Don’t ask me, I’m not a scientist

The New York Times reports that you can now get a master's degree in creationism from Texas:

HOUSTON — A Texas higher education panel has recommended allowing a Bible-based group called the Institute for Creation Research to offer online master’s degrees in science education.

The action comes weeks after the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer, lost her job after superiors accused her of displaying bias against creationism and failing to be “neutral” over the teaching of evolution.

The state’s commissioner of higher education, Raymund A. Paredes, said late Monday that he was aware of the institute’s opposition to evolution but was withholding judgment until the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board meets Jan. 24 to rule on the recommendation, made last Friday, by the board’s certification advisory council.

Henry Morris III, the chief executive of the Institute for Creation Research, said Tuesday that the proposed curriculum, taught in California, used faculty and textbooks “from all the top schools” along with, he said, the “value added” of challenges to standard teachings of evolution.

“Where the difference is, we provide both sides of the story,” Mr. Morris said. On its Web site, the institute declares, “All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the creation week” and says it “equips believers with evidences of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.”

It also says “the harmful consequences of evolutionary thinking on families and society (abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, homosexuality and many others) are evident all around us.”

You may wonder what bright stars the state of Texas has to consider such accreditation questions: 

Asked how the institute could educate students to teach science, Dr. Paredes, who holds a doctorate in American civilization from the University of Texas and served 10 years as vice chancellor for academic development at the University of California, said, “I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.”

 

 

 

 

7 thoughts on “Don’t ask me, I’m not a scientist”

  1. “[T]he harmful consequences of evolutionary thinking on families and society (abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, homosexuality and many others) are evident all around us.”

    None of these alleged consequences is evident to me.

    Formulating an evolutionary explanation of homosexuality poses a significant problem/challenge for biologists–it seems so distinctly maladaptive (remember: if you don’t reproduce, you have zero fitness), that the problem actually becomes explaining why natural selection has not purged the trait from the population. Recent theories involve a lot of hand waving about inclusive fitness, as in, gay guys make such great uncles that it compensates for our effective sterility. I don’t find it persuasive, and it’s not the sort of hypothesis for which one can readily gather data…
    Anyhow, it’s not at all evident to me how evolutionary thinking has led to, promoted, or even satisfactorily accounted for homosexuality.

    Drug use…I fail to see any connection to evolutionary theory here. People have been getting drunk off whatever they could ferment and otherwise getting high off the available plants and fungi for millennia. However, from the perspective of “evolutionary thinking” drugs would appear a huge waste of time; in fact, anything other than indiscriminately fathering children is a waste of time from such a perspective.

    Abortion and promiscuity…I can imagine a sort of crazed-evolutionist-promiscuity, and it would look something like Ghengis Khan’s genetic legacy: impregnate as many women as possible to pass down as much genetic material as possible to future generations. If evolutionary fitness were your only optimality criterion in living your life, then you should concentrate on impregnating women 24/7. Abortion does not fit into this picture well at all, for obvious reasons…maybe if you tried to abort fetuses made with sperm other than your own, that might make sense in terms of maximizing the resources available to your offspring (kin selection)…There’s really no connection between evolutionary thinking and having sex for pleasure using contraception.

    It sounds like he’s trying to blame hedonism on evolutionary theory.

  2. I agree with Dagon that there’s this implication that all social ills ( as perceived through a certain religious lens) are traceable to evolution. Then again, since they are no scientists, I suppose we can’t indict them for a complete and horrific misconstrual of Darwinian evolution.

  3. I think its time dispel some of the myths surrounding evolution. Phrases like “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” are metaphors. “Survival of the fittest” is a trivial statement, merely expressing the idea that whatever survives…well, that thing had to be the fittest (or at least fit enough). There isn’t even a claim to be made by evolutionary biologists regarding optimization. Nothing in evolutionary theory ought to lead one to conclude that every living organism is striving toward perfection. What evolutionary theory does try to explain are the mechanisms of change that occur in organisms via genetic and environmental stimuli and responses. These mechanisms aren’t productive causes, but models and pictures of events. They are accepted or not based on their ability to explain a variety of disparate facts with the greatest parsimony.

    What the creationists fail to see is that evolutionary theory is not a fact. But evolution is. The change in organisms over time is obvious and irrefutable. The theory of how that change came about is not irrefutable, but so far current evolutionary theory is the best explanation we have. Creationism doesn’t compete because it can’t even get the facts straight.

  4. “Formulating an evolutionary explanation of homosexuality poses a significant problem/challenge for biologists–it seems so distinctly maladaptive (remember: if you don’t reproduce, you have zero fitness), that the problem actually becomes explaining why natural selection has not purged the trait from the population.”

    Two words; group selection. It is persuasive and there is data. In many primate societies, most males (and some females) do not reproduce, yet they add to the success of the species (and their own genetic material that is shared by their cohorts). The no reproduction=zero value thesis is at best controversial and at worst naive. In addition, our brains have evolved such that we are not bound by what our genes may or may not demand. This is part of the HUGE is/ought distinction here. This is one of many possible explanations. Another is that homosexuality is simply a “misfiring” of our drive for sex (not that homosexuality is strictly about sex, which is itself a simple-minded construal that is a favorite of the religious right). Then again, by this rational, charity is a “misfiring” of kinship altruism (is/ought again). So no, it doesn’t pose a threat, and good explanations exist if you take the time to look for them or familiarize yourself with evolutionary theory.

    “anything other than indiscriminately fathering children is a waste of time from such a perspective.”

    So is eating a waste of time? Most living things spend a great deal of time looking for food. Is that directed towards self-replicating? Maybe, but only in a overly simplistic sense (see fish below), and in the case of big-brained mammals in particular, it ignores the massive number of exaptations that exist in our evolutionary history and have become important to the survival of our species.

    “There’s really no connection between evolutionary thinking and having sex for pleasure using contraception.”

    Oh? Deferring reproduction happens in several species besides our own (sharks for example). Yet whereas sharks can have sex and not reproduce if conditions are unfavorable without the aid of contraception, we, with our big brains, have come up with profylactics. Again, this also takes reproduction as an end-all-be-all of evolutionary theory, when there is much more to it than that (even if that’s how it came about in the first place). Just because fish exist to reproduce, you aren’t saying anything about fish while ignoring the fact that they swim and live in water.

    Look, I realize you’re probably pro-evolution, whatever you think that means. But when you misrepresent what evolutionary explanations are all about, ignore the is/ought distinction completely, and say things that are flat-out wrong about what evolution is, does and explains, you fall into the same vortex of ignorance that these Texas yahoos strive to generate and maintain. That doesn’t help anybody.

  5. Hi Nevyn,

    I think maybe my plant biology bias led me to deemphasize or trivialize behavior in a way that bothered you.

    I used “inclusive fitness” to mean the same thing you indicated by “group selection”. I certainly didn’t mean that no reproduction=zero value–after all, I don’t feel worthless because I’m gay; however, no reproduction does equal zero fitness unless some other factors are at work (i.e. I’m such a great gay uncle that the advantages I confer on my nephew are so great that he turns out wonderfully and has many healthy offspring, a more effective transmitter of my genetic endowment than if I had sired children myself…this is how all the social hymenoptera function). There are plenty of halfway decent just-so stories explaining homosexuality. It’s still considered an open problem though.

    Eating isn’t a waste of time–actually surviving to reproduce is important. It’s not overly simplistic to say that organisms eat simply to reproduce: viewing life through an evolutionary lens is extremely reductive.

    Reproduction is in fact the end-all-be-all of evolutionary theory. *That’s* why it’s so absurd to talk about “evolutionary thinking” causing something like drug use. From an evolutionary perspective, drugs are bad because they lower your fitness. So a lot of these hedonistic behaviors (I’ll begrudgingly throw homosexuality in with “hedonistic behaviors” for now) hated by the Right don’t make a lot of sense from a fitness perspective. Thus it seems odd to blame them on “evolutionary thinking”…

  6. Dagon,

    “no reproduction does equal zero fitness unless some other factors are at work”

    Reproduction doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and other factors are always at work. This is why I think evolution as reproduction, full stop, is simplistic. Just because what species do can be reduced to reproduction, doesn’t mean that reproduction has any DIRECT bearing on traits (I’m not talking about heritability here). Just because I can be reduced to molecules, doesn’t mean that my molecules have any DIRECT bearing on my typing the letter Y. My genetic make up probably won’t tell you why I picked Y instead of Z (though it may, at some level, tell you how).

    Also, species do more than reproduce, even if reproduction is what all species (though not necessarily individuals) do, and many evolutionary explanations for the emergence of homosexuality, in the non-human animal kingdom for example, that are better than halfway decent.

    Finally, I’m not sure what’s meant here by “evolutionary thinking.” If it means thinking about how something fits within an evolutionary context, it makes sense to think that way, e.g. how did we get big brains? What brains did we have before? What do we share with those brains? (BTW, while we’re talking brains, here’s a suggestion for evolution leading to drugs; to survive, we reproduce [there’s your reduction]. Our incentive to reproduce is pleasure, therefore our brains respond to pleasure. At the same time, our brains evolved in accordance to environmental stressors: we had to be able to choose different options and avoid dangers. Having the ability to choose means genes loose DIRECT control. We still respond to pleasure, but we can choose among a variety of pleasures, from non-reproductive sex to heroin. This isn’t a just-so story, and it is evolutionary thinking (obviously this is a non-technical overview, but I think you get me drift).

    Making the leap from reproduction to heroin doesn’t make sense, granted. It would be simplistic to try and do so. Making the leap from single celled organisms to a complex squid or human doesn’t make sense either. That’s why we need to pay attention to the small incremental steps in between. THAT’S evolutionary thinking, (and what evolution explains). The leap-thinking that the right does is just stupid. It’s the kind of argument that creationists make.

    Evolutionary thinking in the sense that X is right (has value or whatever) because of evolution is the is/ought problem. Sorry if I got snippy.

    N

  7. Dagon: “… a more effective transmitter of my genetic endowment than if I had sired children myself.”

    Ah, I hate to break it to you, but there will be no and can be no transmission of your (or anyone’s) genetic “endowment” without siring a child, who sires a child, who sires a child….

    If I turned out to have a genetic mutation that made me a Superhero, like Superman, no matter how much I use my abilities to help my fellow humans, in an evolutionary sense I will have zero impact on the human species if I never have a child — and my child needs to have a child, etc. etc.

    Unless abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, homosexuality etc have GENETIC causes, evolution has NOTHING to do with such things.

    But the writer uses the term “evolutionary thinking,” and therefore believes that evolution (nature) is not to blame, but thinking (nuture) is. Those damn liberals!

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