Casey and the Straw Man

Following the exploits of the members of the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design movement is a sort of perverse pleasure for me, something of an exercise in schadenfreude, if you will. For my own amusement, not only do I routinely listen to some of the more execrable of their podcasts, but I also get update emails from the Disco, a little thing that they like to call "Nota Bene" (although they have to explain for the more cloth-eared of their readers that it's Latin for "note well" in each of the emails under that name). In it, readers will find all of the delightful nuggets of banality penned by some of the lower-wattage lights of the ID crowd that they've come to expect: Klinghoffer, Luskin, and Egnor, among others.

I consider this reading to be a sort of "opposition research", in the same way that one political party will study the policies of another in attempting to find the inherent flaws and weaknesses, or the way that a barrister might try to find ways in which their client could not have been outside that pub on the rainy Tuesday night in question.

And this time... oh, poor Mr Luskin. He just tries so damn hard to come up with something to say. This is a man who seems moderately surprised at anything said by anyone in any interview he's ever conducted. A good example of this: when interviewing Steven Fuller (a sociologist!) for the ID: the Future (now in 3-D!) podcast back in September - who was quite clearly an American, as anyone with ears would have told you - not only did Mr Luskin mispronounce the name of the university (Fuller holds his post at the University of Warwick: it's "Warr-ick", mate - something called the "law of consonantal shift" that you might want to look into), but he then went on to belabour the absence of his guest's accent, taking pains to point out that he "has a number of English relatives", so he "knows English accents". Mr Luskin may well know them - just not well enough to reproduce basic aspects of pronunciation. (ID: the Future is out there on iTunes, if you want to listen to the train wreck in progress, or I'm sure that there must be another source that doesn't increase their download figures.)

Then there was the whole fracas with Tiana and Kate from the Enemy Combatant Trail Mix and Cuddly Atheist blogs, respectively, and their by-now famous (and utterly brilliant) encounter with Mr Luskin at the Disco. As you'll hear on the most recent episode of Skepticality (look for the show dated 2nd December 2008), they blagged their way into the Bat Cave Discovery Institute and got the grand tour and the free literature, operating under the pretense that they were, in fact, a couple of fun-loving girls looking for some good... information on alternatives to Darwinian evolution? I guess so. Apparently, they were also as overwrought as newts (read: mildly intoxicated) at the time of deciding to undertake their commando raid on the Fortress of Solitude Disco, although being allowed into the hallowed halls must have been a very sobering experience indeed.

Why do I bring all of this up now? Good question. Leaving aside the matter of just how willing the Disco is to debate "the issues" (presumably, the answer is "not terribly") and have the "civilised discourse" about which Mr Luskin claims to feel so strongly, we are faced with having to evaluate their positions on - gasp - the strength of what they actually say. In articles and stuff. Really. Why? 'Cause that's what we do when people won't talk to us like the grown-ups that we might otherwise have assumed them to be.

The articles that appear in the tired dog and pony show of "Nota Bene" are therefore of particular interest to us, because they are like a drunk telegraphing his punches in a bar fight. They indicate to us new fronts in the battle to jam that Wedge that they keep trying to make us forget about somewhere quite uncomfortable indeed.

Sadly then, it's not good news for our faithful interlocutor when he once more sails into uncharted waters with his latest piece: "Materialist Science Fiction Promoted to Students at a Local Public Library". As we know, if you subscribe to Intelligent Design, then books, unless they are stamped with the Dembski-Behe-Wells seal of approval, are not your friends. And even in modern public libraries, there are bound to be one or two books about the place.

What is the particular book that has raised Mr Luskin's ire? It is a controversial title called Life on Other Planets, by Rhonda Donald. Unfortunately for him, this book is readily available in my local library. Not that anyone needed to even see it to know that if he objected to it, there was very likely little wrong with it. Clearly it's a bit simple and doesn't express itself with the clarity and thoroughness that I might otherwise have liked... oh, wait a moment: it's a children's book! That's right, Mr Luskin, you're now pitting your finely honed legal mind against... a children's science author.

So what is our fearless hero's objection to this book? That it's speculative? That until we know more about neighbouring star systems it is very difficult to imagine what might constitute "life" on distant worlds? That the dream of encountering extraterrestrial life, though statistically possible, is still dependent upon variables that we haven't even begun to compute yet?

No. None of those. He's worried about some Dembski-esque rubbish about "information."

One of the pretend assaults on evolutionary thought (and maybe "assaults" is too strong a word, let's say "skirmishes") has been to say that, according to information theory, evolution cannot be true, because there is no mechanism by which the "new information" required to move from general randomness to "specific complexity" (that is, when something is so thoroughly coded that it looks like it must have been "created" by the big angry designer in the sky). Information theory, as I understand it, is a great way to work out problems in software, to understand how networks and distributed computing systems work, things like that. It is, however, complete bollocks in reference to evolutionary biology.

At this point, yes, I'm going to dismiss everything that Mr Dembski has ever said with this simple statement: "information theory, as applied by Mr Dembski, says absolutely nothing useful about evolutionary biology and should be discarded". There, I've said it. No, I'm not a mathematician, just someone with an active baloney detector. But don't worry, real mathematicians have rejected the whole "information" argument already. To use the "information" argument is to play on terrain dictated by the ID gang, and what's wrong with perfectly ordinary evolutionary biology, without all of these nonsense "filters", "sieves", and "collanders"? By the time I've read a chapter of Dembski, I can't decide whether to put out my eyes or make coffee and pasta while sifting dirt for pottery shards. Seriously. What Dembski did was not to simplify the way in which we understand evolutionary biology, it was to overlay his own mathematical wing-nuttery onto reality and demand that reality take notice.

Mr Luskin, therefore, wants us to be outraged by the absence of references to "information" in author Donald's description of "a recipe for life" (see, we're back to cookery already) in her speculative book for children on the subject of extraterrestrial life. Because the "complex and specified information" is not brought up by the book's author, the book should be classified, in Mr Luskin's head, as science fiction.

Let's think about this again for a moment: Mr Luskin walks into his local public library... presumably to see if there are any naughty books about Evilushun that they'd like him to play Bradbury fireman with. No, they reject his request, but then he happens to see a book, perhaps displayed on a table, trying to entice children to read. It's a table about space, or some such thing. He picks up the book, and scans past page 4 (big photo of a radio telescope), reads the title of Chapter One, "Is Anybody Out There" on page 5, skims a bit, and comes to page 6, where the big heading A Recipe for Life leaps out at him. He reads the next seventeen words, and stops and closes the book. Perhaps he read a bit further, to see if at any point it mentions Professor Dawkins ritually slaughtering puppies, but failing that, he puts it down. He has his new topic for the newsletter: what a scoop! This book, which has the temerity to suggest that you need "at least three things" for life on Earth to exist, is clearly science fiction, not science fact.

Casey, dear boy, you might want to read the rest of the book: it's only fifty-six pages, index included, and there are lots of pretty pictures. And here's what it talks about: the rest of Chapter One deals with the organic molecules found in interstellar space and the hypotheses about the beginnings of life on Earth. Chapter Two deals with extremophiles, with life that exists at the edges of what we would consider comfortable and possible. Chapter Three deals with exploring our solar system, looking for other life, or signs of it. Chapter Four discusses hunting for planets outside of the solar system. And Chapter Five is concerned, in a purely speculative manner, what an alien species might be like. That's the book: short and sweet and largely readable. So here's the problem with your assessment.

You see over the years, I've read a lot of science fiction. It used to be, in less-enlightened times, that there were just a few main ingredients in the successful science fiction tale: rocket ships, ray guns, robots, and robustly-bosomed maidens requiring rescue, preferrably on planets which have yet to discover the social taboos which dictate the necessity of clothing. Sure, it wasn't high-brow, but it wasn't half exciting when I was a teenager. Of course, science fiction is more sophisticated now, and so am I... well, for the most part. But what I can tell you, from my own expertise, is that the book that has caused Mr Luskin such caniptious and impotent rage is not science fiction. It is... science. For kids.

And here once again Mr Luskin has done what he and his Disco-theque colleagues are very good at doing: he has, without doing a whole lot of work or research, constructed a nice, tidy straw man, and then, ever so proud of himself, he's knocked it on its arse. Well done, sir. Well done, indeed.

The problem with straw men, though, is that sometimes they get back up again, especially if you're talking about science fiction.