Inappropriately Touched by E.T.

Someone shared this image on Facebook today, with the header "Seriously !! Still believe we are alone ?"

It looks like you can see it, and the comments, without being logged into Facebook, which is handy. (It was posted by Milky Way Scientists, apparently affiliated with NASA, who also posted this smokin' beefcake photo of Albert Einstein. Maybe they should put out a calendar along those lines?)

I'm not exactly surprised, since I know that NASA has always had a high concentration of religious nuts; see David F. Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997). It's a useful reminder that certain New Atheists' assurance that the advance of science will inevitably consign religion to the dustbin of history isn't just bogus, it's a statement of faith.

These are pretty pictures, and I've loved looking at photographs of deep space objects since I was a kid. But they have no bearing at all on the question of extraterrestrial life. Even though I recognize that a leap of faith is involved, I can't see how to get from point A to point B here. Judging from arguments I've encountered in the past, I think that the idea is that in a universe so full of galaxies and stars, there must be some other people out there somewhere! I understand the intuitive appeal of that argument, but there's this little thing called the Fermi Paradox ...

What first caught my attention was the cartoon image below the photos of the Mocker and Scoffer, who believeth not what Science hath shown him so abundantly. I was reminded immediately of a co-worker of mine, who after driving through the desert in the American Southwest was convinced by the beauty of the natural formations that there must be a "higher power." (I asked if her if she felt the same way about soil erosion in her garden, which is also God's work. I don't remember what she answered; probably she did feel the same way about it.)

Some of the comments on the image are revealing.

it would be so stupid if we were alone .....

C'mon i thought this fact makes sense to all of us! Why do u still ignore it?

Hope so. Can't wait for something to come and have a VERY stern word with you, Mankind. And I hope they are A LOT bigger that you are. Although they probably won't be as NASTY as you are.

We are not alone anymore

Well, if anyone is out there watching what is going on down here, they'll just shake their heads, leave us alone and continue searching for intelligent life.

That last one has three "like" flags so far.

These are declarations of faith, not of rationality. And while it could be argued that the comments are just stupid laymen, the tone was set by the scientists who posted the image to begin with. "Still believe we are alone?" Personally I don't have an opinion one way or the other, because no one has shown me any evidence, any reason to believe that there is life on other planets or in other star systems; but at the same time there's no clear evidence that there isn't life on other planets. It's reminiscent of the popular claim that you can't prove or disprove the existence of God, but on the subject of extraterrestrial life, many atheists are ready to make assertions they can't prove. I consider it a great occasion for agnosticism, the admission that we don't know something rather than jumping to unwarranted conclusions. Recently I saw a quotation from Richard Dawkins to the effect that the trouble with religion is that it encourages children to be comfortable with ambiguous conclusions, rather than giving them certain knowledge. (Sorry, I can't find the source; I thought I had it bookmarked.) I'd have thought it was the other way around myself, but I'm not an Oxford man.

The use of the emotionally-laden word "alone" is revealing too. I don't know about you, but I'm not alone: there are billions of other people on this planet. The Christian apologist Blaise Pascal famously wrote, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." It's been argued that he wasn't speaking in his own voice there, but ventriloquizing an imagined atheist; I can't tell, and I don't think it matters because clearly many people, atheists as well as religious believers, are frightened by the vastness of the universe, and want to shrink it to a cozier size by populating it with guardian angels or kindly ETs. (Notice the automatic -- that is, irrational -- assumption that people on other worlds will be smarter and more "civilized" than we are, though contemptuous of terrestrial humans' stupidity and violence. When you assume ... ) It's tempting for me to guess that Milky Way Scientists are cynically selling comfort to (what they perceive as) the ignorant masses by promising to find them playmates or idealized benign teachers elsewhere in the universe; but from what I've seen, I think they believe it will work on the proles because it works on them.

Inappropriately Touched by E.T.

Someone shared this image on Facebook today, with the header "Seriously !! Still believe we are alone ?"

It looks like you can see it, and the comments, without being logged into Facebook, which is handy. (It was posted by Milky Way Scientists, apparently affiliated with NASA, who also posted this smokin' beefcake photo of Albert Einstein. Maybe they should put out a calendar along those lines?)

I'm not exactly surprised, since I know that NASA has always had a high concentration of religious nuts; see David F. Noble's The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997). It's a useful reminder that certain New Atheists' assurance that the advance of science will inevitably consign religion to the dustbin of history isn't just bogus, it's a statement of faith.

These are pretty pictures, and I've loved looking at photographs of deep space objects since I was a kid. But they have no bearing at all on the question of extraterrestrial life. Even though I recognize that a leap of faith is involved, I can't see how to get from point A to point B here. Judging from arguments I've encountered in the past, I think that the idea is that in a universe so full of galaxies and stars, there must be some other people out there somewhere! I understand the intuitive appeal of that argument, but there's this little thing called the Fermi Paradox ...

What first caught my attention was the cartoon image below the photos of the Mocker and Scoffer, who believeth not what Science hath shown him so abundantly. I was reminded immediately of a co-worker of mine, who after driving through the desert in the American Southwest was convinced by the beauty of the natural formations that there must be a "higher power." (I asked if her if she felt the same way about soil erosion in her garden, which is also God's work. I don't remember what she answered; probably she did feel the same way about it.)

Some of the comments on the image are revealing.

it would be so stupid if we were alone .....

C'mon i thought this fact makes sense to all of us! Why do u still ignore it?

Hope so. Can't wait for something to come and have a VERY stern word with you, Mankind. And I hope they are A LOT bigger that you are. Although they probably won't be as NASTY as you are.

We are not alone anymore

Well, if anyone is out there watching what is going on down here, they'll just shake their heads, leave us alone and continue searching for intelligent life.

That last one has three "like" flags so far.

These are declarations of faith, not of rationality. And while it could be argued that the comments are just stupid laymen, the tone was set by the scientists who posted the image to begin with. "Still believe we are alone?" Personally I don't have an opinion one way or the other, because no one has shown me any evidence, any reason to believe that there is life on other planets or in other star systems; but at the same time there's no clear evidence that there isn't life on other planets. It's reminiscent of the popular claim that you can't prove or disprove the existence of God, but on the subject of extraterrestrial life, many atheists are ready to make assertions they can't prove. I consider it a great occasion for agnosticism, the admission that we don't know something rather than jumping to unwarranted conclusions. Recently I saw a quotation from Richard Dawkins to the effect that the trouble with religion is that it encourages children to be comfortable with ambiguous conclusions, rather than giving them certain knowledge. (Sorry, I can't find the source; I thought I had it bookmarked.) I'd have thought it was the other way around myself, but I'm not an Oxford man.

The use of the emotionally-laden word "alone" is revealing too. I don't know about you, but I'm not alone: there are billions of other people on this planet. The Christian apologist Blaise Pascal famously wrote, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." It's been argued that he wasn't speaking in his own voice there, but ventriloquizing an imagined atheist; I can't tell, and I don't think it matters because clearly many people, atheists as well as religious believers, are frightened by the vastness of the universe, and want to shrink it to a cozier size by populating it with guardian angels or kindly ETs. (Notice the automatic -- that is, irrational -- assumption that people on other worlds will be smarter and more "civilized" than we are, though contemptuous of terrestrial humans' stupidity and violence. When you assume ... ) It's tempting for me to guess that Milky Way Scientists are cynically selling comfort to (what they perceive as) the ignorant masses by promising to find them playmates or idealized benign teachers elsewhere in the universe; but from what I've seen, I think they believe it will work on the proles because it works on them.

The Awkward Age

I like this billboard, though I also suspect it was photoshopped, rather than a real billboard.

I also like this comment on the post the image illustrates:

My favorite quote thus far; “So we got the date wrong. It’s not like its the end of the world.”

But that's about as far as it goes. The post itself concludes:

What I am wondering is this: when the world did not end, did it cause anyone to become more rational? Or will the Doomsdayers become stronger believers (as sometimes happens in cults) – and more importantly, do moderate Christians feel their interpretation of the bible has been validated?

The word "rational" (not to mention "moderate") increasingly sets off alarms for me, as more and more atheists say and write and post ravingly irrational things in the name of irrationality. I can't see any reason why the failure of the Rapture to take place last Saturday should "cause anyone to become more rational." As the blogger points out, "moderate" Christians who've been citing Matthew 24:36 as a warning about predicting a date for the Second Coming will probably see Jesus' non-appearance as a vindication of their interpretation of the Bible, not as a reason to abandon Christianity.

But then, why should they? Scientists are constantly making absurd and irrational claims about science and what it can do. A decade or so back, I read a lot of stuff by scientists who claimed that a Grand Unified Theory of Physics was right around the corner. They didn't specify the date and hour, of course -- they were as canny about that as the authors of the gospels -- but they were sure it would happen within a generation. It didn't. A little over a century ago, some physicists were making similar forecasts -- just before Einstein published his theory of relativity and knocked 19th-century physics ass over teakettle. Computer scientists have long made similar failed promises for the development of artificial intelligence. No one -- at least no scientist -- would argue that because these predictions failed, science should be scrapped.

I talked about this with an old friend who said that, confronted with harmful scientific claims about sex and race, she tries to talk about "scientists" rather than "science," since science isn't responsible for what scientists do or say. I agreed to an extent, but argued that you can't really separate the two: there is no such thing as "science", just a lot of scientists engaged in various projects. Then I pointed out that defenders of religion say the same thing she'd said about science: it's not Christianity's fault, it's Christians who you should blame.

A few years ago, Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, "I actually believe in science. I believe we are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves." Pollitt has often attacked critics of science, whether Christian fundamentalists or members of the "academic left." But her statement of belief in science (which I've heard from many other people) isn't rational: it's an affirmation of faith, a credo. Whether "we" really are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves will have to be seen. (I have no such faith myself.) When people, especially scientists, proclaim what Science will do in the future, they are making statements of faith, not reason.

I don't "believe in science" any more than I believe in Christianity; nor do I "believe" in atheism. I don't even "believe" in Reason. I think reason is a useful tool, but like any tool it has its limits, and it's only as good as the premises one starts with. As the saying goes, "Garbage In, Garbage Out." ("Garbage In, Gospel Out," a computer-scientist friend of mine puts it ironically.) Raising Science or Reason to authority is another version of what Religion is for some people: an attempt to escape human limitations and achieve certainty by fiat.

The Awkward Age

I like this billboard, though I also suspect it was photoshopped, rather than a real billboard.

I also like this comment on the post the image illustrates:

My favorite quote thus far; “So we got the date wrong. It’s not like its the end of the world.”

But that's about as far as it goes. The post itself concludes:

What I am wondering is this: when the world did not end, did it cause anyone to become more rational? Or will the Doomsdayers become stronger believers (as sometimes happens in cults) – and more importantly, do moderate Christians feel their interpretation of the bible has been validated?

The word "rational" (not to mention "moderate") increasingly sets off alarms for me, as more and more atheists say and write and post ravingly irrational things in the name of irrationality. I can't see any reason why the failure of the Rapture to take place last Saturday should "cause anyone to become more rational." As the blogger points out, "moderate" Christians who've been citing Matthew 24:36 as a warning about predicting a date for the Second Coming will probably see Jesus' non-appearance as a vindication of their interpretation of the Bible, not as a reason to abandon Christianity.

But then, why should they? Scientists are constantly making absurd and irrational claims about science and what it can do. A decade or so back, I read a lot of stuff by scientists who claimed that a Grand Unified Theory of Physics was right around the corner. They didn't specify the date and hour, of course -- they were as canny about that as the authors of the gospels -- but they were sure it would happen within a generation. It didn't. A little over a century ago, some physicists were making similar forecasts -- just before Einstein published his theory of relativity and knocked 19th-century physics ass over teakettle. Computer scientists have long made similar failed promises for the development of artificial intelligence. No one -- at least no scientist -- would argue that because these predictions failed, science should be scrapped.

I talked about this with an old friend who said that, confronted with harmful scientific claims about sex and race, she tries to talk about "scientists" rather than "science," since science isn't responsible for what scientists do or say. I agreed to an extent, but argued that you can't really separate the two: there is no such thing as "science", just a lot of scientists engaged in various projects. Then I pointed out that defenders of religion say the same thing she'd said about science: it's not Christianity's fault, it's Christians who you should blame.

A few years ago, Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, "I actually believe in science. I believe we are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves." Pollitt has often attacked critics of science, whether Christian fundamentalists or members of the "academic left." But her statement of belief in science (which I've heard from many other people) isn't rational: it's an affirmation of faith, a credo. Whether "we" really are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves will have to be seen. (I have no such faith myself.) When people, especially scientists, proclaim what Science will do in the future, they are making statements of faith, not reason.

I don't "believe in science" any more than I believe in Christianity; nor do I "believe" in atheism. I don't even "believe" in Reason. I think reason is a useful tool, but like any tool it has its limits, and it's only as good as the premises one starts with. As the saying goes, "Garbage In, Garbage Out." ("Garbage In, Gospel Out," a computer-scientist friend of mine puts it ironically.) Raising Science or Reason to authority is another version of what Religion is for some people: an attempt to escape human limitations and achieve certainty by fiat.

Hey, You -- Out Of The Meme Pool!

I can’t see any good reason why Creationist or Intelligent Design research shouldn’t be done. It’s probably a waste of money and time, but so is most scientific research.

Science cultists rant and rave and tear their hair, but there’s no good reason for their wrath. Creationism and Intelligent Design are certainly religiously based, but they are not anti-scientific. In fact their concession that they have to present a science-like case is a surrender to secular science. It’s even remotely possible that some ID researcher will serendipitously make a real discovery. Weirder things have happened – that’s science!

Sure, the premises and motives of the ID research are completely bogus; so what? There’s a lot of secular research being done to prove – excuse me, demonstrate – that women can’t learn math, that men of African descent are biologically capable only of playing basketball and singing spirituals, that gay men are really women’s minds encased in male flesh, and so on. This kind of biological determinism has been discredited many times, yet its proponents don’t seem to have any trouble getting funding or publicity for their latest results. It’s also more harmful socially than Creationism or ID, being used to lend scientific respectability to all kinds of bigotry, and yet it doesn’t seem to rouse the same hysterical derision that Creationism does. My own criticisms of scientific racism in online debate have often been met with the argument that we should just let science run its course, and let the bad ideas and research fall by the wayside, as they assuredly will thanks to the self-correcting nature of science.

If it were up to me, if I were sitting behind a desk at the NIMH, would I provide funding for the next born-gay study? Probably not. At the very least, I’d return the proposal with some suggestions that the researchers correct their assumptions and methodology. But if that happened, none of this research would get done, because it is based on flawed assumptions and crummy methodology. As the biologist Ruth Hubbard wrote in Exploding the Gene Myth (1997, page 98, italics mine):

Given the publicity accorded to such studies, more research will undoubtedly be done on this subject. Molecular biologists are now soliciting participants from extended families with “at least three gay men or lesbians,” hoping to find DNA sequences they can link to homosexuality. In view of the complexities of doing accurate linkage studies and necessarily small size of the samples, such studies are bound to come up with plenty of meaningless correlations, which will get reported as further evidence of “genetic transmission of homosexuality.

I don’t think it would be a great loss if such research were strangled in its cradle, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow queers would be upset, because they are waiting for Science to prove, erm, demonstrate that we can’t help ourselves, we were born this way, we’re prisoners of our genes; and if we could just prove that, then Fred Phelps would like us and let us into his church.

Thousands of scientists would also be upset, because you're not supposed to deny funding to any research program, no matter how worthless, unless it's ... erm ... well, the wrong worthless research program.

Please note again: I don’t think Creationism contains even a grain of truth, but the same can be said of many beliefs and ideas that don’t have hundreds (thousands?) of websites dedicated to ridiculing them. There’s something about Creationism that really gets into the craw of secularists, much as the idea that human beings evolved from monkeys outrages Creationists. Richard Lewontin pointed out:

Neither the Vatican nor much of quite conventional Protestant theology demands that one take the story in Genesis 1 literally. Even William Jennings Bryan, famous as the prosecutor in the Scopes trial in 1925, when called as a witness for the defense, confessed that he did not much care whether God took six days or six hundred million years to create the world. Moreover, even the minimalist Christian position does not require the abandonment of the neo-Darwinian view of the mechanism of evolution. It is quite possible to argue, as some of my believing religious colleagues do, that God set the stage for evolution by natural selection of undirected mutations, but that He reserved the ancestral line destined to become human for special preservation and guidance.

What, then, is the source of the repeated episodes of active political and social agitation against the assertions of evolutionary science? One apparent answer is that it is the expected product of fundamentalist belief, which rejects the easy compromises of liberal exegesis and insists that every word in Genesis means exactly what it says. Days are days, not eons. But there's the rub. A literal reading of Genesis tells us that it took God only three days to make the physical universe as it now exists, yet nuclear physics and astrophysics claim a very old stellar system and provide the instruments for the dating of bits and pieces of the earth and of fossils spanning hundreds of millions of years. So why aren't Kansas schools under extreme pressure to change the curriculum in physical science courses? Why should physicists be allowed to propagate, unopposed, their godless accounts of the evolution of the physical universe? Something more is at stake than a disagreement over the literal truth of biblical metaphors.

He’s right, and it works both ways. It’s a popular trope in science circles that Science has dethroned “Man”: first Copernicus showed that We are not at the center of the universe, then Darwin showed that We are not the crown of creation (though we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder; see below). A lot of science cultists really get into the idea of punishing Man’s sinful pride, as much as any Grand Inquisitor. They still think that Man is pretty special, though, because He can do, like, y’know, Science, and strip Nature nekkid and probe her secrets, and someday He will have, like, total knowledge and total domination of the Universe!

In principle I favor teaching the conflicts between Darwinian evolution and Creationism/ID. I’m as opposed to Sam Harris’ demand that public schools teach “God Is Dead” as I am to the schools’ teaching any other religious position as fact; I think the most important thing schools can teach students is how to research controversies and make up their own minds.

Yes, I know that “teaching the controversy,” as they call it, has been co-opted by the Creationist Discovery Institute. But just because the Ku Klux Klan appeals to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech doesn’t invalidate the principle. (Have you ever noticed that the same people who attack the ACLU for defending free speech are the first to run to it for help when they get into trouble themselves?) But I’m with Gerald Graff: “I’m a believer in the pedagogical and civic value of bad argument. I think a culture of crude and crudely polarized debate is an advance over the Eisenhower era I grew up in, where conflicts were mushed over in a haze of evasive rhetoric.” The fact that so many people apparently believe that free speech doesn’t include bad arguments as well as good, offensive speech as well as nice speech, shows just how poorly educated they are. Hazing over conflict with evasive rhetoric is exactly what I see in most “diversity” education, however.

In practice, though, I doubt that most biology teachers understand Darwinian theory well enough to present it accurately. I know that a good many “reality-based” pro-science liberal types are not really Darwinians at all; rather, they are Spencerians, who believe in a linear, upward march of evolution from the lowly amoeba to Man. I’ve heard enough of them say that less-educated or less “intelligent” people are less evolved than their own superior selves, to be wary of just how well Darwinian evolution is understood by its advocates and supporters. While writing this post I found quite a number of science-related websites and blogs criticizing the March of Evolutionary Progress as a “myth,” but it wasn’t always so – as some of these writers concede. One even admits that St. Carl Sagan’s PBS television account of the glory of science “is at least suggestive of a branching process [instead of a Great Chain of Being], but it still does not fully drive home the diversity of life as it trails our own lineage primarily to the exclusion of others.”

In this clip, Sagan scrupulously mentions evolutionary branching, but his story is about Us and “who our ancestors were,” resulting in a linear narrative. That’s a feature of narrative and language, rather than of the theory, but it shows the pitfalls of trying to come up, as Sagan was, with a new Creation myth to replace the old one. (The same blogger links to an apparently similar clip – no longer available, alas -- featuring Richard “I Am The Antichrist, I Am a Scientist” Dawkins.) That famous image used to be Science; now it’s a Myth. How soon we forget.

(The image below of The Great Chain of Being comes from Dangerous Intersection, whose author erroneously assumes that only opponents of Science still think in those terms.)

Hey, You -- Out Of The Meme Pool!

I can’t see any good reason why Creationist or Intelligent Design research shouldn’t be done. It’s probably a waste of money and time, but so is most scientific research.

Science cultists rant and rave and tear their hair, but there’s no good reason for their wrath. Creationism and Intelligent Design are certainly religiously based, but they are not anti-scientific. In fact their concession that they have to present a science-like case is a surrender to secular science. It’s even remotely possible that some ID researcher will serendipitously make a real discovery. Weirder things have happened – that’s science!

Sure, the premises and motives of the ID research are completely bogus; so what? There’s a lot of secular research being done to prove – excuse me, demonstrate – that women can’t learn math, that men of African descent are biologically capable only of playing basketball and singing spirituals, that gay men are really women’s minds encased in male flesh, and so on. This kind of biological determinism has been discredited many times, yet its proponents don’t seem to have any trouble getting funding or publicity for their latest results. It’s also more harmful socially than Creationism or ID, being used to lend scientific respectability to all kinds of bigotry, and yet it doesn’t seem to rouse the same hysterical derision that Creationism does. My own criticisms of scientific racism in online debate have often been met with the argument that we should just let science run its course, and let the bad ideas and research fall by the wayside, as they assuredly will thanks to the self-correcting nature of science.

If it were up to me, if I were sitting behind a desk at the NIMH, would I provide funding for the next born-gay study? Probably not. At the very least, I’d return the proposal with some suggestions that the researchers correct their assumptions and methodology. But if that happened, none of this research would get done, because it is based on flawed assumptions and crummy methodology. As the biologist Ruth Hubbard wrote in Exploding the Gene Myth (1997, page 98, italics mine):

Given the publicity accorded to such studies, more research will undoubtedly be done on this subject. Molecular biologists are now soliciting participants from extended families with “at least three gay men or lesbians,” hoping to find DNA sequences they can link to homosexuality. In view of the complexities of doing accurate linkage studies and necessarily small size of the samples, such studies are bound to come up with plenty of meaningless correlations, which will get reported as further evidence of “genetic transmission of homosexuality.

I don’t think it would be a great loss if such research were strangled in its cradle, but hundreds of thousands of my fellow queers would be upset, because they are waiting for Science to prove, erm, demonstrate that we can’t help ourselves, we were born this way, we’re prisoners of our genes; and if we could just prove that, then Fred Phelps would like us and let us into his church.

Thousands of scientists would also be upset, because you're not supposed to deny funding to any research program, no matter how worthless, unless it's ... erm ... well, the wrong worthless research program.

Please note again: I don’t think Creationism contains even a grain of truth, but the same can be said of many beliefs and ideas that don’t have hundreds (thousands?) of websites dedicated to ridiculing them. There’s something about Creationism that really gets into the craw of secularists, much as the idea that human beings evolved from monkeys outrages Creationists. Richard Lewontin pointed out:

Neither the Vatican nor much of quite conventional Protestant theology demands that one take the story in Genesis 1 literally. Even William Jennings Bryan, famous as the prosecutor in the Scopes trial in 1925, when called as a witness for the defense, confessed that he did not much care whether God took six days or six hundred million years to create the world. Moreover, even the minimalist Christian position does not require the abandonment of the neo-Darwinian view of the mechanism of evolution. It is quite possible to argue, as some of my believing religious colleagues do, that God set the stage for evolution by natural selection of undirected mutations, but that He reserved the ancestral line destined to become human for special preservation and guidance.

What, then, is the source of the repeated episodes of active political and social agitation against the assertions of evolutionary science? One apparent answer is that it is the expected product of fundamentalist belief, which rejects the easy compromises of liberal exegesis and insists that every word in Genesis means exactly what it says. Days are days, not eons. But there's the rub. A literal reading of Genesis tells us that it took God only three days to make the physical universe as it now exists, yet nuclear physics and astrophysics claim a very old stellar system and provide the instruments for the dating of bits and pieces of the earth and of fossils spanning hundreds of millions of years. So why aren't Kansas schools under extreme pressure to change the curriculum in physical science courses? Why should physicists be allowed to propagate, unopposed, their godless accounts of the evolution of the physical universe? Something more is at stake than a disagreement over the literal truth of biblical metaphors.

He’s right, and it works both ways. It’s a popular trope in science circles that Science has dethroned “Man”: first Copernicus showed that We are not at the center of the universe, then Darwin showed that We are not the crown of creation (though we are at the top of the evolutionary ladder; see below). A lot of science cultists really get into the idea of punishing Man’s sinful pride, as much as any Grand Inquisitor. They still think that Man is pretty special, though, because He can do, like, y’know, Science, and strip Nature nekkid and probe her secrets, and someday He will have, like, total knowledge and total domination of the Universe!

In principle I favor teaching the conflicts between Darwinian evolution and Creationism/ID. I’m as opposed to Sam Harris’ demand that public schools teach “God Is Dead” as I am to the schools’ teaching any other religious position as fact; I think the most important thing schools can teach students is how to research controversies and make up their own minds.

Yes, I know that “teaching the controversy,” as they call it, has been co-opted by the Creationist Discovery Institute. But just because the Ku Klux Klan appeals to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech doesn’t invalidate the principle. (Have you ever noticed that the same people who attack the ACLU for defending free speech are the first to run to it for help when they get into trouble themselves?) But I’m with Gerald Graff: “I’m a believer in the pedagogical and civic value of bad argument. I think a culture of crude and crudely polarized debate is an advance over the Eisenhower era I grew up in, where conflicts were mushed over in a haze of evasive rhetoric.” The fact that so many people apparently believe that free speech doesn’t include bad arguments as well as good, offensive speech as well as nice speech, shows just how poorly educated they are. Hazing over conflict with evasive rhetoric is exactly what I see in most “diversity” education, however.

In practice, though, I doubt that most biology teachers understand Darwinian theory well enough to present it accurately. I know that a good many “reality-based” pro-science liberal types are not really Darwinians at all; rather, they are Spencerians, who believe in a linear, upward march of evolution from the lowly amoeba to Man. I’ve heard enough of them say that less-educated or less “intelligent” people are less evolved than their own superior selves, to be wary of just how well Darwinian evolution is understood by its advocates and supporters. While writing this post I found quite a number of science-related websites and blogs criticizing the March of Evolutionary Progress as a “myth,” but it wasn’t always so – as some of these writers concede. One even admits that St. Carl Sagan’s PBS television account of the glory of science “is at least suggestive of a branching process [instead of a Great Chain of Being], but it still does not fully drive home the diversity of life as it trails our own lineage primarily to the exclusion of others.”

In this clip, Sagan scrupulously mentions evolutionary branching, but his story is about Us and “who our ancestors were,” resulting in a linear narrative. That’s a feature of narrative and language, rather than of the theory, but it shows the pitfalls of trying to come up, as Sagan was, with a new Creation myth to replace the old one. (The same blogger links to an apparently similar clip – no longer available, alas -- featuring Richard “I Am The Antichrist, I Am a Scientist” Dawkins.) That famous image used to be Science; now it’s a Myth. How soon we forget.

(The image below of The Great Chain of Being comes from Dangerous Intersection, whose author erroneously assumes that only opponents of Science still think in those terms.)