Celebrity Atheists and Wimps

Over at talk.origins they're having a debate on Is it becoming fashionable to be an atheist?" One of the participants asked about well-known atheists and quickly received a reply. I'm posing the names here from Celebrity Atheist List...

Douglas Adams, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Woody Allen, Lance Armstrong, Darren Aronofsky, Isaac Asimov, Dave Barry, Ingmar Bergman, Lewis Black, Richard Branson, Berkeley Breathed, Warren Buffett, George Carlin, John Carmack, Adam Carolla, John Carpenter, Asia Carrera, Fidel Castro, Dick Cavett, Noam Chomsky, Billy Connolly, Francis Crick, David Cronenberg, David Cross, Alan Cumming, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, David Deutsch, Ani DiFranco, Micky Dolenz, Harlan Ellison, Brian Eno, Richard Feynman, Harvey Fierstein, Larry Flynt, Dave Foley, Jodie Foster, Janeane Garofalo, Bill Gates, Bob Geldof, Ricky Gervais, Ira Glass, James Gleick, Seth Green, Robert Heinlein, Nat Hentoff, Katharine Hepburn, Christopher Hitchens, Eddie Izzard, Penn Jillette, Billy Joel, Angelina Jolie, Wendy Kaminer, Diane Keaton, Ken Keeler, Neil Kinnock, Michael Kinsley, Richard Leakey, Bruce Lee, Tom Lehrer, Tom Leykis, James Lipton, H.P. Lovecraft, John Malkovich, Barry Manilow, Todd McFarlane, Sir Ian McKellen, Arthur Miller, Frank Miller, Marvin Minsky, Julianne Moore, Desmond Morris, Randy Newman, Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson, Gary Numan, Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswalt, Camille Paglia, Steven Pinker, Paula Poundstone, Terry Pratchett, James Randi, Ron Reagan Jr., Keanu Reeves, Rick Reynolds, Gene Roddenberry, Joe Rogan, Henry Rollins, Andy Rooney, Salman Rushdie, Bob Simon, Steven Soderbergh, Annika Sorenstam, George Soros, Richard Stallman, Bruce Sterling, Howard Stern, J. Michael Straczynski, Julia Sweeney, Matthew Sweet, Teller, Studs Terkel, Tom Tomorrow, Linus Torvalds, Eddie Vedder, Paul Verhoeven, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Sarah Vowell, James Watson, Steven Weinberg, Joss Whedon, Ted Williams, Steve Wozniak.

Here's a list of famous wimps (also called agnostics) ....

Margaret Atwood, Antonio Banderas, Susie Bright, Vincent Bugliosi, Robert X. Cringely, Clarence Darrow, Charles Darwin, Alan Dershowitz, Richard Dreyfuss, Umberto Eco, Timothy Ferris, Carrie Fisher, Stephen Jay Gould, Matt Groening, Bob Guccione, Robert (Bob) James Lee Hawke, David Horowitz, Bob Hoskins, Robert Jastrow, Matt Johnson, Jack Kevorkian, Larry King, Tony Kushner, Dave Matthews, Larry Niven, Neil Peart, Sean Penn, Roman Polanski, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Dan Savage, James Taylor, Charles Templeton, Uma Thurman, Ted Turner, Robert Anton Wilson.

Some of those so-called agnostics sound an awful lot like atheists to me and others sound like spiritualists of various sorts. Some of you may not be familiar with the name Charles Templeton. He's a former evangelical Christian from Toronto who abandoned his faith near the end of his life.

Most of the agnostics are probably wimps. We could expand the atheist list if only we could get Jodi Foster to talk some sense into Margaret Atwood ...

Or maybe Bill Gates could work on Antonio Banderas?

Dover, the Movie

Paramount Pictures is planning to make a movie about the Dover trial. They've hired a screenwriter, Ron Nyswaner, who says, "This story is about the place where faith intersects with science, where what we believe in intersects with what we know. This was a town that was split in half, neighbor against neighbor."

Ed Brayton is pretty excited and so are the readers over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Calm down guys, it's a friggin' movie ... you know, love scenes, car chases, ... that sort of thing. It ain't gonna be another "Inherit the Wind." Instead think "Contact."

I can see it now. There'll be a character from NSCE like Nick Matzke (that's him on the left of the photograph) or Wesley Elsberry (second from the left). The hero will be an atheist. (Sorry Nick and Wes.) Paramount should get Antonio Banderas (a real agnostic) to play Nick. (Incidently, the other handsome dude in the picture is John Harshman. Steve Steve is sitting on the table.)

Nick will fall in love with a sexy Christian school board member, played by Madonna. There'll be a car chase when some of the local yokels try to run Nick off the road. At the end of the movie Nick has to leave town realizing he can never make it with the Christian, ... but there will be at least three attempts. The trial itself will be irrelevant.

This is not something that evolutionists should look forward to. First, it's about one of our biggest failures—a situation were we completely failed to get our message out to the general public and had to rely on lawyers and legal trickery to defend evolution. Second, it's likely to be very sympathetic to the Christians, just like "Contact." The story will end with the audience thinking that good Christians can triumph over atheism. Nick the movie character might even convert to theistic evolution.

Go, Leafs, Go!!!

Tonight is hockey night in Canada. We get to watch Don Cherry on TV.

Last Thursday, the Leafs played Boston, home to Boston University, MIT, and some other schools. The hated Bruins managed to squeak out an overtime victory.

Tonight, the Leafs play New Jersey at the Air Canada Centre. New Jersey is home to Rutgers and my alma mater Princeton. Poor New Jersey won't know what hit 'em. This is the year the Leafs are going to win the Stanley Cup.

Surprise!- Intelligent Design Creationists Trash Peer Review

Denyse O'Leary has posted a four part article on peer review at The ID Report and also at Post-Darwinist.

Mike Dunford of "The Questionable Authority" responds in a well-reasoned and well-researched article. The bottom line is, peer review isn't perfect but it's way better than the second choice (whatever that is).

Horrible Horganism

John Horgan claims that Collins Whups Dawkins in TIME Debate!

David Van Biema, the TIME interviewer (who deserves a pat for good questions), asks both men to comment on the observation that “if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible.”

Dawkins responds that “maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.”

Collins, no fool, pounces: “This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.”

I hate to say this, but Collins is right. The multiverse theory is just as preposterous and lacking in evidence as divine creation. Dawkins is often denounced for his arrogance, bluntness, rudeness--in short, his style. When it comes to multiverses, substance, not style, is Dawkins’s problem. Incredibly, Dawkins’s defense of multiverses has allowed Collins--a Christian who believes in miracles, fer crissake--to score a rhetorical victory in a national forum.

In the actual TIME article Collins replies first to the question. He says,

When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event—namely our existence.

Dawkins replies to this by pointing out that there are two other possible explanations that don't require us to create a cop-out God. Dawkins says ...

People who believe in God conclude there must have been a devine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants the get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. ...

I think Dawkins has given a perfectly adequate response to the question. What it boils down to is we don't know why the universe is constructed as it is but there are some reasonable ideas that make the fine-tuning argument superfluous.

The fact that Collins thinks a God who built the universe is more probable than a multiverse is nonsense. The fact that Horgan thinks it's a valid response only proves that if you repeat an ancient superstition enough times it begins to sound reasonable, even to someone who should know better.

Upside Down World Map

In his new book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins talks about consciousness raising. He points out that we often need a jolt from radical thinkers to get us to start looking at things in a different light. Sometimes all it takes is a strange image to make us realize that we have biases and prejudices. He gives the example of the upside down world map.

Here's an example from The Upsidedown Map Page. Think about it.

A Fin Is A Limb Is A Wing

I highly recommend A Fin Is a Limb Is a Wing by Carl Zimmer, probably the best science journalist in the world. It's in this month's issue of National Geographic. I bought it on the newsstand just so I could have a copy of the article and the wonderful photographs.

As a special bonus, we get to read Carl's posting about this article on the Loom.

It gets a lot better. The IDiots at the Discovery Institute couldn't resist making fools of themselves once again. Casey Luskin posted a critique of Carl's article where he (Luskin) pretends to be a scientist. Imagine the stupidity of someone like Luskin lecturing Carl Zimmer on misrepresenting science! The mind boggles.

The upside to this silliness is that Carl Zimmer has responded in detail to Luskin's charges by posting a lengthy article on his blog [Getting the Mooney Treatment]. It's a wonderful explanation of how a good writer creates a top quality science article in a leading magazine. Thanks Carl.

Flunk the IDiots

Casey Luskin over at the Discovery Institute reported that University of California, San Diego Forces All Freshmen To Attend Anti-ID Lecture. Apparently, the university has become alarmed at the stupidity of its freshman class and has offered remedial instruction for those who believe in Intelligent Design Creationism.

Salvador Cordova has picked up on this at Dembski's blog, Uncommon Descent in an article titled "Darwinian indoctrination required at UCSD? Or will the other side be heard someday?". He notes that 40% of the freshman class reject Darwinism.

I agree with the Dembski sycophants that UCSD should not have required their uneducated students to attend remedial classes. Instead, they should never have admitted them in the first place. Having made that mistake, it's hopeless to expect that a single lecture—even one by a distinguished scholar like Robert Pennock—will have any effect. The University should just flunk the lot of them and make room for smart students who have a chance of benefiting from a high quality education.

Why I'm Not a Darwinist

Charles Darwin was the greatest scientist who ever lived. This may seem like an exaggeration to many people who take evolution for granted, and it appears downright ludicrous to those who reject evolution for religious reasons. But really, who are the other candidates? Newton is the only one who comes close and his contributions were nowhere near as significant and far-reaching as those of Darwin. Biology is much harder than physics.

Darwin discovered natural selection and he promoted and sold the idea of common descent. He founded evolutionary biology. Today evolutionary biology is one of the largest and most exciting fields in all of science.

We all know about evolutionary biology, but what is "Darwinism?" Ernst Mayr has an entire chapter devoted to the question ("What is Darwinism") in his book One Long Argument (Mayr, 1991). At the end of that chapter he says, ...

After 1859, that is, during the first Darwinian revolution, Darwinism for almost everybody meant explaining the living world by natural processes. As we will see, during and after the evolutionary synthesis the term "Darwinism" unanimously meant adaptive change under the influence of natural selection, and variational change instead of transformational evolution. These are the only two truly meaningful concepts of Darwinism, the one ruling in the nineteenth century ... and the other ruling in the twentieth century (a consensus having been reached during the evolutionary synthesis). Any other use of the term Darwinism by a modern author is bound to be misleading.

I agree with Mayr on this point. Darwinism refers to evolution by natural selection. But a "Darwinist" is not just someone who accepts the fact of natural selection, it's more than that. It's someone who prefers this explanation to all other possible mechanisms of evolution. This is the point made by Stephen Jay Gould in his famous 1982 Science paper, "Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory." (The Gould quote about semantics in the left sidebar is from that paper.) Gould defines modern Darwinism as ...

If we agree, as our century generally has, that "Darwinism" should be restricted to the world view encompassed by the theory of natural selection itself, the problem of definition is still not easily resolved. Darwinism must be more than the bare bones of the mechanics: the principles of superfecundity and inherited variation, and the deduction of natural selction thereform. It must, fundamentally, make a claim for wide scope and dominat frequency; natural selection must represent the primary directing force of evolutionary change.

Richard Dawkins is a Darwinist and Daniel Dennett is a Darwinist. I am not a Darwinist. I prefer a modern pluralist view of evolution as I explain in Evolution by Accident.

I am not a Darwinist, just as most of my colleagues in the Department of Physics are not Newtonists, and most of my friends who study genetics are not Mendelists. All three of these terms refer to the ideas of famous men (Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel) who made enormous contributions to science. But in all three cases, the modern sciences have advanced well beyond anything envisaged by their founders.

Call me an evolutionary biologist.

The Three Domain Hypothesis (part 1)

 

The Three domain Hypothesis is dead. It passed away peaceably sometime in the past ten years. Most people didn't notice.

Last year a wake was held. Friends and enemies of the Three Domain Hypothesis were invited. Many gave eulogies and these were published in a book called Microbial Phylogeny and Evolution: Concepts and Controversies. This is a collection of papers by leading scientists in the field. It's edited by Jan Sapp, a Professor of Biology at York University here in Toronto. I've listed the most interesting articles at the bottom of the page and I'll stick to comments on these articles for now.

Surprisingly, some of the guests at the wake did not know the hypothesis had been falsified. They thought the corpse was still breathing!

The Three Domain Hypothesis refers to the proposal by Carl Woese that; (1) archaebacteria form a monophyletic group, (2) this clade is sufficiently different from all other prokaryotes to deserve elevation to a separate Domain called Archaea (the other two Domains are Bacteria and Eukarya), (3) eukaryotes are more closely related to archaebacteria than to other prokaryotes, and (4) the root of the universal tree of life lies in the branch leading to Bacteria.

The "standard" universal tree of life is based on the Three Domain Hypothesis. It is mostly derived from sequences of the small ribosomal RNA subunit (SSU).

In recent years, all four of the major claims of the Three Domain Hypothesis have been challenged. Some would say that two have been falsified. Furthermore, there is growing recognition that SSU-based trees are not as reliable as we once thought. Surprisingly, this skepticism among evolutionary biologists has not reached the ear of the average scientist who continues to act as though the Three Domain Hypothesis is a done deal.

The literature is large, varied, and controversial. I've been following it for twenty years and it's not possible to write a short note covering all the bases. Instead, I'll concentrate on reviewing a few of the papers in the book.

---

Norman Pace The Large-Scale Structure of the Tree of Life.

Woflgang Ludwig and Karl-Heinz Schleifer The Molecular Phylogeny of Bacteria Based on Conserved Genes.

Carl Woese Evolving Biological Organization.

W. Ford Doolittle If the Tree of Life Fell, Would it Make a Sound?.

William Martin Woe Is the Tree of Life.

Radhey Gupta Molecular Sequences and the Early History of Life.

C. G. Kurland Paradigm Lost.

Student Evaluations

Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily is discussing student evaluations in an article titled "Blink" methods now being applied in the classroom". The word "Blink" refers to the best-seller by Toronto author Malcolm Gladwell (an excellent book, BTW). Gladwell mentions a study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in (1992) where they exposed students to short video clips of a lecturer and asked for evaluations. The evaluations weren't much different from those done at the end of the term.

Unfortunately, Dave Munger seems to draw the wrong conclusions from this study as he explains in an earlier posting [The six-second teacher evaluation]. In that article from last May he says ...

So we do appear to be quite effective at making judgements about teaching ability even after viewing only a total of 6 seconds of actual teaching, and without even hearing the teacher's voice.

This is dead wrong. Students are good at evaluating something after six seconds but it sure as heck ain't teaching ability. It's probably whether the students like the teacher or not. We can make snap judgements about personality but not about ability. The correlation with end-of-term evaluations suggests that even after several months, students are still only evaluating the personality of the teacher and not teaching ability.

It makes no sense whatsoever to assume that students can judge how good a teacher you are from a six second video clip. How can they tell whether the lecturer is well prepared, knows the subject, writes fair exams, chooses the appropriate level of difficulty, and communicates important concepts?

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has developed a policy regarding student evaluations. The CAUT report discusses the pros and cons of student evaluations, including the Ambady and Rosenthal (1993) study. Here's what it says in footnote #10 ...

More recently, Ambady and Rosenthal (1993) report findings which point to the conclusion that student ratings of instructors can be strongly influenced by factors that probably bear only a slight relationship to critical dimensions of teaching effectiveness (though one must hasten to add that this is not the conclusion that Ambady and Rosenthal argue for in their study). They report that trained observers' evaluations of very brief segments (30 seconds or less) of silent videotape of college teachers yielded ratings of specific behaviors that correlated positively with students' ratings of the instructors. The experimenters found that appearing to be more active, confident, dominant, enthusiastic, likable, optimistic, supportive and warm, etc., in these "thin slices" of observation correlated positively with students' ratings of the instructors. In one of the experiments, student ratings of the instructors also were found to be "somewhat" influenced by the physical attractiveness of the teachers (p. 435). Whatever aspects of the teaching act have been accessed in this study, and no matter their positive relationship with student ratings, it must be obvious that there is more to effective teaching than demonstrating behaviors that can be documented in 30 seconds or less of silent videotape.

In his discussion of instructor personality and the politics of the classroom, Damron (1994) reviews the extensive literature that suggests that student ratings may be especially sensitive to students' perceptions of instructor personality or aspects of instructors' demeanour that bear little relationship to student learning or achievement.

Conestoga College Teaches Pseudoscience

Check out Jeffrey Shallit's blog Recursivity. He reports that Conestoga College in Kitchener is offering courses in Homeopathy, ESP, and Reincarnation. Shame!

Lost in a Haystack

John Pieret over at Thoughts in a Haystack has weighed in on the agnostic/atheist debate with his article "Agnostic About Atheism."

You'll have to read the comments before gettng a clear idea of John Pieret's position. He says,

...But what I think Dawkins' own example (inadvertently) demonstrates is the correctness of PAP. The scientific community itself, through its practices, recognizes that miracles (assuming, as you must for the sake of this argument, that they exist) cannot truly be addressed by empiric investigation. "Miracles" may be debunked (at least by showing fraud or trickery -- merely showing a sufficient naturalistic cause for something does not mean you have shown the phenomenon is not miraculous) but they may not be empirically confirmed. That inability to truly engage the issue means that empiricism is not capable, in the end, of answering the question of whether God exists.

And since I share with Dawkins the view that empiric investigation is the only game in town for obtaining knowledge, and that the rest is mere opinion, refusing to claim knowledge of God's status is not fence-sitting, it is good scientific practice.

I've heard this before. John's opinion is that science can never absolutely disprove the existence of anything, including the most ridiculous claims of miracles and magic. Thus, according to him, you have to remain agnostic about everything if you are being a good scientist.

While philosophically sound in principle, this doesn't work in practice. Taken to the extreme it says that science can never be sure of anything because there's always the possibility that we could be wrong. I wonder if John proclaims his agnosticism about evolution and intelligent design?

I suspect not. I suspect that religion gets special treatment for some strange reason. It's okay to take a stance and say you don't believe in astrolgy but it's not okay to say you don't believe in God. Strange.

On-line Access to Scientific Journals

One of our students (Sabina) recently posted this comment to our university newsgroups [BIOME].

However, we are VERY fortunate at [the University of Toronto] because we can download any full PDF of an article from almost all possible journals imaginable for free with just our UTorID from the Gerstein off-site access which leads into PubMed, so, we don’t even need a subscription to anything (unless you really enjoy having all those shiny pages at your disposal). So we don’t need to worry about costs for an individual article, most people that need them are associated with an institution that will already have a subscription.

This reminded me how lucky we are to enjoy such open access. Our library currently subscribes to 31,000 journals that allow faculty and students to download articles/abstracts as PDF files. What this means for teachers is that we can assign an article from the scientific literature knowing that every student can print it out at home or on one of the university computers in the "information commons." They can even print it out on a color printer—an important consideration in my field where many of the journal images are in color.


How much does this service cost the university? I asked our librarians for an estimate and they told me it costs several million dollars (<$2,000,000) per year.

Just how lucky are we? I know that some of my friends at other universities don't have access to the same journals we get. I presume that everyone can get articles from Nature and Science but what about the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) or the Journal of Molecular Evolution?

She's Baaaaaack!

Watch Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson commenting about Canada in these clips on YouTube in December 2005. The second half of the video features Carolyn Parrish, my former MP, in an interview with Carlson in November 2004.


Some of you may remember Carolyn Parrish. She made quite a name for herself by stomping on a George Bush doll and proclaiming that she hated American "bastards." She was kicked out of the Liberal party in 2004 and didn't run in the last Federal election in January 2006.

Nobody in our riding was sad to see the last of her. It wasn't because she didn't like Bush—that's not unusual around here—it was because she's a jerk and doesn't know enough to think before she opens her mouth. Here's a list of quotations from someone who doesn't know that silence is sometimes golden. Parrish also didn't like Paul Martin, Prime Minister at the time and leader of her party, and that probably had a lot to do with her ejection. If you're going to belong to the party you have to agree with it's policies or get out.

Anyway, she's back. Caroline Parrish was just elected to the city council in Missisauga. I didn't vote for her. She ran in another ward north of my home. I'd probably have voted for Bush if he had run against her in Ward 6.

Now all decent citizens of Mississauga have to get together and make sure she will never, ever, be elected to replace Hazel McCallion as mayor of our city.