Life does not begin at conception

One of the primary claims of the anti-abortion brigade is that “life begins at conception”, and because it is wrong to take a life, therefore it is wrong to abort a fetus (and perhaps wrong even to prevent a zygote from implanting by use of a UTI). However, this claim is not merely wrong, but ludicrously wrong.

Let me make an aside here. If you are of a religious bent, and if you believe in the existance of a soul, and if you believe that this soul is created, implanted, magicked into being, or otherwise attached to a developing human at some particular point in development, then of course that provides a logical point whereafter abortion may be seen as a crime against said soul. I think you are dead wrong about the existance of souls, but granted that premise, this objection to anti-abortionism does not apply to you. To you, all I have to say is this: Remember that your arguments are inherently non-secular and cannot carry force in a secular judicial system; and please remember that your arguments hold no force with those of us who are not religious.

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With that out of the way, let’s restate the obvoius: Life does not begin at conception. Conception, in us sexually reproducing animals, consists of the fusion of gametes—the sperm fertilises the ovum. But, and this should be painfully obvious to everyone, the gametes are alive. You are the product of a living spermatozoon and a living ovum. Fertilisation did not mark the creation of life, only the fusion of two living cells into a single living cell.

This fusion is certainly a defining moment in your life. Barring mutation so unlikely that I expect it can be discounted, and excepting rare conditions like chimerism and mosaicism, it is the last event that defines your genetic makeup, when the chromosomes you inherit from your parents merge. It is, in a very real sense, a defining moment. It is not, however, the defining moment, because there are many. Even after fusion, not every zygote goes on to successfully implant, and early pregnancies often terminate spontaneously. The biologist Lewis Wolpert famously said that “It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the most important time in your life”.

But before conception, a startling number of things had to happen in order to make you who you are. Before the fertilisation event was to matter at all, the specifics of meiosis in the germ line of each of your parents played as big a role in determining your genetic specifics as did the fertilisation itself: Meiosis, the process where a germ line cell divides into (haploid) gametes with half the chromosomal complement of a normal cell, is when the genetic contribution of each parent is determined. And of course any number of things had to happen very specifically in order to make you who you are, on this basis: Your parents had to have sex at just the right time when the spermatozoon and ovum each carrying half of your genes were alive and active. If they’d waited until next month, things would have been different…

But this is only the beginning (or the end, depending on your view). Those haploid cells, after all, were alive, each of them a living cell from one of your parents, whence they were produced by meiosis from diploid germ line cells. Each of those cells was the unlikely product of very specific meiosis, reproductive timing, and fertilisation by the (most likely four) people who were their parents…and the same goes for all of their parents…and that lineage goes back, centuries, millennia, millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. You are the product of a lineage of living cells that stretches back to the very dawn of sexual reproduction. Looking back further, you’re still the product of living cells, though the processes are different and lateral gene transfer makes the family tree a bit harder to draw…but ultimately, you are the scion of a family of cells—living cell to living cell to living cell—reaching back some 3.6 billion years—3,600,000,000 years—at a ballpark estimate.

That is when life began, and that is, in a sense, when your life began, too: It started then, and it hasn’t died since. Every single intermediary between you and the first primordial, primitive, living cell that serves as ancestor to all life on earth was alive. It started then, and in a sense, you’re just a heavily modified offshoot—3,600,000,000 years down the living line.

I find this an awesome fact to contemplate.

What, then, is so magical about conception? Nothing, really. It’s a defining moment in making you who you are, but it’s really just one of billions upon billions of defining moments. Causing the death of a zygote does exactly as much in preventing a particular potential person from coming about as does causing the death of a spermatozoon (e.g. by masturbating, by ejaculating outside a woman, by using a condom, or by doing nothing and letting the spermatozoon die and get reabsorbed into the body); as does wasting the life of an ovum (by menstruating, in the luteal or ischemic phase). But removing the possibility of a specific human being is even more ubiquitous; after all, every human alive represents millions of potential people lost, as the ones produced by the spermatozoa who lost the race would undoubtedly have been different.

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My own opinions on abortion are not very well-defined. I am, of course, pro-choice, but since I’ve never been in a position where I’ve had to make a hard choice, I’ve never needed to figure out exactly what I think the hard lines are. What I do think, however, is that it is in no way wrong to destroy human tissue, while it is definitely wrong to destroy a moral human person.

The question, then, is what constitutes moral personhood. I will not pretend to have a clearcut answer. If I had to sit down and develop one, it would combine concepts like having thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, and desires; taking part in emotional relationships (a reciprocal relationship); interacting (in some way) with people; acting as a moral agent, rather than merely being acted upon as a ‘moral object’.

It seems abundantly clear to me that no lump of human tissue can possibly meet my criteria unless it has a mind, which requires a working brain. After the brain works in some sense, I believe there is a window, a grey area, where I would in all likelihood agree that abortion may very well be morally acceptable—but this is beside the point I wish to make here, which is that until brain activity begins, I regard it as “no context”: Abortion prior to this is absolutely acceptable. (This may be around week 25 or so of a pregnancy; research shows that sustained EEG activity first appears in bursts around week 20, become sustained around week 22, and bilaterally synchronous around weeks 26–27.)

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Once the position is taken that an early abortion does not, in fact, destroy a moral person, we are back to the notion of destroying “potential” persons. The problem is that we destroy potential persons all the time, no matter what we do. If we have sex, we destroy lots of potential persons (since most of the potential ones will never be, even if we do have children); whenever we don’t have sex even though we could, we are passively murdering potential persons, because we aren’t making children at all.

Modern biotechnology allows us to stretch this argument to a reductio ad absurdum without leaving the realm of the possible. In recent experiments (documented in some very nice articles in Nature), scientists have induced pluripotency in mouse cells and produced viable mice (fully viable, as some of them went on to reproduce). While cloning humans is likely to be much more difficult than cloning mice even on purely technical considerations, and it may well be impossible right now, it seems obvious that the technology is if not in our grasp, then certainly close to it, to produce viable humans from induced pluripotent stem cells. Taking things just a bit further, it may become possible to extract genetic material and inject it into pluripotent cells and so produce clones from any cell with intact genetic material.

Once the technology exists for doing this, the loss of any viable genetic material is, in a sense, the destruction of a potential human life. Scratching your head, cutting your hair or your nails, losing scrapings of epithelial material from your mouth, bleeding…every such act will prevent humans from being who might otherwise have been.

Unless you are willing to condemn this as murder, then any argument that boils down to “You are destroying potential life!” loses all force.

Insufficient Christianity 22.1

Here, Lewis continues his discussion about the Christian virtue of Faith.  In the last chapter, he described how the word "faith" can be used, basically, as a synonym for reason, logic, or evidence.  He said that there is another, second meaning to the word, a "higher sense" of the word.  To set the stage for this second sense, he rants a bit, and continues this ranting in this chapter.  Here's a fairly representative sample:

Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer to God that is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this: really finding out by experience that it is true.

The trouble here is that he never gets around to spitting out what the hell this second meaning of "faith" is.  It's all a very philosophical-sounding block of text about how "faith," in this second, higher sense, means that God wants us to be a certain type of creature, how we have to recognize that we could never repay God for all the awesome things he's done, etc.  Basically, Lewis never says anything to differentiate the virtue of Faith from the virtue of Humility.  Seriously, I can't find where he says anything that corrosponds to any definition of Faith that I've ever heard.  If you have any clues for me, dear readers, let me know.

Lewis does touch on the ancient debate between salvation being due to "Faith," or "Good Works."  Lewis answers that, simply:

A serious moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.

I simply disagree.  Even if the did exist a God, and he did incarnate himself in human form, caused his human form to be named Jesus, and we all have a choice whether to believe these assertions or not, I don't see what faith in these things could possibly mean.  Either you're going to behave ethically, or you're not (or more likely, in some situations you will behave ethically, and in some situations you won't).  Lewis fails to properly address this issue with a pretty significant failure in logic:

One set were accused of saying, 'Good actions are all that matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving money. The best thing to give money to is the Church. So, hand us over £10,000 and we will see you through.' The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only commercial speculations.

Lewis fails to realize that he's been trying desperately to explain that we need to accept God's grace and mercy, and then we will naturally wish to do good works.  Lewis is completely ignoring the possibility of people doing good works simply to make the world a better place, with more security and freedom for humanity.  By Lewis' logic here, a person who doesn't believe in Heaven or Hell at all, yet who does good works anyway, is clearly far more moral than a theist of any stripe.  I completely agree, of course, but I'm not sure that Lewis properly comprehended the implications of this statement.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 21.1

Chapter 21 of Mere Christianity is particularly relevant - we have an ongoing discussion about the Christian virtue of Faith in the comments of Insufficient Christianity: 14.1.  This chapter comprises Lewis' discussion of this virtue.  He claims (and I agree with his main point here) that the word "faith" can be used in two or more ways.  The first, as near as I can tell, is the idea of "faith" and "reason" being synonymous:

For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

I cannot stress how important this is - Lewis states clearly that there are two different ways of using the word "faith."  The first way is to use it interchangeably with the word "reason."  Lewis doesn't touch his second definition of the word until chapter 22.  For now, it's enough to point out, with much emphasis, that these two definitions are not interchangeable.

It is possible for a person to claim that there is only one relevant meaning to the word "faith;" the same meaning as reason, or logic, or evidence.  I personally don't like this definition; we already have the words reason, logic, and evidence.  Faith loses it's meaning if Christianity means the word to simply be a synonym for these words.

If we do take Faith to mean this, however, it is imperative that we actually use that definition.  An example I use often is driving a car - I do not have "faith" that I am much more likely to arrive a destination by driving carefully and obeying traffic laws, I conclude this based on abundant evidence and logic.  If we are to take "faith" to have this kind of meaning, then, we can skip the discussion of whether "faith" is a good thing, and move on to look at the evidence for religious claims.

The difficulty is when a Christian claims that there is only one meaning of the word, but then equivocates this meaning of Faith with the more commonly understood meaning of the word:  holding a belief without supporting evidence or even in spite of opposing evidence.  Here's an example from the comments discussion I mentioned above:

I simply don't know what the trucker is going to do. I think I do, but I really don't. So if I swing left to pass him, I am counting on something I don't know for sure. I don't know that he won't run me off the road. I believe he won't, so I act on my faith and I pull out to pass him.

To put is as simply as possible, either your "faith" is formed by experience, evidence, and logic (telling you that truckers rarely swerve randomly into other lanes), or your "faith" is simply a feeling that you can go ahead and pass and nothing will happen (even though you have no evidence of this).  Christians will sometimes try to make it seem like you have to have faith (in the second sense) to do such ordinary, everyday things like pass a truck on the highway, when you don't.  Passing a truck on the highway is a logical conclusion drawn from evidence.  If this is the definition of "faith" you want to use, then let's discuss the actual evidence.

Meandering back to C.S. Lewis, he states that if you've reached a faith conclusion based on evidence, you still have to be careful to stick with that conclusion, even when you'd rather the opposite be true.  Lewis uses several examples:

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments when a mere mood rises up against it.

There are other examples of this, which we could use to describe the opposing perspective.  I cannot imagine how anguished I'd be if Ziztur died, but it would be pure idiocy to allow myself to be fooled into thinking that we have immortal souls that live on after death, simply because I'm sorrowful about someone I love.  In the same way as Lewis describes, wanting a loved one to live on after their death will not make it happen.  If  I think of Ziztur, and she immediately calls me, it might seem to some that I have psychic powers.  Ignoring the reality of confirmation bias might be tempting, but obviously wouldn't be rational.

Only one more statement of note that Lewis makes here:

And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

Um, no.  I think that most people who lose their faith in the religion that they were raised in were exactly "reasoned out of it by honest argument."  I was.  The appearance of "drifting away" likely results from the long and difficult process of giving up your childhood superstitions, especially when your whole family and culture continue to hammer them into your head.

Lewis then rants at length about the Christian virtue of Humility, and concludes that Humility will inevitably lead us to the conclusion that everything we have in life was given to us by God, and we can never hope to even come remotely close to repaying a slight fraction of what the amazing, almighty God has given us pathetic, worthless creatures.  This, Lewis says, is the foundation of Faith, in the second sense in which it may be meant.  I wonder what definition this could be?

Mere Christianity Online

College attendance and religiosity

Recently I read here that a study [1] had been conducted which looks at the trends between the study of certain subjects in college and religious observance. The study concluded that very religious high school students are more likely than less religious high school students to attend college.

This may surprise the skeptical world. I’ve heard many times that people with high levels of religiosity tend to be less educated and less intelligent whereas people with low religiosity tend to be more educated and more intelligent. Typically people cite an article published in nature as evidence for this phenomenon [2], if they cite an article at all. So why is this study saying that people who are more religious are more likely to attend college?

The authors first rightfully point out that there is a pressure in the United States toward being religious, yet despite this pressure (especially from families), religiosity is remaining more or less steady and even swinging downward as the years go by. One common culprit blamed on this is college, given that college tends to be the first time people are separated from their families for an extended period of time.

The goal of the study was to look at how contents of college curriculum affect student values and to distinguish these effects from patterns of selection based on already-held values. The study hypothesizes that college students are confronted (in varying degrees) to three streams of thought in college that have certain negative attitudes toward religion, and that these streams of thought may have an effect on religiosity. Those streams of thought are:

Science – consisting of a commitment to truth, the scientific method and open-mindedness toward evidence. Natural science fields have a strong scientist content.

Developmentalism – consisting of a commitment to freedom and progress. Economics and business have a strong developmentalist content.

Postmodernism – consisting of a commitment to relativism of truth and morality and the idea that truth and morality are determined by those who are most powerful. The humanities and social sciences have a strong postmodernist content.

The article delves much deeper into exactly what these three streams of thought are and how they come into conflict with religiosity (in a refreshingly impartial manner), but for the purposes of this article I will leave them simply defined.  If on accepts that different majors are tied to different streams of thought, it is possible to test whether any of these three streams of thought contribute to reduced religiosity by looking at initial choices of major and changes of major over time in concordance with any changes in religiosity. They specifically examined the changes in religiosity from high school and into college, using a sample size of literally thousands of students in Michigan from high school and through college.

Here are some of their findings:

-compared to business majors, social sciences and humanities have a statistically significant negative effect on both attendance of religious services and the rating of the importance of religion.
-education majors were more religious than other majors and their religiosity increased over time.
-religiosity increases over time for business majors
-religious attendance decreased for students who are undecided about college major.
-religious attendance decreased for respondents who did not go to college.
-students in science and engineering have less trust in god than people who have not gone to college or business majors (as measured by asking the respondents, “if we just leave things to god, they will turn out for the best [disagree, mostly disagree, neither agree nor disagree, mostly agree, agree]”).

-students who were social science, humanities or engineering tended to think religious organizations should have less of an effect on society, whereas subjects who had not gone to college thought religious organizations should have more influence on society.

The study was fairly well-designed, so I was quite surprised to find that students who were more religious were more likely to attend college, given that it seems to contradict other studies (such as the one reported on in Michael Shermer’s How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God [3]) which indicate that atheism increases with education level.  Religiosity was rated on a 1-4 scale (“how often to you attend religious services? [1=never, 2=rarely 3=once or twice a month 4=about once a week or more]”), and each point on the scale corresponded with a 14% increases in the likelihood of going to college. A change in the rated importance of religion by one point amounted to an 8% increase in the likelihood of going to college.

I think that a weakness in the study lies in the fact that they did not take into account the different denominations of college attendees, and rather used “religious attendance” and “importance of religion” as their measures of religiosity. As such, the study ignored the positive or negative impacts of particular denominations or religious schools of thought, especially Sectarianism (the belief that religious rewards will be given exclusively to the adherents of a particular faith) and fundamentalism (finding value in sacred texts, especially the belief in the inerrancy of biblical texts).  Studies have shown that sectarianism and fundamentalism in particular has a negative impact on educational attainment [4], and especially the educational attainment of women [5]. Sectarian and fundamentalist individuals are also more likely to choose a religious college.

One other interesting thing to note is that the reported amount of time people spend at religious services does not seem to correlate with actual religious service attendance – studies show the actual number is about half of what people report – suggesting that many people overestimate (or lie about?) how often they attend [6]. The best this study can say with regard to religious service attendance is that the people who likely overestimate how often they attend are more likely to go to college.

1. Kimball MS, Mitchell CM, Thornton AD, Young-Demarco LC. Empirics on the Origins of Preferences: The Case of College Major and religiosity. NBER (2009) Working Paper No. 15182

2. Larson EJ, Witham L. Leading scientists still reject god. Nature 1998:394;313

3. Shermer, M. How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. New York: William H Freeman. 1999:76–79. ISBN 071673561X.

4. Sherkat DE. Religion and higher education: the good, the bad, and the ugly. 2007: Online at http://religion.ssrc.org/reforum/Sherkat.pdf

5. Sherkat, DE, Darnell A. The Effect of Parents' Fundamentalism on Children's
Educational Attainment: Examining Differences by Gender and Children's Fundamentalism Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1999:38;23-35.

6. Hadaway CK, Marler L, Chaves M. what the polls don’t show: a closer look at U.S. church attendance. American Sociological Review 1993:58;741-752

Chinese Herbal Medicine for Endometriosis

Media outlets are reporting that Chinese herbs may relieve symptoms of endometriosis, using a Cochrane review of 2 research articles. Headlines read “Chinese herbs show early promise for endometriosis”  and  “Chinese Herbs May Relieve Endometriosis Symptoms, Review Finds”  .

Endometriosis is a medical condition in which some of the endometrial cells (typically found in the uterus under the fluctuating influence of female hormones) are found outside of the uterine cavity. Symptoms include many nonspecific complaints such as pelvic pain, infertility, nausea, unusual menstruation, chronic fatigue, mood swings, back pain, ovarian cysts, constipation, urinary tract infections, diarrhea, anemia, etc. Appropriate diagnosis is by laparoscopic biopsy – a doctor will use a laparoscopic instrument to remove suspected extrauterine endometrial cells and examine them.  Treatments vary and can include hormonal treatments or surgery to remove the cells. In China, treatment of this disorder with Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) is routine.

Both of the media reports linked to above say that the Cochrane reviewers found some evidence that CHM has comparable benefits to conventional drug therapy after laparoscopic surgery for people with endometriosis but that the review has limitations. The primary author of the study is quoted as saying “"I think the positive message is that Chinese herbal medicine may offer equivalent benefits to conventional medicine but with fewer side effects.”

I found the Cochrane review [1] and noted that reviewers collected 110 studies for review and graded them based on methodological criteria. They dropped all but two of the 110 studies due to excluding trials with poor methodology, unconfirmed randomization procedures or ones diagnosing endometriosis without an appropriate laparoscopic biopsy.

Did the two retained articles feature research with superior methodology? First, let’s look at what those two articles were, and what the author concluded from this review:

The first article [2] had two treatment arms: women treated with CHM orally (2x/day) and via enema (1x/day) after laparoscopic surgery versus women treated with gestrinone (2x/wk) after laparoscopic surgery for 3 months. The results showed no difference between rates of symptom relief or pregnancy in either group.

The second article [3] had three treatment arms: women treated with CHM orally(2x/day), women who treated with CHM orally and via enema(1x/day), and women treated with danazol(1x/day) for 3 months. These women did not undergo laparoscopic surgery, but instead were only biopsied for diagnostic purposes.  Women obtained greater symptomatic relief with oral and oral plus enema CHM versus danazol, oral plus enema CHM shower a greater reduction in dysmenorrhoea pain scores than danazol and shrinkage of adenexal masses. There were no differences for other factors (lumbrosacral pain, rectal discomfort, vaginal nodules).

The author concluded that post-surgical administration of CHM may have comparable benefits to gestrinone but with fewer side effects, that oral CHM may be better for treatment than danazol and may be more effective at relieving dysmenorrheal and shrinking adnexal masses when used with a CHM enema.

So, what are our weaknesses?

1.    No placebo control: There was no arm of the first study which looked at women receiving laparoscopic surgery alone without CHM or danazol, and no arm of the second study which looked at women receiving no treatment or a placebo pill treatment.

2.    Poor blinding: I should not have to point out that if you enroll in a study that has a pill treatment arm and an enema treatment arm, it is impossible for the participants to be blinded to which treatment group they are in. And enema, as you probably know, is a procedure in which liquids are forced into the rectum through the anus. It might be possible to blind participants to whether or not they are getting CHM versus the other medications, but I bet most people can tell the difference between a Chinese medicine pill and the other pills in the study. The researchers were also not blinded as to which treatment group women were in, though the paper indicates the assessors were blinded to which treatment group the women were in.

3.    Inadequate comparison treatments: Danazol is no longer commonly used as a treatment for endometriosis, and gestrinone is not available in the USA. These studies would have been much more robust had they compared it to typical drug treatments for endometriosis. In the world of conventional treatments for endometriosis, these two drugs can hardly be called conventional.

4.    Poor outcome measures: In both of the studies, a clinical outcome of “no effect” was recorded if there were no change in symptoms or if the symptoms became worse. Recording worsening symptoms as “no effect” biases the data toward a positive outcome.


I think that the most appropriate take home message or finding of the study is this: the massive stockpile of clinical trials that explore CHM for treating endometriosis have serious methodological shortcomings. 

The author’s main conclusion (and the conclusion parroted by the press), that CHM may work to alleviate symptoms of endometriosis, seems spurious in light of this. Additionally, it appears that researchers used a specific mixture of herbs (Nei Yi) in the two studies, which raises the question: why the author did not title his paper “Nei Yi for endometriosis”?  Perhaps he wanted his readers to focus on the fact that this was a Chinese herbal medicine versus a “conventional” medicine.

Lastly, it is worth noting that although the authors of the review state that there is no conflict of interest in the publication of this review, the primary author is an acupuncture and Chinese medicine practitioner at a center for Chinese medicine in the UK.

References:

[1] Flower A, Liu JP, Chen S, Lewith G, Little P. Chinese herbal medicine for endometriosis. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD006568. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD006568.pub2.

[2] Wu SZ,Chen XL,Chen WZ, Li SY.Clinical analysis of the treatment of endometriosis using Nei Yi pills and Nei Yi enema. Journal of Liaoning University of TCM 2006;8(7):5–6.

[3] Wu SZ, Chen XL, Chen WZ. Clinical observation of Nei Yi pills combined with Nei Yi enema in the treatment of endometriosis. Chinese Archives of TCM 2006;24(3):431–3.

Insufficient Christianity: 4.1

Lewis begins Chapter 4 of Mere Christianity with this:

I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live in. Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures developed into things like us.

Before I begin explaining why this is a strawman misrepresentation of the materialist view, I will note that there is a note at the end of this chapter wherein Lewis explains that these are not the only two views on origins. Now…

The question as to how matter and space “got here” (cosmology), is a separate question from how biological life arose from matter and space (abeogenesis), is a separate question from how biological life became so complex (evolution by natural selection). Lewis essentially boils down the materialist position into that of a smug scientist shrugging his shoulders.  Materialists hold the position that there is no supernatural, that all things operate according to laws of nature, and that life is a product of natural processes. Materialists, assuming they follow consensus cosmology, do not believe that “matter and space have always existed and that nobody knows why.” To even ask “why” is to presuppose a purpose. But, I’ll leave the long-winded explanation of materialism aside and say simply that materialism is not quite as Lewis describes it, though I suppose we can give him a free pass for condensing materialism into its creationist soundbytes, given that Mere Christianity is essentially a transcription of a radio essay.

The other view is the religious view.* According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself--I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up.

This is very interesting. Instead of beginning an inquiry as to the nature of the universe by looking at the evidence we see, Theists like Lewis begin an inquiry as to the nature of the universe by first asking what the purpose of the universe might be, and then proposing a conscious entity to give the universe its purpose. Yet, we have not yet established that the universe has a purpose. That the universe has a purpose is an unstated premise. On a smaller scale, this is akin to walking outside and seeing a smudge of mud on the sidewalk. On seeing the smudge, we ask what the purpose of this smudge might be. Once we inquire as to the purpose of the smudge, we propose a smudgemaker who created the smudge with the intention of having us go outside and ponder the purpose of the smudge. We have not even considered that there us no purpose to the smudge. I realize this paragraph is only loosely related to Lewis’ text, so you’ll have to forgive me for going off on a tangent. Here, Lewis seems to be boiling down the materialist and the religious viewpoint into, “viewpoint that the universe does not have a purpose” and “viewpoint that the universe does have a purpose”.

Moving on…

And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense.”

What Lewis is saying here is that we can’t use observation, experimentation, and rational thinking to determine if the materialist or religious view is the right one. Science, in the ordinary sense, has already determined that the materialist view is the “right one”.  I can only conclude further that what he means by “right one” is the opposing views of whether or not the universe has some greater purpose.

This is a type of fallacy of reification or anthropomorphic fallacy. Having a purpose is an abstraction. All that we have been able to observe about the universe shows that it operates as a series of events, and treating the universe as if it has a “purpose” erroneously attributes intention to these events, unless we can establish that the universe in fact has a purpose. We have not established this - thus assuming that the universe has a purpose, and then assuming that some entity had to give the universe this purpose, and then following that concluding that a god had to give the universe a purpose - is a string of logic based on a fallacious initial premise. Thus, we have a problem. We (humans) generally behave as though we have a purpose – a cognitive awareness of linking cause and effect in order to achieve a goal. We cannot assume the universe is working to achieve a goal, and many errors in thinking can be attributed to this assumption.

Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, 'I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so and-so,' or, 'I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such -and such a temperature and it did so-and-so.' Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.

Science also works by observation and rational thinking.

And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science--and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes--something of a different kind-this is not a scientific question. If there is 'Something Behind,' then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, 'Why is there a universe?' 'Why does it go on as it does?' 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as they were?

I have already answered the question. Quite simply, asking what purpose and meaning the universe has is reification – a fallacy. This is likely to be quite an unsatisfactory answer for most people. So in a way, Lewis is correct. Science can’t answer questions as to the plan and purpose of the universe, because we have observed no such purpose –we have only observed events. Asking “why” presupposes that there is some type of purpose which we might glean from inquiry. Asking science to answer the question as to the plan and purpose to the universe is like asking me how much money I have in my wallet after I've told you I do not own a wallet.

What science tells us is that we give our own lives purpose and meaning and that there is no ultimate plan or purpose.  Why bother give our lives purpose and meaning? The simplest answer is, "because we can".

Ref:  Mere Christianity Online

Homeopathy and the curse of the scientific method Pt1

I really wish I could find a free version of this journal article so that I could share it with you all - it is single the best piece of writing I have ever seen concerning homeopathy and the placebo effect.

Buried in the pages of The Veterinary Journal is an absolute treasure known as Overall (2009). In this article the authors first outline something very important: how to understand the role of bias in selecting populations for use in drug or medication trials. If a researcher approaches an individual to ask them to take part in a trial of a homeopathic medication, there are three main types of people a researcher can encounter, with respect to belief about the efficacy of homeopathy:

1. People who believe homeopathy is effective.
2. People who are unsure.
3. People who believe homeopathy is ineffective.

Of these three people, type 1 is the most likely type to agree to participate in a trial, especially one that is time consuming or involves a lot of work or effort on the part of the participant. When randomizing such a pool, it is highly unlikely that individuals in each respective pool will think (in this case) that homeopathy is ineffective. They are much more likely to believe homeopathy is effective. If they do not know much about homeopathy, they may assume that since this is not a trial to see if homeopathy works, but a trial to see if a particular homeopathic medication works, that homeopathy is therefore evidence based, and researchers are trying to prove that a particular remedy is effective. Either way, most people will be hoping and looking for positive results.

In animal trials in which owners are taking part in the evaluation of the behaviors of their own pets, they are likely to be quite biased or report different results based on their belief in the efficacy of the treatment. This is especially true if the changes in animal behavior are more subjective rather than objective. An owner who believes that a remedy is working may notice things like panting, drooling, or pacing less than an owner who has no such belief.

People often say that animals do not suffer from a placebo effect – that is, if you treat an animal with a medication it does not really know you are giving it something that should make it feel better. If the animal is in pain, it is not likely to feel less pain if you give it a sugar pill. This is basically true, but completely irrelevant, especially when observations of changes in animal behavior (indicative of an effect on the animal) are reported by people not trained in objectivity.

There is a problem in medical literature known as inter-rater reliability. Inter-rater reliability is the measure of different observers’ ability to report similar findings using the same measurement tool. A measurement tool is said to have good inter-rater reliability when several different individuals report very similar results. Inter-rater reliability relies on training in how to use the measurement tool and how to report findings objectively.

For example, several individuals grading a true or false quiz would have very high inter-rater reliability; that is several individuals, if given a key with the answers, will very likely give the same person the same grade. Inter-rater reliability may be reduced if the graders aren’t given an answer key and have to decide if the answers are correct based on their own knowledge. Inter-rater reliability could be extremely low if the tests are given to graders who have no answer key and varying levels of knowledge of the test material.

Similarly, trained investigators using a measure to observe the behaviors of animals may have high inter-rater reliability, whereas a trained investigator observing little Rover’s behaviors versus Mrs. MyDogIsMyChild observing Rover’s behaviors may have very low inter-rater reliability.

So, this is why we must use double blind placebo controlled testing for animals. The owners of animals are very likely to report their findings based on how much they believe the remedy will work. Just think about all of the times a dog owner reported that their dog “looked depressed because daddy went on a business trip”, or “pooped on the floor out of spite”. We’re very good at projecting emotions onto our animals that are not there.

The pet may not know that they are participating in an experiment, but the pet owner knows, and the pet owner is the one reporting perceived effects of treatment. This is why placebo-controls in veterinary medicine are as essential as they are in human medicine.

A placebo is pretty well defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “A drug, medicine, therapy, etc., prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient of being given treatment than for any direct physiological effect; esp. one with no specific therapeutic effect on a patient's condition, but believed by the patient to be therapeutic (and sometimes therefore effective). Also: a substance with no therapeutic effect used as a control in testing new drugs, etc.; a blank sample in a test”

Obviously, since the placebo effect can be so powerful, especially with respect to pain, anxiety, and other subjective issues, placebo trials must be conducted in order to separate remedies or medicines which affect physiology directly from remedies or medications which affect someone psychologically – it does mot matter if the pill is a sugar pill, a starch pill, a lactose pill or – dare I say – a homeopathic pill chemically identical to a sugar pill – the individual took a pill, and their belief that the pill will relieve their symptoms causes their symptoms to be relived. That’s a placebo.

Now, if a homeopathic, herbal, or X-type of medicine remedy has the same effects as a sugar pill, one can reasonably conclude that the remedy is inert physiologically. That is, it has no effect beyond the same effects seen in a sugar pill.

So, when companies market their remedies as being “80% effective”, but don’t tell you that the placebo arm of their study was also “80% effective”, people are being misled. Yet this is what homeopathic practitioners often do. In conventional medicine, if there is no difference between the effects of a placebo and the effects of a new type of medicine, then that medicine is discarded in favor of medicines in which there is an actual effect beyond the placebo effect. Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, on the other hand, seems to absolutely rely on the placebo effect to the point at which we may as well rename it to, “Complementary and Alternative Placebos” save for the fact that their effect will be diminished if people are aware they are being treated with placebo medicine.

Tomorrow, we discuss the importance of effect size!

Overall, K., Dunham, A., Homeopathy and the curse of the scientific method. The Veterinary Journal(2009)  180: 141-148
Online abstract

Faith Infiltration: WEC Origins Seminar Pt. 2.4

To continue Dr. Brad Harrub's proofs for his god's existence, he moved on to this argument which is supposed to prove that his god is beyond the laws of logic and physics:

If something exists today it tells me that something existed forever
if something existed forever, that means that something must be eternal
If something is eternal, it violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
To avoid violating the 2nd Law, this eternally existing thing must be outside of the laws of natural science.

This is a pretty backward way to try to prove that your god is real. The laws of natural science apply to the universe in it's current state of being - they (the laws) break apart as you get closer and closer to the Big Bang. What Dr. Harrub is doing is using the laws of physics to disprove the laws of physics by saying that his god does not follow the laws of physics. If you want to propose that entities exist which do not follow the laws of physics, you can pretty much propose the existence of any entity. If an argument or a theory can be used to propose the existence of anything at all, then the argument is absolutely useless at establishing any truths about reality at all.

For some reason, Dr. Harrub does not appear to like presenting in a linear fashion. As this lecture moved on, he jumped from topic to topic even more. At this point he asked his audience:

Who is more rational, a person who believes in a god he can't see, or a person who is offended by a god he does not believe in?

 Let's think about this. When other people believe in a god I do not believe in, those believers have an observational effect on the world around me. They undermine science and they infringe on my rights. I am offended when science is undermined, and I am offended when people infringe on my rights.

The god of the Bible, if he were real, would have a measurable, observational effect on the world around us.

He doesn't.

Belief in the Christian god has far, far more observable effects than the actual god Christians believe in.

It is far more rational to be offended by something that has an effect on the universe than to believe in something that does not.

Moving on, Dr. Harrub started talking about the incredible design of the human body, and asked several questions pertaining to design:

1. Which came first, the nerves or the organs? Nerve cells are of no use without a spinal cord and a brain (both of which make up the central nervous system)

Are you kidding? There are organisms that have nerve cells but NO central nervous system. Have you heard of the Hydra genus? They have nerve cells but no CNS. If you could ask a hydra what good nerves are without a CNS, if it could talk, it would tell you that nerve cells without a CNS are awesome. you can find examples of simpler organisms that have varying complexities of cellular life, from single celled organisms to hydras to people.In fact, we have a crapload of sensory neurons right in our own heads that require no spinal cord, because the sensory neurons transmit info straight to the brain - try the olfactory nerves. simple nerves are not useless without organs, and vice-versa.

2. how did brains evolve from rocks?

Evolution does not attempt to answer this question! Let's say we drop grains of sand onto the middle of an abandoned superhighway and continue dropping grains of sand, one by one, until we get a pile, and then a mound, and then a dune, and then a hill, and then a desert. We'll call this process the theory of highway-desertification. If we can't say exactly when the pile became a mound, does this falsify the theory of highway-desertification? If we can't say exactly where we got all of the sand, does that falsify the theory of highway-desertification? If we can't tell you exactly which organisms died so that their bodies became the sand, does that falsify the theory? No, because we still have ample evidence and explanation of the process of forming the desert. Sure, it's hard to imagine a whole desert or even a small hill of sand as having a single grain as a starting point, but just because it is hard to imagine does not mean it did not happen.

Asking evolution to explain how life came from non-life is like asking a proponent of highway-desertification how the sand got made. Life from non-life is abiogenesis. It is not evolution. We don't know exactly how it happened but that's okay. We won't pretend that we do. Dr. Harrub told his audience earlier that is is bad to pretend to have all the answers. Science does not do this. Religions does, and then accuses science of pretending it has all the answers.

3. Oooo, look at the bacterial flagella! It's so irreducibly complex!

Pictures of bacterial flagella are artists depictions, rendered to look prettier and more symmetrical than they actually are. Actual pictures of same flagella are composites - that is, they are a bunch of pictures of flagella stacked on top of each other and averaged to look like something resembling complexity. They aren't that complex in real life.

Dr. H also seemingly randomly talked about mousetraps - how if you remove a bit of a mousetrap, it won't work like a mousetrap anymore. He told a story of how some scientists would come to creationist seminars having removed parts of a mousetrap and then securing the mousetrap to their ties. Dr. Harrub used this as proof of the absurdity of evolution by saying that if you remove bits of a mousetrap, you get a tie clip instead of a mousetrap.

Thank you, for making a strong case for evolution and against the irreducible complexity argument. the mouse trap may not be useful as a mousetrap with bits removed, but it is useful as a tie clip, and that's the point. A less complex heart still works, but it functions differently. A less complex nerve cell still works, but in a simpler way. He missed the point entirely. The point is that less complex versions of things can and do still have functions, they just may not have the same functions as the more complex things.

4. Why would evolution create a stomach lining that is shed 5 times a month when that is not needed?

It makes a lot more sense that the purposeless and blind process of evolution would do this rather than a god. What, indeed, is the purpose of a stomach lining that does this if Harrub's god made it do that? Was his god trying to trick us into thinking that stomach linings could have arisen over billions of years by natural processes? No one said that organisms evolve to be very efficient. They evolve if they are just good enough to pass on their genetic material. You pass English 101 class whether you got a 100% or a 61%. I'm graduating from grad school, and I've only got a 3.2 GPA.

When arguing against creationists, some people like to point out all of the ways in which the body could have a better design, and how the seemingly cruddy "design" points to the fact that the "designer" is natural selection over billions of years. Dr. H. turns this idea on it's head and asks why natural selection would create an "inferior design". Interesting!

5. Which came first, the heart or the lungs?

Same deal. There are plenty of examples of animals with underdeveloped lungs and circulatory systems. Here is a simple explanation.

6. What good is a partially evolved heart?

Ask the billions of animals with less complex circulatory systems than ours!  Sheesh! Some fish have single-chambered hearts that only pump due to the swimming action of the fish - which is why they will die if they stop moving.

7. Evolution is like a blind person trying to solve a Rubik's cube

No, it's not like that at all. Evolution is like a blind person rolling a die 2,000 times and trying to roll all 6's, but someone who can see is standing there allowing the blind person to re-roll whenever he or she doesn't roll a 6.

After all of this design stuff, Dr. Harrub moved back to his god, stating that "logic tells us":

Creation must have a creator
design must have a designer
laws require a lawgiver
code requires a code designer or programmer.
communication requires a communicator

sigh.


No, logic does not tell us this. Calling the universe "creation" or "design" or calling DNA "code" and then proclaiming that creation proves there is a creator, design proves there is a designer, etc, is what is known as Begging the Question.  When one engages in begging the question, one assumes the proposition to be proved either explicitly or implicitly in the premise. By calling the universe "creation", we are assuming before we have even begun arguing that creation has a creator by defining the universe as something which has been created.

It is obvious that every "creation" has to have had a "creator". So if you call the universe "creation" you're essentially saying, "this thing here that was created was created and thus has a creator".

In my backyard, there is a smudge of mud on the sidewalk. If I were to make the same argument about the smudge that Harrub is making about the universe, I would say this: "That smudge of mud is a painting. Obviously, every painting has a painter, so where is the painter of the panting on my sidewalk? I want to tell him I really appreciate his eye for modern art. ... What? Of course it has a painter, it's a painting! Common sense will tell you that."

If you want to prove that the universe was created by a creator, you do not win your argument by redefining the universe as "a thing that was created" and then declare you have proved it has a creator. You haven't proven anything except that you know how to play games with words.

As to the assertion that laws require a lawgiver - well yes. But let's not confuse an "explanation of an unchanging facet of physics that humans have decided to call a law" with "something that had to be created by some god because humans can't make the universe operate in a certain way".

As far as communication requiring a communicator... Well, using that same logic, anyone who claims they have communicated with aliens, dead people, Mohammad, or unicorns must have actually done so, because communication requires a communicator.

Tomorrow I'll have more - same atheist time, same atheist blog!

Faith Infiltration: WEC Origins Seminar Pt. 2.3

I hope you guys enjoyed the Guest Ray a Day yesterday, but now we're back to the analysis of the Truth About Origins Seminar!

Dr. Harrub first conquered the cosmological arguments by explaining to his audience that there are three+ explanations for the origins of the universe. The three main explanations are:

1. The universe was eternal and has always existed.
2. The Universe created itself ex-nillio
3. The universe is not eternal and had some beginning

After he said this, he switched inexplicably over to morality (either that, or my notes switched inexplicably over to morality, my memory is starting to get a little fizzy 2-weeks out, but my notes indicate that this is a random switch) and told his audience that morality can come from only two sources:

1. his god
2. man

The problem with morality coming from men, he said, was than men sometimes see two different moral problems and come to different conclusions. As an example he uses the fact that it was at one point perfectly legal according to law during the Nazi Regime to kill Jews, and that lots of people thought it was okay to kill Jews because it wasn't illegal to kill Jews. Therefore, the only conclusion must be that people adapt his god's unchanging morals. That way, we know that whatever his god commands or approves of is good.

Do I have to explain why this is not only hypocritical but makes no sense?

It's already quite obvious that individuals can look at moral problems and come to different conclusions. If the problem with morality is that people can come to different conclusions about morality, simply claiming that this isn't what really happens does nothing to solve the problem.

Using the killing of Jews as an example of "man" getting morality wrong is a silly example, because I can come up with literally hundreds of counter-examples in the Bible itself. It offends my sense of morality and ethics that Dr. Harrub can use Jewish Nazi killings as an example of where humankind has erred in it's moral thinking, but unblinkingly tell me that his god did not err in his moral thinking when his god ordered babies and women to be murdered (among other things).

Further, even a casual glance at the history of religion will show you that religious morality - and specifically his religious morality - does change over time.

I find the anthropological argument (argument from morality) to be both pitiful and somewhat hateful, even if only indirectly hateful. Typically, creationists will make an argument something like this:

Evolution says "survival of the fittest", but being altruistic or sacrificing your good for the good of others contradicts "survival of the fittest", therefore we can't get our morality from evolutionary processes, we must get it from somewhere else.

The thing anti-evolutionists fail to realize is that evolutionary processes are far, far more complex than "survival of the fittest", which is an incomplete and misleading understanding of natural selection.  First, because "survival of the fittest" in an evolutionary sense does not apply to individuals, but to groups of individuals. It seems obvious that groups of individuals will survive much easier and more effectively if they cooperate with one-another.  The fittest individuals are not the only ones who survive and reproduce - less fit individuals reproduce all the time, so evolution would be better characterized by "survival of the fit enough group" or "survival of the better adapted to the environment". Since the environment includes a group of like species, morality can easily be a byproduct of the environment of living in a group. Of course, when you boil down something as complex as natural selection into one four word sound byte, one is bound to misunderstand or oversimplify it.

It should be obvious that things like teamwork contribute to success, but when creationists talk about evolution and boil it down to "survival of the fittest" and then characterize it as pure selfishness, and then decide that belief in evolution will lead people to be selfish, they are creating a concoction of misunderstanding. They ignore the evolutionary benefits of things like kin selection and altruism.

Morality and ethics are central to my worldview and are extremely important to me, and I absolutely have come to the conclusion that I owe my existence to natural causes. I don't need some god to tell me not to kill people or steal things.

Of course, evolution can help explain but cannot prove morality. Justifying my particular moral and ethical values requires critical thinking and intellectual work. It's more difficult to justify my morality and ethics then just saying, "because god knows what's right", but it is certainly worth the effort.

Moving on, Dr. Harrub talked about the teological argument, or the argument for design. He gave his audience the standard line about every building having a builder and every painting having a painter and every designed thing having a designer. He gave a very, very long list of ways in which the universe is "fine tuned" for human life - such as gravity being just so, the oxygen levels being just so, etc. It must have sounded impressive but I am not impressed. I've blogged about this "creation having a creator" business here.

Saying that the universe was fine-tuned for humans is like saying a river was fine tuned for a particular drop of water from a rainstorm to flow through it.  Or, it's like saying my face was fine-tuned for my glasses. In other words, it is not that the universe is fine tuned for humans, it is that humans are fine tuned (by the mechanisms of natural selection) for the universe. We fit into the parameters of the universe, not the other way around. Assuming the universe is fine-tuned for us is putting the cart before the horse. This seems pretty obvious given the amount of time the universe existed before earth and humans existed.  Besides, if the universe is so fine-tuned for humans, why is it that we can only use one immeasurably tiny speck of it?

Dr. Harrub moved on to talk briefly about NASA and it's search for water on other planets, claiming that the purpose of searching for water on other planets is to prove the Bible wrong.

Um.. huh? Dr. H is sounding more and more like a conspiracy theorist. Apparently the presence of water on other planets is sufficient to disprove the Bible, and NASA is spending billions of dollars searching for water with this goal in mind. Are you kidding? I mean... Seriously? I don't even know how to respond to this.

Dr. H switched gears again and talked about how the sun is just perfectly far away and at the perfect temperature to give us seasons and such, so this can't all be a product of evolution, can it?

No. Evolution has nothing to do with cosmology.

Faith Infiltration: WEC Origins Seminar Pt. 1.8

If you're just joining us, this is part 8 of our excessively detailed rebuttal to the Truth About Origins seminar we attended Friday, April 17th.

Moving on from vestigial organs, Dr. Harrub made a comment regarding the creation-evolution controversy, stating:

Maybe we should humble ourselves and admit that we do not know everything.

Indeed. What I know is that Dr. H. has failed to provide any proof for his model of creation, and rather has undermined science by poking invisible holes in biology. Cool.

He moved on to talk about mutations and their role regarding bacteria, stating that even if bacteria mutates into another form of bacteria, that they are still just bacteria.

This is a classic example of moving the goalpost that we've mentioned before. The point is that the genetic makeup of bacteria has changed. He quotes someone (who I have written down in my notes as "Professor Witten") as saying evolutionary theory is not testable.

I think this warrants some extra punctuation:

Not... Testable!?!?!? The whole point of evolutionary biology is it's obnoxious testability. We've seen genetic changes in species. We've seen new species arise since the dawn of evolutionary biology when we first began studying speciation in this way. We have innumerable fossils. It is absolutely testable.

Is creationism testable? Hmm...

He goes on to quote several more people as saying evolution is going to collapse, Darwin fails, and mentions the silly peppered moth thing.

Okay. So I will once again quote shamelessly from Talk Origins:

According to the traditional peppered moth story, cryptic coloration confers protection to the moths from predators, and as the habitat changed due to industrial pollution, natural selection caused the frequencies of different color varieties of the moth to change. As the trees became darker, the lighter moths stood out more, so the darker ones became more plentiful, and vice versa as the pollution cleared. That story is no longer supportable because of flaws found in the experiments, such as where the moths rested, and the occurrence of contrary data, such as unaccountable frequencies of uncamouflaged moths in areas

Source:
Wells, Jonathan, 1999. Second thoughts on peppered moths. http://www.arn.org/docs/wells/jw_pepmoth.htm or http://www.trueorigin.org/pepmoth1.asp
Wells, Jonathan, 2000. Icons of Evolution, Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc., pp. 137-157.

Response:

   1. Although the experiments were not perfect, they were not fatally flawed. Even though Kettlewell released his moths in daylight when a night release would have been more true to nature, he used the same procedure in areas that differed only in the amount of industrial pollution, showing conclusively that industrial pollution was a factor responsible for the difference in predation between color varieties. Similar arguments can be made for all other experiments. Although no experiment is perfect (nor can be), even imperfect experiments can give supporting or disconfirming evidence. In the case of peppered moths, many experiments have been done, and they all support the traditional story (Grant 1999).

   2. Even without the experiments, the peppered moth story would be well established. Peppered moth melanism has both risen and fallen with pollution levels, and they have done so in many sites on two continents (Cook 2003; Grant 1999).

   3. The peppered moth story is consistent with many other experiments and observations of crypsis and coloration in other species. For example, bird predation maintains the colorations of Heliconius cydno, which has different coloration in different regions, in both regions mimicking a noxious Heliconius species (Kapan 2001). Natural selection acting on the peppered moth would be the parsimonious hypothesis even if there were no evidence to support it.

   4. The peppered moth story is not simple. The full story as it is known today fills thousands of pages of journal articles. Familiarity with the literature and with the moths in the field is needed to evaluate all the articles. But the research and the debates over its implications have all been done in the open. Charges of fraud and misconduct stem from neglect and misrepresentation of the research by the people making the charges (Grant 2000). Of those familiar with the literature, none doubt that bird predation is of primary importance in the changing frequencies of melanism in peppered moths (Majerus 1999).

      In teaching any subject to beginners, simplifying complex topics is proper. The peppered moth story is a valuable tool for helping students understand how nature really works. Teachers would be right to omit the complexities from the story if they judged that their students were not yet ready for that higher level of learning (Rudge 2000).

Dr. H. uses the peppered moths as an example of how the experiments of evolution are not repeatable, meaning that the peppered moth experiment was not repeated. He says (quite correctly) that one of the bastions of good science is having repeatable experiments, I.E. someone else does the same experiment and gets the same results. Another bastion of science is predictability, that is that a hypothesis allows one to make predictions which are then testable. 

Okay, pop quiz. Pretend you're a creationist:

The peppered moth experiment is an example of:
a. "Microevolution"
b. "Macroevolution

If you're a creationist, then the answer is a. "Microevolution", which Dr. H has already admitted several times that there is plenty of evidence - mechanistic, predictable, supported, testable, repeatable evidence - for. So using the peppered moths as an example of how evolution is not repeatable just doesn't make any sense, because he's already said that it's repeatable!

Dr. Harrub concluded with a diagram that looked something like this (my personal depiction):

He told his audience that a theory of origins needs to explain these three "pillars" and that the theory of evolution stands or falls if it can explain: How we got life from non-life, the origins of the universe, and the design found in nature. He told his audience that the "evolution model' cannot explain these things. Right at that moment, the triangle at the top fell away (as in, he used a PowerPoint presentation in his sermon, and it was animated so that the triangle fell away), and instead of saying, "evolution model" it says, "creation model". He told his audience then that even though the evolution model cannot explain these things, the creation model does. I suppose I don't have to mention that evolutionary biology does not concern itself with how life arose from non-life. Evolutionary biology definitely does not concern itself with the origins of the universe, and design is only seen in nature if you beg the question by calling it design.

The diagram doesn't even make sense. It would make more sense if the triangle said, "science model". We already know that evolution is not a theory of everything. It only explains how living organisms became complex and varied. You could put "sociological model" up there and the diagram would be pretty much equivalent. 

I have a better diagram. It's a diagram of the pillars of good science. A good theory only gets to sit on top of the pillars if it actually fits:

Now, does creationism rest nicely on top of these three pillars?

NO.

Not only does it not fit, but I pretty much got Dr. H. to admit during the Q&A that creationism is without mechanism and unscientific. At this point, the seminar was finished, and people brought out microphones so that the audience could ask questions. At first, no one went up there. So I jumped up and said this (which is slightly paraphrased):

Ziztur: "Okay. So you say that for a theory of origins to be a good, solid, scientific theory, then the theory of origins has to have a mechanism, right?"

Dr. H. "Yes."

Ziztur: "Okay. It also has to be testable, right?"

Dr. H. "That's right"

Ziztur: "Cool. It also has to be replicable. (he nodded) You claim - and I disagree with you but for the sake of argument - you claim that evolution fails as a theory of origins because it has no mechanism, is not testable, and is not replicable, right?"

Dr. H. "Yes."

Ziztur: "Okay. So explain to me the mechanism of the creation model, and then explain how it is replicable and testable"

Dr. H. "Well the mechanism, obviously, it was miraculous."

Ziztur: "So your mechanism is supernatural?"

Dr. H. "Yes, that's right."

Ziztur: "Okay. So how is it testable and replicable?"

Dr. H. "Well, since miracles are by definition not replicable and not testable, it is not replicable or testable."

I was nervous, and I should have pushed further. I've given enough lectures in my life but it was me versus almost everyone else in the room. I've never held such a minority opinion in a group before. Plus, my question would obviously make it known my position on the matter. So I left it at that, rather than point out that the creation model fails miserably as anything other than an ancient myth of origins.

Stay tuned. We'll talk about what the other people said during the Q&A tomorrow!

Faith Infiltration: WEC Origins Seminar Pt. 1.Flim.2

Ziztur has analyzed the variety of evolutionary hoaxes pointed out by Dr. Harrub, and explained why they have no impact at all in criticizing evolution theory. She also explained how his criticism of Lucy as an evolutionary specimen is completely flawed - all that he addressed were a select few of Lucy's ape-like features. He completely ignored her ability to walk upright, which would obviously be the significant feature of Lucy as a hominid ancestral to modern Homo Sapiens.

He also addresses one other well-known evidence of evolution - the famous Archaeopteryx. This is a common creationist line; Archaeopteryx is simply a bird, not a reptile or a reptile-bird transitional. Dr. Harrub does an even poorer job than many creationists I've seen, too; he simply quotes from a creationist magazine that claims Archaeopteryx was a bird, and dismisses the whole matter on that basis alone! Most creationists can at least find a quote from an actual scientist describing Archaeopteryx as a bird. Interestingly, Dr. Harrub has an article online that addresses Archaeopteryx in much greater detail, here. However, this article argues that Archaeopteryx fossils are not like birds at all, and instead are simply reptiles, with feather impressions being either frauds or misinterpretations! Which is it, Dr. Harrub?

His article mainly consists of large bodies of quoted materials from a certain Alan Feduccia, a paleornithologist. From Wikipedia: "Feduccia is best known for his view that birds have their origin not in the advanced theropods, the most widely-held view, but basally within the archosaurs." What Dr. Harrub declines to mention in his article is that, for one, Feduccia's opinion is well outside of the mainstream scientific opinion on the matter, and for two, that Feduccia's view of the evidence is still an evolutionary model, simply an alternative one. In the article, Dr. Harrub claims to have had personal correspondence with Dr. Feduccia - did he mention that Feduccia's alternate theories are still wildly incompatible with young-earth creationism? Just what is Dr. Harrub's claim, here?

Whether Dr. Harrub claims that Archaeopteryx is an insufficient example of a transitional fossil because it is actually simply a bird (as in the seminar), or simply a reptile (as in his article online), he still completely misses the point. Based on our human conception of biological classification, we have to put an organism somewhere, so simple classification will end up putting Archaeopteryx into either the "bird" or "reptile" categories. However, this certainly doesn't mean that this creature doesn't have numerous features of birds and/or reptiles; on the contrary, Archaeopteryx has numerous reptilian and avian features. Most tellingly, Archaeopteryx has numerous avian and reptilian features that are distinguishing features of modern birds or reptiles, respectively. Talkorigins.org has an excellent breakdown on these features here.

One other interesting point made by Dr. Harrub is worth mentioning. I have to at least give him credit for discussing such a wide variety of topics in such a short amount of time, even if the brevity with which he discusses most topics prevents him from a very meaningful discussion. For example, take the common argument for evolution of the fact of vestigial structures in organisms. How does he answer this clearly-successful prediction of evolution theory? Literally, he simply quotes another mysteriously agreeable creationist resource, claiming that a feature does not classify as being vestigial if it has any function at all, no matter how limited. He then claims that every single feature of any organism that has ever existed does indeed have a function, even if we can't figure out what it is! Even if the evidence screams that a feature is vestigial, his answer is to simply say that it isn't, and that we may or may not one day figure out what function is performed by the feature in question!

Firstly, of course, we can discard his assertion, as it is what we fancy-pants like to call an unfalsifiable hypothesis (by his reasoning, we can literally never determine if a feature is, in fact, vestigial - making his theory immune to disproof, but also making it completely useless).

Secondly, his fellow creationist's definition of "vestigial" is a fabrication. While there is a legitimate distinction to make between vestigial features and exaptation, there is a small degree of overlap between the two concepts. Biologically, vestigial features are features that once had a certain function, but now serve no function, or considerably reduced function, or serve a different function to a small degree. Exaptation is specifically a feature being adapted to perform a different, very significant function. The difference is the degree of usefullness of the feature in it's new, adapted function.

Here's an extremely simple example of exaptation, from the Wikipedia entry: "A multi-stage example involves human hands, which evolved to facilitate tool use and which are an exaptation of primate hands that were used for grasping tree branches. Those primate hands, in turn, were an exaptation of front legs that were used for locomotion on the ground, and those legs were an exaptation of the fins of fish, which were used for locomotion in the water." The important distinction here is that each new function serves a vital purpose.

For those creationists still not understanding the concept of vestigial features, personally, my favorite example is the reflex of goose-bumps. They cause your body hair to stand up, right? Well, think about it - what good does this do for you? What purpose does it serve? You don't have body hair! Now imagine, what purpose does it serve in our ape cousins? That's right; if you do have thick body hair like our close evolutionary cousins, getting goose-bumps when frightened makes you look bigger and more threatening to a predator. Getting goose-bumps when cold insulates you with another layer of air. Without thick body hair, goose-bumps are a vestigial feature.

This makes up a good volume of Dr. Harrub's material, it seems; strawman distortion, quote another creationist to supposedly support the strawman, then make bald assertions if even the strawman isn't sufficient to establish your case (maybe a moved goalpost thrown in occasionally for good measure). Stay tuned, folks.

Hm. During the question and answer session of these seminars, Ziztur and I stood up and asked several questions. It was quite apparent that we were atheists. We said as much to Dr. Harrub and members of the church, etc. Does this mean that the seminar weekend was not so much a "faith infiltration" as a "faithless invasion?"

Faith Infiltration: WEC Origins Seminar Pt. 1.7

Continuing on in our series of blog posts concerning a creation seminar we attended a few days ago, this is part 7 of day 1 of the Truth About Origins Seminar that Flimsy and I attended on Friday, April 17th, 2009.

After Dr. Harrub asked his audience at what point in the evolutionary tree did his god install the soul, he moved on to several other things.

1. How did males and females arise?

Ray Comfort likes to talk about sex too, asking when and where a female evolved to mate with a male, or proposing ridiculous scenarios in which a dog spontaneously evolves and he happens to look around with his eyes that evolved at the same time and sees a female who happened to evolve waiting for copulate with him.

I am not a biologist and sex is not my area of expertise (um... boy do I want to insert a dirty joke here) but suffice to say even a basic Google search will yield one of several competing scientific hypotheses on the origin of sex. You can even look on Wikipedia.

From Talk Origins:

The variety of life cycles is very great. It is not simply a matter of being sexual or asexual. There are many intermediate stages. A gradual origin, with each step favored by natural selection, is possible (Kondrashov 1997). The earliest steps involve single-celled organisms exchanging genetic information; they need not be distinct sexes. Males and females most emphatically would not evolve independently. Sex, by definition, depends on both male and female acting together. As sex evolved, there would have been some incompatibilities causing sterility (just as there are today), but these would affect individuals, not whole populations, and the genes that cause such incompatibility would rapidly be selected against.

Many hypotheses have been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of sex (Barton and Charlesworth 1998). There is good experimental support for some of these, including resistance to deleterious mutation load (Davies et al. 1999; Paland and Lynch 2006) and more rapid adaptation in a rapidly changing environment, especially to acquire resistance to parasites (Sá Martins 2000). 

The point is that Dr. Harrub asks his audience how males and female arose as a rhetorical question. The goal is to stump his audience into going, "Huh.. how DID sexes arise?" and thus since the audience members cannot answer that question, they are supposed to assume that evolutionary biologists cannot either. Of course, their answer is that the sexes arose when their god made them, which really doesn't say anything at all. "the forces of natural selection caused the sexes" or "our god caused the sexes" as standalone statements don't really give us any new information.

Dr. Harrub also asks how we developed certain behaviors such as altruism, or the ability to laugh, cry, have language, or a consciousness. Honestly, these questions are basically the same as the question of how sexes arose. There is no reason that over a period of millions of years, some animals would develop these abilities. One might ask why other animals do not have the same abilities we do but the answer is that they do not have our abilities, but they have other abilities we do not have. Altruism in particular is blindingly easy to explain. If you're a pre-hominid, and you've got some tools, and you give your tools to your neighbor, and your neighbor in turn gives you some food or trades you a different tool, you're better off and probably more likely to survive. Altruism is seen in non-human animals, as is language, emotions, etc. In fact if one looks at the whole of earthly organisms, one can see different levels of all of these abilities, just as one can see different levels of the ability to fly or run fast. Consciousness might seem-extra special to us humans and it might be hard to comprehend how consciousness arose, but if we were a cheetah we might be arguing that we stand out evolutionarily because of our incredible ability to run fast, and see all other animals as crazy slow.

Moving from humans and to other animals, Dr. Harrub opens by citing another National Geographic piece outlining the evolution of the horse. He claims that scientists originally thought that certain fossils were showing ancestral horse transitions, but then they decided later that these were actually camel transitions, so they "changed the diagrams, showing horses instead of camels"

It's not really possible to establish with absolute certainty that any particular fossil species is the direct ancestor of another. As such, there will always be conflicts. In this case, evolutionary biologists originally thought that one lineage of fossils belonged to horses, but upon further examination and research determined that the lineage was probably the ancestors of camels. This is an example of science working well - when they discover new things, they change existing theories to fit evidence. Unlike creation, who tries to mold the evidence (and by mold I mean misapply, mis-characterize, and ignore evidence that obviously falsifies it) to fit in with the theory.

Studying a little about horse and camel evolution, I am not even sure Dr. Harrub is on target when he talks about "changing diagrams. It seems that horse evolution and camel evolution are so similar (really, they are very similar animals) that people hardly talked about camels back in the day, simply because people were more familiar with horses and so it was easier to illustrate evolutionary paths to hordes of non-scientists using an animal they were familiar with. Really, it does not seem as simple as some evil scientists changing diagrams around.

The good Dr. moved to embryology and talked about the oft-cited "fake embryo drawings" of Haeckel, stating that these "faked" drawings are still used in biology textbooks. To my knowledge, corrected drawings are used in biology textbooks, so I invite proof: show me a newer book in which they are still being used.

Besides, this, it is not the drawings that are important, but the embryos themselves. To quote Talk Origins yet again:

Within a group, early embryos do show many similarities. For example, all vertebrates develop a notochord, body segments, pharyngeal gill pouches, and a post-anal tail. These fundamental similarities indicate a common evolutionary history. Other embryological similarities are found in other lineages, such as mollusks, arthropods, and annelids. These similarities have been long known. Professor Agassiz in 1849, for example, said, "We find, too, that the young bat, or bird, or the young serpent, in certain periods of their growth, resemble one another so much that he would defy any one to tell one from the other--or distinguish between a bat and a snake." (Scientific American 1849) 

The embryos also show some differences, which Haeckel glossed over. However, differences should also be expected, since the animals are not all equally related. It is the pattern of both similarities and differences that displays patterns of descent. Organisms that are less closely related are expected to look less similar.

Using corrected pictures is an example of science working properly. A longer explanation can be found right here.

If inaccurate pictures are supposed to falsify or weaken some theory, I need only point out that there are many different pictures of Jesus - "he was only one guy, so why does he look so different in pictures?" is a similarly inane argument.

Dr. H also mentions that Haeckle considered his reading of Darwin a turning point in his thinking. So? Is this supposed to imply that reading Darwin will lead people to falsify drawings of embryos?

Moving on, Dr. H pulled up a powerpoint slide of the cover of a Wendy's happy meal showing a picture of an Archaeopteryx. He then ranted for a few minutes about how this was an example of the "evils of marketing" and how dumb he thought it was that we were learning about evolution from a fast food bag (I don't remember exactly what he said here. My notes say, "haha - Wendy's "Evil of Marketing"/fact - birds "PROBABLY" related to dinosaurs - hahahaha" - which means that Dr. H said something that made his audience laugh appreciably)

Yes, scientists do sometimes use funny sounding language such as "fact - birds are probably related to dinosaurs". This is because there are such things as "facts" but there are no absolute truths. Theories are either supported or falsified, and at least the general body of scientists has the integrity to make this very clear. This does not mean that religion actually has absolute answers while science does not - this means that religion claims to have absolute answers, while science does not make that claim.

Before Dr. H changed topics, he mentioned the supposed evolution from scales to feathers, asking rhetorically, "Has anyone ever seen a sceather?"

Oh snap, you totally got us there. There's no way we've ever seen some kind of intermediate between a feather and a scale that one might amusingly call a sceather. That's not even fathomable. Gee, evolutionary theory just totally tanked on that one. No sceathers. Creationism wins.

But wait! I bet some bird-owners or fanciers out there have seen a scute!  What's a scute, you ask? Oh, only the scale-like-yet-also-feather-like things on the feet of birds that are made of up the same chemical composition and genetic material as feathers. Have you ever looked at the feet of a bird, Dr. H.? They look kind of like something between scales and feathers. You can clearly see a transition, right on a bird's foot. You don't even need an imagination.

Just because you don't know what you are talking about does not make what you are talking about false. Even these Christians here are capable of recognizing the scale-scute-feather thing.

Refs:

1. Barton, N. H. and B. Charlesworth, 1998. Why sex and recombination? Science 281: 1986-1990.
2. Davies, E. K., A. D. Peters and P. D. Keightley, 1999. High frequency of cryptic deleterious mutations in Caenorhabditis elegans. Science 285: 1748-1751.
3. Kondrashov, Alexey S., 1997. Evolutionary genetics of life cycles. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 28: 391-435.
4. Paland, Susanne and Michael Lynch. 2006. Transitions to asexuality result in excess amino acid substitutions. Science 311: 990-992. See also: Nielsen, Rasmus. 2006. Why sex? Science 311: 960-961.
5. Sá Martins, J. S., 2000. Simulated coevolution in a mutating ecology. Physical Review E 61(3): R2212-R2215