Keith Windschuttle, hypocrite historian

Keith Windschuttle is the Australian equivalent of a holocaust denier. His publications on history (especially 2002's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One) claimed there were no massacres (let alone genocidal) by white settlers of aboriginal Australians. He has claimed that oppositional historians have fabricated evidence, misrepresented facts, and insufficiently researched the sources.

Since that book's publication, Windschuttle has repeated promised imminent publication of a Volume Two, which has never emerged, no doubt due at least in part to the extensive rebuttals that have been published of Volume One.

Of course, Windschuttle's heyday was in the era of Australia's arch-conservative Prime Minister John Howard (1996 - 2007). Howard warmly embraced Windschuttle's views (both railed against a purported 'black armband' view of history), to the extent of appointing him - a contemporary at Canterbury Boys High School - to the board of the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster (previously mentioned here).

Windschuttle was also appointed editor of the conservative journal Quadrant. And he has now fallen victim to his own vituperations. Without checking sources - or the author's bona fides - he published an article on genetic engineering that turned out to be a deliberate hoax. This was more Sokal than Ern Malley - the writer followed Alan Sokal's temptation to an editor: does it sound good, and does it reinforce the editor's ideological preconceptions?

Enthusiasm for such an article is not a hanging offence. But the bait was too good for Windschuttle, and he published on sympathy rather than rigour.

So what does he do now? Hang on in case the Quadrant board doesn't boot him out? It'll be hard for him to fall back on Volume Two: his work would be subject to fine scrutiny. Shame he remains festering like a carbuncle on the ABC. But it can't last forever.

A footnote on bad science: both climate change sceptics and creationists are these days clutching at straws, rather than engaging in rigorous analysis (SMH Columnist Michael Duffy is a case in point, often arguing with incomplete understanding of the presentation of facts of climate change). It can't take much to tempt such people to hang their hat to anything that sounds to them plausible. They would be more deserving of this treatment than scientists, since they do not foster debate by constant analysis and refinement through exchange and testing of ideas - more by grabbing at plausibility that suits a perspective.

Creationists - dumb and dishonest

The 2005 Dover trial was a re-run of the Scopes monkey trial - except that the creationists had created a modern vernacular in the so-called "intelligent design".

The broad brush strokes are easy to recall. Reason (rationalism) was ultimately triumphant again, and the Pennsylvania township's creationists on the school board were unceremoniously dumped at the first opportunity.

But a documentary aired tonight (Judgment Day - Intelligent Design On Trial) was particularly adept at the nuances of the case, for which a bald reading doesn't do justice.

For one thing, it gave a clear depiction of the skill of the prosecutors of the case in opposing Intelligent Design's presence in the science curriculum.

It could also be said that the judge was to be commended for not being swayed by the creationists' attempts at obfustication: it's easy to imagine that in both this and the original Scopes trial, the hands of less rational judges would have directed more anti-science a verdict. However, it could equally be said that appeals would ultimately have carried the day in each case anyway.

Particularly funny was a joke that must have done the rounds of evolutionists the world over. The book that was foisted on the school, the ID tract Of Pandas And People, was a core aspect of the defendants' argument that it wasn't about religion. The prosecutors subpoenaed all draughts of the book, and painstakingly analysed them. Turns out the publishers, in their hurry to substitute intelligent design for creationism, slipped up in one cut-and-paste, and ended up publishing the phrase "cdesign proponentsists" - ie someone had attempted to paste in "design proponents" over the top of the word "creationists" (full details here). The joke was that they had found the missing link between creationism and intelligent design.


That wasn't the only creationist dishonesty exposed in the case. The other one (that I remember) came when defendants tried to disguise the funding of the creationist book purchases. When the creationist bagman was caught out in a lie in the trial (no, I did not know the source of the funding), he fumbled for a while before falling back on the excuse that he "mis-spoke". Personally, I believe that there would have been numerous other examples of dishonesty amongst creationists involved in that trial, but it begs the question of what they believe versus what they want to believe. The Discovery Institute must be a seething cauldron of cognitive dissonance.


I very much doubt any other OECD country experiences significant creationist pressure. Only in the USA; and even there it's as much an issue of right wing ideology as it is religion.


Fortunately Obama - a religious man - has been unequivocal in his support for rational science, and evolution in particular.

Americans, evolution, and survey methods

Early this year, the FASEB Journal [Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology] reported a survey of American attitudes to evolution.

Surveys typically show a surprisingly high proportion of Americans don't believe evolution is a fact - New Scientist has in the past reported a worse result for the US than for most developed nations. However, clearly it matters how the questions are phrased, and the overall context of the survey. Drill down, and it is likely a religion-focused survey will elicit sympathetic responses, where many will be reluctant to support evolutionary theory if it means denouncing their religious beliefs. Likewise, if the questions are posited in a rationalist context, people are more likely to want to be seen to be rational, particularly if the questions aren't seen to be placed in direct opposition to their beliefs.

One example of the difference in survey methods: in the FASEB report, a simple examination of three different surveys gave three different measures of whether Americans thought evolution was guided by natural processes or by a supreme being.

Gallup: 13% natural selection vs 38% supernatural guidance
Pew: 25% vs 18%
FASEB: 36% vs 25% on one set of questions; 32% vs 21% on another
[In each case the remainder didn't accept evolution - as it was phrased. Note that Pew Reseach is not a specifically religious organisation.]



A key finding of the FASEB survey - and a central didactic point of the accompanying article - is said to be that people's support for [teaching] evolution is directly related to their level of understanding of science. Stating the obvious, true, and it doesn't address the disparity between the level of acceptance of evolution in America and other western nations. The obvious response is the difference is due to the particular sociological - political, religious, ideological - pressures in that country.

The full FASEB report here; a press report on it here.

Lewis Black on creation; Bronowski on humans

Something to round off the week. A comedian gives a perspective on creationism that is quite apposite - and funny. Lewis Black doesn't need to engage from a rationalist point of view - but it's not a rationalist argument anyway.

In the process he has a dig at the lack of commitment to solar energy.

Don't know the bloke, but he seems all right on the whole. (Again, thanks to Bill for the reference.)


I also watched some of a BBC documentary series from 1973, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent Of Man (sic). It's very specifically Dr Bronowski's perspective, and despite the date, I can't fault his take on the emergence of human civilisation. On the basis of what I've seen so far, well worth a wat

Science: New science snippets

New Scientist (right), the weekly British science news magazine, is often an embarassment of riches. When I had a weekly subscription, I ended up with rather a backlog of issues to consume my reading space.

The occasional issue is most welcome; this week's had a number of interesting items, some of which appear here today.


Creationism and science teachers
The US is the only western country for which creationism is a significant issue. Most of the rest of the world is accepting of scientific reason; or more correctly, most of the rest of the world doesn't have a powerful fundamentalist christian lobby voice.
A survey of science teachers (presumably secondary level) from Pennsylvania State University has found some interesting statistics - as well as a fair bit of the bleeding obvious. A quarter of the 900-odd respondents taught about creationism, and about half of those presented it as a valid scientific alternative to Darwinism.
Sixteen percent of these science teachers believe humans were created in the last 10,000 years.
So, half of those who raised the concept of creationism didn't teach that it was valid; and there was a number who thought it was valid, but didn't teach it.
Interestingly, it notes that the amount of class time given to evolution was higher, the more science education the science teachers themselves had. Making a rather good case for science teachers to be properly trained.
The study suggested that less-trained teachers felt less confidence engaging in the subject (ie responding to questions).
However, I strongly suspect that even where science is taught properly, a lot of those teachers would have a somewhat weak grasp of the two fundamental tenets of random mutation and natural selection, let alone the myriad implications that stem from them.

Inbreeding and genetic disorder
A review of studies from Murdoch University in Western Australia examined genetic disorders amongst the offspring of first cousins. This would be a rather surrogate measure, of course, of the effects of inbreeding. The study found a 1.2% higher rate of infant mortality of offspring of first cousins, compared to the overall population. Another such (review) study in 2002 found a similar order of magnitude: less than 3%.

Artificial legs as a boost for runners
Recently was shown a prosthetic foot design that enabled high performance sprinting, notably in double amputee Oscar Pistorius. Claims then made that this unfairly boosted performance - which have now been tested.
Again, a proxy measure was used to determine any advantage conferred: the amount of calories burnt per distance - ie whether it was cheaper to fuel the prostheses.
The answer given was no - it wasn't more efficient. So Pistorius is free to compete in the Olympics - unless some other hurdle appears.

Linking us to starfish

More precisely, this post is about the connection between vertebrates and echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, and so on).


The New Scientist article mentioned in the last post describes this connection, which seems fairly uncontentious on the whole, with broad agreement in the sources I've consulted (Tudge, Dawkins, Palaeos, Wikipedia).

It goes like this, according to the article: echinoderm -> hemichordate -> sea squirt -> lancelet -> vertebrate.


By phylum, the latter three are all chordates, but sea squirts and lancelets are more basal than the vertebrates we know and love.

Tunicates (sea squirts) - © Martin Riddle

They constitute the three sub-phyla of the Chordata phylum: respectively Tunicata (Urochordata, until recently), Cephalochordata, and Vertebrata. Wikipedia lists the number of species for each as approx 3000, 30, and 58,000 respectively.


The article suggests lancelets were probably neotenous tunicate larvae. Funny to see sessile marine creatures (pictured above) related to vertebrates. But from what I've read, most sessiles seem to have a motile juvenile phase. So the above is what we could have looked like if we'd continued developing, rather than reproducing early then trundling off down a different path. Rather a plank in the eye for creationists, I'm afraid, but an object lesson in deanthropocentrism.



I recommend this entry in a Nature.com blog about tunicates (it's where I got the nice picture). Eerie.

Evolution Quackery 1: Wrong classification!

As I was browsing through the library's books around 576 in the Dewey system - Evolution - I came across yet another book that offered a challenge. One of those books that says "Darwin got it wrong" or "the failure of evolution theory".

I rifled through it, but found that all its references were to the Bible; there were no references to scientific sources.

I left a note for the librarian, and later got a call back. She agreed with me that it was incorrectly classified, and said it would get filed under religion. She wanted to cross reference it to evolution, but by that point I wasn't going to argue the toss.

Dewey 576 is a scientific classification. It is not religion, philosophy or religious philosophy.


I am keen to read well-sourced books that refute some aspect of current evolutionary theory. There is no requirement to conform to current theory: paradigm shifts come from challenges to orthodoxy. This is how knowledge is advanced and refined.

But that book was not about science.


This is a simple case. To follow are some less trivial examples of misguided attempts at anti-science.