A disturbance in the force

Well, not actually the force, but a new argument has come up in the world of Bloggingheads.tv, and since I'm a regular, if not daily, viewer of Bloggingheads, I thought I'd comment a bit.

Bloggingheads is the brainchild of Robert Wright, an author of many notable books, in which he produces dialogues between people on various political, cultural, or scientific topics. By attracting intelligent, interesting people, and by using technology that enables them to conduct these conversations from the comfort of their own homes or offices, Bob is able to produce some great dialogues. Bloggingheads is in my blogroll, and I've linked to it or discussed it here in the past.

The issue here is two recent diavlogs featuring prominent creationists without significant challenge. One was between John McWhorter, a linguist and BHTV regular, and Michael Behe, a charlatan and creationist mouthpiece best known as a propagandist who was aptly eviscerated in the federal court decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. In this diavlog, McWhorter gives Behe the warmest imaginable tongue bath, along the lines of the following:

Michael Behe, I am so glad to meet you, and thank you for agreeing to do this. This is one of the rare times that I have initiated a Bloggingheads pairing, and it’s because I just read your book The Edge of Evolution from 2007, and I found it absolutely shattering. I mean, this is a very important book, and yet I sense, from the reputation or the reception of your book from ten-plus years ago, Darwin’s Black Box, that it may be hard to get a lot of people to understand why the book is so important.

And it really doesn't get any better than that. The general tenor of the discussion is McWhorter's repeated observations that since he, a linguist, doesn't understand various aspects of biological evolution, the only possible explanation is that God did it. This is convenient for Behe, because that's basically Behe's view as well.

The other, which appeared on the Bloggingheads Science Saturday edition, was between Ronald Numbers and Paul Nelson, an honest-to-god young earth creationist. I haven't viewed the entire thing yet, but objective observers, including Bloggingheads staff, have observed that Nelson's creationism is not challenged in the diavlog.

In the aftermath of these two diavlogs a number of prominent scientists who have participated in Bloggingheads have announced that they will no longer do so, including Carl Zimmer, Sean Carroll, Phil Plait, and PZ Myers.

To their credit,, Bloggingheads has not tried to defend its decisions. Rather, Bob Wright has said that the appearance of these creationists, particularly on a Science Saturday episode, did not comply with BHTV policies.

1) Both of the diavlogs in question had been arranged without my knowledge.
2) I would certainly not have approved both of them, and probably not either of them, had I known about them.
3) The Behe diavlog, in particular, was blatantly at odds with guidelines I’d laid down to my staff more than a year ago in discussing the prospect of Behe appearing. Namely: Behe should only appear in conversation with someone who is truly expert in the relevant biological areas, and since most such matchups would yield a conversation unintelligible to a lay audience, it was hard to imagine a Behe pairing that would make sense.
4) Since these two diavlogs were arranged, I have told the staffers who arranged them that in the future they should make sure to clear diavlogs of this sort with me before arranging them.

In addition, the BHTV staffer who set up one of the diavlogs has also written about it:

I agree that creationists and ID’ers are crackpots. I agree that these crackpots do harm (e.g. by corrupting public perception of science). I agree that appearing on a site that has featured crackpots could damage the reputation and integrity of reputable scientists, so I fully understand Sean’s choice to stay away from BhTV (although I’d be very happy if he were to reconsider).

Anyway, this is just my opinion, but I think we (BhTV) screwed up — and the origins of that screw-up lie in my ill-fated decision to put together the Numbers/Nelson diavlog. One Sean Carroll diavlog is worth any number of creationism conversations. If I could rewind and start over I’d aim to do it all differently.


I'm not going to stop watching BHTV. There are plenty of people on BHTV that I can't stand to watch, and I just don't.

On Saturday Bob and George Johnson recorded a new Science Saturday diavlog to discuss the creationist controversy, and the comment section has over two hundred comments on that, which I commend your attention to. To Bob's credit, he takes responsibility for the system failures that led to these two grossly inappropriate diavlogs to go up, and he does set forth the standards that he will apply for someone like this in the future, so I'm hoping that this will help to improve things.

I think Bloggingheads is a great resource, and I hope that this can do what it takes to recover.

Creationist goes to court to silence critic

I guess that's what's left when prayer doesn't work.

SANTA ANA – A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled today.

James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, referred to Creationism as “religious, superstitious nonsense” during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan.

That's the takeaway message from the Orange County Register, but a closer examination shows that the court was clearly wrong, and is likely to be overturned if the teacher has the resources to appeal this decision.

The suit, brought by a creationist former student of the defendant, attacked James Corbett for a large number of statements that the plaintiff construed as being opposed to religion, yet the court found only one that, in its view, actually violated the student's First Amendment rights.

The test by which government actions may be said to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is referred to as the "Lemon test", because it was first articulated in the Supreme Court's decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 406 U.S. 602 (1971). Under the Lemon test,

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion.

Usually cases raising the Lemon test involve legislation, such as "moment of silence" legislation, but they apply to other circumstances in which a government official, like a public school teacher, is claimed to have taken a position that has the effect of establishing a particular religious view. In this case the court rejected the plaintiff's general claim that the defendant's statements had the effect of establishing a "religion of secularism", but it did find that one statement in particular failed the Lemon test.

The Court turns first to Corbett’s statement regarding John Peloza (“Peloza”). (Farnan’s Ex. I, pp. 222-25.) This statement presents the closest question for the Court in assessing secular purpose. Peloza apparently brought suit against Corbett because Corbett was the advisor to a student newspaper which ran an article suggesting that Peloza was teaching religion rather than science in his classroom. (Id.) Corbett explained to his class that Peloza, a teacher, “was not telling the kids [Peloza’s students] the scientific truth about evolution.” (Id.) Corbett also told his students that, in response to a request to give Peloza space in the newspaper to present his point of view, Corbett stated, “I will not leave John Peloza alone to propagandize kids with this religious, superstitious nonsense.” (Id.) One could argue that Corbett meant that Peloza should not be presenting his religious ideas to students or that Peloza was presenting faulty science to the students. But there is more to the statement: Corbett states an unequivocal belief that creationism is “superstitious nonsense.” The Court cannot discern a legitimate secular purpose in this statement, even when considered in context. The statement therefore constitutes improper disapproval of religion in violation of the Establishment Clause.

The court is clearly wrong here in finding no secular purpose because it fails to adequately consider the nature of Peloza's religious statements that Corbett describes as "superstitious nonsense". In fact, Corbett's statement was not a wholesale attack on Peloza's religious beliefs, but on the factual claims made by creationists. These claims are not only religious in nature, but are demonstrably false, and have been shown to be so by a century and a half of scientific study. Thus, the description of creationism as "superstitious nonsense" is precisely identical to the description of astrology, or the belief that the earth sits on the back of a gigantic turtle, as "superstitious nonsense". As such, any public school teacher is justified in criticizing another teacher for teaching false and superstitious nonsense in the science classes of a public school. The district court is clearly wrong here.

There is another interesting point here. The particular statement that Corbett is sued for, and which the court found was a violation of the Establishment Clause, is the statement that creationism is "superstitious nonsense". In other words, it was a statement criticizing the religious beliefs of both the other teacher, but also the plaintiff. As you probably know, for years creationists have claimed that creationism, which they now prefer to call "intelligent design", and previously called "scientific creationism", is not religion at all, but science. This claim was authoritatively disposed of in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005), in which the supporters of creationism brought in the leading experts in their field and mounted a valiant effort to establish the scientific validity of creationism, only to be thoroughly discredited in court. Yet in this case, the only way for the plaintiff to prevail is to demonstrate the essentially religious nature of the tenets of creationism. Thus, even in winning, the creationists lose.

Stranger things have happened, but it's hard to see this decision standing up on appeal.