Finocchio

Daniel Dennett Contra "Intelligent Design"

Writing in today's New York Times, Daniel Dennett takes on the foolish claims of "intelligent design" to the status of scientific theory:

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. “Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat,” you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as “some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers.” What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, “You haven’t explained everything yet,” is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

And the creationist/intelligent design response to the challenge to engage in responsible, testable science?  The Los Angeles Times reports on efforts to build a creationist theme park.

"We're putting evolutionists on notice: We're taking the dinosaurs back," said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that's already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

"They're used to teach people that there's no God, and they're used to brainwash people," he said. "Evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs. That's their star."

The nation's top paleontologists find the creation theory preposterous and say children are being misled by dinosaur exhibits that take the Jurassic out of "Jurassic Park."

"Dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden, and Noah's Ark? Give me a break," said Kevin Padian, curator at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley and president of National Center for Science Education, an Oakland group that supports teaching evolution. "For them, 'The Flintstones' is a documentary."

Swanning About In A Boston Marriage

Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but she is certainly queerly lavender in most everything else.  Only a few months after the kerfuffle over the Bremerhaven Penguins, monogamously-mated male penguins whom a German zoo attempted to break up, in a bit of reparative therapy using imported Swedish siren-penguins (the experiment didn't work -- see here and here and here), officials at the Boston Parks and Recreation Service have now revealed that a beloved pair of swans in the Public Garden are, in fact, a female couple.

Pigs In Space

In a new twist on the space race, China has become the first nation (to my knowledge) to send pig semen into space.  The BBC reports that:

"Agricultural experts hope to use the sperm to fertilise pig eggs back on Earth - to see what effect a period of microgravity will have had on the sperm's activity."

One wonders how competitive the selection process was.  This bit of information is intriguing:

"The pigs chosen are a breed called Rongchang, named after an area in the southwest of the country and famed for their physique and for the quality of their meat."

Can the shapely swine of Nebraska be far behind?

Celestial Desires

What a pleasant surprise to discover that our beloved Vilaine Fille is and has long been a "space geek."  I still have and still treasure a portfolio of photographs from the Apollo program which includes an autographed photograph of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.  Collins was my favorite, somehow, in his lonely vigil, circling high above, well out of the limelight.  To go so far, but never to touch the goal that was reserved for others.

The Sheep From The Goats

It will surprise no gay man to learn that some men who declare themselves to be bisexual reveal a somewhat different reality when their actual arousal responses are measured.  Decades ago, Dr. Alfred Kinsey wrote that "Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. . . . The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats."  A recent study looks to those underlying realities.

"In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.

The study is the largest of several small reports suggesting that the estimated 1.7 percent of men who identify themselves as bisexual show physical attraction patterns that differ substantially from their professed desires. . . .

The researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.

Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.

Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.

But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.

'Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal' to one sex or the other, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate psychology student at Northwestern and the study's lead author."

The results of this study can be spun in any number of directions, bent to serve a particular thesis, but what is to be hoped -- outside the realm of spin -- is that, in reviewing this study, we could at least conceive of an environment in which a greater honesty to self and others could be fostered.  We shouldn't need to be betrayed into truth involuntarily by our bodies.

Maybe Not Such A Great Thing -- Priapism Explained

And, while we're on the subject of the administration . . .  Among the things one has always wanted and needed to know, Slate's Daniel Engber now explains the causes of and treatments for priapism.

Penguin Pride

We knew that somehow those German penguins would come into their own.

(click on thumbnail for larger image) (hat tip OhlalaParis)

Free The Bremerhaven Penguins!

OK, so we're mildly obsessed (and enormously amused) by the recent convolutions of officials at the Bremerhaven Zoo in attempting to convert nice, contented gay penguins in committed same-sex relationships to a rowdy, randy Playboy (Playpenguin) lifestyle.  It seems zoo officials have not only declared their seduction-therapy experiment to be a failure, but are now at pains to assure the world that the couples are not to be separated.

"'We don't know whether the three male pairs are really homosexual or whether they have just bonded because of a shortage of females,' said [a zoo official], quoted by Germany's Der Spiegel news magazine.

Gay groups insisted that penguins had a right to form couples without human interference, she said.

'Nobody here wants to forcibly separate homosexual couples,' she said."

(We note that the penguins are fortunate to live in Bremen and not in, say, Virginia, where the legislature would regard mere nature to be frighteningly unnatural.)

While it is very nice that the happy male penguin couples will not be harassed into duplicitous lives of heartless fornication, the zoo still faces its original problem -- too few baby penguins.

"Only one baby Humboldt penguin has been born at the zoo, which has six males and four females, Der Spiegel reports."

May we suggest a donor arrangement with some nice lesbian penguins?  (hat tip NewYorkCityBoys)

Enduring Love

Three pairs of gay male penguins in Germany's Bremerhaven Zoo, who were the subject of the zoo's attempt to seduce them into breeding with specially-imported Swedish sirens, have resisted the temptation, remaining faithful to their natures and their partners.

"The female penguins were flown in especially from Sweden in an effort to encourage the Humboldt penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo to reproduce.

But the six homosexual penguins showed no interest in their new female companions and remained faithful to each other.

Zoo Director Heike Kueck said: 'The relationships were apparently too strong.'"

It would seem that some simple devoted aquatic fowl know something that posturing politicians do not.  (hat tip Andy Towle)

Breaking Up Families -- Ex-Gay Experimentation

Andy Towle reports that:

"A German zoo has imported female penguins from Sweden in an attempt to sway its gay penguins from homosexual activity. Three out of five pairings of penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo have been found to be same-sex partners.

And just in case this experiment (which will be monitored by a biologist) doesn't work, they've also flown in two new male penguins 'so the ladies don't miss out altogether.'"

According to an Ananova report, this ex-gay experiment may well prove unsuccessful.

"Keepers at the zoo ordered DNA tests to be carried out on the penguins after they had been mating for years without producing any chicks.

It was only then they realized that six of the birds were living in homosexual partnerships.

Director Heike Kueck said that the zoo hoped to see some baby penguins in the coming months.

She said that the birds had been mating for years and one couple even adopted a stone that they protected like an egg.

. . . . But introducing the Bremerhaven penguins to their new Swedish friends may not be as successful as hoped after earlier experiments revealed great difficulties in separating homosexual couples."

One would have thought that the penguins' gym memberships and tastefully-appointed nests would have given some indication.