For Once, Chris Mooney Talks Sense

 
Read Chris Mooney's latest posting on The Intersection where he addresses the framing controversy [A Dialogue on Framing, the F-Word, and the Future of ScienceBlogs, Part I: Framer Culpa].

When I teamed up with Matthew Nisbet a year ago to talk about the subject of framing science--which I still believe to be a very important one--it was not my goal to alienate or outrage a group that I consider one of my most important audiences, namely, ScienceBlogs bloggers and readers. And yet when you look at the latest blowup over what I have posted, Sheril has posted, and Nisbet has posted about Expelled, it's undeniable that there is now an audience that reacts very negatively even to any basic mention of the concept of framing.

And there's just no other way to spin it--this is a painfully ironic communication failure on the part of those of us who wanted to introduce what I view as a very important communication tool to the science world. If we can't explain something so useful to an important segment of our own audience, how can we possibly hope to use it to counter the other side?

Good for you Chris. The irony has been apparent to many of us and it's really good to see you confess to having created the problem. My respect for you just went up several notches.

Let me just correct one little thing. There are plenty of science bloggers out there who don't like your views on framing science. Not all of us belong to the ScienceBlogs^TM consortium.

Now, to be sure, the concept of framing has been quite influential already for many people who care about science, but who are not seemingly well represented on ScienceBlogs. When I go around lecturing with Matt Nisbet, we constantly encounter enthusiastic, receptive scientist-laden audiences at universities. There is simply nothing like the response that we've seen here over the last week. Indeed, I believe the reactions at lectures may have skewed my perceptions, and made me neglect or dismiss, to a significant extent, the way our ideas were faring in the science blogosphere.

But no success on the lecture circuit can change the fact that somehow--and I'll have ideas about how it happened in later posts--the concept of framing has been blackened on Scienceblogs, which I consider a truly tragic occurrence. And while I'm hardly the only guilty party here, I certainly played a role in that, whether actively or by omission.

It's very common for people on the lecture circuit to get an exaggerated—and false—impression of their message. This is because the only people who come to your talks are the true believers. When dissenters do show up it's often hard for them to debate the speaker just by posing questions from the audience.

I'm not surprised that the Nisbet/Mooney road show fooled you into thinking that your ideas were widely accepted in the scientific community. The other way of fooling yourself is to organize a conference where the only people invited are those who agree with you. This is what Nisbet did at AAAS.

Allow me to re-iterate the point I made earlier. It's not just on ScienceBlogs^TM that the concept of framing has been blackened. I've met many scientists who think that your views on framing¹ are an unacceptable way to teach science. A good many of those scientists have never read a single posting on any ScienceBlogs^TM blog and, furthermore, they have never even heard of Seed and the group it supports.

I admire the fact that you confess to poor framing of your ideas. Now. how about discussing whether they are even correct? Up to now all you've done is reject any criticism on the ground that we don't really understand framing. Maybe we do, but we're still opposed. Have you ever thought of that?

Your message still seems to be that you just made the mistake of not presenting your ideas correctly. In other words, you didn't frame properly. I hope that subsequent postings won't continue in that vein. It's time to realize that it was not only the medium that was flawed but also the message.

---

1. Framing is deliberately altering what you want to say in order to make it more acceptable to your audience.

Is Faith Inevitable?

 
Last Thursday evening I watched a panel discuss the question "Is Faith Inevitable?" Unlike previous shows on TV Ontario, this one had a balance of believers and non-believers.

Two of the non-believers, Robert Buckman and Ronald de Sousa, are well-known in Canada (see below). You can watch the entire show at The Agenda.

I agree with the comments made by an undergraduate here at the University of Toronto when he says that the discussion got sidetracked [The Unexamined Life ...]. The real question is not whether faith is valuable, it's whether there is a God that you should have faith in.

Furthermore, I was very disappointed in Buckman and de Sousa because both of them bought into the line that we have evolved a need for religion. This is ridiculous. There is no gene for believing in supernatural beings and there's no reason to think that atheists need to overcome their genetic makeup in order to reject the notion of God. I wish we could put an end to this silly meme before it spreads any further.

---

Gene Genie #28

 
The 28th edition of Gene Genie has been posted at Greg Laden's Blog [Gene Genie #24]. (It really is number 28, in spite of what Greg says. See Gene Genie.)

Welcome to Gene Genie #24: with a heavy emphasis on Personal Genetics.

The beautiful logo was created by Ricardo at My Biotech Life.

The purpose of this carnival is to highlight the genetics of one particular species, Homo sapiens.

---

Canada Wins World Championship!

 
I'm sure you've already heard the news. The Canadian women's team of Dawn Askin (lead), Jill Officer (second), Cathy Overton-Clapham (third) and Jennifer Jones (skip) beat China yesterday to win the World¹ Women's Curling Championship.

Most of you were probably watching the game so I don't need to remind you how exciting it was.

---

1. Just to clarify for my American friends ... this was not a tournament where only teenagers in colleges like UNC could play and it was not a tournament confined to a single country. This is a world title. The USA didn't even make the playoffs.

[Photo Credit: Ford World Women's Curling Championship]

Stuff White People Like

 
Check out the blog Stuff White People Like, especially, Paris, San Francisco, and Having Gay Friends.

---

[Hat Tip: Jane at Beer with Chocolate.]

Monday's Molecule #66

 
This is a very important enzyme. Most living organisms on this planet could not survive if this enzyme didn't do its job. Very few species have this enzyme but we depend on those few species for our very existence.

Your task for today is to identify the enzyme (1) and the species from which this particular enzyme was isolated (2). You also have to write out the complete reaction that is catalyzed by this enzyme (3).

In addition you have to identify the Nobel Laureate who is associated with the reaction that is catalyzed by the enzyme. (Hint: the Nobel Laureate studied the chemical reaction, not the biological one.)

The first person to correctly identify the enzyme and species, write the chemical equation, and name the Nobel Laureate. wins a free lunch at the Faculty Club. Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first collected the prize. There is only one ineligible candidate for this week's reward.

THEME:

Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly answers the questions and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Laureates so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings.

Correct responses will be posted tomorrow along with the time that the message was received on my server. I may select multiple winners if several people get it right.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours. Comments are now open.

UPDATE: We have a winner! The enzyme is nitrogenase from Azotobacter vinelandii. It fixes atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia by catalyzing the following reaction ...

The Nobel Laureate is Fritz Haber (1918) who worked out a chemical method of synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen.

Bryant Ing of the University of Toronto was the first person to get it right.

---

[Image Credit: Dixon and Kahn (2004) based on the structure PDB 1n2c by Schindelin et al. (1997)]

Dixon, R. and Kahn, D. (2004) Genetic regulation of biological nitrogen fixation. Nature Reviews Microbiology 2, 621-631. doi:10.1038/nrmicro954

Schindelin, H., Kisker, C., Schlessman, J.L., Howard, J.B. and Rees, D.C. (1997) Structure of ADP x AIF4(-)-stabilized nitrogenase complex and its implications for signal transduction. Nature 387: 370-376 [PubMed]

Make Your Own Phylogenetic Tree

 
Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World has prepared a short video presentation on how to make your very own phylogenetic tree from DNA sequences [A beginner's guide to making a phylogenetic tree].

---

Nisbet Reveals His True Colors

 
Framing is about spin, censorship, and, above all, it's about agreeing with Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney. If you don't agree with them then it's because you just don't understand framing.

It's about time we started to ignore Nisbet and Mooney. Fortunately, they are making it easy by posting drivel like Why the PZ Myers Affair is Really, Really Bad for Science and PZ Myers, Mind Your Manners (see comments).

I'm opposed to censorship of any kind but I really wish Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney would voluntarily decide to keep their stupid mouths shut for a few years. I'm with PZ Myers on this one [I'm supposed to sit down and shut up?].

If anyone is really interested in seeing exactly what the blogosphere thinks of Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney you need only check the links that Greg Laden has posted at The Framing Critique (Dawkins-Myers-Expelled! -Gate). I really hope this spells the beginning of the end for the Nisbet/Mooney tag team.

---

Wells Takes a Rain Check on Apology

 
The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution.

Evolution News & ViewsI challenged Jonathan Wells to agree to a simple statement that, I believe, might reflect his true beliefs about evolution [A Challenge to Jonathan Wells].

In one of the biggest surprises of the 21st century (not!) Wells has backed off [What’s in a Word?].

Darn. I guess I’ll have to take a rain check on that apology – because I don’t agree with this – and not just because Maurice et al. (2008) are cited incorrectly. Here’s why.

"Evolution" has many meanings. It can mean simply "change over time." The present is different from the past. The cosmos evolves. Technology evolves. No sane person denies evolution in this sense.

Biological evolution never means just change over time, but that's not the real problem with Wells' post. You're going to have to scoot on over to Evolution News & Views and read the whole thing.

I can't make head nor tail of it. I wonder if Wells actually thinks it makes sense?

John Pieret takes on the task of dissecting the Wells definition of evolution on Thoughts in a Haystack [Falling in the Wells]. He's a braver man that I.

---

Watch and Weep

 
ABC News follows a group of home-schooled Christian children on a museum tour. The tour leaders are interviewed. They attempt to defend the lies they are telling the children.

---

[HatTip: Friendly Atheist: How to Ruin a Trip to the Museuam.]

Evil and Sin

 
Yesterday's issue of the Toronto Star had an article on The fundamentalist atheists.

I'm getting real tired of hearing this phrase but I haven't completely given up trying to understand what people mean when they use it. In this case, the article is by Stuart Laidlaw, who is billed as the "faith and ethics" reporter. Laidlaw is commenting on a recent talk by Chris Hedges. Hedges seems to be one of those "sophisticated" Christians who have all the answers.¹ Naturally, he denigrates the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins because they just don't understand serious Christianity.

Serious Christians seem to be very concerned about evil and sin.

Hedges, in Toronto recently to promote his book, attacks both fundamentalists and the new breed of atheists as not only intolerant, but wrong about both the Jesus story and the nature of sin.

Sin, he says, is a personal thing that will always be with us. Humans will never outgrow it through evolution, as the atheist authors contend, nor can anyone (Jesus included) relieve us of it, as fundamentalist Christians believe, Hedges says.

The best we can do, he says, is try to mitigate evil by living a good life, and having democratic institutions in place to ensure that we can get rid of bad leaders from time to time.

Sin, as I understand it, is when you violate a moral rule of some kind. It usually means you are disobeying the wishes of supernatural beings. It's not a word used by atheists.

Evil is something I can understand. People do bad things. Religious people do bad things and atheists do bad things. No atheist that I know would ever claim that humans will evolve to the point where they don't do bad things. What a ridiculous idea. What in the world is Hedges thinking?

For fundamentalists, evil and sin are an external force – often represented by Satan – to be vanquished by giving yourself over to Jesus. For the new atheists, evil and sin are the fault of religion, and can be defeated by getting rid of all religion and giving yourself over to scientific, reasoned thought.

For Hedges, it's the same argument: People are basically good, but external forces make us do bad things. Get rid of those forces, and people will be good.

No more effort is needed to achieve utopia, he says.

Just because religions can be evil does not mean that all evil is due to religion. No atheist believes this, as far as I know.

I believe that people are basically good but they still do bad things and they don't need external forces to do them. People are quite capable of being evil all by themselves. What in the world motivates people like Hedges to make up false stories about athiests? It makes him look very silly.

The question of evil and sin seems to be so intertwined with the existence of God that religious people (Christians?) seem to have difficulty untangling them. They seem to think that atheists are as obsessed about evil and sin as they are when, in fact, most of us don't give it much thought. Perhaps that's because we don't have to deal with the paradox of a good God who allows evil and sin?

Hedges draws a distinction between the new breed of atheists and such past non-believers as Albert Camus or scientists of the Enlightenment, whose skepticism he says helped drive human knowledge and understanding.

But Hedges has few such hopes for the new atheists. Where atheists of the past used their disbelief as a stepping off point to find something else to believe in, the new atheists claim to have already found it in what he calls a "cult of science."

Anything that can't be proved scientifically is simply discounted, Hedges says, warning that such a narrow approach to study thwarts the pursuit of knowledge by denying a voice to those who disagree.

The "new atheists" claim there are no supernatural beings because there's no evidence of such beings. This has nothing to do with evil and sin. When are these sophisticated Christians going to address the real question instead of going off on weird tangents? If they have a good argument for the existence of god then let's hear it. Otherwise, their "sophistication" looks more like "obfuscation" to me. (Or like The Emperor's New Clothes and the Courtier's Reply.)

It's time to stop whining and face up to the real question. Is there a god? Questions about evil and sin are irrelevant until that question is settled.

---

1. In spite of his confusion about religion, he seems to be a pretty good guy. He was right about Iraq, for example.

The Spin Begins

 
The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution.

Evolution News & ViewsThe Discovery Institute website has skirted around the obvious hypocrisy and attacked Dawkins and Myers. Bruce Chapman has posted an article on Evoluton News & Views about the expulsion of PZ Myers from a viewing of EXPELLED [Richard Dawkins, World’s Most Famous Darwinist, Stoops to Gate-crashing Expelled].

Amazingly, the best selling Oxford scientist/author Richard Dawkins also crashed a showing of Expelled in Minnesota last night and he not only was let in, but introduced at the end of the showing.

Dawkins apparently acknowledged that he had not been invited and did not have a ticket. A sophomoric side to his ideological campaign is thus revealed.

Dawkins, understandably is nervous about this film, among other reasons because Ben Stein has him on camera acknowledging that life on Earth may, indeed, have been intelligently designed, but that it had to have been accomplished by space aliens! This is hilarious, of course, because Dawkins is death on intelligent design. But it turns out that that view applies only if it includes the possibility that the designer might be God.

Myers, of course, relished being expelled from Expelled, but objective observers know that Myers is the most vociferous advocate of expelling Darwin critics from academia. Not from movie pre-screenings where he wasn’t invited, mind you, but from their jobs. Too bad the film doesn’t show (and I wish it had), his promotion of advice to attack teachers and professors who dare question Darwin’s theory. The whole point of Myers is that he is a take-no-prisoners, crusading atheist scientist who has made it his purpose in life to harass people who disagree with him. Dawkins turns out to be his buddy and mutual admirer.

Those of you who have been following the issue on the various blogs, and in newspaper articles, know full well that Dawkins did not "crash" the movie. People did not have to be invited and there were no tickets. Chapman and his friends must know this too. Therefore, he is lying.

I'm not surprised that most of the IDiots are behaving this way. What will surprise me is that all of them might behave like Bruce Chapman. I expect at least one prominent IDiot to admit that expelling PZ Myers was a mistake and to admit that he should have been allowed to see a movie that featured him.

Let's see if there's at least one IDiot with the guts to speak the truth. Bill Dembski is not going to be that person (suprise!) because he has just posted the Chapman piece on his blog [Discovery News Release on Richard Dawkins Crashing EXPELLED Screening]. I'm hoping that Denyse O'Leary will be the one with the gumption. Or maybe Michael Behe. I expect Jonathan Wells to weigh in with even more lies about the incident.

---

PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins Discuss "EXPELLED"

 
New York Times article by Cornelia Dean: No Admission for Evolutionary Biologist at Creationist Film.

---

[HatTip: RichardDawkins.net]

EXPELLED! - Waiting for the Creationists to repsond ...

 
By now you've all heard the news. PZ Myers was standing in line to see a screening of the propaganda movie EXPELLED when security guards asked him to leave. They didn't bother with his family or his friend, Richard Dawkins. Read PZ's account at EXPELLED!.

Now let's see how the creationists respond to this incident. Remember, the movie is about discrimination by scientists against people who are religious. It will be very interesting to see how they can justify keeping PZ Myers out of the movie when all kinds of other people were let in.

Here's one response, posted on the EXPELLED website [Richard Dawkins crashes the party at a screening of “Expelled”]. The writer is Stuart Blessman, a Christian who was given tickets to see the movie by his pastor. Blessman was present at the theater on Wednesday evening. He is responding to the charge that PZ Myers was prevented from seeing the movie because he (PZ) is an evolutionist. Here's what Stuart Blessman says ...

I just happened to be standing directly in line behind Dawkins’ academic colleague. Management of the movie theatre saw a man apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in. Management then approached the man, asked him if he had a ticket, and when he confirmed that he didn’t, they then escorted him off the premises. Nowhere was one of the film’s producers to be found, and the man certainly didn’t identify himself. If a producer had been nearby, it’s possible that he would have been admitted, but the theatre’s management didn’t want to take any chances.

This sounds very much like a blatant, bare-faced, lie. Anyone who knows PZ Myers would know that he would bot be "hustling" and "bothering" the people waiting in line. Quite the contrary, PZ and his colleague Richard Dawkins would have been trying to keep a low profile.

In his followup posting, PZ responds by saying that Blessman's account is a complete fabrication [A late night quick one].

Now, I'm going to be looking in on creationist blogs to see how they handle this story. So far there has been deathly silence. Is that because the creationists are embarrassed? Is it because they never criticize their own kind? Or, is it because they don't see the hypocrisy? Please let me know of any creationist responses.

---

Communicating Science in a Religious America

 
"Communicating Science in a Religous America" was the title of a session at the AAAS meeting in February. Here's a summary of the meeting from someone who seems to have been paying attention [Puttin Science in a Frame]. Here's a teaser ...

Framing has not been without controversy, as some have viewed it as little more than a form of empty platitude or an attempt to dumb down science. What became clear from Nisbet's talk, however, is that there can also be people left out of the ostensibly-shared values; it should be no surprise they are objecting.

---