Science, heresy, and cherry pie

The battle over the LSEA just took another weird turn.

The LSEA is the Louisiana Science Education Act, a 2008 law that introduces "teach the controversy" and "academic freedom" provisions into state science education guidelines as a way of levering in creationism, intelligent design, climate change denialism, and other loony anti-scientific ideas that are currently in vogue with the powers that be.  Every year there's a push to have the law repealed, and every year it fails to achieve the requisite number of votes, despite the trenchant comment by science education activist Zach Kopplin, "We don't give teachers the academic freedom to teach that 1 + 1 = 3."

In 2013, the defense of the law reached a new height of bizarre desperation, with State Senator Elbert Guillory saying that the LSEA protected multicultural approaches by allowing science teachers to tell their classes about witch doctors.  (I swear I'm not making this up; the entire quote is in the link provided.)  And this year, Guillory made another baffling statement in defense of the LSEA, this time from the standpoint of historical precedent:

There was a time, sir, when scientists thought that the world was flat.  And if you get to the end of it, you’d fall off.  There was another time when scientists thought that the sun revolved around the world.  And they always thought to ensure that anyone who disagreed with their science was a heretic.  People were burned for not believing that the world was flat.  People were really badly treated.  My point, sir, is that not everyone knows everything.  And in a school, there should be an open exchange of ideas.  Knowledge only grows when people can talk about [sic], and have this intellectual back-and-forth, and discourse, with all ideas on the table.  To restrict ideas is against knowledge and against education.  

Okay, where do I start?

First, I think you're confusing "scientists" with "religious leaders."  There has never been a Scientific Inquisition, wherein anyone who disbelieves in the Law of Gravity is found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake.  You are free to disbelieve in science all you like, in fact; this doesn't make you a heretic, it makes you an idiot.

It was scientists who disproved the flat Earth and geocentric models, actually; Eratosthenes accomplished the first, all the way back in the third century B.C.E., and Nicolaus Copernicus the second with his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543.  Any serious opposition to these ideas came from organized religion, which by and large taught that knowledge comes from the bible and from divine revelation, not from experimentation and logic.

Then there's Guillory's claim that we're somehow stifling knowledge by telling biology teachers that they can't teach their students creationism.  "An open exchange of ideas," Guillory says, is critical.  On the surface, he's right; we do need to be able to talk about all ideas, and that's how our knowledge grows, and wrong ideas are winnowed out.

It's that last piece that's missing from Guillory's statement, and therein lies the problem.  Because if creationism and climate change denialism are "put on the table" for honest discussion, it becomes abundantly clear that there's not a shred of evidence in favor of either one.  What Guillory seems to want is not that all ideas are considered, but that all ideas are accepted. 

So a geology teacher is supposed to "put on the table" the claim that the Earth's mantle isn't made of liquified rock, but of cherry pie filling?  And that the crust is actually made of graham crackers?

Just in the interest of "intellectual back-and-forth," you understand.

I'm sorry, Senator Guillory; the claims that the LSEA shoehorn into the state science curriculum are simply wrong.  The only reason that creationism is being pushed into biology classrooms is religion; the only reason climate change denialism is being pushed into earth science classrooms is political expediency.  Neither view has the least thing to do with science.

None of that apparently mattered, as the repeal-the-LSEA measure failed again, having been killed in committee on a 4-3 vote.  The reality-denying CherryPieologists won the day.

I live in hope, however, that the tide is turning, however slowly, and that eventually we'll have educational oversight by people who trust scientific research over the philosophical meanderings of a bunch of Bronze-Age sheepherders.

But as Aragorn said, "That day is not today."

E. coli, Mike Walsworth, and the Straw Man fallacy

I think the most maddening of all of the logical fallacies is the Straw Man.

In case you're not familiar with this particular infuriating ploy, the Straw Man fallacy is when the individual you're arguing with knocks down an oversimplified (or exaggerated, or flat-out incorrect) characterization of your position, and then forthwith declares that (s)he has won the argument.  Ann Coulter, that living embodiment of specious thinking, is the past master of the Straw Man; she is notorious for taking the weakest (or most extreme) viewpoints of American liberals, demonstrating that those are incorrect, and concluding from this that all Democrats (i.e. around 50% of Americans) are blithering morons.

But you've never seen an example of the Straw Man fallacy like the one I'm about to show you.

Zach Kopplin, a young man from my home state of Louisiana who has become a champion for the teaching of evolutionary biology in public school science classes, posted a video on YouTube, showing a discussion between Louisiana Senator Mike Walsworth and a high school science teacher on the floor of the state senate.  Walsworth asks the teacher if there are any experiments that have been done that demonstrate Darwinian evolution in action.  The teacher responds that there have, and proceeds to describe Richard Lenski's elegant experiment with the bacteria E. coli, in which a population of E. coli were sampled over decades, and the samples frozen, with the (unfrozen) remainder subjected to various environmental factors as selecting agents -- and at the end of the decades-long project, all of the bacteria, the various frozen ones and the ones that had been allowed to continue growing, were compared.  (Estimates are that in the duration of the experiment, over 50,000 generations of bacteria had occurred.)  Guess what?  The lineage had changed demonstrably, with novel genes cropping up (including one that allowed one branch of the "family" to metabolize citric acid).  There you are: evolution in action.

And then Senator Walsworth asked the teacher if any of the bacteria had evolved into a human.  (It may have been my imagination that immediately afterward, Senator Walsworth added, "Herp derp hurr!")

The teacher, of course, responded "No."  And one lady in the audience did a highly amusing forehead-smack.  But you could just about hear all of the creationists in the audience responding, "Well, ha!  There you go, then!  I guess Senator Walsworth showed you." 

You'd think that the transparency of this particular Straw Man would be so obvious that no one could possibly fall for it.  But this sort of response is frequent enough that you have to wonder if creationists attend special Straw Man Training Workshops in order to learn how to perform it as obnoxiously as possible.  I've had conversations with creationists (I won't dignify them with the name "arguments"), and have been asked questions like, "Have you ever seen a cat give birth to a squid?  Well, okay, then!  (Herp derp hurr.)"  You can trot out all of the evidence you want, all of the examples of evolution being directly observed in the field or in the lab, but if you can't show me an animal evolving, in one generation, into an animal from a whole different freakin' phylum, I'm not buying it.

But of course, that last statement is the crux of the matter, isn't it?  "I'm not buying it."  I've already decided what I believe (note, "believe;" not "understand").  Nothing you can do can change that.  If you establish your definitions and evidence, I'll just shift my ground so that it redefines the terms.  (Yet another fallacy, the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.)  Show me experiments that support your theory, I'll ask why those experiments didn't do something entirely different, and then sit back with a cheesy grin on my face and claim I won.

The sad fact is, by some estimates 30% of Americans do think that this constitutes "winning."  And you may think this is a tad harsh, but it's my considered opinion that anyone who is that incapable of understanding the basics of critical thinking (not to mention the basics of biology, chemistry, and scientific induction) should not be entrusted to cast a vote.

Which, now that I come to think of it, explains Mike Walsworth's presence in the Louisiana senate.