Donald R. Prothero's Blog, page 6

The ridiculous government shutdown was bad enough. Lost in all the shouting was the damage it did to American science.

A review of Michael E. Mann's inside account of the climate wars

Many creationists try to get around the fact that the world LOOKS like it has a long history by arguing that God created it that way! That argument was actually first put forth in 1857, and completely rejected by both scientists and religious people, for different reasons.

So how did cryptozoologists respond to our new book challenging their beliefs? Just like creationists!

The fastest growing group in this country is the "religiously unaffiliated"—and the cause for their increase among young people should be no surprised: the political influence of the hate-filled messages of religious zealots among the evangelicals.

Jenny McCarthy is famous for being the leader of the anti-vaxx movement, claiming that vaccines are "poison" or "toxins" and advocating healthier living without them. Guess what? If she's paid to shill for a deadly substance, she will do it!

A review of "Blackfish," the gripping, stomach-churning movie about killer whale abuse in marine parks

Whenever you hear someone say that the denial of scientific consensus is harmless, remember the example of the hundreds of thousands who died in South Africa due to the false notion that HIV does not cause AIDS

A review of Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen Meyer (HarperCollins, New York, 498 pp.)

In everything the prudent acts with knowledge, but a fool flaunts his folly.

—Proverbs 13:16

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

 
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

 

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well-known phenomenon in psychology first named in 1998, but it has been recognized since before the Bible and Shakespeare. In a nutshell, it is (as Bertrand Russell put it) 
”The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”. There is also another well-known psychological phenomenon: motivated reasoning. Our brains have many blind spots in them that allow us to reconcile the real world with the world as we want it to be, and reduce the clash of cognitive dissonance. The most familiar of these is confirmation bias, where we see only what we want to see, and ignore or forget anything that doesn’t fit our preferred world-view. When this bias emerges in argument, it takes the form of cherry-picking: finding a few facts out of context that seem to support what we want to believe, and ignoring everything else that contradicts what we are trying to promote.

The entire literature of creationism (and of its recent offspring, “intelligent design” creationism) works entirely on that principle: they don’t like any science that disagrees with their view of religion, so they pick tiny bits out of context that seem to support what they want to believe, and cherry-pick individual cases which fits their bias. In their writings, they are legendary for “quote-mining”: taking a quote out of context to mean the exact opposite of what the author clearly intended (sometimes unintentionally, but often deliberately and maliciously). They either cannot understand the scientific meaning of many fields from genetics to paleontology to geochronology, or their bias filters out all but tiny bits of a research subject that seems to comfort them, and they ignore all the rest.

Another common tactic of creationists is credential mongering. They love to flaunt their Ph.D.’s on their book covers, giving the uninitiated the impression that they are all-purpose experts in every topic. As anyone who has earned a Ph.D. knows, the opposite is true: the doctoral degree forces you to focus on one narrow research problem for a long time, so you tend to lose your breadth of training in other sciences. Nevertheless, they flaunt their doctorates in hydrology or biochemistry, then talk about paleontology or geochronology, subjects they have zero qualification to discuss. Their Ph.D. is only relevant in the field where they have specialized training. It’s comparable to asking a Ph.D. to fix your car or write a symphony—they may be smart, but they don’t have the appropriate specialized training to do a competent job based on their Ph.D. alone.

Stephen Meyer’s first demonstration of these biases was his atrociously incompetent book Signature in the Cell (2009, HarperOne), which was universally lambasted by molecular biologists as an amateurish effort by someone with no firsthand training or research experience in molecular biology. (Meyer’s Ph.D. is in history of science, and his undergrad degree is in geophysics, which give him absolutely no background to talk about molecular evolution). Undaunted by this debacle, Meyer now blunders into another field in which he has no research experience or advanced training: my own profession, paleontology. I can now report that he’s just as incompetent in my field as he was in molecular biology. Almost every page of this book is riddled by errors of fact or interpretation that could only result from someone writing in a subject way over his head, abetted by the creationist tendency to pluck facts out of context and get their meaning completely backwards. But as one of the few people in the entire creationist movement who has actually taken a few geology classes (but apparently no paleontology classes), he is their “expert” in this area, and is happy to mislead the creationist audience that knows no science at all with his slick but completely false understanding of the subject.

Order the book from Skeptic.com

Let’s take the central subject of the book: the “Cambrian explosion”, or the apparently rapid diversification of life during the Cambrian Period, starting about 543 million years ago. When Darwin wrote about it in 1859, it was indeed a puzzle, since so little was known about the fossil record then. But as paleontologists have worked hard on the topic and learned a lot since about 1945 (as I discuss in detail in my 2007 book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters). As a result, we now know that the “explosion” now takes place over an 80 m.y. time framework. Paleontologists are gradually abandoning the misleading and outdated term “Cambrian explosion” for a more accurate one, “Cambrian slow fuse” or “Cambrian diversification.” The entire diversification of life is now known to have gone through a number of distinct steps, from the first fossils of simple bacterial life 3.5 billion years old, to the first multicellular animals 700 m.y. ago (the Ediacara fauna), to the first evidence of skeletonized fossils (tiny fragments of small shells, nicknamed the “little shellies”) at the beginning of the Cambrian, 543 m.y. ago (the Nemakit-Daldynian and Tommotian stages of the Cambrian), to the third stage of the Cambrian (Atdabanian, 520-515 m.y. ago), when you find the first fossils of the larger animals with hard shells, such as trilobites. But does Meyer reflect this modern understanding of the subject? No! His figures (e.g., Figs. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) portray the “explosion” as if it happened all at once, showing that he has paid no attention to the past 70 years of discoveries. He dismisses the Ediacara fauna as not clearly related to living phyla (a point that is still debated among paleontologists), but its very existence is fatal to the creationist falsehood that multicellular animals appeared all at once in the fossil record with no predecessors. Even more damning, Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian (nowhere are they even mentioned in the book, or the index) and talks about the Atdabanian stage as if it were the entire Cambrian all by itself. His misleading figures (e.g., Fig. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) imply that there were no modern phyla in existence until the trilobites diversified in the Atdabanian. Sorry, but that’s a flat-out lie. Even a casual glance at any modern diagram of life’s diversification demonstrates that probable arthropods, cnidarians, and echinoderms are present in the Ediacara fauna, mollusks and sponges are well documented from the Nemakit-Daldynian Stage, and brachiopods and archaeocyathids appear in the Tommotian Stage—all millions of years before Meyer’s incorrectly defined “Cambrian explosion” in the Atdabanian. The phyla that he lists in Fig. 2.6 as “explosively” appearing in the Atdabanian stages all actually appeared much earlier—or they are soft-bodied phyla from the Chinese Chengjiang fauna, whose first appearance artificially inflates the count. Meyer deliberately and dishonestly distorts the story by implying that these soft-bodied animals appeared all at once, when he knows that this is an artifact of preservation. It’s just an accident that there are no extraordinary soft-bodied faunas preserved before Chengjiang, so we simply have no fossils demonstrating their true first appearance, which occurred much earlier based on molecular evidence.

The details of the Cambrian diversification event, showing how different groups appear in different stages of the Precambrian and Cambrian. Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian, falsely giving the impression that it is abrupt and rapid.

Meyer’s distorted and false view of conflating the entire Early Cambrian (543-515 m.y. ago) as consisting of only the third stage of the Early Cambrian (520-515 m.y. ago) creates a fundamental lie that falsifies everything else he says in the ensuing chapters. He even attacks me (p. 73) by claiming that during our 2009 debate, it was I who was improperly redefining the Cambrian! Even a cursory glance at any recent paleontology book on the topic, or even the Wikipedia site for “Cambrian explosion”, shows that it is Meyer who has cherry-picked and distorted the record, completely ignoring the 23 million years of the first two stages of the Cambrian because their existence shoots down his entire false interpretation of the fossil record. Sorry, Steve, but you don’t get to contradict every paleontologist in the world, ignore the evidence from the first two stages of the Cambrian, and redefine the Early Cambrian as the just the Atdabanian Stage just to fit your fairy tale!

Even if we grant the premise that a lot of phyla appear in the Atdabanian (solely because there are no soft-bodied faunas older than Chengjiang in the earliest Cambrian), Meyer claims the 5-6 million years of the Atdabanian are too fast for evolution to produce all the phyla of animals. Wrong again! Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the “Cambrian explosion” are typical of any adaptive radiation in life’s history, whether you look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the non-avian dinosaurs vanished, or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 m.y. ago. As distinguished Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll put it in his 2003 book, Life on a Young Planet:

Was there really a Cambrian Explosion? Some have treated the issue as semantic—anything that plays out over tens of millions of years cannot be “explosive,” and if the Cambrian animals didn’t “explode,” perhaps they did nothing at all out of the ordinary. Cambrian evolution was certainly not cartoonishly fast … Do we need to posit some unique but poorly understood evolutionary process to explain the emergence of modern animals? I don’t think so. The Cambrian Period contains plenty of time to accomplish what the Proterozoic didn’t without invoking processes unknown to population geneticists—20 million years is a long time for organisms that produce a new generation every year or two. (Knoll, 2003, p. 193)

(It’s interesting that Meyer talks about millions of years like an ordinary geologist might. I’ll bet his Young-Earth Creationist readers, who refuse to concede the earth is older than 10,000 years old, are not to happy with him for this. This might explain why the book, which was artificially pushed up the best-seller list by a huge creationist publicity effort before it was published, has now dropped out of the best-seller list like a stone, once people see it’s not supporting Young-Earth Creationism).

The mistakes and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations go on and on, page after page. Meyer takes the normal scientific debates about the early conflicts about the molecular vs. morphological trees of life as evidence scientists know nothing, completely ignoring the recent consensus between these data sets. Like all creationists, he completely misinterprets the Eldredge and Gould punctuated equilibrium model and claims that they are arguing that evolution doesn’t occur—when both Gould and Eldredge have clearly explained many times (which he never cites) why their ideas are compatible with Neo-Darwinism and not any kind of support for any form of creationism. He repeats many of the other classic creationist myths, all long debunked, including the post hoc argument from probability (you can’t make the argument that something is unlikely after the fact), knowing that his math-phobic audience is easily bamboozled by the misuse of big numbers. He wastes a full chapter on the empty concept of “information” as the ID creationists define it. He butchers the subject of systematic biology, using the normal debate between competing hypotheses to argue that scientists can’t make up their minds—when that is the ordinary way in which scientific questions are argued until consensus has been reached. He confuses crown-groups with stem-groups, botches the arguments about recognition of ancestors in the fossil record, and can’t tell a cladogram from a family tree. He blunders through the fields of epigenetics and evo-devo and genetic drift as if they completely falsified Neo-Darwinism, rather than as scientists view them, as supplements to our understanding of it. (Even if they did somehow shoot down some aspects of Neo-Darwinism, they are providing additional possible mechanisms for evolution, something he supposedly does not believe in!). In short, he runs the full gamut of topics in modern evolutionary biology, managing to distort or confuse every one of them, and only demonstrating that he is completely incapable of understanding these topics.

In several places in the book, he shows his pictures of the Cambrian sections in China, or talks in the final chapter about visiting the Burgess Shale in Canada (a Middle Cambrian locality, millions of years after the “Cambrian explosion” was long over), as if to establish his street-cred that he at least got away from his office and computer once in a while. Visiting these famous places like a tourist doesn’t qualify you to write a guidebook of the complexity of the fossils that were recovered there. If he had actually done the hard work of learning about paleontology and doing the research in the field himself (as real scientists have), we might take him seriously. As it is, this book only demonstrates that Meyer can completely misunderstand, misinterpret and misread subjects like paleontology just as badly as he botched his interpretation of molecular biology. (For a good account by real paleontologists who know what they’re doing, see the excellent recent book by Valentine and Erwin, 2013, which gives an accurate view of the “Cambrian diversification”).

Finally, one might wonder: what’s all the fuss about the “Cambrian explosion”? Why should it matter whether evolution was fast or slow during the third stage of the Cambrian? Some scientists might find this puzzling, but you must understand the minds of creationists. They operate by a “god of the gaps” argument: anything that is currently not easily explained by science is automatically attributed to supernatural causes. Even though ID creationists say that this supernatural designer could be any deity or even extraterrestrials, it is well documented that they are thinking of the Judeo-Christian god when they point to the complexity and “design” of life. They argue that if scientists haven’t completely explained every possible event of the Early Cambrian, science has failed and we must consider supernatural causes.

Of course, this is a lie. For one thing, Meyer’s description of the “Cambrian explosion” is distorted and false, since he deliberately ignores the events of the first two stages of the Cambrian. Secondly, this “god of the gaps” approach is guaranteed to fail, because scientists have explained most of the events of the Early Cambrian and find nothing out of the ordinary that defies scientific explanation. Only a few details remain to be worked out. As our fossil record of that time interval improves and we understand it even better, there will be nothing left for the creationists to point to that might require supernatural intervention. This is a losing strategy for them in every possible way.

In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I’ve written before, if you are a complete amateur and don’t understand a subject, don’t demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! Some people with creationist leanings or little understanding of paleontology might find this long-winded, confusingly written book convincing,  but anyone with a decent background in paleontology can easily see through his distortions and deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations.  Even though Amazon.com persists in listing this book in their “Paleontology” subsection, I’ve seen a number of bookstores already which have it properly placed in their “Religion” section—or even more appropriately, in “Fiction.”

 Postscript: When I first wrote this book review, I posted it on the book’s Amazon.com site. Naturally, it got a huge reaction out of the creationists, and there was a string over over 1900 comments on my review. Surprisingly, the scientists and paleontologists managed to overwhelm the usual comments of the creationists, and about 70% of the commenters marked my harsh review as “helpful”. The creationist comments were mostly personal attacks on me, or claims that I didn’t read the book, not substantive comments about my points about Meyer’s ignorance of paleontology.

Unsurprisingly, it also got a harsh attack from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Meyer’s home institution. Their spokesman Casey Luskin (a lawyer, not a paleontologist) criticized my review by using all the classic creationist tactics. Mostly he quote-mines Erwin and Valentine’s new book to make it appear that these distinguished paleontologists are creationists! (When I pointed this out to my good friend Doug Erwin, he found it laughable and made it clear to me that in no way does his book support creationism or Meyer’s misinterpretations—not that Luskin would care if Erwin himself wrote a detailed refutation of every bit of misquotation the DI post used). The rest of Luskin’s ridiculous post claims I didn’t read the book, or really read the chapters where Meyer made specific arguments. (I sure did read them—but no matter how many times you read it, Meyer’s arguments and statements are completely wrong, and Meyer does not understand the key issues but grossly misinterprets them). In short, it’s the usual pack of lies and distortions and quote-mines and diversionary tactics designed to mislead the casual reader who does not understand what I wrote, not addressing the key points of contention in my review. In no place does Luskin acknowledge or even mention the central point of this review: that Meyer has deliberately and dishonestly ignored the first two stages of the Cambrian to give the false impression that it was inexplicably rapid.

Finally, I should note an interesting phenomenon. The creationist community gave the book a huge buildup in their circles, and got their acolytes to pre-order the book in huge numbers, so it was #7 on the New York Times Best Seller List when it was released. Since its release, however, it has plummeted in sales, probably because once the Young-Earth Creationists read it, they’ll realize it is full of ideas they don’t support, like “millions of years.” I watched its sales ranking on Amazon.com go from near the top, to (currently) around #11,000 or lower on the ranking of best sellers—in just over a month! The most satisfying thing, however, is that initially Amazon.com put it in their “Paleontology” category. But just a week ago, they removed it and moved it to “Religion & Science.” Apparently, the huge negative backlash from REAL paleontologists made them reassess it. Now if they could only move it over to “Fiction”, where it truly belongs…

References

Erwin, D., and J.W. Valentine. 2013. The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Biodiversity. Roberts and Company, Publishers, New York.
Knoll, A.H.  2003. Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Life on Earth. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Lieberman, B.S. 2003. Taking the pulse of the Cambrian radiation. Integrative and Comparative Biology 43:229-237.
Prothero, D.R. 2007. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. Columbia University Press, New York.

In a democracy, it is very important that the public have a basic understanding of science so that they can control the way that science and technology increasingly affect our lives.

— Stephen Hawking

If you are scientifically literate the world looks very different to you. Its not just a lot of mysterious things happening. There is a lot we understand out there. And that understanding empowers you to, first, not be taken advantage of by others who do understand it. And second there are issues that confront society that have science as their foundation. If you are scientifically illiterate, in a way, you are disenfranchising yourself from the democratic process, and you don’t even know it.

—Neil DeGrasse Tyson, astronomer, 2009

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which the most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.

—Carl Sagan, 1996

Item: the headline from CNN.com reads “China shoots up rankings as science power, study finds.” As the article summarizes, a recent study by the Royal Society of London, the world’s foremost and oldest scientific organization, found that although the U.S. was still the dominant scientific power in terms of scientific publications, the Chinese scientific had experienced a “meteoric rise” in scientific publications and new research. Back in 2003, fewer than 5% of scientific articles came out of China. By 2008, 10% were Chinese-authored, putting it second only the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. share of scientific publications dropped from 26% to 21%. Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith FRS, Chair of the Advisory Group for the study, said: “The scientific world is changing and new players are fast appearing. Beyond the emergence of China, we see the rise of South-East Asian, Middle Eastern, North African and other nations. The increase in scientific research and collaboration, which can help us to find solutions to the global challenges we now face, is very welcome. However, no historically dominant nation can afford to rest on its laurels if it wants to retain the competitive economic advantage that being a scientific leader brings.”

China is already improving in many rankings, making it the second largest economic power as well. Unencumbered by global warming deniers or stem-cell research antagonists or creationists who interfere with science policy, China is making huge investments in new technologies for a world with global warming and limited oil, while the U.S. slips down the rankings of countries investing in green technology. Germany and several Scandinavian countries have long led the world in their investments in green technology and their societal commitment to low energy use and reducing greenhouse gases—yet their economies are stronger than ours or than most of those in southern Europe or elsewhere. Not surprisingly, these northern European and East Asian countries also rank at the top of science literacy rankings, and we already saw the correlation between acceptance of evolution and science literacy and other factors (see my previous post).

The U.S. still holds the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes in sciences, and has since 1956, when the effect of Germany’s experiment with Hitler, anti-Semitism and World War II caused a “brain drain” from Germany to the U.S. and other countries, and ended German supremacy in science. But how long can this U.S. supremacy in science last when our population is less scientifically literate than that of most Asian or northern European nations? How long can it last when political and religious ideologues and zealots interfere with stem-cell research, deny evolution, and try to stifle American awareness of, and preparedness for issues of global warming, population growth, and the limits of our resources?

Some people say, “It can’t happen here. The U.S. has been the #1 power ever since World War II, and now we’re the only superpower left.” But as historians have pointed out, many other powerful societies with enormous economic reach and flourishing sciences and the arts have also declined in the past. Only 150 years ago, the British Empire of Queen Victoria once spanned the entire globe, but now it is a relatively minor player among global powers, as it lost most of its economic strength and its colonial empire during and after World Wars I and II. The once-mighty Soviet Empire fell in just a few years during the 1990s. The U.S. has been embroiled in two different wars in the Middle East, draining billions of dollars and thousands of American lives, while running up huge economic deficits in a time of recession. We like to think of ourselves as exceptional and bulletproof, but that’s not the lesson history teaches us.

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I put it this way in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future: imagine a society where a great flowering of science and technology spanned several centuries—and then, due to dogmatism, it throws away all this progress, and recedes into the Dark Ages. Hard to imagine our own society sliding back into darkness and pre-Industrial conditions? Well, it has happened before. The Greeks made huge advances in mathematics, geometry, engineering, philosophy, arts and literature, especially during the golden ages of Periclean Athens, and again during the Hellenistic Greek period, where the descendants of Alexander’s conquest of the known world flourished in Alexandria (where Ptolemy set up the famous model of the geocentric world) or in Syracuse (where Archimedes made great intellectual leaps in geometry, mathematics, and engineering). But this all vanished when the Greeks were conquered by the Roman Empire. A Roman soldier killed Archimedes during the conquest of Syracuse. The soldier did not recognize him, or realize the genius of the man he had killed, even though there were orders from the Roman generals to capture him alive. Archimedes, completely absorbed in doing geometry, allegedly said “Don’t disturb my circles,” before he was killed. And the Roman conquest of the other great centers of learning, such as Alexandria, did much to set back science and philosophy, although the Romans did great feats of engineering and spread the benefits of Greek mathematics and engineering and civilized life to almost all of Europe.

The Roman Empire fell in 456 A.D., and the western world slipped into the Dark Ages. The advances in science and mathematics and engineering were lost for almost a thousand years, and wouldn’t return to the European world until the Renaissance in the 1400s and 1500s. The ancient texts of the great Greek and Roman authors were largely destroyed as heretical by the Catholic Church, or (since papyrus and parchment were rare and precious), re-used by medieval monks to write religious documents right over the ancient texts (a palimpsest). In fact, most of the copies of the works of classical Greek and Roman authors come from palimpsests, where the monk copyists placed no value on ancient learning, but only saw the ancient parchment as a valuable source of paper for copying their own religious ideas. Only centuries later did scholars realize that these palimpsests contained the key documents of the ancient Greeks and Romans, overwritten by medieval religious graffiti.

Few people realize that during the Dark Ages, there was more science and scholarship going on in Baghdad about 1000 A.D. than in any European city at the time. Known as the “Arabic golden age” from about 800-1100 A.D., Baghdad and many other Arabic cities experienced their own Renaissance, and incredible scientific and mathematical advances occurred. These scholars made advances in agriculture, the arts, economics, industry, law, literature, navigation, philosophy, sciences, sociology, and technology, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding inventions and innovations of their own . There was a long period of religious tolerance in Baghdad and elsewhere, allowing Jews, Christians, and even non-believers to live in peace in a predominantly Muslim world. Thanks to them, we all use Arabic numerals rather than clumsy Roman numerals for most mathematical tasks. Arabic scholars invented the concept of zero, and invented algebra (an Arabic word, as is the word “algorithm”). Many of the stars in the sky have Arabic names, and Arabic astronomers made huge advances, mostly in service of navigation for their large seagoing trade networks. Some of the inventions, concepts, and cultural advances they made include the camera obscura, coffee, soap bar, tooth paste, shampoo, distilled alcohol, uric acid, nitric acid, alembic, valve, reciprocating suction piston pump, mechanized waterclocks, quilting, surgical catgut, vertical-axle windmill, inoculation, cryptanalysis, frequency analysis, three-course meal, stained glass and quartz glass, Persian carpet, and celestial globe.

For three centuries, these advances continued under this period of relatively benign rule and religious tolerance. Then, during the 1100s and later, their Renaissance collapsed in a spectacular fashion. According to George Sarton, “The achievements of the Arabic speaking peoples between the ninth and twelfth centuries are so great as to baffle our understanding. The decadence of Islam and of Arabic is almost as puzzling in its speed and completeness as their phenomenal rise.” Although there is much debate among historians as to the cause of this spectacular decline, much of it can be laid at the feet of religious extremism and intolerance. By the 1200s and 1300s, extremism dominated the Muslim world, and still does today. In this past few decades, the Muslim world has been so dominated by extremists that it is hard for us to think of Muslims as tolerant of other religions, or concerned with concepts in science or philosophy that might threaten their concept of Islam. Indeed, most of the Muslim countries are highly resistant to the notion of evolution, and have their own virulent form of creationism that borrows heavily from the version founded by American fundamentalists.

There are other examples of religious or political intolerance and oppression of science when it conflicts with the established powers. Take the infamous case of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s favorite scientist. Lysenko held almost absolute power over Soviet science from 1927 until 1964. Most modern historians of science consider him a mediocre geneticist who promoted ideas of how Lamarckian inheritance might improve Soviet crop yields and prevent famine. His experimental results were inconclusive or outright fraudulent, yet he told Stalin that he could produce incredible bounties of food. As a result, he became the most powerful figure in the Soviet scientific establishment, and conspired with Stalin to suppress Mendelian geneticists, who really did understand how inheritance worked. Most of them were killed outright, sent to concentration camps, or driven into exile, forever destroying the vitality and strength of Soviet genetics and biology. Soviet genetics fell decades behind that of the rest of the world until the 1960s, when Lysenko was finally denounced, his work discredited, and he died in disgrace. Millions of people died in frequent famines when his nonsensical ideas were applied to agriculture.

No matter whether it is the classic Greek science, or Arabic science, or Soviet science, the conclusion is clear: science cannot be subservient to ideology, and scientists cannot be forced to distort their message or results in order to please the political or religious powers that be. Lysenko and Stalin did not believe in Mendelian genetics or Darwinian biology, and they murdered hundreds of legitimate scientists who had the temerity to disagree with them. Other regimes (such as the Nazis or the devout Muslims after 1100) have distorted science to support their ideas, but ultimately scientific reality must win.

It is true that we don’t live in the Soviet Union of Stalin, and that the United States has some safeguards against such oppression of scientific ideas. But as Mooney (2005) and Shulman (2007) showed, the Bush Administration actively interfered with legitimate scientists, rewriting reports by federal scientists that disagree with their right-wing ideology, encouraging fringe scientists to testify as legitimate equals with well-regarded scientists in order to cancel out their politically inconvenient message, and generally ignoring the conclusions of scientists who don’t agree with them. As we saw in previous posts, the House “Science” Committees are run by creationists and climate deniers. The current Republican House majority asks global warming deniers and other fringe scientists to testify in front of Congress, and passes bills denying obvious scientific facts. Stem-cell research in the United States has been set back compared to that in other countries, as our best scientists go to countries with less political oppression. Likewise, the foot-dragging and denials of global warming by the Bush Administration and the flunkies of the oil industry in Congress may have cost the world valuable time in addressing this serious crisis.

When the prophet Cassandra told the Trojans what they didn’t want to hear, they ignored her and were eventually destroyed. If science tells us that we have evolved from the animal kingdom, or that microbes are evolving resistances to all our medicines, or that our wasteful society is destroying our planet, we had better learn from it, rather than shooting the messenger—and letting our children pay the ultimate price for our folly.

As usual, the late great Carl Sagan said it best:

“There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. It’s a foreboding I have—maybe ill-placed—of an America in my children’s generation, or my grandchildren’s generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we’re a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people (by “the people” I mean the broad population in a democracy) have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what’s true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness. “