…and this is a 
Eamon Knight finds an irritating debate (you can listen to the podcast) between a real evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne, and a theologian and a philosopher, and … Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute. The first three are all pro-evolution (although I found the theologian to be annoyingly apologetic for religion, naturally enough; Denis Lamoureux is a weird and obnoxious kind of Christian who seems to use science as a tool to proselytize) and Nelson fulfills the stereotype: he opens the debate with a quotemine and gross misrepresentation. He claims that W. Ford Doolittle rejects common descent. He claims that this notion that "all living things share a common ancestor" is being challenged; unfortunately and misleadingly, he puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Doolittle would say that "all living things share a common ancestor". Doolittle argues that there was a large pool of organisms down near the root of the tree of life that liberally swapped genes among one another, so that you can't trace life back to a single common ancestor — you can trace it back to a large population where species distinctions were greatly blurred.
Misrepresentation of legitimate scientists it's about all Nelson brings to the debate. It's an excellent example of why it's a waste of time to treat these kooks as fair and equal and trustworthy.
For another example, Nelson claims that one justification for pushing ID is that our past understanding of biology was flawed (not that he says anything that ID contributes to our current understanding). He claims that when he was in school he was taught that "cells are just bags of enzymes", and that ID has revealed all these amazing, unexplainable "molecular machines." Nelson is about my age or younger; when I was taught cell biology back in those same dark ages, I certainly was not taught any such nonsense. Compartments and transport, for instance, were major parts of the curriculum.
It's not just that these creationists don't understand biology — it's that they actively lie about biology. Don't trust them.
Mike Dunford has another recent example of Nelson mangling a scientific conclusion.
Comments
Posted by: Brownian | July 4, 2007 12:36 PM
Denis Lamoureux is relatively infamous at the U of Alberta (my alma mater) for his undergraduate "Science and Religion" classes. I've never been able to fit one in so I can't say anything from first-hand experience, but PZ's assessment seems pretty bang-on: most students I've talked to who've attended his class relayed a kind of starry-eyed science-is-just-so-neat-it-must-be-due-to-god attitude. He also gives serminars on the compatibility of science and religion, so students need not confront their religious beliefs.
The sole skeptic I know who attended one of his classes found her perspective to be relatively unwelcome.
Posted by: PZ Myers | July 4, 2007 12:59 PM
Yeah, he was also on iidb for a short while, before melting down spectacularly. I don't think he coped well with a collection of atheists who found his apologetics boring and foolish and unnecessary.
Posted by: Dave Wisker | July 4, 2007 1:27 PM
Listening to so many Iders complain about their biology educations forces me to conclude they all were educated at clown school. "Bag of enzymes" my ass.
Posted by: VWXYNot? | July 4, 2007 1:32 PM
Serminar - a cross between a sermon and a seminar? That's excellent, I'm going to use it. Was it intentional?
Posted by: waldteufel | July 4, 2007 1:36 PM
It's always dismaying for me when a real scientist, especially a biologist, debates with a creationist like Paul Nelson.
The frauds, liars, and kooks at the Discovery Institute should only be ridiculed, mocked, and lampooned; they should never be on the same platform with an intellectually honest scientist.
As for Paul Nelson's biology education, Dave Wisker has it right. "Bag of enzymes" my ass.
Posted by: Reginald Selkirk | July 4, 2007 2:12 PM
It is my belief, based on evidence, that that large pool of gene-swapping organisms all descended from a single ancestor. I hope that you and Doolittle would agree with me, rather than suggest that the ribosome and the genetic code developed multiple times; because gene-swapping, i.e. horizontal gene transfer, makes no sense at all without a shared genetic code.Posted by: N.Wells | July 4, 2007 2:38 PM
Reginald, even if you posit one origin for the genetic code, it seems plausible that pre- or proto-cells and pre- or proto-genes and perhaps other components could have had separate origins and got together in some sort of parallel or precursor to symbiosis. (Not that this should be mistaken for an expert opinion or anything.)
Posted by: Emmet Kelly | July 4, 2007 2:55 PM
Dave at #3: I think you should learn a little bit more about clownschooling before you spout off like that. Let's face it: The public schools are horrible, and many people view clownschooling as a viable alternative. I myself was clownschooled, and look at how well I turned out. We're not all a bunch of illiterate Bozos, you know.
Posted by: Nordic | July 4, 2007 3:49 PM
Paul Nelson actually visited my university here in Bergen, Norway, last fall, to debate a biologist here. (Some creationist organization paid the trip for him) Needless to say he was laughed out of the country. (He got the same responses from university audiences in Oslo and Trondheim as well) You can keep those lunatics on your side of the Atlantic.
Posted by: Space Parasite | July 4, 2007 4:07 PM
Nordic @ #9: "You can keep those lunatics on your side of the Atlantic."
Aw, can't we compromise on somewhere in the middle?
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | July 4, 2007 4:31 PM
We can agree that clownschools aren't good - clownfish reject the concept outright.
I'm not up to the list of technical details and differences, but this sounds a lot like a similarity to quasispecies. Besides viral quasispecies they are studied in abiogenesis, so I guess it is a population type that we would expect sooner or later looking back in time. Funny how creationists see magical barriers where biology see continuity.
I don't see how any of that follows from models such as quasispecies, where distributed and unreliable replication is possible. And how do we test that?
OTOH, the different nonhomologous families of RNA and DNA informational proteins have lead at least one researcher to suggest the three viruses, three domains theory. Look at his fig. 1 that shows one possibility, where DNA viruses split off from a DNA viral world to establish three different canonical DNA replication apparatuses in cell lineages from an RNA cellular world. He has some discussion on how to test this.
Posted by: Eamon Knight | July 4, 2007 4:43 PM
Nordic @ #9: "You can keep those lunatics on your side of the Atlantic."
Aw, can't we compromise on somewhere in the middle?
I don't think the Icelanders would like that.
(Meanwhile, my site stats spike! WOOT!)
Posted by: Brownian | July 4, 2007 7:40 PM
Yup, I meant it, VWXYNot. Go ahead and use it all you like!
Posted by: Justin Moretti | July 5, 2007 2:39 AM
PZ, you may have a point that it is futile trying to debate these lunatics - they will always throw far more dishonest curve-balls than one scientist who is expert in their area can possibly catch - but on the other hand NOT debating them hands the ID/Creo crowd a propaganda victory: "The Evolutionists are scared to debate us because they know we're right", while for us to tell the public that debating a bunch of liars is beneath us renders us vulnerable to "Ivory Tower" judgements.
There are nasty parallels with the Iraq embroglio. The terrorists are not afraid to blow up a market full of women and children in order to kill the Iraqi policemen who are their military enemies (and therefore legitimate targets), and they do so without much reaction in the Western anti-war press; whereas every civilian killed accidentally by Coalition forces brings scorn and wrath down on the Coalition leadership's head.
Likewise the Creos/ID are not afraid to lie openly, knowing there is precious little chance they will be called to account for their lies, especially among the naive people they are trying to make, or keep, their mind-slaves. Unless scientists engage these people on at least some level - defusing their obvious misrepresentations and showing up their lack of corroborating evidence, if nothing else - we have handed the ID/Creos the battlefield on a platter.
This will mean allying with believers in God who are willing to reduce that contentious first part of Genesis to a parable. People brainwashed by religion will not be pulled away from the extreme on the authority of an atheist scientist - it takes another believer in God to win their trust.
Posted by: minimalist | July 5, 2007 9:49 AM
I could possibly believe Paul Nelson's statements about his biology "education" if he is referring to a private fundamentalist Christian school. I'd imagine it's hard to get decent biology teachers to work at such places.
Plus they have a vested interest in creating their own "parallel biology" to make creationism seem sustainable. The way they revise history ("The Founding Fathers were all Bible-believing fundamentalists just like us!"), law, literature, comparative religion ("CompaWHUT?"), etc. The most frightening aspect of fundie schooling/homeschooling is that they're creating their own parallel reality where all that BS is taken as fact. When a movement that size clashes with the real world, I don't see the results being very pretty. Hell, we're beginning to see some of the fallout right now.
Posted by: Mike | July 5, 2007 10:56 AM
"He claims that when he was in school he was taught that "cells are just bags of enzymes", and that ID has revealed all these amazing, unexplainable "molecular machines.""
Is Nelson actually enough of a big fat liar to actually claim ID had anything to do with developing our current understanding of cellular mechanisms, as appears from that?
Posted by: Dave S. | July 5, 2007 10:57 AM
I just wanted to point out that I was taught my biology by Ford Doolittle (amoung others) waaaaaay back in 1980. A pretty cool guy even back then. He's probably having a good laugh at the foolish and clumsy mangling of his ideas by Nelson and his cohorts.
Posted by: Strider | July 5, 2007 11:43 AM
I had to snort derisively at Nelson's comment near the end of the debate when he magnanimously suggested from his exalted position that in order to learn from each other science and religion would, instead of "staring at each other across a chasm", have to meet in the middle. According to Nelson this meeting would lead to uncomfortable questions such as possibly redefining science (I assume to include the supernatural); and he was SERIOUS! From what corner of Nutjobistan is this guy coming that he thinks this is going to happen?!
Posted by: windy | July 5, 2007 11:45 AM
"Aw, can't we compromise on somewhere in the middle?"
I don't think the Icelanders would like that.
Rockall, then. Or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?
Posted by: mojojojo | July 5, 2007 11:48 AM
Hey wait, I kind of LIKE the idea that my ancestors may NOT have sprung from the same section of root as Mr. Nelson!
Posted by: CCP | July 5, 2007 1:17 PM
"We're not all a bunch of illiterate Bozos, you know."
But I think we're all bozoz on this bus.
Posted by: Stephen Wells | July 5, 2007 3:25 PM
You know, I was just recently in Tuebingen (sorry, can't find an umlaut on this keyboard), where Meischer first isolated nuclein (DNA) in 1868. So anyone babbling about "bags of enzymes" anytime in the last century-plus is clearly hopelessly underinformed.
Maybe Nelson WAS taught this crap, but not by any actual biologists.
Posted by: Trip the Space Parasite | July 5, 2007 3:52 PM
windy @ #19: "Or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge?"
Sure, we can have someone drop him off as they're on their way to study the vast amounts of cool biology there.
The pocket ecosystems that spring up on whalefalls should do just as well on piles of several hundred cdesign proponentists, right?
Posted by: truth machine | July 13, 2007 1:52 AM
It is my belief, based on evidence, that that large pool of gene-swapping organisms all descended from a single ancestor.
What evidence is that?
I hope that you and Doolittle would agree with me, rather than suggest that the ribosome and the genetic code developed multiple times
Straw man.
because gene-swapping, i.e. horizontal gene transfer, makes no sense at all without a shared genetic code.
Non sequitur. That just says that the organisms of the pool had a shared genetic code; it doesn't support the claim that we descended from a single organism in the pool.
Posted by: Lars | July 14, 2007 4:06 AM
So... how did Nelson misrepresent Doolittle? You say that in Doolittle's view "you can't trace life back to a single common ancestor", yet you also say 'Doolittle would say that "all living things share a common ancestor".' "A common ancestor" doesn't sound like "a large pool of organisms" to me.
At the same time you claim that it was "a gross misrepresentation" for Nelson to say Doolittle rejects common descent. It sounds like Nelson is no more guilty of misrepresenting Doolittle's views than you are.
He claims that when he was in school he was taught that "cells are just bags of enzymes", and that ID has revealed all these amazing, unexplainable "molecular machines."
Did Nelson actually say or imply that ID was responsible for revealing the molecular machines? or is that just something you added?
"Just bags of enzymes" does sound like an oversimplification on his part. Maybe you should ask him what he meant.
Posted by: Lars | July 14, 2007 4:32 AM
Mike Dunford has another recent example of Nelson mangling a scientific conclusion.
When I read the post, I found that Dunford only disagrees with Nelson in his conclusions, and even there only in the spin: What Nelson calls an "open puzzle", Dunford calls "an indication that we're on the right track for learning more". That sounds like two ways of saying the same thing, except that Dunford wants us to accept a promissory note for the future.
How is that "mangling a scientific conclusion"?
Unfounded allegations reflect more on your integrity than on Paul Nelson's.