Post-debate analysis: Bill Nye on The Last Word

Lawrence O'Donnell discusses the Nye-Ham debate with Bill Nye on "The Last Word":

Ken Ham was there, but Bill Nye brought home the bacon

The "debate" last night between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis ended with a sigh of relief from many of us who worried that Ham's skill at lying about the nature of science and tossing out incoherent and unanswerable bits of nonsense like broken bottles onto a road would trip up Nye.

No such thing happened. Nye was relatively cool and collected, and in command of a nice array of facts, while Ham spent most of his time asserting that creationism is true because The Bible. Whenever Nye asked him to provide some evidence for the assertion that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old, Ham simply repeated: The Bible. Evidence for just one all-encompassing catastrophic flood: The Bible. And so on. He was unable to respond at all to Nye pointing out several times that "The Bible" which Ham depends on is a translation into "American English" of a very old book that was originally written in several different languages.

 One of Ham's themes, from the beginning, was to draw a bizarre distinction between what he called "observational" science, the kind he trusts, and "historical" or "origins" science, which he does not. Observational science is OK because it deals with the here and now, and we are witnesses; historical science is invalid, because we cannot witness the things we are talking about. And, The Bible. This strange paradigm was overthrown in the 19th century by Charles Lyell, a contemporary of Darwin, who showed that the understanding of current processes can be used to reconstruct the past history of the earth, based on the not unreasonable hypothesis that the same gradual processes of erosion and uplift that change the earth’s surface today had also been at work in the past. How could Ham miss this? And again, what evidence does he hand over that this is not the case? None. So when Ham asserts that "we cannot observe the age of the Earth," he is wrong. We can bring material into lab, date it in a variety of ways. We can observe the age of the earth in the observations we make during the dating process. Ham is just plain wrong, but, you know, the Bible.

I feel not so alone

Way back in March 2010 I wrote a post about Liberty University in which I suggested that Liberty's accreditation should be yanked because they teach creation "science."  On a recent episode of "Real Time" Bill Maher echoed my sentiment, but in a funnier way. The stimulus was Presidential candidate Willard "Mitt" Romney's delivering of the commencement speech at Liberty:

Kooks to Earth: "Happy birthday to you, happy..."

This escaped my attention yesterday, but a post on Pharyngula reminds me that yesterday was Earth's birthday. According to English Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656), God created the Earth on October 23, 4004 BC. He based his calculation on an analysis of the chronologies in the Old Testament. And here's the sad part: a very large number of people in the USA and elsewhere continue to believe that this is literally true.

Now ABC News makes me cranky

The ABC News website has an article on Ardipithecus, the newly publicized (not really newly discovered) fossil that provides a glimpse into the world of Hominins (bipedal apes, like humans) that existed some four and a half million years ago. She (yes, she's a she, nicknamed "Ardi") is an early biped, but there are some interesting differences between her and the Australopithecines, such as the famous "Lucy," who came a bit later. For example, her feet seem to be more chimp-like with an opposable big toe, and her pelvis, while clearly allowing for bipedality, is not quite like that of Lucy, who was fully bipedal. She lived in a forest ecology, which reinforces the hypothesis that human ancestors were bipedally oriented before, rather than after, they came down out of the trees and entered the open savanna environments of eastern Africa.

So far, so good. The part that makes me cranky is that this article is on ABC News's Technology and Science website, and the article headline reads:

Creationists Say Science and Bible Disprove 'Ardi' Fossil is Evidence of Evolution

The writer, Russell Goldman, sets the tone of the discussion with this:

In the case of "Ardi," the ape-like fossil recently discovered in Ethiopia and already being celebrated as the oldest found relative of modern human beings, the final determination depends on who is doing the talking.

In one camp are evolutionary scientists who last week published and hailed the discovery of an upright walking ape named Ardipithecus ramidus, or "Ardi" for short, who made Ethiopia her home nearly 5 million years ago.

But despite the excitement from the paleontology community, another group of researchers, many of them with advanced degrees in science, are unimpressed by Ardi, who they believe is just another ape -- an ape of indeterminate age, they add, and an ape who cannot be an ancestor of modern man for a range of reasons, including one of singular importance: God created man in one day, and evolution is a fallacy.

Say what? Scientists who have examined these remains for years, meticulously describing everything they can about them, are paired off against people who believe that every word in a set of myths and stories made up by nomadic pastoralists several thousand years ago is literally true? And the "final determination" of the fossil's significance simply depends on which of these groups has the floor? I don't think so.

See, this is what's wrong with America. Every opinion, no matter how loony, is equal in weight to every other opinion, no matter how well supported by, you know, facts and things. I usually refer to this as the Crossfire Model of Argumentation (CMA), after the old CNN talk-news show. A "liberal" and a "conservative" each gave their take on things, nobody was ever challenged to provide evidence, and in the end nothing was ever resolved; it was just entertainment.

CMA is an outcome of hyper-independence training, a component of the enculturation of people in the US. We see it in our classes, where students feel that simply having an opinion is just as good as doing the hard work sometimess necessary to have an informed opinion. On a wider scale, we see it among supporters of the "Birther" movement, who just "know" that President Obama was not born in the US, evidence be damned. We see it in the "Death Panel" movements, whose adherents are just absolutely certain that the health care reform legislation moving oooh sooo slooowly through the process contains provisions that will allow the gummint to kill their grammas.

Goldman's article ends, sadly, not with a debunking of the witless yahoos who think the Earth is 6,000 years old, but with this quote from David Menton, an "acclaimed anatomist and creationist" and a "researcher in residence at Answers in Genesis" (in other words, a total fraud):

"Evolution is supposedly based on science, but the science does not prove what they want it to. Creationism is not based on scientific observation but on God's word. God created everything in six days, and that's it."

When will we, as a nation, grow up?

Creationism is not a theory!

An otherwise ok article posted on Alternet recounts a visit to The Creation Museum by a group of paleontologists, biologists, anatomists, and so on: you know, scientists. The museum is a theme park constructed by and for fundamentalist believers in Biblical literalism. It's located in Kentucky (of course- they also gave us Senator Mitch McConnell) west of the greater Cincinnati area.

The theme of the museum is captured in this paragraph from their home page:

Prepare to Believe

The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Majestic murals, great masterpieces brimming with pulsating colors and details, provide a backdrop for many of the settings.

Children and dinosaurs romping together? Yes, these folks believe that the Earth was created sometime before midnight on Oct 22, 4004 BC, as calculated by Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656). In other words, they are loons who have not yet entered the 21st; no wait, the 20th; er, the 19th; yikes, not even the 18th century. But enough of that; my attention was grabbed by this:

Creationism is a theory not supported by most mainstream Christian churches.

True enough, I suppose, but there's a problem. Creationism is not a theory, not in the scientific sense of the word. For scientists, a theory is a set of interconnected hypotheses that describe and/or explain some aspect of the world. The hypotheses must be logical, falsifiable, and above all constructed from the analysis of data collected by way of systematic, objective investigation of the empirical world.

Creationism is what some of us call a folk model or even, in our more charitable moments, a folk theory. Most all cultures have one or more; for summaries of some, see here. The Judaeo-Christian version was made up by the more creative members of a tribe of pastoral nomads some thousands of years ago, perhaps assisted by heat, thirst, hunger, or any number of other imagination-enhancing elements. It's fantasy, not scientific theory. There is no empirical evidence for it, and no, the Bible does not count as empirical evidence for anything except the existence of the Bible.

Strictly speaking, even evolution is not really "a theory." Evolution, the change over time observed in Earth's living organisms, is the fact that Darwin's theory of natural selection was developed to explain.

It's very difficult to get this idea of what it means to be a scientific, as opposed to a folk, theory across to people. This past summer semester I had one student who got all the way through an introduction to cultural anthropology only to write, in his final essay:

The Big Bang Theory, evolution, and many other theories are just that, theories.

He retained the folk definition of theory to the end, despite the time spent explaining that theory in science does not refer to a casual, unsupported guess. I'm not prepared to state categorically that religion makes you stupid, but there is some empirical evidence for that hypothesis, and it is falsifiable.