Ronald Numbers has written the definitive history of creationism recently published in a new expanded version, The Creationists, 2006, Harvard University Press. He arguably has one of the most even-handed, insightful and informed perspectives on the evolution-creation debate. Numbers cites a very vocal secular atheist minority as contributing to the erosion of science education rather than offering solutions. In a recent interview for Salon.com Numbers says,

"I don't know what the figures are right now, but I bet half of the scientists in America believe in some type of God. So I think Dawkins and Dennett are in a minority of evolutionists in saying that evolution is atheistic. I also think it does a terrible disservice to public policy in the United States." - R. Numbers, January 2, 2007

Understanding of the motivations and beliefs of those who reject evolution is critical in improving science education. As long as the public perceives science as an enterprise hostile towards religous convictions the evolution-creation debate will continue indefinitely.

Critics of the Bush administration often claim that the president is undermining science education by promoting the teaching of creationism. The "teach the controversy" mantra is attributed to the president as being a reflection of administration policy. Critics of the admintration's science policy should temper their critiques with the actual facts. On November 15 speaking at an American Association for the Advancement of Science Leadership Seminar Presidential science advisor and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Dr. John Marburger was recently quoted as saying,

"No one is putting pressure on me or suggesting that creationism should be a part of science education—that's ridiculous," he said. "I've never heard this discussed in any—in any-of the meetings or forums or private discussions...that I've ever had with anybody in the White House [or federal agencies]." American Association for the Advancement of Science News Archives

The Bush administration may be guilty of some politcal pandering to the religous right but the fact is there is no absolutely no evidence that this posturing on creationism and intelligent design reflects actual policy. To the contrary, the administration, through officials like Marburger, have expressed complete support for the scientific consensus on evolution.

It isn't often that an entirely new species of bird is discovered so when it does happen it is big news. Professional astronomer, amatuer ornithologist and dedicated conservationist Ramana Athreya of Pune University, Pune, India has discribed a new member of the genus Liocichla in the extreme western part of the Northern India state of Arunachal Pradesh. This bird was known from an area of Arunachal Pradesh called the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary for quite some time but carefull study was needed to determine if this population truly represented a new species or not. The new bird, named the Bungun Liocichla (Liocichla bungunorum), after the name of the local indigenous people, is the fourth named species in it's genus. The three other liocichla species include the Red-faced Liocichla (Liocichla phoenicea, widely distributed in South and Southeast Asia), the Emei-shan Liocichla (Liocichla omeiensis, retricted to a few forested moutainsides in China) and Steere's Liocichla (Liocichla steerii, a species endemic to the mountains of Taiwan and the subject of much of my own research). All these species frequent dense undergrowth and edge habitats in mountain forests, except for the Red-faced Liocichla which can also be found in lowland forests.

Typically discovery of a new species involves collection of a type specimen to be deposited in a museum collection. This makes the relevent biological material accessable for scientists all over the world so they may examine the data for themselves. However, Dr. Athreya felt culling an indiviudal bird or two from the population was unwise owing to the unknown status of the population therefore the description of this new species was made on the basis of measurements and photographs taken from live birds captured in the field. The primary tool of the 19th century ornithologist was the shotgun rather than a pair of binoculars. But, many modern ornithologists are more sensitive to environmental concerns and considerably more squeamish about killing birds (although there to date is little evidence that scientific collecting has had any long term harm on avian populations). Fortunately however the shotgun need not be necessary in every case. Modern comparative genetic analyses, such as DNA barcoding, is extremely useful in identifying relationships among species and DNA can be archived in museum freezers and sequences placed on online databases so that they can be available to other researchers. Tissue from feathers lost from the birds during capture could well provide a source of DNA that could further confirm the species status of this find.

I have a personal interest in this story as an ornithologist whose research deals with the Taiwan species of Liocichla, Steere's Liocichla. Dr. Athreya contacted several professional ornithologists, including myself, about a year ago asking for our input and advice on this species. There was a lively discussion at the time through the Oriental Bird Club's discussion list over the issue of scientific collecting. In the end however Dr. Athreya did the right thing for now in deciding not to collect museum specimens until further information became available about this species' status. The existing description of this species in the end made excellent use of limited information and luckily this species was so very different from it's congeners that even on the basis of some photographs and morphological measurments there is a strong case to be made for species status for this population. However, the genetic work should still be done. I would have loved to obtain some blood samples or other sources of genetic material from this species for analysis in my lab, however, this population is in a highly protected area and the Indian government is extremely sensitive and cautious when it comes to sharing biological samples with foreign researchers so in the end this was unfortunately not possible. But, there are many labs these days in India equiped to do such work (of course as long as they can depend on the good will of other countries to share samples with Indian researchers). It sounds like there is much exciting work ahead not just on this new species but on this unique forest ecosystem in Arunachal Pradesh. One can only hope that the forest habitat of the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary can be subject to sound mangement practices.

Press coverage of this discovery can be found at BirdLife International, MSNBC and the BBC News. The description of this new species was published in the journal Indian Birds and is available online.

That's me holding a young Chinese Pangolin (Manus pentadactyla) during a visit to the Taiwan Endemic Species Research Institute. Pangolins are mammals in the order Pholidota and there are eight extant species distributed throughout Africa and South Asia. Their bodies are covered with keratinized scales and when threatened they roll into a ball. In fact, the name pangolin is from a Malay word which means "something that rolls up". Heavy rains often means bad news for burrowing animals and this individual and his mother and sibling were flooded out of their home during a particularly long bout of heavy rains in Taiwan during 2006. The wildlife hospital at the Endemic Species Institute takes in cases like this and rehabilitates them for later release back into the wild.

Evolution wins in Kitzmiller versus Dover

A federal court decision has been handed down in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania over the Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover Area School District case. The defendant in the case was attempting to uphold the constitutionality of a Dover, Pennsylvania school board policy that required the teaching of intelligent design theory in the science classroom. The Dover school district mandated the reading of a statement that made Darwinian evolution out to be a problematic theory only required for the purposes of standardized testing while also saying that intelligent design (ID) theory was a viable scientific alternative. The board also required the creationist textbook Of Pandas and People, published by The Foundation for Thought & Ethics and authored by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon, be made available for students in the Dover Area School District. The decision came down clearly and unambiguously on the side of the plaintiff. The decision can be read in it’s entirety here.

In that decision Judge John E. Jones III said of the defendants’ attempt to portray a secular cause for the school board decision,

Defendant's previously referenced flagrant and insulting falsehoods to the Court provide sufficient and compelling evidence for us to deduce that any allegedly secular purposes that have been offered in support of the ID policy are equally insincere. Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause. Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover Area School District, Page 132.

What’s more Judge Jones completely rejected any notion that ID was a science let alone a well supported science.

To briefly reiterate, we should first note that since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the ID policy is the advancement of religion. Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover Area School District, Page 133-134.

In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from it's creationist, and thus religous, antecedents. Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover Area School District, Page 136.

Also, the decision had harsh words for the defendants themselves as it seems that school board members were deliberately dishonest as to the origin of the funding for the Of Pandas and People textbooks.

It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy. Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover Area School District, Page 137.

This decision joins many others since the trial of John Scopes in 1925. These decisions include the 1968 Supreme Court decision in Epperson versus Arkansas saying that the banning of evolution from the public schools is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and the Edwards versus Aguillard case that struck down a Louisiana statute that mandated equal time for creationism and evolution. The modern legal history of the evolution/creation debate has come down time and time again on the side of evolution and this latest decision constitutes a major blow to the strategy of using appeals to academic fairness and ID as a means to create a wedge to open up the public school system to a particular religious ideology.

The response from the ID crowd has been the predictable mix of outrage and victimization. The Discovery Institute, the premier clearinghouse for the ID ideas and one of the main fronts in the ID movement, is already screaming about judicial activism. On their webpage at www.discovery.org Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute Dr. John West says,

The empirical evidence for design, the facts of biology and nature, can't be changed by legal decree.

Strange coming from an organization backed by conservative, evangelical Christian legal organizations such as the Thomas More Law Center who sees appeals to school boards and lawsuits as the way to validate their ideas. Then West makes a vain an attempt at a positive spin on the Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover decision.

Americans don't like to be told there is some idea that they aren't permitted to learn about. It used to be said that banning a book in Boston guaranteed it would be a bestseller. Banning intelligent design in Dover will likely only fan interest in the theory.

I think Dr. West should remember that anyone in America can learn about any idea they wish, including ID. All the decision is saying is that it is a violation of the US Constitution to mandate learning about this topic in the context of the science classroom.

It will be interesting to see how the Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover decision will influence the ID movement especially in light of their recent successes in the state school board in Kansas. I think this decision will be much more of a blow to the ID movement than John West and others at the Discovery Institute care to admit. At the very least it has pulled back the veil on the fraud that is this appeal to intellectual fair-play and shown it for exactly what the ID movement is, a strategic wedge movement started by a California law professor, Phillip Johnson, to inject religious views into science and education.

Male white-tailed blue robin (Myiomela leucura montium) captured at the Meifeng Horticultural Research Farm. 

Common blind snake (Ramphotyphlops braminus) from Taiwan. 

Female thicket flycatcher (Ficedula hyperythra) captured at the Taiwan Forest Bureau Zueyenshi Forest Reserve in Nantou County, Taiwan. 

Designing Mount Rushmore

Intelligent design (ID) proponent William Dembski is fond of Mount Rushmore. He often uses the American landmark carved into the granite hills of South Dakota by Gutzon Borglum in1941 as an obvious example of our ability to recognize design in nature. Of course Dembski is right. Clearly the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln were shaped out of the South Dakota granite by intelligence. But, how exactly do we come to this conclusion? Well, the most obvious evidence is the documented history of the project in writing and even film. We can look to the historical record and actually see Borlum and his workers suspended from the Rushmore cliffs chiseling out the images of these influential American presidents. But, what if we didn’t have that historical record? What if after thousands of years it is lost and future explorers rediscover Rushmore beneath the overgrown jungle of perhaps a now tropical South Dakota warmed by climate change? Could they recognize it as design and not the result of wind and rain on granite? Well, Dembski is right again, of course they could recognize it as such. But, why is this so? What is it exactly about the structure of Rushmore that would lead some future archeologist to conclude it was shaped by intelligence?

Dembski says we can recognize Rushmore for the human creation that it is because of specified complexity. The shape and structure of any hill side is complex with projections, undulations and cracks interwoven in intricate patterns, but, in the case of Rushmore these features are specifically concordant with the features of these four former presidents. The complex pattern we observe on Rushmore is specified to match the complex pattern unique to the faces of these four American presidents thus revealing the cliff face’s designed origins.

But, where does this specificity come from? What specifically draws our attention to the cliffs of Rushmore that so obviously screams “design”? Well, it is of course because we ourselves have faces. We see a nose, an eye, a chin and even spectacles because human beings have these features. We are familiar with these features. What’s more we recognize faces we are familiar with, faces seen in books, paintings and in the case of Roosevelt, even films. This would be true for human archeologists of the future. Even if the historical record were lost future explorers would still recognize these faces as human faces because they would have their own faces to compare them to. Also, these archeologists would know a little about the limitations of human designers. They could date the feature in the field with help from their pocket sized combination mass spectrometer and radioisotopic analyzer and determine it was formed in the mid-twentieth century. Knowing a little about the primitive humans of this era they would know that carving a mountainside would be a challenge but within the capabilities of human agents. If future human societies are anything like those of today and those societies of thousands of years ago they would also realize that human societies build monuments to their Gods, military generals and political leaders.

Future archeologists would have a template on which to match the pattern of the rock face, either recorded images of Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson or simply their own human faces. They would have an idea about the capabilities of the proposed designer and realize that such design was within human limits of the time. They also would have a clear idea of the purpose of the design, namely as a monument to some revered figures. These elements taken together are why we can recognize design in human artifacts. We know about human appearances, human abilities and limits and human needs and wants so recognizing human design is well within the capabilities of scientific investigation.

But, Dembski uses the example of Rushmore as an example of detecting design in general, even if the designer is not human or not even a material entity at all but a divine, omnipotent agent. Can we make this extrapolation? Is it possible to take the example of a human designed structure such as Borglum’s Rushmore and use it as a guide for detecting the actions of some divine intelligence on the material world? Let’s consider that for a moment.

We clearly recognize Rushmore as a human design because we match the pattern on the rocks to our own human faces or better yet the faces of the former presidents the sculpture is designed to represent. What about features designed by aliens? What should they look like? Well, it may be very difficult to recognize an alien portrait as we have no idea what aliens look like. If aliens look much the same as we do with faces, eyes, two arms, two legs, etc. (much like the aliens of Hollywood films) then maybe it would be quite easy to recognize an alien image carved in the landscape of another planet. But, what if aliens were amorphous blobs? They may have many distinguishing features easily recognized by other amorphous blobs but we would be completely unfamiliar with these forms and be unlikely to recognize the blob version of Rushmore, “Blobmore”, even if we were scaling up its face. Likewise the Amorphous Blob Society for Archeology would, having never seen a human face, or any face for that matter, have considerable difficulty recognizing the design of Rushmore and may easily and quite logically from their perspective chalk it up to a feature created by erosion. Omnipotent Gods are no better. Perhaps the face of God Almighty looks exactly like the Hillary Step on Mount Everest. If so then generations of climbers have been unceremoniously scrambling up this sculpture without a clue of its obvious design.

How about the capabilities of designers? Mount Rushmore was a massive undertaking but it was within the capabilities of a human race with access to chisels and pneumatic jackhammers in the mid-twentieth century. Modern molecular genetic tools allow us today to synthesize long stretches of DNA. What if we find an sliver of DNA imbedded in amber and very ancient, perhaps not coding for any particular gene product, but, a stretch of DNA nonetheless, could we pose a designer for this complex bit of nature. Well, human designers indeed can fabricate a stretch of DNA to match any sequence they so wish and future archeologists exploring the abandoned catacombs of the National Institutes of Health upon finding a stretch of DNA could indeed invoke design as such actions were within the capabilities of the intelligent agents known to exist during that time. However, they could not invoke design in regards to the same stretch of DNA dated to a time hundreds of thousands of years prior to the advent of automated DNA synthesis.

What about purpose? Rushmore was designed in homage to Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln and we expect such monuments to be built by humans as humans love to build big complex structures to honor Gods and great leaders. What about non-human design? The fact is other than human beings and a handful of other organisms who build things we have no idea as to why designers would build anything. Maybe alien designers or supernatural agents would design for exactly the same purposes we do, both practical reasons borne out of necessity and sociological ones, but, then again, maybe they wouldn’t. Dembski would say a stretch of DNA that codes for nothing, so-called “junk DNA” is "undesigned", probably the product of random mutation accumulating a locus because that locus is not constrained by selection, a perfectly natural explanation. But, what if divine agents just like to string together DNA for no reason? What if such sequences while serving no practical purposes in our cells, we would be perfectly fine without them, simply please their designers? What if complexity for complexity's sake was the designer's purpose? What if they do have a purpose that is completely unknown to us but obvious to a divine omnipotent designer? Again, without knowing this facet of the designer, His/Her purposes, unlike the example of Rushmore where the purpose of the monument could easily be deduced by future human archeologists, it becomes impossible to recognize design from “non-design”. Everything could potentially be consdered designed depending on the personal quirks and whims of the designer one is posing.

Dembski and other ID proponents are reluctant to say anything about who the designer(s) of nature are but in doing so they undermine their claim that they can recognize design through science. They often make parallels to archeology. Of course in archeology we can recognize design because we have very particular designers in mind. We know about their physical appearance. For example, we know the size of their hands and can recognize the size expected for a stone tool. We know about their limitations and know what sort of materials are available to them and thus we can use this data to recognize design and even design specific to different periods in human history. We also know about human needs and wants and thus can determine design by understanding the sort of things humans would create for themselves. We know none of these things for aliens, seeing as there is no compelling physical evidence for alien beings to begin with, nor do we have any clue as to any of these things as they pertain to divine, omnipotent agents. In fact divine, omnipotent agents could potentially be consistent with any conceivable data thus they can not be tested as science.

As long as ID remains silent on the identity of the designer it can not be tested as science. Maybe the designers are aliens as many ID proponents claim is a possibilty, but, we have no evidence aliens exist much less what sort of things they would design and why. Maybe the designer is an omnipotent God, perhaps in this respect ID proponetns are right, but, seeing as omnipotent Gods could have just as well directly designed a structure such as the Hillary Step as one resembling the face of Mount Rushmore such an assertion makes no testable predictions and therefore it isn’t amenable to the scientific method.

For a collection of William Dembski's writings on Intelligent Design click on the link below.
Design Inference Website: The Writings of William A. Dembski

Steere's babbler (Liocichla steerii). A forest songbird endemic to the mountains of Taiwan.