Politics and Science

Liberals like to claim that conservatives are “anti-science,” but in fact both Republicans and Democrats will reject science when they find it ideologically uncongenial. Stossel discusses fracking, genetically modified organisms, vaccines, global warming and other issues.

Academic Authoritarianism: Universities Should Ban “Fake Science”

From a science oriented website, a demand that certain ideas be banned from university campuses. How, it asks, should universities deal with “fake science?” The answer:

By banning it—and recognizing that’s very different from restricting academic freedom.

Universities are supposed to stand for the highest ideals in science and scholarship. “Our mission is to advance knowledge and transform lives,” reads Michigan State University’s mission statement, by “conducting research of the highest caliber that seeks to answer questions and create solutions in order to expand human understanding and make a positive difference.” So what is a university like Michigan State supposed to do when it unwittingly lends its name and reputation to an organization that embodies the very opposite of the highest caliber scholarship?

The organization in this case is a Christian fundamentalist group that held an anti-science “Origin Summit” on the MSU campus last Saturday. The conference organizers managed to use a student religious group to book a room on campus. They then proceeded to emphasize in their advertising that the meeting was being held at a big-name research university and “bringing world renowned scientists before the students.” These scientists have “tangible proof and viable evidence” that science and the bible are “in total agreement.” To reconcile the Bible with science, the summit program—which has since been removed from the organization’s website, but can be found here—featured speakers who discussed the role of evolution in Hitler’s thinking, why “the Big Bang is FAKE,” why evolution is impossible, and the evidence for intelligent design in nature. One talk was devoted to criticizing a famous experiment by one of MSU’s own evolutionary biologists.

 Unorthodox, certainly. So it can’t be allowed on campus.

. . . a campus is not a Marriott. Universities should recognize as British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University did after it offered space to an anti-vaccine conference—that when you rent a room, you also implicitly rent your name and credibility. The second principle is that bad scholarship can be rooted out by conventional means, while pseudoscience cannot. Hiring a creationist as a science faculty member or hosting a debate with a figure from an anti-science movement runs the risk of misleading the students and the public, by giving such people air time under the university’s seal. When universities make a commitment to open inquiry, it doesn’t mean that they have to open their doors to fake science.

So these folks need to be banned from campus.

We happen to think young earth creationism is a bit of a crackpot position, but we would rather have a lot of young earth creationists around than nasty authoritarians who want to shut up speech they disagree with.

Where public universities are concerned, attempts to shut up certain viewpoints are pretty much unconstitutional. Our colleague Paul Nolette (who teaches Constitutional Law) responded to this article as follows:

I think that plaintiffs would have a strong viewpoint discrimination case if a public university attempted to ban what it deemed to be an “anti-science” summit while allowing similar discussions to proceed. While public universities are not quite the same as public parks or sidewalks (which are “traditional” public forums), they are nevertheless still limited public forums in which bans like this would raise serious questions. There’s a fairly clear line of precedent that suggests that designating a public forum, such as a lecture hall or other meeting space, to those with one viewpoint but closing it to another would violate free speech principles.

I would also add that such a ban might also violate the Free Exercise Clause as well. There are a number of cases involving student religious groups in which the Court held that school restrictions violated the students’ religious rights. Indeed, there are enough elements for a lawsuit that I would think a university would reverse its policy or settle before such a case even reached the courts.

Another example from the article:

In 2007, astronomer Martin Gaskell had applied for the directorship [at the University of Kentucky] of a new observatory at the university. His application was turned down, and the position was given to someone with less training and experience, in part because Gaskell had given public lectures endorsing intelligent design and claiming that there was little or no evidence for evolution. Though the job was in astronomy and not biology, the hiring committee was justifiably wary of hiring someone who rejected major elements of modern science. . . . But Gaskell sued for religious discrimination. The University of Kentucky settled, agreeing to pay Gaskell $125,000.

We are glad the University of Kentucky had to pay for this egregious instance of discrimination.

It’s one thing to say that if you want a job in (say) Physical Anthropology, you need to believe in evolution to teach and publish effectively.  But demanding orthodox beliefs in a different field really is discrimination (religious, in this case).

Some Crackpot Ideas Acceptable

Interestingly, scientists would doubtless be quite tolerant of crackpot notions that didn’t contradict the scientific orthodoxy.  A job candidate in Physical Anthropology or Astronomy who believed that Dick Cheney arranged the 9/11 attacks, or that the CIA had John Kennedy killed would be tolerated.

Indeed, years ago we had a conversation with a colleague in the natural sciences (we’ll conceal his name to protect the guilty), who loudly demanded that high school students not be taught about the theory of intelligent design.  We asked him whether it is OK that they be taught Marxist economics or JFK conspiracy theories, and he said that was perfectly acceptable.

In short, unorthodox and even crackpot theories are fine so long as they don’t contradict “science.”  Science is sacred.  Science is special.  Science should not be subjected to the rough and tumble of the marketplace of ideas.

Ironically, there is good evidence for one variant of intelligent design:  the anthropic principle, which shows that our universe appears to be contrived — designed — to allow the evolution of life.

Of course, science changes its orthodoxy sometimes.  The history of science is full of fiascoes like support for eugenics and acceptance of Piltdown Man as a human ancestor.  Scientists will point out that science is “self-correcting.”  Scientists themselves will correct their own errors.

After they do, people are then free to change their beliefs and accept the new scientific orthodoxy.  In fact, they better do so, on penalty of being called “anti-science.”

Political Fiddling With Global Warming Report

From the Heartland Institute:

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is in full spin-control mode today after analysts pointed out politicians rather than scientists are driving IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers.

Earlier today, IPCC released the Summary for Policymakers for its Fifth Assessment Report. However, IPCC failed to release the Fifth Assessment Report itself, explaining it had to make revisions to the Report to comport with the Summary for Policymakers. The content and wording of the Summary for Policymakers is formulated by political representatives of UN member nations rather scientists.

The revelation that politicians and political representatives are dictating what appears in the Summary for Policymakers and the Fifth Assessment Report itself further damages IPCC’s poor credibility regarding objectivity and scholarly merit. Scientific watchdogs previously noted IPCC’s top staffers who direct the Report’s content and conclusions include dozens of staffers affiliated with environmental activist groups. Additionally, IPCC reports are notorious for citing environmental activist memos and other unreliable sources to support alarmist climate assertions.

The just-released Summary for Policymakers bears the undeniable fingerprints of political mischief. For example, a draft Summary for Policymakers that IPCC leaked to friendly journalists several weeks ago reported global temperatures have remained flat since last century and IPCC computer models cannot explain why. The draft Summary also acknowledged temperatures are rising more slowly than asserted in prior IPCC reports. Political representatives openly complained these acknowledgements provided evidentiary support for skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis. The political representatives expressed special concern regarding IPCC’s acknowledgement that it could not explain the ongoing flat temperatures, and they urged IPCC to change its findings. Today’s revised Summary reflects the political objections to the earlier scientific findings, with the revised Summary claiming IPCC computer models can explain the ongoing flat temperatures, and claiming the lack of recent warming has no bearing on long-term temperature trends. IPCC authors are presumably re-writing applicable sections of the Fifth Assessment Report this weekend to change the Reports’ scientific conclusions and reconfigure them to meet the demands of politicians.

IPCC chair Raj Pachauri, meanwhile, is in personal damage control mode after claiming earlier this week that there has been no slowdown in global temperature rise. As reported here earlier this week, reporters documented Pachauri acknowledged earlier this year that global temperatures have indeed been flat for the past 17 years. The draft Summary for Policymakers, before it was scrubbed by politicians and political representatives, also acknowledged the lack of recent warming despite Pachauri’s claims to the contrary.

Of course, politics and science don’t mix very well, and when they do mix, it’s science that likely takes a back seat since the politicians control the resources that the scientists want: money, power, legitimacy, the feeling that one is “making the world better.”

It’s deeply ironic that warming proponents accuse skeptics of being politically motivated. No doubt skeptics have political biases, but they are not so blatantly acting as willing lackeys, doing the bidding of the politicians.

Popular Scientific Arrogance

From The Wall Street Journal “Best of the Web:”

Popular Science Is Neither. Discuss.

The website of Popular Science magazine, beset with “trolls and spambots,” is shutting off user comments, explains its online content director, Suzanne LaBarre. We can sympathize with that—but not with this:

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

All scientific knowledge is empirically based and tentative; “scientific doctrine” is an oxymoron, and “scientific certainty” a relative term. LaBarre’s comments exemplify the danger of religion’s decline. Science is corrupted when people look to it to provide them with a belief system.

This is typical of the arrogance of those who pretend to speak in the name of “science.” They show the dogmatism equal to religious dogmatism at its worst.

If “science” insists that something is true, don’t you dare doubt it.

For these folks, science is not something produced by ordinary mortals. Science never heads off down the garden path, the result of political ideology, group think, careerism, or personal or group self-interest on the part of the scientists.

But in the real world, scientists, a century ago, embraced the poisonous doctrine of eugenics. A little more recently, they accepted the Piltdown Man hoax. And their current claims about global warming are sounding a bit suspect given the reality that there has been essentially no warming for the last 15 years.

We have no problem with the theory of evolution, but we are rather put off by the fact that that members of the cult of science are radically offended that anybody might disbelieve it. They just can’t accept that, no matter how emphatic science is about an issue, people will choose heretical ideas.

Members of the cult of science need to grow up. Nobody has a right to have people agree with them.

We are rather skeptical of anthropogenic global warming, and we are especially put off by the fascist demands for orthodoxy on the part of its proponents.

It’s relevant here that scientists are (relative to other professions) a rather secular lot, with a very large proportion of atheists among their ranks. But of course, when one decides one does not believe in God, the desire for certainty and moral purity does not go away. Rather, it gets transferred to another belief system. Science becomes that belief system. That’s how science becomes scientism.

Liberals and Science: Pesticides Hoax

From the (liberal) Huffington Post:

“Many of the ‘healthiest foods’ we eat may not be as healthy as we think” was the lede of a recent Channel 11 news story out of Pittsburgh. It was based on the Environmental Working Group’s just released 2013 “Dirty Dozen” report on pesticide residues on produce, which is trotted out every year by the NGO. These misleading pseudo-analyses frighten consumers and actually discourage them from buying healthy fruits and vegetables.

The news story continues, “Pesticides are meant to kill pests, but the residue isn’t meant to be eaten, and it could be harmful to your health.” Actually, the only truth in that statement is that “pesticides are meant to kill pests.” The rest of it is false, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, which unambiguously states that “U.S. food does not pose a safety concern based upon pesticide residues.”

The Channel 11 news story is typical of the insidious reporting that results from the EWG list. (We refuse to call it a study.) In fact, such news stories are the very reason EWG releases the report each year — to generate coverage that inhibits people from eating produce that isn’t organic. Unless of course, the produce is on the relatively new list, “The Clean Fifteen,” which contain the lowest level of pesticides, according to EWG.

EWG tries to make their “Shopper’s Guide” appear legitimate by relying on samples taken and tested by the USDA and FDA. According to an article in The Huffington Post, “The EWG looked at six measures of pesticide contamination, gave each measurement a score from one to 100 and compiled the results.

But what was their methodology, if you could call it that? “In government tests analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, detectable pesticide residues were found on 67 percent of food samples after they had been washed or peeled. We found striking differences between the number of pesticides and amount of residues detected on Dirty Dozen Plus™ and Clean Fifteen™ foods.” (Yes, they’ve trademarked the names.)

In essence their approach is (in our words), “Some produce had more residue and some had less. We put the ones with most on a list and called them ‘dirty’ and the ones with least and made a different list and called them ‘clean.’”

This type of gimmick should result in an “F” in a 4th grade science fair, not adoring coverage in major media.

Federal agencies agree that pesticide residues, even from those topping the dirty dozen list, are not in the least harmful at the levels they occur. If you think the government agencies are in cahoots with “big agriculture” and you shouldn’t believe them, consider that even the first lady in her “Let’s Move” campaign advocates consumption of more fruits and vegetables, and hasn’t insisted they be organic.

Yet the Dirty Dozen is resurrected each year, and each time — like Charlie Brown fooled by Lucy pulling away the football at the last second — the media buy into it.

The EWG’s crying “Wolf!” about this non-issue began in 1995, when, backed by such eminent scientific entities as the Barbra Streisand Foundation (we are not making this up), the organization published its first “Dirty Dozen” — a list of produce that supposedly contained the highest levels of chemical pesticides. The annual list, which this year includes some of the most nutritious and delicious components of our diet - such as apples, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, peaches, strawberries and grapes - is accompanied by an admonition to limit consumption of those kinds of fresh produce and to avoid conventionally grown varieties in favor of the more costly organic options.

However, a study published in 2011 in the Journal of Toxicology by Dr. Carl Winter and Josh Katz of UC-Davis showed that 90% of the cases “exposed” in EWG’s 2010 list involved levels of pesticides 1,000 times lower than the chronic reference dose (the level of daily exposure likely to be without an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime of chronic exposure). They concluded, “The potential consumer risks from exposure to the most frequently detected pesticides on the ‘Dirty Dozen’ list of foods are negligible and cast doubts as to how consumers avoiding conventional forms of such produce items are improving their health status.”

Moreover, as Dr. Winter wrote in a separate commentary for the International Food Information Council, “Three-quarters of the pesticide/commodity combinations [identified by the EWG] showed consumer exposure estimates more than one million times lower than doses given to laboratory animals continuously over their entire lifetimes that do not show adverse effects.”

These are critical observations because, as has been known from antiquity, “the dose makes the poison”; in other words, a substance is toxic only if the dose and length of exposure are sufficient to cause damage - a fundamental principle of toxicology seemingly alien to the EWG (which relies heavily on the percentage of samples with pesticide, rather than on potentially toxic levels). Moreover, the EWG’s main recommendation - to “buy organic” - is belied by the fact that many organically grown versions of the “dirty” products are also “contaminated.” As Winter and Katz pointed out, the same data from the Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program used by the EWG indicate that there are pesticide residues in nearly a quarter of organic food samples.

The “Dirty Dozen” list is always a headline grabber for EWG, so it is no wonder that the media-hungry activist group keeps updating the same worthless analysis each year. The report informs — or more aptly, misinforms — the public conversation about the alleged dangers of pesticides on food. EWG cleverly publishes the report in the spring, just as Americans are getting excited about the prospect of summer produce.

The media have failed dismally to do their homework. Reporters consistently fail to ask pertinent questions about dose, exposure, likelihood of actual harm or compliance with federal regulations. Had they done so, they would have discovered that the pesticide tolerances in food established by the EPA are extraordinarily conservative — that is, highly risk averse — and that even these stringent limits are exceeded less than one percent of the time. But reporters and editors regurgitate the same old story, touting the Dirty Dozen’s supposed dangers while ignoring the science that belies the warnings

Although the minuscule amounts of synthetic pesticides in our foods pose negligible health risks, some activists actually advise consumers not to eat fruits and vegetables at all if they can’t afford organic varieties — in spite of decades of evidence that those who eat the most conventionally grown fruits and vegetables have half the cancer rates for practically every type of cancer and live longer than those who eat less.

We might add, of course, that the extra expense of organic food is easily borne by the affluent yuppies that are the core constituency of places like Whole Foods, but not so available to people who have to eat on food stamps.

We will never convince the intransigent ideologues of the error of their ways, but the media can — and must — do better at presenting accurate and complete information.

Liberals like to claim that conservatives are “anti-science,” since a lot of Christian conservatives don’t believe in evolution, and a lot of conservatives (secular and religious) are skeptical about anthropogenic global warming.

But when an issue comes up that serves neither the social biases of liberals (as evolution does) nor their class interests (as global warming does) the situation is different.

Their dislike of business shows in their rejection of the science on fracking, and their faddish embrace of organic and locally-grown produce.

Their cultural biases against the sort of people who own guns causes them to ignore the social science evidence on the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban, and the evidence that concealed carry laws at worst do no harm, and there is much evidence that they deter crime.

And liberals, being much like likely than conservatives to be secular, are more attracted to flaky new-ageist things like astrology. So social and ideological biases can cause people all across the ideological spectrum to ignore sound science. The problem is that the ignorance of the liberals is much less likely to be challenged in schools, and in the media.

Ignoring the Evidence on Fracking

From the Associated Press:

PITTSBURGH (AP) — In the debate over natural gas drilling, the companies are often the ones accused of twisting the facts. But scientists say opponents sometimes mislead the public, too.

Critics of fracking often raise alarms about groundwater pollution, air pollution, and cancer risks, and there are still many uncertainties. But some of the claims have little — or nothing— to back them.

For example, reports that breast cancer rates rose in a region with heavy gas drilling are false, researchers told The Associated Press.

Fears that natural radioactivity in drilling waste could contaminate drinking water aren’t being confirmed by monitoring, either.

And concerns about air pollution from the industry often don’t acknowledge that natural gas is a far cleaner burning fuel than coal.

“The debate is becoming very emotional. And basically not using science” on either side, said Avner Vengosh, a Duke University professor studying groundwater contamination who has been praised and criticized by both sides.

Shale gas drilling has attracted national attention because advances in technology have unlocked billions of dollars of gas reserves, leading to a boom in production, jobs, and profits, as well as concerns about pollution and public health. Shale is a gas-rich rock formation thousands of feet underground, and the gas is freed through a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which large volumes of water, plus sand and chemicals, are injected to break the rock apart.

The Marcellus Shale covers large parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia, while the Barnett Shale is in north Texas. Many other shale deposits have been discovered.

One of the clearest examples of a misleading claim comes from north Texas, where gas drilling began in the Barnett Shale about 10 years ago.

Opponents of fracking say breast cancer rates have spiked exactly where intensive drilling is taking place — and nowhere else in the state. The claim is used in a letter that was sent to New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo by environmental groups and by Josh Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of “Gasland,” a film that criticizes the industry. Fox, who lives in Brooklyn, has a new short film called “The Sky is Pink.”

But researchers haven’t seen a spike in breast cancer rates in the area, said Simon Craddock Lee, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

David Risser, an epidemiologist with the Texas Cancer Registry, said in an email that researchers checked state health data and found no evidence of an increase in the counties where the spike supposedly occurred.

And Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a major cancer advocacy group based in Dallas, said it sees no evidence of a spike, either.

“We don’t,” said Chandini Portteus, Komen’s vice president of research, adding that they sympathize with people’s fears and concerns, but “what we do know is a little bit, and what we don’t know is a lot” about breast cancer and the environment.

Yet Fox tells viewers in an ominous voice that “In Texas, as throughout the United States, cancer rates fell — except in one place— in the Barnett Shale.”

Lee called the claims of an increase “a classic case of the ecological fallacy” because they falsely suggest that breast cancer is linked to just one factor. In fact, diet, lifestyle and access to health care also play key roles.

Fox responded to questions by citing a press release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that doesn’t support his claim, and a newspaper story that Risser said is “not based on a careful statistical analysis of the data.”

When Fox was told that Texas cancer researchers said rates didn’t increase, he replied in an email that the claim of unusually high breast cancer rates was “widely reported” and said there is “more than enough evidence to warrant much deeper study.”

Another instance where fears haven’t been confirmed by science is the concern that radioactivity in drilling fluids could threaten drinking water supplies.

Critics of fracking note the deep underground water that comes up along with gas has high levels of natural radioactivity. Since much of that water, called flowback, was once being discharged into municipal sewage treatment plants and then rivers in Pennsylvania, there was concern about public water supplies.

But in western Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority did extensive tests and didn’t find a problem in area rivers. State environmental officials said monitoring at public water supply intakes across the state showed non-detectable levels of radiation, and the two cases that showed anything were at background levels.

Concerns about the potential problem also led to regulatory changes. An analysis by The Associated Press of data from Pennsylvania found that of the 10.1 million barrels of shale wastewater generated in the last half of 2011, about 97 percent was either recycled, sent to deep-injection wells, or sent to a treatment plant that doesn’t discharge into waterways.

Critics of fracking also repeat claims of extreme air pollution threats, even as evidence mounts that the natural gas boom is in some ways contributing to cleaner air.

Marcellus air pollution “will cause a massive public health crisis,” claims a section of the Marcellus Shale Protest website.

Yet data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that the shale gas boom is helping to turn many large power plants away from coal, which emits far more pollution. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency passed new rules to force drillers to limit releases of methane from wells and pumping stations.

Some environmental groups now say that natural gas is having a positive effect on air quality.

Earlier this year, the group PennFuture said gas is a much cleaner burning fuel, and it called gas-fired power plants “orders of magnitude cleaner” than coal plants.

Marcellus Shale Protest said in response to a question about its claims that “any possible benefit in electric generation must be weighed against the direct harm from the industrial processes of gas extraction.”

One expert said there’s an actual psychological process at work that sometimes blinds people to science, on the fracking debate and many others.

“You can literally put facts in front of people, and they will just ignore them,” said Mark Lubell, the director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior at the University of California, Davis.

Lubell said the situation, which happens on both sides of a debate, is called “motivated reasoning.” Rational people insist on believing things that aren’t true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views, he said.

Vengosh noted the problem of spinning science isn’t new, or limited to one side in the gas drilling controversy. For example, industry supporters have claimed that drilling never pollutes water wells, when state regulators have confirmed cases where it has. He says the key point is that science is slow, and research into gas drilling’s many possible effects are in the early stages, and much more work remains to be done.

“Everyone takes what they want to see,” Vengosh said, adding that he hopes that the fracking debate will become more civilized as scientists obtain more hard data.

Liberals, of course, love to claim that conservatives are “anti-science” when they find conservatives wanting to teach intelligent design in schools, or being skeptical of anthropogenic global warming.

But liberals will quickly throw science under the bus when it interferes with their political agenda. This is most obvious when economics is concerned, but on a lot of other issues too.

More Scientifically Literate People Are More Skeptical of Global Warming

Liberals love to believe that conservatives are anti-science, and that they (the liberals) embody objective scientific enlightenment.

This tendency is, of course, quite selectively observed. Liberals entirely ignore the economic science that says that minimum wage laws are harmful. And liberals are more likely to believe that astrology is somehow scientific. Indeed, among voters in the 2004 presidential election, more Kerry voters than Bush voters said astrology was “very scientific” or “sort of” scientific.

But where supposed global warming is concerned, liberals wrap themselves in the mantle of “science” and proclaim that skeptics are flat-earthers.

But now comes a study, from a mainstream academic journal, financed by the National Science Foundation, showing that the more somebody knows about science and math, the more likely they are to be skeptical of the supposed risks of global warming.

When asked “How much risk to you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” those with a higher level of science literacy/numeracy saw less risk. The difference is not large, but it runs in entirely the “wrong” direction. It is also statistically significant: greater than could be accounted for by mere chance.

The most straightforward interpretation of the results is that the more people know about science, the more sophisticated and skeptical they tend to be. They know that ideology, careerism and group think affects scientists as much as anybody else, and they know about Piltdown Man, Lysenko and cold fusion. Scientists will claim that science is “self correcting,” and therefore we should believe whatever science says. But sophisticated people know that science can take a long time to correct, especially when powerful interests and/or ideological biases are in play (as with Piltdown Man and Lysenko).

The authors of the study, who seem to be true-blue (or perhaps true-green would be better) believers, don’t draw this obvious conclusion, but rather invoke social conformity. They say:

For the ordinary individual, the most consequential effect of his beliefs about climate change is likely to be on his relations with his peers. A hierarchical individualist who expresses anxiety about climate change might well be shunned by his co-workers at an oil refinery in Oklahoma City. A similar fate will probably befall the egalitarian communitarian English professor who reveals to colleagues in Boston that she thinks the scientific consensus on climate change is a hoax.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it works equally well for climate scientists, who are as sensitive to the opinions of their subculture as anybody else. Indeed, more so, since to prosper (and even to get tenure) they need to be within the acceptable range of opinion.

This tendency to demean — and indeed to threaten and intimidate — those who are skeptical about global warming seems to suggest one of two things. Either those who support that view are at some level insecure about their position, and not willing to see an open and free-wheeling debate, or they are part of such a narrow little subculture that they really can’t understand how anybody can disagree with them.

Elite Scientists Who Question Man-Made Global Warming

One of the typical claims made by the global warming activists is that there is a scientific concensus on the subject, and that no reputable scientist disputes it.

This, quite simply, is a brazen lie. There is no other word to describe it.

From Marty Nemko, a list of elite scientists who insist there is plenty of doubt about Al Gore’s pet cause.

Unlike younger citizens who have only seen Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” in their high-school or college classes, we remember a long of series bogus environmental scare stories, all supported by considerable scientific opinion and all highly touted by the media: the “New Ice Age,” the Club of Rome Report, the Population Bomb, etc.

All of these were soon enough discredited. But the fact that they were discredited disappeared down a Mainstream Media memory hole, and the new global warming hysteria is treated as though nothing like this has ever happened before.

Heresy! “Scientific” Orthodoxy Allowed to be Challenged in Louisiana

From National Review online:

To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life.

Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is “anti-science.” In reality, the opposition’s efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific inquiry.

Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren’t well explained by existing theories.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the “scientific” view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

Real science, however, is a lot more messy — and interesting — than a set of ideological talking points. Most conservatives recognize this truth already when it comes to global warming. They know that whatever consensus exists among scientists about global warming, legitimate questions remain about its future impact on the environment, its various causes, and the best policies to combat it. They realize that efforts to suppress conflicting evidence and dissenting interpretations related to global warming actually compromise the cause of good science education rather than promote it.

The effort to suppress dissenting views on global warming is a part of a broader campaign to demonize any questioning of the “consensus” view on a whole range of controversial scientific issues — from embryonic stem-cell research to Darwinian evolution — and to brand such interest in healthy debate as a “war on science.”

The Louisiana Science Education Act offers such teachers a modest measure of protection. Under the law, school districts may permit teachers to “use supplementary textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner.” The act is not a license for teachers to do anything they want. Instruction must be “objective,” inappropriate materials may be vetoed by the state board of education, and the law explicitly prohibits teaching religion in the name of science, stating that its provisions “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine.”

The law was so carefully framed that even the head of the Louisiana ACLU has had to concede that it is constitutional as written.

Of course, this bill only allows balanced treatment of “hot button” scientific issues. It doesn’t require it, and it should -- with the unfortunate proviso that teachers who want to present one-sided indoctrination will do so, regardless of any state mandate.

(My students tell me that teaching of abstinence was required in their high-school sex education classes, but it was a “joke” since liberal teachers sneered at the idea that teens should abstain from sex.)

The author goes on:

Second, the idea that the current scientific consensus on any topic deserves slavish deference betrays stunning ignorance of the history of science. Time and again, scientists have shown themselves just as capable of being blinded by fanaticism, prejudice, and error as anyone else. Perhaps the most egregious example in American history was the eugenics movement, the ill-considered crusade to breed better human beings.

During the first decades of the 20th century, the nation’s leading biologists at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford, as well by members of America’s leading scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Museum of Natural History, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were all devoted eugenicists. By the time the crusade had run its course, some 60,000 Americans had been sterilized against their will in an effort to keep us from sinning against Darwin’s law of natural selection, which Princeton biologist Edwin Conklin dubbed “the great law of evolution and progress.”

Today, science is typically portrayed as self-correcting, but it took decades for most evolutionary biologists to disassociate themselves from the junk science of eugenics. For years, the most consistent critics of eugenics were traditionalist Roman Catholics, who were denounced by scientists for letting their religion stand in the way of scientific progress. The implication was that religious people had no right to speak out on public issues involving science.

Of course, the proponents of scientific orthodoxy turn suddenly open-minded about heterodox ideas that serve their interests, or come down on their side of the Culture Wars.

Economic science condemns the minimum wage as forcefully as biology affirms evolution. But nobody would think of questioning a teacher who presented arguments in favor of the minimum wage.

Conspiracy theories thrive among high school teachers. These range from the entirely unsupported notion that the Oil Companies are conspiring to fix prices, to bizarre conspiracy theories about 9/11, to the more popular (but disreputable in the history profession) theory that a conspiracy killed John Kennedy.

So liberals are perfectly tolerant of dissenting and heterodox opinions -- except where they run afoul of their anti-religious biases (being critical of evolution) or their interests (global warming).

Lancet and Iraq Deaths: Propaganda Masquerades as Science

From Jeff Jacoby, an example of how a supposedly reputable medical journal can be used for proprganda purposes:

Few medical journals have the storied reputation of The Lancet, a British publication founded in 1823. In the course of its long history, The Lancet has published work of exceptional influence, such as Joseph Lister’s principles of antiseptics in 1867 and Howard Florey’s Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on penicillin in 1940. Today it is one of the most frequently cited medical journals in the world.

So naturally there was great interest when the Lancet published a study in October 2006, three weeks before the midterm US elections, reporting that 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the US-led war.

Hundreds of news outlets, to say nothing of antiwar activists and lawmakers, publicized the astonishing figure, which was more than 10 times the death toll estimated by other sources. The Iraqi health ministry, for example, put the mortality level through June 2006 at 50,000. Iraq Body Count, a nonpartisan anti-war group that maintains a public database of the war’s victims, tallied some 45,000 Iraqi dead. If The Lancet’s number was accurate, more Iraqis had died in the 2½ years since the US invasion than during the eight-year war with Iran.

President Bush, asked about the study, dismissed it out of hand: “I don’t consider it a credible report.” Tony Blair’s spokesman also brushed it off as “not . . . anywhere near accurate.”

But the media played it up, for the most part unquestioningly. “One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion,” blared a front-page headline in the Guardian, a leading British paper. CNN.com’s story began: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the US-led invasion, a new study reports.” The CBS Evening News announced “a new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq. . . . 655,000 Iraqis -- 2.5 percent of the entire population -- have died as a consequence of the war.”

Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR’s Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, “Right before the election you’re making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it’s not politically motivated.” Burnham told Newsweek the same thing: “There’s no political motivation in this. I feel very confident in the numbers.”

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid. The study’s authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of “data-heaping” -- that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud.

“They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication,” Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.

Bad as the study’s methodological defects were, its political taint was worse:

• Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, “spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.”
• Coauthors Burnham and Roberts were avowed opponents of the Iraq war, and submitted their report to The Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election. Roberts, a self-described “advocate” committed to “ending the war,” even sought the Democratic nomination for New York’s 24th Congressional District. “It was a combination of Iraq and Katrina that just put me over the top,” he told National Journal.
• Lancet editor Richard Horton “also makes no secret of his leftist politics,” Munro and Cannon write. At a September 2006 rally, he publicly denounced “this axis of Anglo-American imperialism” for causing “millions of people . . . to die in poverty and disease.” Under Horton, The Lancet has increasingly been accused of shoddiness and sensationalism. In 2005, 30 leading British scientists blasted Horton’s “desperate headline-seeking” and charged him with running “badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories.”

The claim that the US-led invasion of Iraq had triggered a slaughter of almost Rwandan proportions was a gross and outlandish exaggeration; it should have been greeted with extreme skepticism. But because it served the interests of those eager to discredit the war as a moral catastrophe, common-sense standards were ignored. “In our view,” the Baltimore Sun editorialized, “the Hopkins study stands until someone knocks it down.”

Now someone has, devastatingly. But will the debunking be trumpeted as loudly and clearly as the original report? Don’t hold your breath.

Intelligent Design vs. The Dogmatists

A “major motion picture” is promised about the entire “intelligent design” controversy.

Ben Stein, the lovable, monotone teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years is on a journey to answer one of the biggest questions ever asked: Were we designed or are we simply the end result of an ancient mud puddle struck by lightning? Stein, who is also a lawyer, an economist, a former presidential speechwriter, author and social commentator, is stunned by what he finds on his journey. He discovers an elitist scientific establishment that has traded in its skepticism for dogma. But even worse, along the way, Stein uncovers a long line of biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their reputations destroyed and their careers ruined by a scientific establishment that allows absolutely no dissent from Charles Darwin’s theory of random mutation and natural selection.

“Big Science in this area of biology has lost its way,” says Stein. “Scientists are supposed to be allowed to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, no matter what the implications are. Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning.”

Expelled uncovers that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired in some cases for the fact that they believe there is evidence of “design” in nature, challenging the idea that life is a result of random chance. For example, Stein meets Richard Sternberg, a double PhD biologist who allowed a peer-reviewed research paper describing the evidence for intelligence in the universe to be published in the scientific journal Proceedings. Not long after publication, officials from the National Center for Science Education and the Smithsonian Institution where Sternberg was a research fellow began a coordinated smear and intimidation campaign to get the promising young scientist expelled from his position. This attack on scientific freedom was so egregious that it prompted a congressional investigation.

On his journey, Stein meets other scientists such as astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, who was denied tenure at Iowa State University in spite of his extraordinary record of achievement. Gonzalez made the mistake of documenting the design he has observed in the universe. There are others, such as Caroline Crocker, a brilliant biology teacher at George Mason University who was forced out of the university for briefly discussing problems with Darwinian theory and for telling the students that some scientists believe there is evidence of design in the universe. The list goes on and on.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for release in February 2008. For more information on Ben Stein’s journey visit http://www.expelledthemovie.com/.

It’s important to understand that Intelligent Design is not the same as Creationism. The latter view sees the world created in six days -- just as in the Book of Genesis.

Intelligent Design, in contrast, accepts evolution, and accepts that the universe evolved pretty much as the orthodox scientists say.

The issue is: is the universe we see entirely the result of random processes, or does it show evidence of design? Of course, if it shows evidence of design, that implies a Designer. And that’s where the scientists get huffy.

That there could be no such Designer is a matter of dogma with them.

Of course, they can’t prove there is not. And they certainly can’t explain everything about the universe. But they are keepers of the Faith.

Getting Emotional About “Global Warming”

From Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:

Introducing Newsweek’s Aug. 13 cover story on global warming “denial,” editor Jon Meacham brings up an embarrassing blast from his magazine’s past: an April 1975 story about global cooling, and the coming ice age that scientists then were predicting. Meacham concedes that “those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 Newsweek piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be.” But rather than acknowledge that the skeptics may have a point, Meacham shrugs it off.

“On global cooling,” he writes, “there was never anything even remotely approaching the current scientific consensus that the world is growing warmer because of the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Really? Newsweek took rather a different line in 1975. Then, the magazine reported that scientists were “almost unanimous” in believing that the looming Big Chill would mean a decline in food production, with some warning that “the resulting famines could be catastrophic.” Moreover, it said, “the evidence in support of these predictions” -- everything from shrinking growing seasons to increased North American snow cover to record-setting tornado outbreaks -- had “begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”

Yet Meacham, quoting none of this, simply brushes aside the 1975 report as “alarmist” and “discredited.” Today, he assures his readers, Newsweek’s climate-change anxieties rest “on the safest of scientific ground.”

Do they? Then why is the tone of Sharon Begley’s cover story -- nine pages in which anyone skeptical of the claim that human activity is causing global warming is painted as a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the coal and oil industries -- so strident and censorious? Why the relentless labeling of those who point out weaknesses in the global-warming models as “deniers,” or agents of the “denial machine,” or deceptive practitioners of “denialism?” Wouldn’t it be more effective to answer the challengers, some of whom are highly credentialed climate scientists in their own right, with scientific data and arguments, instead of snide insinuations of venality and deceit? Do Newsweek and Begley really believe that everyone who dissents from the global-warming doomsaying does so in bad faith?

Anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hypothesis, not an article of religious or ideological dogma. Skepticism and doubt are entirely appropriate in the realm of science, in which truth is determined by evidence, experimentation, and observation, not by consensus or revelation. Yet when it comes to global warming, dissent is treated as heresy -- as a pernicious belief whose exponents must be shamed, shunned, or silenced.

Newsweek is hardly the only offender. At the Live Earth concert in New Jersey last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced climate-change skeptics as “corporate toadies” for “villainous” enemies of America and the human race. “This is treason” he shouted, “and we need to start treating them now as traitors.”

Some environmentalists and commentators have suggested that global-warming “denial” be made a crime, much as Holocaust denial is in some countries. Others have proposed that climate-change dissidents be prosecuted in Nuremberg-style trials. The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen has suggested that television meteorologists be stripped of their American Meteorological Society certification if they dare to question predictions of catastrophic global warming.

A few weeks ago, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis published an article opposing mandatory limits on carbon-dioxide emissions, arguing that Congress should not impose caps until the technology exists to produce energy that doesn’t depend on carbon dioxide. In response to Lewis’s reasonable piece, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, Michael Eckhart, issued a threat:

“Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America.”

This is the zealotry and intolerance of the auto-da-fé. The last place it belongs is in public-policy debate. The interesting and complicated phenomenon of climate change is still being figured out, and as much as those determined to turn it into a crusade of good vs. evil may insist otherwise, the issue of global warming isn’t a closed book. Smearing those who buck the “scientific consensus” as traitors, toadies, or enemies of humankind may be emotionally satisfying and even professionally lucrative. It is also indefensible, hyperbolic bullying. That the bullies are sure they are doing the right thing is not a point in their defense.

Michael T. Eckhart: Environmentalist Threatens Global Warming Skeptic

Via the Washington Times Inside the Beltway.

Michael T. Eckhart is president of the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE). As such, he ought to be a fairly responsible person. When when faced with a highly reputable scientist who disagreed with him about “global warming,” he turned into a thug.

He sent a threatening e-mail to Marlo Lewis. Lewis is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who wrote an article for the American Spectator skeptical of some bills now before Congress.

Eckhart wrote:

“Marlo, you are so full of crap. . . . You have been proven wrong. The entire world has proven you wrong. You are the last guy on Earth to get it.

“Take this warning from me, Marlo. It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on.”

When one side in a debate is reduced to intimidation, it becomes pretty obvious that they doubt their ability to win in the marketplace of ideas.

We think it is relevant here that liberals have a strong tendency to be secular, and that scientists among liberals have an even stronger tendency to reject religion.

But if one decides that there is no God, the craving for personal righteousness does not go away.

The desire to see ideas that are Good and True expressed, and conversely to silence what one considers evil heresy does not disappear.

Thus it is no surprise to find, among environmentalists, the sort of fanaticism that has marked religion at its worst. Admittedly, a lot of environmentalists (like most religious believers) are benign enough people. But a hard core of the ultra-orthodox exists, and is willing to war against the heretics.

Marlo Lewis, welcome to the new Inquisition.

Militant Atheist Scientists Versus Newton

From Jeff Jacoby:

DID YOU hear about the religious fundamentalist who wanted to teach physics at Cambridge University? This would-be instructor wasn’t simply a Christian; he was so preoccupied with biblical prophecy that he wrote a book titled “Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John.” Based on his reading of Daniel, in fact, he forecast the date of the Apocalypse: no earlier than 2060. He also calculated the year the world was created. When Genesis 1:1 says “In the beginning,” he determined, it means 3988 BC.

Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely “intelligent design” but out-and-out divine creation. This applicant’s writings on astronomy, for example, include these thoughts on the solar system: “This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being . . . He governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done.”

Hire somebody with such views to teach physics? At a Baptist junior college deep in the Bible Belt, maybe, but the faculty would erupt if you tried it just about anywhere else.

Many of them would echo Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, the prominent evolutionary biologist, who writes in The God Delusion that he is “hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. . . . It subverts science and saps the intellect.”

Equally blunt is Sam Harris, a PhD candidate in neuroscience and another unsparing foe of religion. “The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum,” he writes in an essay whose title -- “Science Must Destroy Religion” -- makes clear the antipathy with which many modern scientists regard religious faith. “The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.”

Less elegant but more influential, the National Science Education Standards issued by the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 classified religion with “myths,” “mystical inspiration,” and “superstition” -- all of them quite incompatible with scientific study. Michael Dini, a biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, made headlines in 2003 over his policy of denying letters of recommendation for any graduate student who could not “truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer” to the question of mankind’s origin. Science and religion, he said in an interview at the time, “shouldn’t overlap.”

But such considerations didn’t keep Cambridge from hiring the theology- and Bible-drenched individual described above. Indeed, it named him to the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics -- in 1668. And a good thing too, since Isaac Newton -- notwithstanding his religious fervor and intense interest in Biblical interpretation -- went on to become the most renowned scientist of his age, and arguably the most influential in history.

Newton’s consuming interest in theology, eschatology, and the secrets of the Bible is the subject of a new exhibit at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (online at jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/mss/Newton). His vast religious output -- an estimated 3 million words -- ranged from the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple to a method of reckoning the date of Easter to the elucidation of Biblical symbols. “Newton was one of the last great Renaissance men,” the curators observe, “a thinker who worked in mathematics, physics, optics, alchemy, history, theology, and the interpretation of prophecy and saw connections between them all.” The 21st-century prejudice that religion invariably “subverts science” is refuted by the extraordinary figure who managed to discover the composition of light, deduce the laws of motion, invent calculus, compute the speed of sound, and define universal gravitation, all while believing deeply in the “domination of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Far from subverting his scientific integrity, the exhibition notes, “Newton’s piety served as one of his inspirations to study nature and what we today call science.”

For Newton, it was axiomatic that religious inquiry and scientific investigation complemented each other. There were truths to be found in both of the “books” authored by God, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature -- or as Francis Bacon called them, the “book of God’s word” and the “book of God’s works.” To study the world empirically did not mean abandoning religious faith. On the contrary: The more deeply the workings of Creation were understood, the closer one might come to the Creator. In the language of the 19th Psalm, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

To be sure, religious dogma can be a blindfold, blocking truths from those who refuse to see them. Scientific dogma can have the same effect. Neither faith nor reason can answer every question. As Newton knew, the surest path to understanding is the one that has room for both.

The hostility toward Christianity of many in the scientific community doesn’t follow from any principled committment to the scientific method.

Rather, it comes from a set of cultural biases.

What Do You Write On Your Engineering Exam If You Are Clueless?

Well, here are some answers that real students have given when asked:

• Explain the shape of a graph showing overall mass over time
• Expand (a+b)ⁿ
• Given a triangle, find X
• What did an engineer do that caused his boss to fire him?
• Trying to solve an equation that turns intractable
• Find the field and potential that affect a proton
• What happens when you slide an object down a ramp?

We are happy to report that none of these come from Marquette Engineering students.

But who knows, Engineering faculty here may have some that are similar.

Anti-Christian Darwin Day

Via Patrick McIlheran, an essay discussing the evangelical hostility to religion of those who organize and promote Darwin Day.

February 12 used to be known in classrooms across the nation as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. But over the last decade, an increasing number of schools and community groups have decided to celebrate the birthday of the father of evolution instead.

The movement to establish February 12 as “Darwin Day” seems to be spreading, promoted by a evangelistic non-profit group with its own website (http://www.darwinday.org/) and an ambitious agenda to create a “global celebration in 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origins of Species.”

Darwin Day celebrations provide an eye-opening glimpse into the world of grassroots Darwinian fundamentalism, an alternate reality where atheism is the conventional wisdom and where traditional religious believers are viewed with suspicion if not paranoia.

Promoters of Darwin Day deny that their activities are anti-religious, but their denial is hard to square with reality.

According to the Darwin Day website, the movement’s inspiration was an event sponsored by the Stanford Humanists and the Humanist Community in 1995. Since then the honor roll of groups sponsoring Darwin Day events has been top-heavy with organizations bearing such names as the “Long Island Secular Humanists,” the “Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin,” the “Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists,” the “Humanists of Idaho,” the “Southeast Michigan Chapter of Freedom from Religion Foundation,” and the “San Francisco Atheists.” The last group puts on an annual festival called “Evolutionpalooza” featuring a Darwin impersonator and an evolution game show (“Evolutionary!”).

Given such sponsors, it should be no surprise that Darwin Day events often explicitly attack religion. At a high school in New York a few years ago, students wore shirts emblazoned with messages proclaiming that “no religious dogmas [were] keeping them from believing what they want to believe,” while in California a group named “Students for Science and Skepticism” hosted a lecture at the University of California, Irvine, on the topic “Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design without a Designer.” This year in Boston there is an event on “Biological Arguments Against the Existence of God.”

The original “honorary president” of Darwin Day was biologist Richard Dawkins, author most recently of The God Delusion. Dawkins is best known for such pearls of wisdom as “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate,” and “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Darwin Day celebrations are fascinating because they expose a side of the controversy over evolution in America that is rarely covered by the mainstream media. Although journalists routinely write about the presumed religious motives of anyone critical of unguided evolution, they almost never discuss the anti-religious mindset that motivates many of evolution’s staunchest defenders.

What Darwin Day shows, however, is just how ordinary the anti-religious views expressed by Dawkins are among grassroots Darwinists. Far from being on the fringe, Dawkins’ views form the ideological core of mainstream Darwinism.

Not that this should come as a shock. According to a 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), nearly 95 percent of NAS biologists are atheists or agnostics.

The anti-religious outlook of many of Darwin’s chief boosters exposes the hypocrisy in current discussions over Darwin’s theory. The usual complaint raised against scientists who are skeptical of Darwin’s theory is that many of them (like the vast majority of Americans) happen to believe in God. It is insinuated that this fact somehow undermines the validity of their scientific views. Yet, at the same time, defenders of Darwinism insist that their own rejection of religion is irrelevant to the validity of their scientific views—and most reporters seem to agree.

Of course, in an important sense these defenders of Darwinism are right. Just because leading Darwinists are avowed atheists or agnostics does not mean that their scientific beliefs about evolution are wrong. Scientific propositions should be debated based on their evidence, not on the metaphysical beliefs of those who espouse them.

But if Darwinists have the right to be debated based on evidence, not motives, then scientists who are supportive of alternatives to Darwin’s theory such as intelligent design should have the right to expect the same treatment.

We have no problem with Darwinism as a scientific theory. But we have a considerable problem with Darwinism as the government-imposed dogma.

And we have a huge problem with Darwinism as a rallying cry for people who hate religion.

We have posted on the culture of religious intolerance in science.

The problem is not wanting to “do science,” the problem is adopting a whole complex of cultural attitudes that are typical in science, but not at all required to “do science.”

Interestingly, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment as prohibiting any attempt to “promote” religion on the part of government. But the same rulings also prohibit any attempt to “impede” religion.

Intolerant secularists, of course, pound on the first restriction, and entirely ignore the second.

The Culture of Religious Intolerance in Science

From the New York Times, an article about scientists who take the account of Creation in Genesus literally, but manage to function in orthodox science environments.

Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules

KINGSTON, R.I. — There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island.

Prof. Steven B. Case of the University of Kansas said it would be frightening if universities began “enforcing some sort of belief system.”

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross’s dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework.”

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”

He likened his situation to that of a socialist studying economics in a department with a supply-side bent. “People hold all sorts of opinions different from the department in which they graduate,” he said. “What’s that to anybody else?”

But not everyone is happy with that approach. “People go somewhat bananas when they hear about this,” said Jon C. Boothroyd, a professor of geosciences at Rhode Island.

In theory, scientists look to nature for answers to questions about nature, and test those answers with experiment and observation. For Biblical literalists, Scripture is the final authority. As a creationist raised in an evangelical household and a paleontologist who said he was “just captivated” as a child by dinosaurs and fossils, Dr. Ross embodies conflicts between these two approaches. The conflicts arise often these days, particularly as people debate the teaching of evolution.

And, for some, his case raises thorny philosophical and practical questions. May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

Those are “darned near imponderable issues,” said John W. Geissman, who has considered them as a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico. For example, Dr. Geissman said, Los Alamos National Laboratory has a geophysicist on staff, John R. Baumgardner, who is an authority on the earth’s mantle — and also a young earth creationist.

If researchers like Dr. Baumgardner do their work “without any form of interjection of personal dogma,” Dr. Geissman said, “I would have to keep as objective a hat on as possible and say, ‘O.K., you earned what you earned.’ ”

Others say the crucial issue is not whether Dr. Ross deserved his degree but how he intends to use it.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Ross said his goal in studying at secular institutions “was to acquire the training that would make me a good paleontologist, regardless of which paradigm I was using.”

Today he teaches earth science at Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell where, Dr. Ross said, he uses a conventional scientific text.

“We also discuss the intersection of those sorts of ideas with Christianity,” he said. “I don’t require my students to say or write their assent to one idea or another any more than I was required.”

But he has also written and spoken on scientific subjects, and with a creationist bent. While still a graduate student, he appeared on a DVD arguing that intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, is a better explanation than evolution for the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of animal life that occurred about 500 million years ago.

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a private group on the front line of the battle for the teaching of evolution, said fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials “to miseducate the public” were doing a disservice.

Michael L. Dini, a professor of biology education at Texas Tech University, goes even further. In 2003, he was threatened with a federal investigation when students complained that he would not write letters of recommendation for graduate study for anyone who would not offer “a scientific answer” to questions about how the human species originated.

Nothing came of it, Dr. Dini said in an interview, adding, “Scientists do not base their acceptance or rejection of theories on religion, and someone who does should not be able to become a scientist.”

A somewhat more complicated issue arose last year at Ohio State University, where Bryan Leonard, a high school science teacher working toward a doctorate in education, was preparing to defend his dissertation on the pedagogical usefulness of teaching alternatives to the theory of evolution.

Earle M. Holland, a spokesman for the university, said Mr. Leonard and his adviser canceled the defense when questions arose about the composition of the faculty committee that would hear it.

Meanwhile three faculty members had written the university administration, arguing that Mr. Leonard’s project violated the university’s research standards in that the students involved were being subjected to something harmful (the idea that there were scientific alternatives to the theory of evolution) without receiving any benefit.

Citing privacy rules, Mr. Holland would not discuss the case in detail, beyond saying that Mr. Leonard was still enrolled in the graduate program. But Mr. Leonard has become a hero to people who believe that creationists are unfairly treated by secular institutions.

Perhaps the most famous creationist wearing the secular mantle of science is Kurt P. Wise, who earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1989 under the guidance of the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a leading theorist of evolution who died in 2002.

Dr. Wise, who teaches at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., wrote his dissertation on gaps in the fossil record. But rather than suggest, as many creationists do, that the gaps challenge the wisdom of Darwin’s theory, Dr. Wise described a statistical approach that would allow paleontologists to infer when a given species was present on earth, millions of years ago, even if the fossil evidence was incomplete.

Dr. Wise, who declined to comment for this article, is a major figure in creationist circles today, and his Gould connection appears prominently on his book jackets and elsewhere.

“He is lionized,” Dr. Scott said. “He is the young earth creationist with a degree from Harvard.”

As for Dr. Ross, “he does good science, great science,” said Dr. Boothroyd, who taught him in a class in glacial geology. But in talks and other appearances, Dr. Boothroyd went on, Dr. Ross is already using “the fact that he has a Ph.D. from a legitimate science department as a springboard.”

Dr. Ross, 30, grew up in Rhode Island in an evangelical Christian family. He attended Pennsylvania State University and then the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where he wrote his master’s thesis on marine fossils found in the state.

His creationism aroused “some concern by faculty members there, and disagreements,” he recalled, and there were those who argued that his religious beliefs should bar him from earning an advanced degree in paleontology.

“But in the end I had a decent thesis project and some people who, like the people at U.R.I., were kind to me, and I ended up going through,” Dr. Ross said.

Dr. Fastovsky and other members of the Rhode Island faculty said they knew about these disagreements, but admitted him anyway. Dr. Boothroyd, who was among those who considered the application, said they judged Dr. Ross on his academic record, his test scores and his master’s thesis, “and we said, ‘O.K., we can do this.’ ”

He added, “We did not know nearly as much about creationism and young earth and intelligent design as we do now.”

For his part, Dr. Ross says, “Dr. Fastovsky was liberal in the most generous and important sense of the term.”

He would not say whether he shared the view of some young earth creationists that flaws in paleontological dating techniques erroneously suggest that the fossils are far older than they really are.

Asked whether it was intellectually honest to write a dissertation so at odds with his religious views, he said: “I was working within a particular paradigm of earth history. I accepted that philosophy of science for the purpose of working with the people” at Rhode Island.

And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, “I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates.”

Dr. Fastovsky said he had talked to Dr. Ross “lots of times” about his religious beliefs, but that depriving him of his doctorate because of them would be nothing more than religious discrimination. “We are not here to certify his religious beliefs,” he said. “All I can tell you is he came here and did science that was completely defensible.”

Steven B. Case, a research professor at the Center for Research Learning at the University of Kansas, said it would be wrong to “censor someone for a belief system as long as it does not affect their work. Science is an open enterprise to anyone who practices it.”

Dr. Case, who champions the teaching of evolution, heads the committee writing state science standards in Kansas, a state particularly racked by challenges to Darwin. Even so, he said it would be frightening if universities began “enforcing some sort of belief system on their graduate students.”

But Dr. Scott, a former professor of physical anthropology at the University of Colorado, said in an interview that graduate admissions committees were entitled to consider the difficulties that would arise from admitting a doctoral candidate with views “so at variance with what we consider standard science.” She said such students “would require so much remedial instruction it would not be worth my time.”

That is not religious discrimination, she added, it is discrimination “on the basis of science.”

Dr. Dini, of Texas Tech, agreed. Scientists “ought to make certain the people they are conferring advanced degrees on understand the philosophy of science and are indeed philosophers of science,” he said. “That’s what Ph.D. stands for.”

The level of intolerance coming from some secular scientists here is stunning.

Consider, for example, Scott’s claim about “fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials to miseducate the public.”

She is claiming that scientists, when they get out of graduate programs, are obliged to use their honestly gotten credentials only to promote ideas that the majority of members of a discipline condone.

This is like saying that (for example) students who graduate from conservative theological seminaries are not allowed to decide they favor gay marriage. Or that graduates of highly reputable history departments are not allowed to write books claiming a conspiracy in the assassination of John Kennedy.

To state what should be obvious to tolerant people, individuals get to decide for themselves what constitutes “miseducating” the public.

Likewise, Michael L. Dini is admittedly discriminating against students who disagree with him. If a student can answer questions asked on exams, and write papers that pass scholarly muster, why should personal religious beliefs be penalized?

We teach public policy, and expect students to be able to write on the claimed virtues of markets as a device for allocating resources. This is as much the orthodoxy in economics as evolution is in biology. But it would never occur to us to penalize a student who merely expressed a preference for a socialist system.

It gets more and more bizarre. Consider the notion that subjecting students to creationist or intelligent design arguments is “harmful” to them, and thus violates a University’s rules on dealing with human subjects.

How would left leaning faculty react if conservatives claimed it was “harmful” to subject students to Marxist ideas? To feminist ideas?

In which context, “harmful” clearly simply means “ideas we disagree with.”

People like Scott would never claim that students who are Marxists should not be admitted to reputable economics programs because they “would require so much remedial instruction.”

But worst of all is Dini. Saying that people should not be allowed to get a degree in science unless they “understand the philosophy of science and are indeed philosophers of science” is simply a way of saying “you have to buy our philosophical orthodoxy, in toto, or we will deny you a degree.”

We have discussed issues like this with some of our colleagues in the physical sciences. They have no objection to exposing students to conspiracy arguments about the JFK assassination. They have no objection to exposing students to Marxist economics.

But the idea of exposing students to heterodox ideas about the history of the planet and the origin of species is a different matter to them.

It seems that scientists have deep-seated cultural biases. They don’t start with the idea “let’s explore the universe and see what we can find.” They don’t start by saying “maybe we can find some regularities in the universe and model them and explain things that nobody has an explained before.”

Rather, they start with the notion that science is the rational way of addressing any issue, and all else is “superstition” which must be banished.

Thus, their dogmatism about “science” has historically outrun their actual ability to explain phenomena.

Thus, they often lack the patience to actually debate those with heterodox ideas. They don’t think they should have to do that. And to protect people from heresy, they want to shut up the heretics.

There are exceptions like Fastovsky, Geissman and Case. But there is also a nasty streak of authoritarianism.

We Can’t Allow Heresy