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Found on this website, “Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution” is meant to be a handy guide for students skeptical of evolution. According to this article at The New York Times, science teachers in the US are increasingly having to deal with similar anti-evolution ploys. Reading through the list gave me a few chuckles, so I thought — with only my knowledge from high school biology — I would go through the list and do my best to respond to the various challenges.

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1. ORIGIN OF LIFE. Why do textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life’s building blocks may have formed on the early Earth — when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?

It appears to be a favorite tactic of anti-evolutionists to try to tie evolutionary biology with the question of the origins of life. The truth is, biological evolution, natural selection, and common ancestry don’t say anything about how life began. Life could have started any number of ways; evolution is merely the proposed mechanism to explain the diversity and robustness of modern life.

That being said, we aren’t completely in the dark as to how life on Earth began. Unfortunately, we may never be able to prove how life on Earth began, but rather only likely ways that it could have began. While there is some controversy as to whether the Miller-Urey experiment replicated the atmospheric conditions of early Earth¹, it did show us the possibility of creating the building blocks of organic life from non-living materials. In that respect, it is still an important experiment, with implications for our search for the origin of life.

Regardless, this is not a criticism of evolution — it’s a criticism of the Miller-Urey experiment.
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I am a big fan of Consumer Reports magazine. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a consumer information and advocacy magazine. In each issue, it selects groups of products (e.g. computers, televisions, lawn mowers, refrigerators), and makes recommendations based on a battery of tests, surveys, and investigation of the product. It tests all of the products that it recommends, and usually has a very scientifically-minded approach to studying consumer goods.

However, the magazine is not limited to the analysis and recommendation of products, but also contains other supplementary material. Some of these things, like recall and safety notices, are often valuable in supplementing the content of the magazine. However, they can sometimes get into trouble in their supplementary sections, leading to problems like those in their latest issue. I took exception to two articles in particular: When to Buy Organic and How Did You Sleep Last Night?.

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Admittedly, there’s a fine line between skepticism and cynicism — one that’s easy to cross if you don’t watch where you step. Skeptics are accused of making the world a dull place by taking all of the magic and wonder out of everything. As the poet John Keats once said (back when Philosophy and Science were pretty much the same thing):

“Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.”

This criticism has been leveled both at me, personally, and has been leveled at the entire skeptical movement for quite some time. Most of the people I talk to about skepticism don’t understand why we have to go around raining on others’ parades. However, skepticism isn’t about parades or precipitation, but rather looking for the true beauty in the world around us, rather than settling for apparent surface beauty. Great skeptics, like Carl Sagan, have pointed out that we need not divorce our sense of wonder from our skeptical mindset in order to further scientific inquiry and understanding¹:

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”²

Science has shown us that we can find more beauty through unweaving the rainbow then we could ever have hoped to find just by looking at, and being content with, the pretty colors in the sky. But there is another concern that is often raised about skepticism. Few people argue that logic and rationality lack a place in our understanding of the world, but some feel that skepticism fails to account for the magic and mystery of fantasy and fiction. Good stories are often capable of reaching people in ways that good logic and scientific inquiry often can’t, and appeals to emotion are able to evoke responses much stronger than can be generated through logic and reason.

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As much as I love the skeptic community, I’ve recently felt that a few problems need addressing. Namely, that refuting unscientific, false or misinformed matters is quite often approached through ridicule rather than a respectful outlaying of the facts. Given the highly doubtful nature of certain premises such as homeopathy, keeping oneself from succumbing to frustration in arguing against such nonsense can admittedly be a very difficult task on its own. Nevertheless, resorting to the derision of “believers” can only result in the affirmation of their misplaced beliefs, as their mere indifference to the alternative is substituted by outward hostility. Read the rest of this entry »

Science and religion have an unstable relationship. Oftentimes they are content to stay separate and do their own things. Occasionally, they clash over certain issues of public policy. However, are these two world-views actually compatible, and if not, which one is correct?

Let us look at the last part of that statement first. A favorite argument of the Young Earth Creationists and the Answers in Genesis crowd is to state that science and religion provide different worldviews– That the systems use different assumptions about our world and reality and are therefore destined to arrive at different conclusions.  Some go as far as to label science as a religion, and why shouldn’t they? Science is based on a bunch of presuppositions as is any other system of belief. So why is science a more legitimate worldview? Because it lets us get at the truth. In order to understand why science is not “just another religion”, we have to understand what science really is as well as the presuppositions upon which it is based.

Science can only reveal empirical truth, and not metaphysical truth. Some people see this as a shortcoming of science, but even if metaphysical truth existed, of what use would it be to us? Philosophy is an interesting intellectual pursuit, but even Descartes had the common sense to see that the way we view the world through philosophy fails to alter our worldviews when we leave our study and go outside afterward. Whether religious, scientific, or both, we all tend to judge the truth in the same way: By what matches our observations¹. The religious person still looks both ways before they cross the road, and they wash their hands before they sit down to eat dinner. From any moderate perspective, it is obvious that science and religion do not conflict in basic worldviews, as some extremists would have you think. In fact, science and religion are both dependent upon empiricism; the only main difference is that religion assumes that one can talk with god (an all-knowing supernatural entity that imparts divine wisdom).

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Let’s talk about Orgone. A form of energy allegedly discovered by Wilhelm Reich, it has spawned an entire system of belief and generation of quackery. Due to the complex nature of this post, I’m going to break it down into topics. Let’s start with the basics:

What is Orgone?

From Wikipedia:

Orgone energy is a term coined by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for the “universal life energy” which he was convinced to have discovered in published experiments in the late 1930s. Reich claimed that Orgone energy was a “life energy” which filled all space, was blue in color, and that certain forms of illness were the consequence of depletion or blockages of the energy within the body. These theories are considered pseudoscience by most.

In many ways, the concept of Orgone bears certain resemblances to the Chinese concept of Qi, or how the force worked in Star Wars before Lucas changed his mind and decided informed us it was caused by midi-chlorians. The concept was actually originally based on the Freudian concept of libido. Though Orgone doesn’t obey the same set of laws as the rest of the physical universe (it isn’t subject to the laws of Thermodynamics, for example), it can still be captured and directed. Again, much like Qi, Reich believed that certain illnesses were caused by a lack of Orgone in key places in the body. Naturally, Reich created a machine called a cloudbuster, which he claimed could cause clouds to dissipate merely by manipulating Orgone fields. Later, certain conspiracy groups adapted the technology to disperse so-called chemtrails.

So why should we reject this premise?

Lack of any evidence. Beyond that, lack of any hypothesized mechanism for what Orgone is, how it behaves, or how it is able to do what people think it does. Wilhelm Reich was not a total crackpot; realizing that he was dealing with science outside of his professed field, he enlisted the help of some notable physicists in order to verify his claims. Subsequent tests showed that Reich’s Orgone accumulator was not able to generate the intended effect. Since then, nobody has been able to show conclusively (i.e. in a controlled test) any effect from the direction or accumulation of Orgone energy. Nor have physicists, with their ever-increasing knowledge of what the universe is made of, uncovered some type of particle or field that bears resemblance to Orgone.
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God doesn’t exist:

It is possible that God exists, but it’s also possible that the Sasquatch exists. Seeing as there is no evidence of the Sasquatch, it would not be folly to say that “the Sasquatch doesn’t exist”. Similarly, there is no evidence of God. We demand evidential support of all conclusions that people come to in life with the sole exception being in the realm of religion, of which there is very little evidential support. I see no reason why religion should not adhere to the same principles as every other thing we experience in life, and so I say that God does not exist.

I have heard it argued that the existence of life in itself is enough evidence to believe in God. I do not believe this. Although I believe that it is reasonable to hypothesize that a higher power created life, there is no evidence in support of this hypothesis and there is no reason to believe that this hypothetical higher power is God, whether it be the Hebrew Gog or any other God.

There are a number of arguments brought up against this assumption that God doesn’t exist by theists, and I will cover as many of them as I can think of below:

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Free energy (and its little brother, perpetual motion), is an idea that’s been around a long time, and has persisted despite the complete and utter failure of every single invention purported to generate energy “from nothing”. Why has it lasted so long? It seems that there are two reasons for this: the first is that there is confusion over what actually constitutes “free” energy. There are two types of free energy devices; those that generate power from nothing, and those that generate power from some unknown external source. The “power-from-nothing” types often use magnets in their construction, and are usually disclaimed with a “would work if there was less friction”. Of course, the laws of thermodynamics expressly forbid such things from existing. So why do they continue to be invented?
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A recent entry in this blog discussed a poll in which Americans were asked whether or not they believed nanotechnology is immoral. According to the poll, it turns out that a minority of Americans believe that research in the field of nanotechnology is moral. Regardless of what this says about the American political landscape, I feel this raises the more important issue of morality in science. Mainly, what role does morality play in science, and to what extent can we call a technology ‘immoral’?
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Each and every evening, I make it a priority to visit Ken Ham’s absolutely appalling website, www.answersingenesis.org. It isn’t so much that I’m a masochist, but I do oftentimes find the nonsense Ham ad libs to be amusing, or even, in a very odd way, charming.

Imagine my excitement to discover his latest podcast entry, which turns out to be as much honest and enlightening as it is classic rock. In it, Ham attempts to expose evolution’s “racist roots.” He first recites a 19th century newspaper article which describes the natives of Tasmania as “a lower order of the human race.” Ham then recounts an alleged story where Charles Darwin’s grandfather dug up the grave of a Tasmanian aboriginal man to be placed on display at the Royal College of Surgeons. He thusly concludes that evolution is inherently racist. We have therefore all descended from Adam and Eve…and those who hear the podcast have therefore all gained a better understanding of the non sequitur.

Oh Ken, you’ll be the the end of us all.

Linking evolution to racism is nothing new; Creationists have used this tactic for years upon years in an effort to trivialize evolution. Despite Ham’s effort, his latest anecdote fails to make such a link.

Most skeptics have heard this all before, and it’s no longer easy to appear surprised. Anti-evolutionists such as Ken Ham seem to believe that claims of Darwin’s racism somehow refute the incontrovertible nature of evolution. Even were it the case that evolution stood on such shaky ground, it’s not necessarily true.

Yes, I wrote “necessarily,” and, to perhaps shock you even further, I wrote it in italics. What could that possibly mean? Could I actually be agreeing that Darwin was a racist?

Well, yes and no. Read the rest of this entry »