary development of the IC
impedance-matching function of the terrestrial mammalian
middle ear.

I’m a co-author on research that looked at hearing sensitivity
in white whales. Part of that paper discusses the loss of
impedance-matching reported by others in terrestrial mammals
placed in hyperbaric chambers. (You don’t have to use surgery
to reduce the efficacy of the middle ear’s
impedance-matching.)

Sam Ridgway, Donald Carder, Rob Smith, Tricia Kamolnick, and
Wesley Elsberry. 1997. First audiogram for marine mammals in
the open ocean and at depth: Hearing and whistling by two
white whales down to 30 atmospheres. The Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America Volume 101, Issue 5, p. 3136.

WRE>The human blood clotting system, one of Behe’s examples of
WRE>IC systems, is not *necessary* to circulation in much the
WRE>same way.”

NA>Why can’t any one anti-IDist be specific?

What, specifically, does Nelson think is vague about the
statement above? Human circulation occurs even if there is a
problem with the human blood clotting system. Terrestrial
mammalian hearing occurs, at reduced sensitivity, if the
impedance-matching function of the middle ear is compromised.
Trying to dismiss the impedance-matching function of the
mammalian middle ear on the grounds that hearing is not
entirely lost if it is interrupted should likewise cause ID
proponents to reject the example of the human blood clotting
system, which if interrupted does not mean that all
circulation stops.

[...]

Here’s some of what I’ve written on the topic before.

[Quote]

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed
of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to
the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the
parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

[End Quote - MJ Behe, Darwin's Black Box, p.39]

The mammalian middle ear has on one side the tympanum, which
demarcates between middle and outer ear, and on the other the
oval window of the cochlea. In between the two are three
small bones, the malleus, incus, and stapes. These small
bones are articulated in series. What the system of tympanum,
malleus, incus, stapes, and oval window accomplish as a
function is the conversion of high-volume, low pressure
movements of sound in air at the tympanum into low-volume,
high-pressure movements of the oval window and thus the fluid
contents of the cochlea. In tech terms, the system is an
impedance-matching mechanism.

If any component of the system is removed, the
impedance-matching properties of the system go away, and
hearing thresholds are reduced by about 30 dB. With this
system in place, though, hearing can be quite sensitive.

This system appears to make a good match for Behe’s definition
of irreducible complexity. One might wonder why Behe doesn’t
use this instead of mousetraps. Well, one reason is that
there is a fossil record showing forms intermediate between
the reptilian ancestral condition and the mammalian anatomy,
and irreducible complexity doesn’t look so spiffy a concept if
one has to say that IC excludes evolutionary explanation,
except for this case that has been documented as having an
evolutionary explanation.

Wesley

Jerry Pournelle is apparently convinced that “intelligent design” creationism is unfairly being suppressed. Among a smorgasbord of misunderstandings served up by Jerry, I’m just going to pick on a little one here.

I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about intelligent design because I have never had any concern about the impossibility of reconciling something like Darwinian Evolution and religion (nor indeed of reconciling reason and religion). This is probably due to my education at Christian Brothers College (now Christian Brothers High School) in Memphis during the 1940’s. Brother Fidelis was careful to teach the theory of evolution (although the Scopes Law had not yet been repealed and it was in theory illegal for him to do so) along with St. Augustine’s and St. Thomas Aquinas’s discourses on reason and science; and the concept that God could easily have created the universe in germinal causes and fixed laws, and allowed development to proceed with a bare minimum of miraculous interventions.

(Emphasis added.)

It is possible that I misunderstand this; if “Christian Brothers College” (now High School) was, in fact, a public school in the 1940s when Jerry Pournelle attended, then you can ignore everything further, because it is all premised on taking Christian Brothers High School as being both now and then a private Catholic school.

There is no “Scopes Law”. The law under which John T. Scopes was tried was the “Butler Act”. The Butler Act is not mysterious, and we actually know the content of it. Or, at least, some of us do.

An Act prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.

Section 1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

Section 2. Be it further enacted, That any teacher found guilty of the violation of this Act shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than One Hundred ($100.00) Dollars nor more than Five Hundred ($500.00) Dollars for each offense.

Section 3. Be it further enacted, That this Act take effect from and after its passage, the public welfare requiring it.

Was Brother Fidelis really a scofflaw as Pournelle asserts? It seems most unlikely. The most likely scenario is the one where Pournelle’s high school alma mater really was a private school, and thus what was taught within it was completely unaffected by the content of the Butler Act.

I went to a Catholic high school, too, and was taught evolutionary science from the BSCS curriculum textbook there. We didn’t spend our limited time in science class being taught things that hadn’t passed scientific muster. I don’t know why Jerry Pournelle thinks the limited time of public school students should be given over to credulous treatment of the sham of “intelligent design” creationism.

One hundred fifty years ago, this date fell on a Thursday. On that Thursday, the meeting of the Linnean Society in London had a reading of an essay by Alfred Russel Wallace and a manuscript chapter extract and a letter from Charles R. Darwin on the topic of tranformism, or the evolution of new species from existing species. This collage of material was presented under a single title, On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection.

The reading itself produced hardly a ripple in the currents of scientific discourse; the Linnean Society president Thomas Bell noted in his journal that nothing of importance took place that dayyear. The real story lay in how it came to be that there was a joint presentation of material from Wallace and Darwin, rather than Wallace alone, and in the course of history that followed on.

Wallace was a naturalist in the field, his field being first the Amazon basin and later the Malay Archipelago. One of the hazards of being a European naturalist out in those regions was disease, and Wallace suffered an attack of malaria. While feverish, Wallace worked out the basics of how natural causes could explain the adaptations that mark different species of organisms. Once recovered, he wrote out an essay on the subject, and sent that on to Charles Darwin, with whom he had previously corresponded on the topic of transformism.

The essay, titled “On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type”, caught Darwin rather by surprise. While Darwin appreciated Wallace’s previous paper promulgating the “Sarawak Law” that all species are found in geographic proximity to allied species, Darwin had apparently classed Wallace’s views on tranformism as corresponding to progressive creationism. In the essay Darwin read in spring of 1858, though, Wallace clearly laid out the very mechanism of natural selection that Darwin had cogitated over for about twenty years. Clearly, Wallace’s essay deserved publication, but what of Darwin’s own, unpublished, work on the topic? Darwin took the matter to his friends, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker. They have a preface to the piece read to the Linnean Society 150 years ago that explains their solution to the problem.

MY DEAR SIR,—The accompanying papers, which we have the honour of communicating to the Linnean Society, and which all relate to the same subject, viz. the Laws which affect the Production of Varieties, Races, and Species, contain the results of the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace.

These gentlemen having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry; but neither of them having published his views, though Mr. Darwin has for many years past been repeatedly urged by us to do so, and both authors having now unreservedly placed their papers in our hands, we think it would best promote the interests of science that a selection from them should be laid before the Linnean Society.

Taken in the order of their dates, they consist of:—

1. Extracts from a MS. work on Species*, by Mr. Darwin, which was sketched in 1839, and copied in 1844,2 when the copy was read by Dr. Hooker,3 and its contents afterwards communicated to Sir Charles Lyell. The first Part is devoted to “The Variation of Organic Beings under Domestication and in their Natural State;” and the second chapter of that Part, from which we propose to read to the Society the extracts referred to, is headed, “On the Variation of Organic Beings in a state of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and true Species.”

2. An abstract of a private letter addressed to Professor Asa Gray, of Boston, U.S., in October4 1857, by Mr. Darwin, in which he repeats his views, and which shows that these remained unaltered from 1839 to 1857.1

3. An Essay by Mr. Wallace, entitled “On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type.”2 This was written at Ternate in February 1858, for the perusal of his friend and correspondent Mr. Darwin, and sent to him with the expressed wish that it should be forwarded to Sir Charles Lyell, if Mr. Darwin thought it sufficiently novel and interesting. So highly did Mr. Darwin appreciate the value of the views therein set forth, that he proposed, in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, to obtain Mr. Wallace’s consent to allow the Essay to be published as soon as possible. Of this step we highly approved, provided Mr. Darwin did not withhold from the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of Mr. Wallace), the memoir which he had himself written on the same subject, and which, as before stated, one of us had perused in 1844, and the contents of which we had both of us been privy to for many years. On representing this to Mr. Darwin, he gave us permission to make what use we thought proper of his memoir, &c.; and in adopting our present course, of presenting it to the Linnean Society, we have explained to him that we are not solely considering the relative claims to priority of himself and his friend, but the interests of science generally; for we feel it to be desirable that views founded on a wide deduction from facts, and matured by years of reflection, should constitute at once a goal from which others may start, and that, while the scientific world is waiting for the appearance of Mr. Darwin’s complete work, some of the leading results of his labours, as well as those of his able correspondent, should together be laid before the public.

We have the honour to be yours very obediently,

CHARLES LYELL.

JOS. D. HOOKER.

As solutions to wrangles over scientific priority go, this one is near the lead for deference being paid all around. Wallace and Darwin became, via this joint presentation, co-discoverers of natural selection and its proposed role in the production of new species from existing ones. The reading also forced Darwin’s hand, and the following months saw him discard his long-term project of writing a large monograph on natural selection, and instead hurry to produce an “abstract” of his work. That “abstract” is what we now know as the book, “Origin of Species”, published in November, 1859.

The Lyell-Hooker solution of producing a joint presentation to the Linnean Society has been endlessly argued over. The primary question posed would be, was the solution unfair to Wallace, whose essay lays out the logic of natural selection in graceful and economical prose, preferred by some to Darwin’s own explication? There’s a book length treatment by Brackmann of the argument that Wallace was thoroughly swindled by Darwin and Darwin’s colleagues, set to play a subordinate role to the elder naturalist. Brackmann, though, appears to have been letting a general animus for Darwin determine his approach to the material. The record of continued cordial correspondence between Darwin and Wallace, though strained at times by their varying views of selection with respect to human mental capacity, seems to run counter to various conspiratorial readings of the situation.

I’ll close this post with the final paragraph of Wallace’s Ternate essay, the last part of the presentation given to the Linnean Society 150 years ago today.

We believe we have now shown that there is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type—a progression to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits—and that the same principle which produces this result in a state of nature will also explain why domestic varieties have a tendency to revert to the original type. This progression, by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit.

Check out material on this anniversary at the Beagle Project, too.

There were presentations on Sunday about at least two software packages that allow students to investigate evolutionary processes in the classroom.

Rob Pennock gave a talk about Avida-ED, a version of the Avida artificial life platform that adds a graphical user interface with a number of features useful for interactive use. Typically, running Avida is done in batch mode from a command-line interface. Avida-ED allows the user to specify configuration options from the interface and presents views of populations or individual Avidians as requested. As Avida-ED runs, one also can get graphical indications of population changes in fitness, gestation time, and other measures.

Brian White talked about Aipotu, a simulator that uses genetics and proteomics with evolutionary processes recently added on. (The application is derived from MGX, for Molecular Genetics Explorer.) There are some similarities in the interface for Aipotu and Avida-ED, as White’s group has consulted with the Avida-ED team about ways to display evolution in progress. Aipotu uses an example of genetics of “flower” color as the basis for showing how evolution can change genotype distributions by comparing phenotypes.

I’m going to make what is likely to be taken as an extreme criticism. I hope to start some discussion by this, and perhaps get people to think about a problem in a somewhat different way. So here goes… Back in graduate school, Diane and I would attend conferences with our advisor, Bill Evans. At several conferences, we would take a look at posters or sit together to listen to presentations. And it was a common occurrence that Bill would tell us that some method or result being reported as new was, in fact, something that had been done or accomplished and duly reported in the literature some decades prior. Bill would be able to give us the appropriate pointer to a citation where we could check that, indeed, a chunk of “new” research happened to be stuff that was (in all likelihood unknowingly) a repetition of what had been done before. And that leads me to the main claim I’m going to make here:

A critical part of scientific practice is identification of prior work and putting current research in context of it. However, this part of scientific practice is not just weak or problematic. It is broken.

Let me explain. First, I will quote a definition of an effective method:

The Turing-Church thesis concerns the notion of an effective or mechanical method in logic and mathematics. ‘Effective’ and its synonym ‘mechanical’ are terms of art in these disciplines: they do not carry their everyday meaning. A method, or procedure, M, for achieving some desired result is called ‘effective’ or ‘mechanical’ just in case

1. M is set out in terms of a finite number of exact instructions (each instruction being expressed by means of a finite number of symbols);
2. M will, if carried out without error, always produce the desired result in a finite number of steps;
3. M can (in practice or in principle) be carried out by a human being unaided by any machinery save paper and pencil;
4. M demands no insight or ingenuity on the part of the human being carrying it out.

Now, consider the problem at issue, that of locating prior scientific work on some topic. We’ll need to establish some points.

A. Except for the very most restricted of topics, the scientific literature is too voluminous to be retained in detail in the memory of any one person. (Even someone with an eidetic memory can only flip pages so fast. Using a repository like a library is thus required.)

B. No repository, collection, or database of scientific literature offers a complete index or better coverage of that literature. (One cannot rely upon any single repository, collection, or database to allow one to survey all the work on a chosen topic. Comparisons of results from separate databases show that upwards of a third of entries present in one may be absent in another.)

C. Systems for search based upon less than full content are inadequate. No information retrieval system known can entirely replace or make up for a lack of supplying appropriate keywords. Keyword identification for indexing can be incomplete or erroneous.

D. Insignificant or negative results are commonly left unreported.

E. Methods that are tried, but fail to meet desired criteria for producing reliable results, are almost never reported.

What I will assert here is that there is no effective method that will, for each and every choice of scientific topic, produce the result that one will obtain a list of the existing publications that bear upon that topic, and cannot produce the complete range of work that has been attempted on the topic. Where one may occasionally obtain a complete result is likely to be where the topic is both recent in origin and where there are yet few relevant published papers.

Certainly, one can apply certain steps and often obtain a partial list of existing publications. Consulting this specific library or that specific database, where library and database are each noted for extensive and general holdings or entries, will likely provide one with some relevant references. But this does not alter the fact that a complete review of relevant literature is not only highly unlikely for any particular topic; it becomes much less likely that for any series of unrelated searches that one would obtain a complete review in every case.

Why should completeness be desirable or desired for this problem? Certainly, completeness has been unobtainable for well over a century, and yet scientific practice continues and has accomplished amazing things. I would argue that scientific practice has succeeded in spite of instead of because of existing methods of reviewing prior work. There are a number of inefficiencies that result from our current methods. First, researchers may unknowingly replicate work. “Reinventing the light-bulb” has entered popular language as the extreme example of this outcome. This problem is not even limited to the natural sciences; it is also endemic to the practice of mathematics, as illustrated by the case of “intelligent design” advocate William A. Dembski re-inventing the Renyi information measure where a=2 in a self-web-published article (see this page for details). Second, researchers are denied the benefit of prior thought and effort in a field of inquiry. Where this does not actually involve “re-invention” scenarios, it will mean that synthetic thinking will be handicapped by keeping prior work obscure. Third, incompleteness implies that the most successful modern researchers are likely to be those who not only have a primary aptitude in their field of specialization, but who also have a high aptitude in being able to mine the current system of literature retrieval for the best available approximation to complete results on specific inquiries. These are the people who will least often find themselves in the position of getting negative comments in peer-review for having overlooked prior work. This secondary aptitude is largely a matter of talent and art rather than application of a straightforward set of techniques, which means that scientific success is a composite of work done using the scientific method and of work done in the tradition of scholarship in the humanities, which is in various aspects not well systematized. This violates item (4) in the list of attributes of an effective method given above.

There are various other drawbacks to incompleteness that could be explicated, but I think that these are enough to show that the problem is real and worthy of our attention. OK, at this point I’ve either convinced you that there is a problem worth considering, or that I’ve gone completely loopy. If the latter, you can drift off to doing something else, and take it as read that I already know that a substantial number of readers will disagree with me on this stuff.

Please note that my list of issues that lead to incompleteness are more inclusive than simply accusing the library sciences of not having delivered a solution. Part of the problem includes what is deemed worth remembering and preserving about effort in the sciences that is not directly fruitful. Just as “hunting” does not mean “catching”, so too does “research” often fail to obtain a desired result. Knowledge about methods that are ineffective or not well-suited to particular problems is useful in the sense that it, if it is published and attended to, can reduce wasted effort on the part of other researchers. There is a lot of jocularity concerning the titles of the humor magazines, “The Journal of Irreproducible Results” and the “Annals of Improbable Results”, but various researchers in conversation will admit that there is something to the notion that our current emphasis on telegraphic reportage of results overlooks the utility of laying out not only what worked in a research project, but also the usually various problems that a research effort encounters and sometimes overcomes.

Given that I have advocated for the existence of a problem, a reasonable concern is whether I have any constructive notion about what to do about it. I think that the problem is certainly difficult, but I do have hopes that it may actually be soluble. What remains to be seen is whether the level of sustained effort that would be necessary to get to a solution that meets several of the properties of an effective method would be worth the very real costs associated with it.

The first cost would be freeing scientific knowledge from the grip of commercial interests. The publication of scientific research is largely done in such a way that the publishing entities expect to retain rights to the work published and be compensated in some way for access to that work over a significant period of time (copyright currently granting something like most of a century of protection). This is a large problem in itself, as current research appears in a bewildering array of thousands of research journals, each applying somewhat differing standards and procedures to the peer-review process. Indexing services themselves add another layer of costs, and any solution to the problem is going to have the side effect of putting these services out of business.

Another cost would be in establishing a comprehensive means of surveying past work. While one may argue that current research is of most value and that a system might be contemplated that would deliver comprehensive and complete results concerning work more recent than some arbitrary date nnnn, this is a bit short-sighted. Once one has the procedural and other concerns taken care of for solving the case of the scientific literature more recent than nnnn, one simply has the finite and diminishing body of surviving work as one expands the system to include earlier values of nnnn. We may as well make a determined effort to incorporate the corpus of human knowledge in the natural sciences in the system.

A further cost lies in making any such system universally accessible. One could argue that, having spent the time, effort, and money to develop a comprehensive system for retrieval of knowledge in the natural sciences that one should attempt to recover part of that cost in direct fees from users. I think that, too, is short-sighted. The benefit of open access to this knowledge lies in fostering work that would in turn be added to the system. Along the way, one would expect that applied results will generate economic benefits that should make the costs discussed so far trivial in comparison. That, though, is simply my expectation and could be a point of argument.

There are the costs of overcoming the technical hurdles in search. I think the progress that was made from 1994 to the present in generating relevant results to natural language queries concerning the unorganized content of the World Wide web indicates that this problem, too, should yield to some concentrated effort, or at least give an approximation to complete results that significantly advances and enhances the progress of scientific research.

There are the costs of changing what gets reported as a scientific result. We need to compensate the time needed to not only briefly report what eventually worked in research (as is done now), but to also report, in sufficient detail to provide a basis for others to benefit without having to travel down false paths themselves, what problems were encountered in technique and methods. This also includes the cost of expanding the volume of reported results to accommodate the extra words needed to do this.

Would a trillion dollars solve this problem? I think so, handily. I suspect that the actual cost would be a small fraction of that figure. (The post just previous reports on how the Encyclopedia of Life project has, as a secondary effort, already digitized about 1% of the available literature on taxonomy for some fraction of their $25 million operating budget.) There are things that are costing us a chunk of a trillion dollars that don’t have anywhere near the potential for economic benefit that solving this problem in scientific practice might offer. In fact, it might be just the thing to do to prepare to pay that outstanding bill.

I just heard a talk about the Encyclopedia of Life, a project to put up a page for every named species. They already have something like a million pages up, though many are stubs.

Another aspect of their project is to digitize every publication touching upon taxonomy. That reminded me of a draft post I’ve had hanging for a bit over a year now; I’ll put it up shortly. In any case, they estimate that there are some 80 million pages of pre-1923 taxonomic literature, and something near 400 million pages of taxonomic literature total, and that they have already digitized about 1% of the literature in the year or so that they’ve been operating.

The Louisiana legislature has passed a bill allowing teachers to insert essentially whatever they want into curricula about evolutionary science. The only thing that remains is for Governor Jindal to either sign it into law or allow it to take effect without his signature, and thus the only thing to stop it is a veto by Jindal. Contact information for Jindal:

Contact Information:

E-mail: http://www.gov.la.gov/index.cfm?md=form&tmp=email_governor

Phone: 225-342-7015 or 866-366-1121 (Toll Free)

Fax: 225-342-7099

And the message I sent:

Please veto SB 733.

This bill does not improve science education. It is backed by groups like the Discovery Institute, whose preferred arguments require revising the definition of science in order to privilege their own account of biological origins. Those arguments also are clearly taken from the religious antievolution movement’s past ensemble of arguments.

That has three implications that you should consider.

1. Parents who do not share exactly the religious views promoted by the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, and the Institute for Creation Research are ill-served by having the State of Louisiana abandon its responsibility in determining what teachers will — and will not — instruct their students about. A substantial proportion of Christians have no problems accepting the results of science; see the Clergy Letter Project at evolutionweekend.org, where over 11,000 US Christian clergy have signed a statement supporting the teaching of evolution and the exclusion of “intelligent design” arguments from science classrooms.

2. Antievolution arguments encourage students to distrust both the scientific process and scientists. A common theme is that mainstream science is covering up information that would point to creationism. This distrust is unlikely to help students fit into a society that is increasingly dependent on constant advancement of technology to remain competitive in the global marketplace.

3. The antievolution arguments are long-rebutted, and represent a misrepresentation of the state of science today. There is no secular purpose to teaching misinformation to students. The antievolution arguments are not in any sense a “state of the art” addition to a curriculum, and are easily linked to their earlier, explicitly creationist, forms. This means that there is no hope that a teacher choosing to use SB 733 as a means of teaching antievolution arguments could defend a challenge in court. This needlessly exposes Louisiana teachers and school districts to significant legal liability.

The religious, sociological, economic, and legal ramifications of SB 733 all require that you veto the bill. I hope that you will do so. The stated cover of improving academic freedom or education generally is a sham.

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.
Visiting Research Associate
Michigan State University

If you write something to Governor Jindal, please copy it to the comments here.

I arrived last night here in Minneapolis. This morning, Weezie Mead from NCSE and I made our way over to the Bell Museum of Science for a K-12 Education workshop. The primary goal was to provide teachers with materials about effective teaching of evolutionary science to students.

This evening, there was a reception at the Bell Museum.

I will be transferring photos and getting those processed. I’ll post more later.