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This is a story about Galileo Galilei. It's not the story about an enlightened scientist being persecuted by a narrow-minded Catholic Church because that story is (mostly) a myth. It's not a story about a great scientific genius either, though he was that (mainly). It's also not a story about someone being reincarnated with the soul of the old astronomer like the song by the Indigo Girls that, for a few weeks in '92, I thought was (almost) profound. (And I should point out that it not an original story but one that cribbed together from other sources.)

But like all good stories this one provides a (mostly) valuable lesson.

In Galileo's day, the predominant view in astronomy was a model first espoused by Aristotle and developed by Claudius Ptolemy in which the sun and planets revolved around the earth. The Ptolemic system had been the reigning paradigm for over 1400 years when a Polish Canon named Nicholas Copernicus published his seminal work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs.

Now Copernicus' heliocentric theory wasn't exactly new nor was it based on purely empirical observation. While it had a huge impact on the history of science, his theory was more of a revival of Pythagorean mysticism than of a new paradigm. Like many great discoveries, he merely took an old idea and gave it a new spin.

Although Copernicus' fellow churchmen encouraged him to publish his work, he delayed the publication of On the Revolution for several years for fear of being mocked by the scientific community. At the time, the academy belonged to Aristotelians who weren't about to let such nonsense slip through the "peer review" process.

Then came Galileo, the prototypical Renaissance man, a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and musician. But while he was intelligent, charming, and witty, the Italian was also argumentative, mocking, and vain. He was, as we would say, complex. When his fellow astronomer Johann Kepler wrote to tell him that he had converted to Copernicus' theory, Galileo shot back that he had too--and had been so for years (though all evidence shows that it wasn't true). His ego wouldn't allow him to be upstaged by men who weren't as smart as he was. And for Galileo, that included just about everybody.

[Note: This post gets preachy. And the sermon is for my fellow Bible-believing Christians. If you do not fall into that category you are welcome to read on, even share your thoughts, though I'll regard your opinion as moot. Since we aren't in agreement on the premises, we will obviously differ on the conclusions. However, if you are a believer that trusts in the authority of Scripture, and you find yourself disagreeing, please read the disclaimer at the end of the post.]

Reading my friend Henry Neufeld's post "Why the Creation-Evolution Controversy is Important" was one of the most paradoxical experiences I've ever encountered while blogging: I am in almost word-for-word agreement with the entire post…but for the exact opposite reasons it was written. (Although I will summarize parts of the entry, I encourage you to read his brief post before continuing.)

Neufeld argues that there is "a full scale assault going on against free inquiry, something that is essential to the integrity and continued progress of science." I wanted to cheer when I read that until I realized he wasn’t talking about the constant suppression of Intelligent Design by the scientific community but of anti-ID scientists by creationists.

I didn’t catch that at first so I thought we were simpatico when I read, "There is simply no excuse in my view for what amounts to a demand to lie." Bravo, I was thinking, until I realized that he wasn’t talking about the demand by many in the scientific community that we lie (or at least pretend it isn't true) about what God has told us is true about his creation.

It is in the conclusion, though, that I found we were on completely different wavelengths:

1. If the entire morbidly obese population of the U.S. lived in one state, it would be the 12th highest-populated state, with more people than Virginia.

2. An average adult's skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.

3. Rats' front teeth grow 4½ to 5½ inches each year. Rats wear them down by continuously gnawing on everything around them, including cement, brick, wood, lead pipes, and other small animals.

4. Landfills are actually the No. 1 human-generated source of methane, belching 7 million tons into the atmosphere each year.

5. Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.

6. In the ninth century, a team of Chinese alchemists trying to synthesize an "elixir of immortality" from saltpeter, sulfur, realgar, and dried honey instead invented gunpowder.

7. Whales and dolphins can literally fall half asleep. Their brain hemispheres alternate sleeping, so the animals can continue to surface and breathe.

8. Leonardo da Vinci was an accomplished lyre player. When he was first presented at the Milanese court, it was as a musician, not an artist or inventor.

9. Although all seven astronauts died in the space shuttle Columbia disaster, hundreds of nematode worms, carried in canisters to study the biology of weightlessness, survived.

10. Honey never spoils. Ever.

Imagine if you were told by a group of scientists that "the Chinese mind does not exist."

At first you are puzzled and wonder if they mean that statement metaphorically, as in “the American mind” or the “Arab mind” are not true cultural phenomena. But they dismissively shake their heads and say that they mean it quite literally: Chinese humans do not have a mind. Our belief that Chinese people have a “mind”, they say, is simply a neurological accident or perhaps a byproduct of natural selection.

Now, your initial response might be to protest and offer reasons why the scientists are wrong. More likely, you’d simply dismiss their claim as being profoundly stupid. Whatever the reaction, your opinion of science—or at least these scientists—would probably be diminished by the exchange.

Unfortunately, a recent article in New York Times is likely to produce a similar effect. In a claim that is only slightly less absurd than denying that Chinese people have minds, evolutionary biologists and cognitive scientists attempt to explain why humans maintain a belief in a deity:

These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

What is most disconcerting is how almost all of the “scholars” mentioned in the article take such a decidedly unscientific approach to the question. As philosopher Alvin Plantinga claims, the sensible meaning of the term “science” is any activity that is (a) a systematic and disciplined enterprise aimed at finding out the truth about our world, and (b) has significant empirical involvement. In order to answer this question, then, we need to take the two main competing hypotheses that could be true (Hypothesis X: God exists; Hypothesis Y: God does not exist) and test to see which one leads to the most empirically valid answer.

“If you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics,” said Lewis Carroll. “It does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligible, as long as there is enough of them.” Statistics can not only be used, as Carroll noted, to inspire confidence, they can be used to inspire confidence in confidence.

Consider the following statements, each consisting of two distinct, transferable clauses:

1 - (A) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has more than 90 percent confidence that (B) carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of warming in the past half century.

2 - (C) Family Research Council has more than 90 percent confidence that (D) a child will, statistically speaking, be better off if raised by a mother and a father.

3 - (E) I have more than 90 percent confidence that (B) carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of warming in the past half century.

4 - (E) I have more than 90 percent confidence that (D) a child will, statistically speaking, be better off if raised by a mother and a father.

5 - (E) I have more than 90 percent confidence that (F) God exists.

Of the five statements, which is the least subjective? Answer: None, they are all equally subjective.

Our natural intuition is to disagree. After all, #1 is a matter of physical science, #2 of social science and #5 of metaphysics. They can’t all be equally subjective, can they? Also, #1-2 should be less subjective since they are institutional rather than individual beliefs.

Each of these statements, though, is derived by using a Bayesian inference. This method involves collecting evidence that is meant to be consistent or inconsistent with a given hypothesis and adjusting the degree of belief in a hypothesis accordingly.

A group of more than 85 influential evangelical leaders has released a statement, the Evangelical Climate Initiative (ECI), expressing a �biblically driven commitment to curb global warming� and calling on the government to �enact national legislation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that are contributing to global climate change.�

The group's manifesto, "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call for Action", includes a FAQ explaining the urgency of the issue. �Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change,� notes the website. �Why? Climate change will make natural disasters like floods, droughts, and hurricanes more damaging.� The site also notes that �few are in denial about the reality of the problem, a scientific consensus that climate change must be addressed has actually existed since 1995.�

Is there a scientific consensus that climate change is occurring? An article in Newsweek appears to provide strong evidence for that claim:

There are ominous signs that the Earth�s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production� with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth�.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree � a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. �A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,� warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, �because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.�

This article would appear to shore up the ECI�s claim that �Climate change, also called global warming, is an urgent problem that can and must be solved.� Except that the article is titled �The Cooling World� and is dated April 28, 1975 during a time when the scientific consensus held that climate change, known back then as global cooling, was leading to a new Ice Age.

A few weeks ago I argued that parents who oppose the teaching of neo-Darwinism in public schools were following the wrong tactic. Instead of "Teaching the Controversy" I claimed that they should simply teach students how to think critically and logically and then have them read the claims made by "evolutionists" (people who have an almost religious faith in the ability of the theory to provide "scientific" explanations). At the top of such a reading list would be the complete works of Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins is, inexplicably, what passes for a public intellectual in England. He is a zoologist by training, an evangelical atheist by temperament, and a dullard by nature. Time and again he is called out for his illogical, inaccurate, or simply inane claims and yet is always treated as if he were something more than an intellectual poseur.

His latest bout of silliness can be found in this week's New Scientist, in an article titled "The world's ten biggest ideas." (via Pharyngula) Apparently, all reputable evolutionary biologists were busy with actual scientific projects and so Dawkins was tagged to write the entry on evolution. As usual he mixes fact with his own farcical claims to come up with a typically Dawkinseque bit of mystical tripe:

Nothing good ever comes from trying to sell monkey skulls.

That's the lesson learned by German anthropologist, Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten, whose 30-year career ended after he tried to pawn 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer. After German police began investigating the professor for fraud, an inquiry found that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarized other scientists' work.

Protsch had claimed to have discovered one of archaeology's most sensational finds, a skull fragment found near Hamburg that was believed to be the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals. But the discovery that the fragment was not from 36,000 years ago but was a mere 7,500 years old is causing experts to rewrite a large segment of mankind�s history:

�What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

This was the question posed to a��who's who� of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers� by the Edge, a web site dedicated to intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues. John Brockman, a literary agent and publisher of Edge, asks a new question at the end of each year. He asked the intriguing query because, �Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it.�

Because what constitutes �proof� remains undefined, the 118 responses include a wide variety of beliefs. Some are intuitions or presupposition. Others are rational inferences or assumption based on analogical reasoning. Some are intriguing, many are banal, and others just plain absurd.

But that should not be particularly surprising. After all, as G.K. Chesterson noted, �A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish."

Here are a few select snippets from some of the (often lengthy) responses:

During the beginning of the Cold War, the US Air Force began performing experiments with rocket-sleds, a small railroad car with rockets attached, in order to test how humans were able to withstand rapid acceleration. One experiment required mounting a set of 16 accelerometers to different parts of the subject's body in order to measure the acceleration. Each sensor could be glued to its mount in one of two ways. Naturally, the technician mounting the devices installed all 16 the wrong way.

A few days later, a press conference was held and the subject of the experiment, a young Air Force captain and medical doctor named John Paul Stapp, was asked how it was possible that no one had been severely injured during the rocket sled tests. Stapp replied that is was because they took Murphy's Law under consideration, The principle was named after Edward A. Murphy, Jr, a development engineer working on the project, who is claimed to have said, �"If it can happen, it will happen.� Stapp claimed that they were able to prevent accidents by considering all the possibilities before doing a test.

Since that day in 1949, Murphy�s Law* has proven itself to be one of the most consistent laws in the universe. Murphy and his team of engineers were used to dealing with design flaws and had training in how to correct them. The common man, however, has been less able to compensate for the effects of ML.

But now, thanks to some panel of experts commissioned by British Gas, you don�t have to be a rocket scientist to predict the occurrence of Murphy�s law.

The panel, which consists of a psychologist, a mathematician, and an economist, has discovered the statistical formula for predicting Murphy�s Law occurrences to be: ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)). [Note: Using the Murphy�s Law calculator makes it easy to calculate the probability.]

While scanning through the posts on Panda�s Thumb today I stumbled across an article in The American Enterprise by sociologist Rodney Stark. The story, titled �Fact, Fable, and Darwin�, opens with this paragraph:

I write as neither a creationist nor a Darwinist, but as one who knows what is probably the most disreputable scientific secret of the past century: There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species! Darwin himself was not sure he had produced one, and for many decades every competent evolutionary biologist has known that he did not. Although the experts have kept quiet when true believers have sworn in court and before legislative bodies that Darwin's theory is proven beyond any possible doubt, that's not what reputable biologists, including committed Darwinians, have been saying to one another.

As you might expect, not everyone agrees. Ed Brayton calls it �a delightfully ridiculous little article� and Steve Reuland says it �proves that there really is no rock-bottom when it comes to anti-evolutionist diatribes.�

I�ve been following these types of arguments for almost twenty years now without coming closer to understanding which side is right. As a Christian, I believe that God is ultimately responsible for the variety of life in existence. Such a view obviously classifies me as a �creationist.� But while I'm convinced about who is behind the process, I'm still unclear on how it occurred.

One significant part that remains unclear is the claim that the common descent of living organisms from shared ancestors is a scientific �fact.� Most people who claim to have trouble accepting �evolutionary theory� are really saying that they disagree on this particular point. I suspect that the crux of the entire controversy centers around this dispute.

According to many scientists, though, the question has already been sufficiently addressed. As evolutionary geneticist R.C. Lewontin notes:

There was once a time when the English produced some of the finest minds in history. The island once gave the world such giants as Newton, Shakespeare, and Milton, as well as lesser titans such as Churchill, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. Sadly, the British Empire no longer produces such geniuses. The once great country is forced to scrape the dregs of its populace just to produce someone worthy of the title �intellectual.� What an embarrassment it must be for them to be reduced to selecting as their �top public intellectual� the zoologist Richard Dawkins.

This list of Britain�s top 100 public intellectuals was put together by Prospect so the choice of Dawkins may say more about the intellect of the magazine�s readers than it does about the British mind. Still, it is an unfortunate choice. For a man who considers himself to be a �bright� he is not all that, well,�bright.

Obviously, Dawkins is a man of considerable intellect. I don�t dispute that. But a high IQ does not necessarily make a person �smart� much less a reputable intellectual. (If it did then Ted Kaczynski would hold a place in the pantheon of American thinkers.) The problem with Dawkins is not with the quantitative state of his intellect but with the qualitative state. If Robert Reich can be considered an �intellectual gimp� then Dawkins is an �intellectual quadriplegic.�

This is a story about Galileo Galilei. It's not the story about an enlightened scientist being persecuted by a narrow-minded Catholic Church because that story is (mostly) a myth. It's not a story about a great scientific genius either, though he was that (mainly). It's also not a story about someone being reincarnated with the soul of the old astronomer like the song by the Indigo Girls that, for a few weeks in '92, I thought was (almost) profound. (And I should point out that it not an original story but one that cribbed together from other sources.)

But like all good stories this one provides a (mostly) valuable lesson.

In Galileo's day, the predominant view in astronomy was a model first espoused by Aristotle and developed by Claudius Ptolemy in which the sun and planets revolved around the earth. The Ptolemic system had been the reigning paradigm for over 1400 years when a Polish Canon named Nicholas Copernicus published his seminal work, On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs.

Now Copernicus' heliocentric theory wasn't exactly new nor was it based on purely empirical observation. While it had a huge impact on the history of science, his theory was more of a revival of Pythagorean mysticism than of a new paradigm. Like many great discoveries, he merely took an old idea and gave it a new spin.

Although Copernicus' fellow churchmen encouraged him to publish his work, he delayed the publication of On the Revolution for several years for fear of being mocked by the scientific community. At the time, the academy belonged to Aristotelians who weren't about to let such nonsense slip through the "peer review" process.

Then came Galileo, the prototypical Renaissance man a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and musician. But while he as intelligent, charming, and witty, the Italian was also argumentative, mocking, and vain. He was, as we would say, complex. When his fellow astronomer Johann Kepler wrote to tell him that he had converted to Copernicus' theory, Galileo shot back that he had too -- and had been so for years (though all evidence shows that it wasn't true). His ego wouldn't allow him to be upstaged by men who weren't as smart as he was. And for Galileo, that included just about everybody.

John Marburger, the science advisor for the Bush Administration, would make an excellent blogger. After the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC) issued a report, "Scientific Integrity In Policy Making", that listed instances of what it described as the administration's "misuse of science", Marburger fired back with a point-by-point fisking of the USC’s claims.

When comparing the original report to the rebuttal, it becomes obvious that on many points the USC is being intentionally misleading. While I don’t think the 60 “prominent" scientists who signed the document are all bald-faced liars, I think they should certainly be more careful about attaching their good names to such a shoddy report.

One area in particular that caught my attention was the USC’s claim that scientific knowledge on HIV/AIDS prevention had been intentionally distorted. Since it referenced documents that I wrote about yesterday, I wondered if I had been duped by the CDC. Here is the entire excerpt (excluding footnotes) from the USC's report on the supposed HIV/AIDS “distortion":

If you’ve ever spent much time around monkeys you've probably noticed an obvious trait that they all share -- they are really terrible at the game of Scrabble. In fact, for being such close evolutionary relatives, monkeys aren’t all that proficient at such traits as language and reason. This difference used to be attributed the asymmetrical shape of the human brain. But now that view is changing.

A British psychiatrist is even accusing some researchers of having an 'observer bias" and of finding asymmetry where it doesn't exist:

In a paper in the April issue of the journal Laterality, Tim Crow of the Warneford Hospital in Oxford also criticizes the high-profile journals that have published their findings. 'It is as if the editorial policies of Science and Nature are directed towards obfuscating the origins of Man," he writes (Laterality, 9:233-242, April 2004).

Crow believes the authors of these papers want to find precursors of language in nonhuman primates to support a theory of graduated evolution. Instead, he revives Paul Broca's 1877 hypothesis that an evolutionary leap took place between our closest ape relatives and us, and produced language.

What? Peer-reviewed science journals skewing evidence to fit their preconceived notions of macroevolution? No way. They would never do that. Because if it were true that would cast doubts on the interpretation of other evidence and then we might have to start thinking about these issues for ourselves. We certainly can't have that, now can we?

Two recently released reports, based on figures from 2000, show that half of all young Americans will get a sexually transmitted disease by the age of 25. You would think such news would generate a backlash against the failed sex education policies that were prevalent during the Clinton Administration. But instead the epidemic of STDs is considered proof that we simply need more �education�:

Remember as a kid how you're mom seemed to have the ability to read your mind? Turns out that she might have had just such a skill after all:

Researchers in South Korea have been able to cull stem cells from a cloned a human embryo which has been touted as 'an important step toward one day growing patients' own replacement tissue to treat diseases.” Just as the launch of Sputnik changed the space race, this surprise announcement is being viewed as a setback for American science. In a recent editorial, the Washington Post* lamented:

[Note: Read this post to learn more about this series.]

Think back to your high school or college biology textbooks and you'll probably recall seeing a drawing commonly referred to as Haeckel's embryos. The purpose of the illustration is to show the similarities among veterbrates during embryonic development*:

There's just one problem with the drawing -- it's a fraud:

Kathy Cox, Georgia's state school superintendent, has proposed striking the word 'evolution” from the state's science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase "biological changes over time":

Cox repeatedly referred to evolution as a "buzzword" Thursday and said the ban was proposed, in part, to alleviate pressure on teachers in socially conservative areas where parents object to its teaching.

This move would be such a boon to education that it is almost assured to fail (in a country that can‘t even decide what 'marriage' means what chance does scientific terminology have?). Anyone who doubts that evolution has become an imprecise buzzword should ask their friends and neighbors to define the term. Anyone who doesn't begin by asking you if you are referring to micro or macro evolution is already off to bad start.

Even highly intelligent people like Brad from Crooked Timber (where I found this link) appears to misunderstand what the word means:

Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, California, claims that "Darwin's theories are inherently flawed."

Was she convinced of Darwin’s error because of it’s circular logic? Perhaps, she realized that the theory could be used to explain anything at all and thus had no explanatory value. Or maybe she was convinced that Intelligent Design theory offers more promising research programs.

Um, not exactly.

"If a theory says something is wrong with so many people,"says Roughgarden, "then perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people."

What is Darwin's theory wrong about? Homosexuality. [Note: may not be a "work-safe" link.]

Imagine Roughgarden’s dilemma. Her belief that homosexuality is natural bumped up against her worldview that claims homosexuality is a "genetic aberration." Either her PC belief or her belief in Darwinism had to go.

Naturally, she threw out the science.

As she writes in the New Scientist magazine (via plastic bag):