Is The Bush Administration Going After Evolution?
Well, maybe this is a honest mistake:
Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.That absence apparently indicates that students in the evolutionary sciences do not qualify for the grants, and some observers are wondering whether the omission was deliberate.
It MUST be a mistake (and if you believe that I need to tell you about a nice, furry bunny that’ll hide eggs around your house this Easter). So let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, as the reporter does:
The question arises at a time when evolution has become a political hot potato at all levels of education. While the theory of evolution has overwhelming support from scientists, some conservative Christian groups argue for alternative explanations of the origins of life, including “intelligent design,” which holds that an intelligent agent guided the creation of life.Even President Bush has weighed in, advocating teaching “both sides of the debate.”
The awards in question — known as Smart Grants, for the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent program — were created by Congress this year, with strong support from the president. The grants are worth up to $4,000 and are awarded in addition to Pell grants.
Recipients must be college juniors or seniors enrolled in one of the technical fields of study that the Department of Education has deemed eligible for funds. Many different topics, as varied as astronomy and Arabic, qualify.
But evolutionary biology is absent.
When some members of the administration talk about “social engineering” or activists judges (if a ruling comes down that they don’t like; rulings they like aren’t done by activist judges but by good judges) they perhaps need to look in the mirror. It certainly seems this is a deliberate POLICY CHANGE done by omission.
Precisely when was there an official policy change by Congress or announced by the administration to downgrade the theory of evolution in regards to anything coming out of the Department of Education? There wasn’t. This is why this administration increasingly is being seen as less of a conservative than a radical one — and that’s just in the eyes of some Republicans.
36 Responses to “Is The Bush Administration Going After Evolution?”
Bush panders to the fringe groups and the MSM lets him get away with this. His pandering is almost as bad as the fundies he is fighting in the ME.
Even I, who usually expect the worst out of these people, would hesitate to call this intentional offhand. You see, I think these people are opportunists, not “true believers”. Maybe John Ashcroft is enough of a crazy man to think like that, but not most republicans. Some of these people ARE stupid, but most aren’t, most are also educated in the best schools money could buy. I’m fairly certain a majority of them have learned evolution, even if, like most non-scientists, they’ve forgotten most of it. They don’t want to hurt science because they PERSONALLY doubt evolution, but because it panders to group that is perceived as an important voter bloc.
The point? It doesn’t look like they made much publicity out of excluding evolutionary biology. Political ploys mean nothing if they are not publicized. Without the publicity it doesn’t give them “traditional values” points, so I don’t think it’s worth their while.
Now on to the next task, where I create a standard email of complaint to send to newspapers who insist on calling “intelligent design” a theory.
I stopped believing in intelligent design after seeing one thing: Bill Frist.
Now that is just ridiculous. Study of Evolution no eligible? What BS is that?
His supporters have been attacking evolution since he took office. Recent polling data would indicate Bush’s war on Science has opened up a new front.
I think Andrew Boswarth covered that in the following piece
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/081806N.shtml
LOL
To be honest, though, I think that it does qualify as a ‘theory’ in the strict meaning of the word (admittingly though, I’m not a scientist -> far from actually)
Actually, no. A scientific theory must have predictive value and it must be testable.
“Intelligent design” fails to meet either requirement.
And yet again proof that I’m not a scientist
How I loath it.
Lynx, this could still be a political ploy. They may not have made a big deal about it because they knew the scientists would. They may have left it out because they knew the fundamental Christians would make a big deal out of it. There are many possibilities.
The thing I don’t get is why fundamental Christians are so closed minded about evolution. Heck, even the Vatican accepts evolution as the sound theory it is and doesn’t try to push “intelligent design” as science.
How long do you think the reporter waited to get a comment back from the Department of Education? I’m guessing 20 minutes. hell, its a burocracy maybe even a day could go by without someone having the balls to clarify this error.
However, anyone want to keep and eye on this one and post back in a week or two if something still hasn’t been done? Then it might be worth the effort.
Or, you know, maybe the executive branch used its constitutionally-provided power to decide how to the executive branch acts?
Evolutionary biology isn’t exactly a field that promotes general welfare. I’m sure there’s a use for cellular paleontology, but compared to, say, pharmatology or materials science, it doesn’t seem .
I suppose we should assume that, because this grant does not apply to literature majors, that Bush’s reading of Camus has lead him to a jihad against books?
I’ll also note that the string theory is not testable with current science and materials, but we teach it anyway.
“Evolutionary biology isn’t exactly a field that promotes general welfare.”
When was the last flu pandemic? Idiot.
LOL…excellent points, gattsuru. I’m quite sure we are headed to another Dark Age where all enlightened thought will be squelched because we might have 22 people majoring in evolutionary biology next year instead of 25. Did anyone honestly even know, prior to reading this story, that it was possible to major in evolutionary biology?
Thanks, gattsuru, also, for reminding Joe that there are different functions assigned to the executive and judicial branches (thus his analogy of this and activist judicial decisions is pretty weak.)
“I’ll also note that the string theory is not testable with current science and materials, but we teach it anyway.”
You are allowed to theorize about things you lack the capacity to test at that point in time. (Note: capactity to test is usually held to a more strict standard than, ‘Jesus will tell me after I go to heaven.’)
Evolutionary biology is an applicable science that has grown tremendously over the last few decades – NOT just because of interest in dinosaurs, but because of interest in understanding how destructive microorganisms mutate.
This program is directed at applied sciences with the most immediate and significant impact on our economy, safety, and general well being. The politics of it has a whole lot less to do with evolution than with determining which science disciplines are important enough to be subsidized. I’m sure we could go through quite a list of “Why did they leave THAT out?” Picking on evolution is a bit over the top.
Unless, of course, the oversight committee saw the word “evolutionary” and automatically dismissed it for…well…ANY reason.
The real sin is an uninformed knee-jerk response.
Ryan:
“The thing I don’t get is why fundamental Christians are so closed minded about evolution. Heck, even the Vatican accepts evolution as the sound theory it is and doesn’t try to push “intelligent design” as science.”
I was raised in a family of fundamental Christians. What you have to understand is that they are “Believers”, and their entire lives are centered in their beliefs. In other words it’s all about “beliefs”, and not at all about “facts”.
A foundational tennant of their belief system is a an acceptanace of the literal translation of the Bible. The Bible says that the Universe was created in 7 Earth days, and that is that. No room for the mountains of facts that Evolutionary science and Cosmology bring to bear on the issue.
If you pull the Biblical creation story out equation then the Bible can no longer be accepted as literal truth, and their whole belief system starts to crumble at its foundation. Fundamental Christians literally cannot go their in their minds. If they did they would risk destroying the very means by which they order their lives.
I’m not arguings that it makes any sense, I’m just saying that you have to understand where they are coming from to understand why they so staunchly reject Evolutionary science and cling to “intellegent design”.
How much do you know about evolutionary biology and its uses in things such as pharmatology? To quote Arthur Johnson:
Another quote I found interesting from there:
C Stanley the article says that evolutionary biology MADE the cut, got a score on the classification that qualified it, but is missing from the final list:
Under that classification scheme, there is a heading for “Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology,” under which 10 biological fields are defined. For instance, ecology is 26.1301, and evolutionary biology is 26.1303.
But on a list that defines majors eligible for the grants, issued by the department in May, one of those 10 is missing. On that list, the classification numbers rise in order from 26.1301 to 26.1309 — with the exception of a blank line where 26.1303, or evolutionary biology, would fall.
gattsuru wrote:
String theory isn’t taught in high schools. Moreover, it is at least presumably capable of making predictions, otherwise it will be dismissed as pseudo-science.
As for intelligent design and other forms of “scientific creationism,” on one email list, a friend by the name of Shalini wrote, “So far, no creationist on DebunkCreation has provided any scientific alternate theories.”
She was refering to the email list:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DebunkCreation
… to which she and I both belong.
The following was my response, with some editing…
Well, I think the first hurdle for them is simply the fact that they are afraid of having their “scientific theory of creationism” falsified — as this would result in the falsification of their particular belief in God. So, even when a creationist gets past the song-and-dance of preaching their beliefs or attempting to argue against evolutionary biology in particular or empirical science in general (rather than putting forward a positive empirical case for their own views), while they may attempt to put forward a “theory” which sounds scientific, it won’t actually be anything falsfiable. That is, the “theory” won’t be used to generate empirical hypotheses which may then be tested by means of as of yet undiscovered evidence or through experiments.
Oftentimes, they will simply limit themselves to predicting only that which was discovered before they proposed their “theory” in the first place, so that they may tailor their “theory” to fit the evidence. This is entirely unlike the motivation which drives real scientists. Real scientists do everything the can to make their theories as testable and as falsifiable as possible. Real scientists make specific predictions about what has yet to be discovered, and try to make those predictions as risky as possible given the current state of our generally accepted knowledge, knowing that if they do so and win, then they win big.
However, there is another hurdle standing in the way of any “scientific creationist theory.” They wish to claim that God is both omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipotent (all-powerful). However, to make specific predictions, they must assume that God is of a specific nature, that he is limited. Thus for example, when they claim that the reasons for the genetic similarities between different species is due to the fact that once God “found something which worked,” he “didn’t want to reinvent the wheel,” they are assuming, at least implicitly, that God is limited in his powers of thought and action. He couldn’t “waste his time” or “resources” on the “discovery” of some alternate way of doing things and then implimenting that approach. Thus if they attempt to create a genuine scientific theory of creationism, their God becomes finite. But they would find this entirely unacceptable.
Logically, they could say that God created the universe, but leave it to empirical science to discover how God created the universe. This would be the traditional Christian approach of the past two centuries. Alternatively, they can simply claim that dispite all appearances to the contrary, the universe is young — and was created to appear as if it were ancient — this would be the Omphalos approach. Or they could claim that all evidence supporting the view that the universe is ancient was placed there by the devil. But the first recognizes the division between science and religion — and would leave science free to seek knowledge and people free to seek knowledge by means of science — and even hold different religious or philosophical beliefs — all of which Fundamentalists find entirely unacceptable. As such, Fundamentalists will of necessity opt for either of the two latter views.
So this leaves them with the argument that while all science and all scientific evidence supports the existence of an evolutionary process and is highly likely to continue to do so as long as the world exists, this is a matter of appearance, illusion, perhaps as the result of the actions of God, but quite possibly as the result of Satanic deceit. In either case, they must reject the entire empirical enterprise — and if they are to get others to accept their views, as a matter of strategy, they must preach the rejection of this world, employ deceit — perhaps to counter Satanic deceit, or seek to impose their views by means of force through the establishment of a totalitarian theocracy — or perhaps all three. I myself strongly suspect their strategy is generally this last alternative: a truly unholy trinity.
String theory isn’t taught in high schools. Moreover, it is at least presumably capable of making predictions, otherwise it will be dismissed as pseudo-science.
Yes, string theory is taught in public schools. I have the teacher’s edition of a physics 117 text book in my house that discusses the very basics of it not far from a review of VESPR theory. It’s the single easiest Unified Theory to dumb down : of course it’s going to be covered. Book writers don’t like to list a problem with no solution.
And, no, string theory doesn’t make predictions. In the words of Richard Feynman, they make excuses.
“As such, Fundamentalists will of necessity opt for either of the two latter views.”
Do I need to name the logical error for taking some possibilities and assuming they are the only ones?
I think the statement that we “teach” string theory in high school is a little…strange. I would imagine (though I do not know) that it is brought up, maybe even pointed to… but here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:
Yes, it is not technically a theory.
No, I don’t buy that it’s being taught as fact in any sense in a high school textbook.
Perhaps you can link evidence?
(Clarification: being mentioned in a textbook and being taught are two entirely different things. Even creationism gets a lot more play in textbooks than it gets teaching in the classroom–sometimes a book will mention it, in passing, without going into details. I find it hard to imagine a high school textbook having the mathematical and theoretical maturity to “teach” String Theory.)
gattsuru wrote:
Mentioning it in passing is not the same thing as teaching it. And no, at this point it is not something that can be tested – but this doesn’t prevent it from being developed into something which can be tested or which is at least potentially testable, otherwise, as I have said, it will be dismissed as pseudo-science.
As for “scientific creationism,” I believe I demonstrated that in principle there are only two alternatives. If you disagree, then please explain how can you have a theory which makes specific predictions based upon “God did it!” without rendering God finite.
PS for gattsuru…
As far as string theory goes, currently I would regard it more as a field within mathematics, an abstract branch of geometry, much like Riemannian geometry. At the moment, I would not consider it an empirical theory but as the mathematical language for what may become an empirical theory – or not. In the case of Riemannian geometry, Riemmann attempted to at least measure the curvature of space back in the 1800s – believing that it gravity might “bend” light in a way that his geometry might be able to describe. It wasn’t until Einstein that his geometry was suitably modified and made into the mathematical language of an empirical theory capable of making predictions.
Now with regard to religion and science, assuming you are religious (which I believe is a safe assumption), either you will view them as complementary but non-overlapping, or you will have to choose between the two, denying faith in favor of empirical science, or denying empirical science as dealing with a realm of illusion where religion deals with what is genuinely real.
*
“… there are a great many religious individuals who believe that God is not something which one can fit inside a test-tube, and that it is a mistake to treat the belief in God as an empirical hypothesis to be tested inside a lab or a class devoted to science. They believe that the very act of attempting to demonstrate the existence of God is itself destructive of true faith.”
A Test for Intelligent Design Propoents
Chris wrote:
There is a great deal more going on, too – although a great deal of it ultimately has to do with viruses. For example, we have been able to identify 30,000 endogenous retroviruses in the human haploid genome, we have identified three endogenous retroviruses which create a barrier to the mother’s immune system in the placenta where just these three retroviruses alone contribute proteins to over a dozen different organs in the body. By comparing endogenous retroviral sequences, we have been able to verify the phylogenetic relationships between different species of primates, we have identified the hippo as the closest land-based, extant relative of the whales. Moreover, 49 percent of your DNA consists of retroelements of one form or another – and as such appears to be relics of earlier retroviral infections.
Moreover, by examining the developmental, regulatory pathways and their basis in the respective genomes, we have been able to explain why, for example, when dolphins lost their hind limbs, it was sudden, whereas in the case of whales, it was much more gradual. We are able to explain the origin of batwings through a shift towards the posterior late in embryonic development in the domain of expression of the HoxD13 gene which results in a higher level of expression in a bone morphogenic protein (by 30%), resulting in an increased rate of growth in the forearm and digits, increasing the length of the forearm by a factor of 2 and the length of the digits by a factor from 6 to 8.
We are able to understand the chromosomal rearrangements which took place at 300 hotspots 50-60 MYA at the time of the mammalian radiation in terms of hairpin and cruciform structures which exist in H- and Z-DNA. These structures promote mutations by catalyzing chemical reactions. Moreover, the very same sites are still active today. One tenth of one percent of all newborns are born with chromosomal rearrangements, and fifty percent are not clinically significant. However, the very same hotspots have also been implicated in much of the cancer seen in hospitals.
At a genetic level, we are able to explain the variation between different breeds of dog as being due to hypermutative tandem repeats in the coding sequences for specific regulatory proteins, and it appears that much of evolution is driven by hypermutative microsatellites in the promoter regions for various genes. Tandem repeats, including microsatellites, appear to be relics of viral infections. Spliceosomal introns (which separate coding regions within a single gene and splice coding sequences so that, on the average, we have three proteins for every gene) appear to have descended from earlier type 2, self-splicing, introns found in bacteria today, the latter of which are mobile elements akin to the viruses which infect bacteria (“phages”), resulting in so much of the lateral gene transmission between different bacterial species.
Then of course there are all the fossils we are finding, such as the titaalik roseae…
This discussion could’ve went all sorts of wrong, but it turned out to be intelligent discussion. Kudos, all! I’m serious, too.
Chris and Timothy Chase gave some fine examples of advances in scientific knowledge relating to evolution and I, too, commend the serious discussion. I remain unconvinced though, that failure to give preferential grants to students who wish to major in this field would cause a cataclysm, as the original article seemed to imply.
My hunch (and I’m willing to admit I could be wrong) is that those who declare this as their major field of study are theoriticians, and that most of the practical applications that the aforementioned commentors noted have likely been made by virologists, geneticists, etc. Evolutionary biology is a part of many scientific fields, but what I was saying is that if I met someone at a dinner party who told me he was an evolutionary biologist, my first thought would be, “I had no idea that such a thing existed,” and my second thought would most assuredly NOT be, “Thank goodness we have enough of these guys around and I certainly hope that our president will increase funding so that more people can enter this field of study.”
Having said that, I will note that if the Bush administration did leave this one field of study off of the qualifying list simply because they worried that Falwell’s crowd would get uptight about the word evolution, then that is stupid. Pandering to a narrow constituent group is always foolish and often backfires anyway.
Ryan,
The Vatican and fundamentalists are at odds with each other on a LOT of issues. In fact, a certain sect of fundamentalists pushes the belief that a future pope will be the antichrist.
Come on down to the Bible belt if you’d like to hear more of this fun discussion.
Actually the way I read the article, it’s not a matter of a draft list and then a final cut. They seem to be saying that the first list is a standard list of all possible major fields of study, by the DOE. Then there was a list of the fields which were approved to receive this grant. And, in the section where evolutionary biology falls, it is the only one that doesn’t appear on the final list.
Again I’ll say that if this was intentional for political purposes, I think that’s just dumb. But if it was a conscious choice because the person(s) who made the decision didn’t feel that that field met the criteria (particularly if OTHER fields were excluded), then that is certainly a legitimate decision. The article implies that evolutionary biology was the only scientific field that was left off the final list…but all it really states is that it was the only field that fell within that section which was excluded.
C Stanley, I may have just that experience some time down the road now that my father moved to Alabama. I’m sure it will be an educational experience to spend some time down there. I’m sure quite different from Wisconsin and Colorado, the two states where I’ve spent most of my life.
As for the benefits of evolutionary biology as it is related to different fields, my science knowledge is fairly limited but I believe evolutionary biologists are the ones who came up with and tested the theories and procedures that virologists, geneticists, pharmacologists, and other scientists use. Without encouraging evolutionary biologists to continue working on theories and procedures, we could hamstring the abilities of these other scientists who rely on evolutionary biology to continue coming up with new medicines and medical procedures that could help many people. Other sciences that don’t directly lead to “real world” results but are important “upstream” of those results were not left off the list, why was this one seemingly singled out?
What a minute — I thought Intelligent Design had nothing to do with God or Religion?
Um, unless God created all the laws of nature including the process of evolution. There are contradictions between this belief and the literal interpretation of the Bible, but not an inherent contradiction as long as you accept a more abstract interpretation of the Bible creation story.
In response to the quote by David Klinghoffer’s:
C Stanley wrote:
I am not religious, but I see no conflict between religion and science – if both are properly understood. With regard to what you are suggesting concerning the relationship between God and evolution, I have developed this idea somewhat in “Religion and Science”, then of course there is Kenneth Miller, a biologist and staunch critic of creationism, and more recently Francis Collins, who heads the Human Genome Project. A fairly mainstream view of God in Christianity is that he exists outside of space and time, and that he is both the transcendental, original cause and the immanent, sustaining cause of everything which exists. In fact this goes back to St. Augustine. Empirical science does not deal in either of these two fundamental forms of causation and I strongly suspect it never will: they are part of the subject matter of metaphysics, philosophy and theology.
Likewise, when evolutionary biology speaks of “random mutation,” by “random,” it does not mean random in any metaphysical sense, but random with respect to fitness, which is an empirical question. For example, there exists the question of whether there might exist a mechanism for mutation which itself is the product of natural selection such that mutations are not random with respect to fitness. The evidence for this has been mixed. A branch of empirical science which one might argue comes closer to introducing randomness at a metaphysical level would be quantum mechanics, but if there exists a god outside of space and time, what is random for us may not be relative to him. Indeed, if he exists outside of time, it is difficult to see how it could be.
With respect to the more abstract understanding of the Bible of which you speak, as I understand it, many Christian clergy of various denominations understand Genesis allegorically. In their view, Genesis expresses certain fundamental truths regard the relationship between God and his creation in the language which speaks most directly to the human soul — that of poetry, symbol, and metaphor, and in this way is able to speak to all individuals in all ages.
(However, I also understand that different clergy may interpret Genesis differently, which at the same time does not necessarily mean that there is any substantive disagreement. Personally, I think it would be interesting if a number of clergy from different traditions were to gather their different interpretations into a single volume.)
Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List
By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: August 24, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/24/washington/24evo.html
They are now saying that the omission of evolutionary biology majors from grants was due to a clerical mistake. Given the attacks on evolutionary biology by fundamentalists and other members of the religious right recently, as well as Bush’s support for the “teach the controversy” intelligent design strategy for inserting often-refuted creationist arguments against evolutionary biology, it seems that some are convinced.
Here are two excerpts:
***
Just a very brief thought on the evolution vs intelli design thing to toss in here:
I think it’s the word “THEORY” itself that causes such a problem. In a non-scientific context, it implies a thought, an idea, a flight of fancy even (“My theory is that the dog channel-surfs while we’re not home.”).
So the anti-evolution folks read “Theory of Evolution” and probably see a bunch of white labcoats sitting around a box of donuts tossing “theories” around. If you listen to the rhetoric from the i.d. camp, they obviously don’t understand the word in its scientific sense.
Confounded semantics!!!
The Bush Administration spokespeople contacted about this try to claim that it was just an oversight, but nearly four months later they still haven’t corrected this “oversight.� And students wanting to major in evolutionary biology and receive SMART grants are still unable to get SMART grants to study that scientific field because the Bush Administration is unable or unwilling to correct something they claim is merely an oversight.
Given the past opposition of the administration towards evolutionary biology, if this were merely an oversight they would have corrected it immediately to avoid the appearance of bias. But since they have not corrected this oversight from last May even though it was brought to their attention shortly after it was placed on the Dept. of Education’s website and they continue to refuse to allow students to request and receive SMART grants for evolutionary biology, this is no oversight. This is purposeful and only an idiot would think otherwise.
The Administration thinks the American people are idiots to tell us that this was an oversight that they just can’t seem to get around to correcting four months later.
From the article:
That blank line is still there from last May: a blank line in the Bush Administration’s view of what Congress has instructed them to do to increase science and math study in the US and a blank line in their assessment of the intelligence of the American people.