A number of very interesting articles have come across my desktop over the last week or so:

Evolutionary biologist extraordinaire and former still-productive centenarian Ernst Mayr has an article in this month’s Scientific American (discussed on last week’s podcast) titled “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought” – it’s actually a reprint of an article from 2000, and is available online for free for a month in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. His thesis: That, of all the great minds shaping the last 100+ years of radical change and advancement, modern thought has been most influenced by Charles Darwin.

Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21st century, drastically different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists as to the source of this revolutionary change. Karl Marx is often mentioned; Sigmund Freud has been in and out of favor; Albert Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that Einstein’s theories “have profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the phenomena of inanimate nature.” No sooner had Pais said this, though, than he recognized the exaggeration. “It would actually be better to say ‘modern scientists’ than ‘modern men and women,’” he wrote, because one needs schooling in the physicist’s style of thought and mathematical techniques to appreciate Einstein’s contributions in their fullness. Indeed, this limitation is true for all the extraordinary theories of modern physics, which have had little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world.

The situation differs dramatically with regard to concepts in biology. Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more—and for more drastic—modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin.

Mayr discusses the secularization of modern science (as opposed to the theological Victorian gentleman natural philosopher) being largely due to Darwin, and the effects that the removal of the special creation of Man from his former unique position had on both philosophers and common thought.

[Darwin] developed a set of new principles that influence the thinking of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism.

I ran across an old Isaac Asimov column from The Skeptical Inquirer in 1989 titled “The Relativity of Wrong” in which he critiques the common postmodern fallacy that, because all science is ultimately incorrect at some level, it can all equally be discarded in favor of whatever pseudoscientific drivel or quasi-quantum twaddle one prefers. Asimov points out that claiming that the theory “the earth is spherical” is equally as wrong as the theory “the earth is flat” is, in fact, stupid.

[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

So the next time someone with a crackpot theory tries to claim that “Einstein will be proven wrong, too!”, remind them that yes, he almost certainly will; but he is going to be proven wrong at the sixth or seventh decimal place.

The Royal Society of London is providing free access to some of the most famous papers from its three-and-a-half centuries of publishing in celebration of its semiseptcentennial in 2010. Included in the lot are Robert Boyle’s description of the first blood transfusion (from the year of the Great Fire of London); Robert Hooke inventing artificial respiration in 1667; Isaac Newton’s 1672 description of the theory of light and colours; van Leeuwenhoek’s first use of the microscope; Edmund Halley viewing eclipses; Ben Franklin’s description of his famous kite experiment; the description of Bayesian probability; Watson and Crick’s structure of DNA; and Maxwell’s theory of the electric field (the birth of Relativity):

The most obvious mechanical phenomenon in electrical and magnetical experiments is the mutual action by which bodies in certain states set each other in motion while still at a sensible distance from each other. The first step, therefore, in reducing these phenomena into scientific form, is to ascertain the magnitude and direction of the force acting between the bodies, and when it is found that this force depends in a certain way upon the relative position of the bodies and on their electric or magnetic condition, it seems at first sight natural to explain the facts by assuming the existence of something either at rest or in motion in each body, constituting its electric or magnetic state, and capable of acting at a distance according to mathematical laws.

Good stuff! Plus, there are a few dozen other gems including the invention of aspirin, the smallpox vaccine, and penicillin.

They’ve been busy over there. Good work, Royal Society – keep it up!

And now for something completely different.

Well, now that we’ve seen what the scientific method can accomplish, what about the unscientific method?

Crackpot, young-earth creationist, and convicted felon (and proprietor of Dinosaur Adventure Land – “Where Dinosaurs and the Bible Meet!” [Meat?]) Kent Hovind‘s doctoral dissertation has been leaked to the public. This after years of refusal by him and his alma mater (Patriot Bible University) to allow it to be subject to review and scrutiny. You know, like academic standards in any reputable institution would require.

And what does this horrible piece of dreck look like? No title (?); 100 pages; one figure; no tables. And zero references. Zero.

I guess this guy must be an expert on whatever he’s talking about.

These honest questions deserve an honest answer. I believe we have been lied to about the age of the earth. Satan, the father of all lies, has come up with this one to try to make a fool of Jesus Christ. Jesus said in Matthew 19:4 that the creation of Adam and Eve was the beginning. I believe that Jesus was right.

Anyone taking bets on which group is more useful to humanity?

Update: It turns out Ray Comfort* is a demonstrable liar. (OK, this is no surprise: he’s been a demonstrable liar on many issues for years. But here’s a nice, concrete example that he’s a demonstrable liar on this particular issue.) In addition to being disingenuous and despicable, turns out he’s also an intellectually dishonest plagiarist. Apparently, What Would Jesus Do? is copy and paste the text of a Darwin biography directly into your introduction, without appropriate citation.

Actually, this situation is even worse than what I was going to blame him for: I had assumed that the various stories I’d seen about this were all referring to the same instance of plagiarism. As it turns out, don’t give a guy like Comfort the benefit of the doubt: There are two separate issues of plagiarism in the first five pages of his introduction! He lifts an entire timeline of Darwin’s life into his book with a citation at the very end, suggesting that only the last statement is being cited, rather than a two-page hunk of text copied verbatim. And he appears to have lifted the preceding biographical essay nearly entire without any citation whatsoever!

And unsurprisingly, what changes there are in the copied text tend to be insulting to Darwin: Changing “in his youth he demonstrated predilections for hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation” to “young Charles showed less interest in studying than in hunting, natural history, and scientific experimentation”; “In 1839 he married Emma Wedgwood” to “In 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood”; etc. So, in the entire first five pages – and there’s an entire page of illustration – it looks like he might have written half a page himself.

(Just so I don’t get accused of plagiarism, thanks to PZ Myers for covering this.  )

In other evolutionary update news, check out this week’s Scientific American Podcast, with several concrete examples that one can use to smack people like Comfort upside the head, including the evolution of lactose digestion in adult humans, evolution of malaria resistance through non-ideal means, and NOVA’s new three-part series on human evolution, “Becoming Human” (part one, covering ~7-2 million years ago, was pretty good!)

*For those of you who don’t regularly follow Comfort, his partner-in-stupid is Kirk Cameron. Yes, that Kirk Cameron. No, seriously. No, for real seriously. I know – Reality has just Poe’s Law‘ed itself.

Starving, exhausted, lobotomized fish in a nearly-empty barrel.

Creationist nut-bag Ray atheists’-nightmare banana-fetishist Comfort has had the audacity (bad judgement? misfortune?) to go mano a stupido with actual scientist and non-crazy-person Dr. Eugenie Scott in a resent set of essays on the US News & World Report Blog. (Dragon*Con-ers may remember Dr. Scott from Skeptrack this year.) Comfort starts out . . . strong? Well, he starts out . . . and gets knocked down, but he gets up again (you’re never going to keep him down!) – oh wait, yes you are. And Dr. Scott does so handily.

Comfort’s arguments really are almost indescribably bad (he says, immediately before going on to attempt to describe them). Fallatious arguments abound: ad hominems, quotes out of context, straw men, special pleading, moving the goalposts, non sequiturs, appeal to consequences (hell, it takes him all of five paragraphs to smack into Godwin’s Law!). These essays, and everything Comfort has ever done, frankly, are such a mess of ignorance, mischaracterisation, and misinformation that they pretty much devolve to the level of Gish Gallop: he gives so much bad, innaccurate data so fast that’s wrong on so many levels, that a step-by-step refutation becomes impossible in the allotted space. For instance, here is his “argument” that evolution is wrong because of the problem of the evolution of sex:

[E]volution has no explanation as to why and how around 1.4 million species of animals evolved as male and female. No one even goes near explaining how and why each species managed to reproduce (during the millions of years the female was supposedly evolving to maturity) without the right reproductive machinery.

This argument is so blitheringly stupid, and is wrong on so many (basic) levels that even having it postulated in a “serious” debate makes my eyes bleed. Fortunately, it also makes him sound like a raving loon.

The sad thing is that people like Comfort, who is at best a complete idiot, and at worst an outright liar, are given such prominent stages from which to present their arguments, as if they weren’t definitively refuted long ago. Of course debate of contentious issues should be fostered in the public arena, but you don’t see them giving Time Cube Guy a chance to debate his position on ABC’s Nightline. Why? Because he is clearly nuts, and any rational person can see that his arguments are ridiculous. It’s about time to start treating Ray Comfort the same way.

For a cogent and thoroughly watchable discussion of “Why Evolution Is True” (and a pallet-cleanser to get all the Comfort out of your system), check out this recent lecture Jerry Coyle at the AAI conference in Californina:

Particularly nice was his inclusion of the excellent transitional fossil record of whales, which Comfort claims is completely missing – something that further shows that he is either completely out of his depth, or is deliberately misrepresenting the facts. Or both.

This week’s two-hour long Nova, titled “Darwin’s Darkest Hour,” was really excellent. The exposition was occasionally (OK, frequently) heavy-handed, but probably out of necessity. But the settings were gorgeous, the acting was good, and it was very historically accurate. True, Darwin is suspiciously handsome, but I suppose that’s to be expected. Also (coolness), they present some scenes set at London’s Natural History Museum that were either filmed there, or are very accurately recreated. And, when Darwin meets with John Gould, a couple of the cases displayed in his office appear to be very recognizable currently-exhibited NHM cases displaying quite extraordinary Victorian collections of exotic birds.*

(The movie also features an awful lot of cetaceans and penguins jumping majestically out of the sea–but I assume that was mostly for Joël’s benefit.)

I’m writing this while watching – Darwin just puked in the Andes. Historical verisimilitude! And, for some reason, he’s dressed like Doctor Who.

I don’t know enough about the actual historical record, and, given that it’s the Victorian age, maybe it’s an accurate portrayal, but Emma Darwin is presented as a bit of a flighty sounding board for the brilliant man to bounce his ideas off of. “Can you explain that to me? I’m just a woman.” She does have a certain strength that shores him up, but there’s something grating about her naïvety. It gets a little old.

They (the Darwins) do have a practice of giving a daily beer to their mailman, of which I must heartily approve. I also like the abundant in-jokes, like quotes from the Origin, an edge-of-screen shot of the B-tree, and the inclusion of Linnaean Society president’s comment that “The year… has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize… the department of science on which they bear” – it’s like a goddamn comic book movie for evolution nerds.

OK, still watching it – Emma Darwin is literally kneeling and praying by her bed, after having her spiritual world rocked by the Big D., when he gently knocks on the door, enters, and starts making out with her (in a very sexy Victorian nightgown) (Emma, not Charles)! Creepy.

But why, why did they have to begin the program with the disclaimer:

The following program contains material that may be considered offensive.

Offensive?! Well, I suppose that make-out scene was a little offensive. And I guess it’s the best that can be expected from a local affiliate these days – at least the show itself didn’t pull any punches.

*The cases themselves are beautiful works of art, and the contents are stunning. But the specimens are displayed in that singularly disturbing Victorian death-in-life style, akin to death photography, that seems to have fueled Tim Burton’s nightmares. The best part of those (and similar) display cases in the Natural History Museum (including the one holding the dodos) are the little attached notes, which say, effectively, “Yes, these are all very rare, very beautiful animals that were killed, stuffed, and returned to England for public display. We’re very, very sorry, but that’s how they did things back then. And, since they’re already dead, we may as well and go ahead and display them, right? Also, here’s a nearly-extinct stuffed tiger.”