Lately, there’s been a bit of a dust-up over at the ScienceBlogs schizophrenic hive mind over some statements by Mitt Romney. During the course of the kerfluffle, I started thinking about the slippery way words work, and how oddities in our relationships to words affect the way we interpret them. As the fracas was dying down, a related post zinged my way from a different quarter which motivated me to ramble about the whole affair.

It began with Michael Luo writing the following at the New York Times political blog “caucus.”

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

Is this a good sign or a bad one? More exactly, does it signify a move from very bad to less so? Well, tough to say — I don’t think “close reading” is a very useful tool to apply to politicians’ statements. (If this were a letter from Thomas Pynchon, then yes, we should scrutinize it for every nuance of meaning, yet Romney is not a future Nobelist but rather an embryonic Nixon.) Whether a man can be an ally in the struggle for reason and critical thought depends not only upon his ideas, but upon the man himself.

As a person who is moderately informed about biology, I grow nervous when I hear people single out “the human body” for preferential treatment as the desired end product of the evolutionary process. Remember in Calvin and Hobbes when Calvin described the prehistory of Earth from 4.5 billion years ago until today and then announced, “Now, in 1988, there’s me. The acme of evolution!” Satire, almost twenty years ahead of its target. Remember Prometheus, sculpting humans out of clay and stealing fire because all the good tricks had been given to the other animals? The only noteworthy difference between the Greek story and the modern myth is that like Bill Watterson, the Greeks recognized how feeble our bodies are without feral claws and feline night-vision.
Continue reading Enhanced Circumlocution Techniques →

James Barlow asked a good question down in the comments, which I thought was worth promoting to the top level.

Anyone got any ideas for completing this Foxworthy-esque statement:

You’re probably shilling for the Discovery Institute if. . .

Some suggestions:

• You say the words “specified complexity” with a straight face.
• You believe that a “Darwinist conspiracy” is keeping Intelligent Design out of the peer-reviewed journals.
• Every claim you make has already been dissected at Talk Origins.

Further completions welcome!

Anybody drive a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution? If so, you’re aiding and abetting the forces of Satan, as Arnold Zwicky patiently explains:

The Lancer Evolution is, according to the Wikipedia page, “Mitsubishi’s flagship sports car”, in production since 1992 and now up to 2007 model X (that’s a Roman numeral, not an unknown quantity). The name “Evolution” was probably chosen to suggest progress, but it occurred to Swarthmore biologist Colin Purrington a little while back to wonder whether the name might be a drawback in parts of the U.S. where creationist, rather than Darwinian evolutionist, ideas have considerable currency — places where, you might say, “evolution” is a dirty word. Being a scientist, Purrington collected some data (from Mitsubishi) and assembled a nifty graph, headed “‘Evolution’ car dissed by Red States”:

According to its Flickr page, Purrington has released this graph under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. He comments:

The quote is from the official marketing web site. There are no plans to release a “Lancer Creation” version, as far as I know. Las Vegas is probably driving the odd sales data for Nevada (it was a filming location for the Evolution-featurin’ flick, “Too Fast Too Furious”, I think). Not sure what is up for Maine. I probably need to rerun the statistics using “18-44 males” to get a more accurate estimate of the underlying car-buying population that favors Rally and NASCAR models. And, to be fair, I should include a control car (e.g., Galant) from Mitsubishi, just in case the red states have a tendency of “buying American”, which probably plays a part in these data.

Zwicky corrects, “Ah, not “2 Fast 2 Furious” (2003), which was set in Miami and filmed in various Floridian locations, but “Redline” (2007); both movies destroyed a lot of cars and were not well received by critics, so it would be easy to confuse them.” One should probably also run a comparison to control for general economic well-being, which I’m sure affects car-buying habits. According to the manufacturer’s horrendously Flash-drenched wobsite, the 2006 Lancer Evolution will dent your wallet to a depth varying from $29,774 (“Rally Special” trim) to $36,924 (“the ultimate”). Comparing to other cars, foreign and domestic, in the same price range would be necessary in order to lock down all the variables.

Still, it’s a funny graph.

And when you’re tooling out in your MR Lancer Evolution to pick up your sultry atheist babe, be sure to give her a bottle of DNA perfume, in its spunky triple-helix bottle officially approved by the Ig Nobel Prize Committee.

IN OTHER NEWS: John Armstrong, whose taste in music is quite respectable, has said positive things about William Shatner. Cue the Four Horsemen and the Seven Seals.

Michael Egnor is back, with yet more drivel about reverse engineering. This time, he’s upset about a new blog post by Michael Lemonick (the one whose blog started Michael Egnor‘s career as a DI shill in the first place, although Egnor had a history of kookiness). Lemonick speaks some plain and simple truth:

If the DI had been around when people thought lightning was stuff the gods threw when angry, we might still not have electricity.

That didn’t make Egnor very happy:

It’s ironic that Mr. Lemonick would choose electromagnetism as a vignette for the design inference in science. The two scientific pioneers of classical electromagnetism, Faraday and Maxwell, were particularly devout Christians who inferred design everywhere in nature. They believed that God designed everything—including electricity. Their approach to science was pure design inference, undiluted by atheism or materialism. Contra Mr. Lemonick, we have electricity because of men who believed in God and in the evident design in nature.

Mr. Lemonick misunderstands the philosophical origins of modern science. The Scientific Revolution emerged within, and only within, Judeo-Christian civilization, and nearly all of the scientists who gave us modern science—Copernicus, Pascal, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Leibniz, Harvey, Vesalius, Linnaeus, Lavoisier, Mendel, Pasteur, as well as Faraday and Maxwell, were devout Christians who inferred design in all of nature. They worked entirely from the design inference.

In a word, NO. They worked from the idea that Nature exhibits predictable regularities, which is an entirely different animal. They also worked from the evidence, which is a concept the creationists of all stripes, ID included, have had a hard time understanding. Most important of all, they accepted the facts which their observations revealed to them. Scientists of religious persuasions take our discoveries about Nature as indications of the divine imagination, but they do not refuse to acknowledge discoveries because they conflict with prior dogma — and, my friends, that’s all the Discovery Institute has ever done. There’s a big gap — no, a gaping chasm — between thinking that God set the world up with some intelligible order which people can understand and refusing to acknowledge that order because it clashes with your personal notions of the divine blueprint.

Taking an honest search for Nature’s patterns expressed in the mindset of earlier times and conflating that with the Discovery Institute’s manipulative propaganda tactics is despicable behavior.
Continue reading Michael Egnor: Manipulative Liar →