Darwinism's inquisitors on the march again

From Patrick Anderson at the Argus Leader, More Misinformation on Academic Freedom in South Dakota:
Sarah Chaffee February 9, 2016 1:03 PM 

We've met reporter Patrick Anderson before. On the subject of academic freedom, his work has left much to be desired. Now Mr. Anderson is back, spreading more misinformation.

In January, Senator Jeff Monroe introduced Senate Bill 83, which noted:

No teacher may be prohibited from helping students understand, analyze, critique, or review in an objective scientific manner the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established pursuant to § 13-3-48.
Unfortunately, the bill died in committee on Thursday. However, I would like to correct Anderson's inaccurate reporting about the bill in particular and the issue of academic freedom in science education generally.

First, academic freedom bills, such as SB 83, do not authorize the teaching of intelligent design.

On January 31, Anderson wrote for the Argus Leader:

The bill is an effort to protect educators who offer a different school of thought on some of the subjects outlined in the state's science standards, Monroe said.
But science teachers don't need the protection as long as they're working with theories based on factual evidence, said Julie Olson, a science teacher in Mitchell. Olson is president of the South Dakota Science Teachers Association.

"Science has got to be fact-based, it has to be evidence-based," Olson said. "Intelligent design isn't evidence-based, so it isn't science."

...

Olson wishes Monroe and other lawmakers behind the senate bill would be more direct about their intentions.

"I just hate the fact that they're trying to sneak in the discussion on intelligent design," Olson said. "If that's what they want taught they should at least say it."

Anderson allows this to go unchallenged. But no, the bill only would have permitted the teaching of scientific strengths and weaknesses on "scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established..." Since intelligent design is not part of the curriculum anywhere in South Dakota, it would not have been protected by the bill.

Teaching the strengths and weaknesses of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is not the same as teaching about ID. For instance, in discussing evolution, a teacher might talk about whether or not Galápagos finches provide evidence of macroevolution. But such a discussion would not present positive evidence for design. To demonstrate the validity of intelligent design, one must make a positive case for the theory.

Second, Discovery Institute does not support pushing intelligent design into public schools. In fact, we oppose it.

Patrick Anderson has misstated Discovery Institute's position before, claiming that Discovery Institute advocates teaching intelligent design in public schools on the evidence of our textbook, Discovering Intelligent Design, produced explicitly and exclusively for home and private schools.

This year, he's at it again, writing: "The bill [SB 83] is based on model legislation from the Discovery Institute, a group with a curriculum for teaching intelligent design." No, here is what the Introduction to the curriculum says:

A NOTE ON USE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
This supplemental textbook is not intended for use in public schools. ID is a scientific theory and is not religiously based, but we live in a highly charged political climate that is often hostile to ID. While ID should be perfectly legal to discuss in public schools, there are strong reasons not to push ID into the public school curriculum.

In particular, the priority of the ID movement is to see the theory progress and mature as a science. However, when the subject is forced into public schools, it tends to generate controversy, changing the topic from a scientific investigation into an emotional, politicized debate. This can result in persecution of ID proponents in the academy, ultimately preventing ID from gaining a fair hearing within the scientific community.

The Introduction goes on to quote our official policy on teaching ID in public schools, which we have stated again and again. We oppose mandating the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classroom, and have made that clear in our ID curriculum for home and private schools. Can this be any clearer?

Third, academic freedom legislation, such as Monroe's bill, doesn't authorize the teaching of creationism.

Anderson reports:

The proposal could make it easier for teachers to bring Creationism into a public school classroom, despite parts of the bill that disavow any association with religion, said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education....
"It's kind of a recipe to encourage teachers to go rogue," Branch said. "I admit that it's fairly unlikely that teachers are going to be doing that, but teachers are people too, and people have funny ideas."

...

... [T]he bill states it "may not be construed to promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine."

Authors give no direction for determining what the promotion of religious doctrine might look like, Branch said.

"It's like wearing big sign saying, 'ignore me,'" Branch said.

Again, no. The bill would not have authorized the teaching of creationism or other religious beliefs. The text notes it only would have protected "the teaching of scientific information and may not be construed to promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine, nor may these provisions be construed to promote discrimination against any religion, religious belief, nonreligion, or nonbelief."

Furthermore, the bill didn't need to give "direction for determining" what promotes religion because courts have already defined what constitutes promotion of religion. Branch is neither a lawyer nor a legislator. There is a long line of court cases that make clear what is permissible and what is not.

As Casey Luskin has pointed out, "[I]f you're teaching religion, then you're not protected by an academic freedom bill. Since creationism has been ruled a religious belief by the Supreme Court, teachers who teach it would not be protected." Clearly, South Dakota's legislation would not have authorized teaching creationism.

Finally, opponents hold that the academic freedom bill somehow would have subverted the state's science standards. Andersonreports, "Even without the religious implications of the bill, Monroe's proposal undermines the democratic process of approving curriculum standards for K-12 schools, [Glenn] Branch [deputy director of the National Center for Science Education] said."

The National Center for Science Education reports on their website:

Testifying against the bill was Wade Pogany, the executive director of the Associated School Boards of South Dakota, who told the committee, in the words of KELO AM radio (February 4, 2016), that "state and federal courts have ruled that teachers can't abandon the curriculum for their own beliefs."
But Branch's and Pogany's concerns have little relevance to SB 83.

First, such legislation does not "undermine the democratic process." The Board of Education in South Dakota isn't elected in the first place, but appointed and then confirmed by the Senate. It would seem just as democratic to have permissive legislation for academic freedom in science education passed through the legislature.

Additionally, the general public overwhelmingly supports teaching the scientific strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories in at least one area (Darwinian evolution) as evidenced by a recent SurveyMonkey nationwide poll. Eighty-one percent of respondents agreed that, "when teaching Darwin's theory of evolution, biology teachers should cover both scientific evidence that supports the theory and scientific evidence critical of the theory." Of those from the West North Central region (which includes South Dakota), 83 percent agreed.

Furthermore, this legislation was limited to "the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information presented in courses being taught which are aligned with the content standards established pursuant to § 13-3-48." This bill only applies to content that has already been approved by the Board of Education of South Dakota. It does not authorize the teaching of information on topics outside of the standards.

The Introduction to the South Dakota Science Standards notes:

The concepts and content in the science standards represent the most current research in science and science education. All theories are presented in a way that allow teachers to structure an experience around multiple pieces of scientific evidence and competing ideas to allow students to engage in an objective discussion. The theories are presented because they have a large body of scientific evidence that supports them. These 6 standards were developed in such a manner to encourage students to analyze all forms of scientific evidence and draw their own conclusions.
Academic freedom legislation is in agreement with the spirit and purposes of South Dakota's science standards.

So what would academic freedom legislation actually accomplish? As I have written here previously, it would permit teachers to foster an environment of scientific inquiry by educating students about the evidence on both sides of scientific issues. Where this approach to learning has been adopted already, it trains students to think analytically. It awakens interest in science by inviting students to confront relevant research themselves. And students who succeed in science courses in grades K-12 are surely more likely to pursue degrees in those fields.

Inquiry in the classroom paves the way for inquiry in the lab. Contrary to what Mr. Anderson has been telling readers of the Argus Leader, enacting academic freedom legislation would have done a service to educational excellence in South Dakota.

Darwinism Vs. the real World XXVIII

Another Layer of Defense: The Adaptive Immune System:
Howard Glicksman February 9, 2016 11:19 AM

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body."  Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

The body is constantly under attack from powerful microorganisms that, if given the chance, will invade and take over. The body's first layer of defense is the skin and epithelium that lines the respiratory, gastrointestinal, and genitourinary tracts. If the microbes get past this barrier, they come up against the body's immune system. The immune system can be divided into the innate immune system,which each of us is born with and acts in the same way every time it encounters foreign matter, and the adaptive immune system which develops over time and reacts in a specific way to the foreign matter it is encountering.

Without the first layer of defense or both components of the immune system, our earliest ancestors could not have lived long enough to reproduce because they would have died from overwhelming infection. In the last several articles in this series, I have detailed how the cells and proteins of the innate immune system work. But on their own, they are incapable of defending the body from pathogenic microorganisms. Now we will start to look at the adaptive immune system, which brings extra intelligence, firepower, and precision accuracy to the field of battle to help the rest of the immune system get the job done.

The cells of the adaptive immune system are called lymphocytes and are produced in the bone marrow. The B-lymphocytes (B-cells) stay in the bone marrow to mature and the T-lymphocytes (T-cells) enter the blood and migrate to the thymus. The thymus is located inside the chest between the breastbone and the heart and is not to be confused with the thyroid gland, which is in the neck and secretes thyroid hormone. Once inside the thymus, the T-cells develop further and become subdivided into helper T-cells and cytotoxic T-cells. Since the lymphocytes come from the bone marrow and the thymus, these regions are known as primary lymphoid tissue.

Using about a thousand different receptors, each of the immune cells of the innate system can detect about a thousand different chemical patterns present on the surface of invading microbes. These cells activate when their receptors lock on to these foreign chemical patterns. Therefore, although the cells of the innate immune system can only detect a limited number of different chemical patterns, they all have the same ability to do so. This means that when they sense the presence of an intruder, all of the cells of the innate immune system can start to work together as a large fighting force.

In contrast, each lymphocyte has about a hundred thousand identical receptors on its surface, which can only detect a very small chemical pattern. This is usually just a few amino acids from within a very large protein molecule on the surface of a microbe. The first cells of the adaptive immune system to be understood were the B-cells. When B-cells activate by having their receptors lock on to these small chemical patterns on a microbe, they produce millions of specific proteins called antibodies.

Each of these antibodies has the same small chemical pattern as the specific receptors on the surface of the B-cell that produced it. Contact with one of these specific small chemical patterns on a microbe was responsible for generating specific antibodies from a B-cell, so scientists call them antigens. The word antigen is a shorthand term for an anti(body) gen(erating) small chemical pattern on a microbe which can cause an immune response from B-cells or T-cells. As opposed to the immune cells of the innate system, which can only detect about a thousand different chemical patterns, it is estimated that altogether, the cells of the adaptive immune system can detect about ten billion different antigens.

A lymphocyte activates when its specific receptors lock on to the specific antigens on the surface of a microbe. But, since each of the ten billion different lymphocytes can only detect one specific, small chemical pattern on a microbe, when they activate, there are too few of them around to provide an effective defense for the body. In other words, altogether, the cells of the adaptive immune system, with their ten billion different receptors, are much better at detecting foreign invasion than the innate immune system, with its one thousand receptors, but not as good at mounting an immediate response. The job of the adaptive immunity requires much more time than the one of innate immunity, because it must take the specific information it has detected about the pathogen, integrate it, and then use specific effector cells to bring about a more effective defense.

On its way back to the bloodstream, the fluid in the lymphatics travels through tissue that contains collections of lymphocytes. In this way, the lymphocytes are exposed to antigens from microbes that are present within the lymph that is draining all the organs and tissues of the body. These regions are called the secondary lymphoid tissue and consist of the lymph nodes, the spleen, the tonsils, and adenoids and the appendix. After they mature, lymphocytes migrate back and forth between the blood and the secondary lymphoid tissue, patrolling for foreign antigens.

Each helper T-cell has about a hundred thousand specific T-cell receptors on its surface that can detect only one specific antigen. Upon digestion of microbes in the tissues, dendritic cells and macrophages from the innate immune system migrate to the secondary lymphoid tissue. By placing some of the foreign protein they just digested on their surface, they present it to passing helper T-cells to activate them. Then the dendritic cells and macrophages release cytokines that enable the helper T-cells to grow and multiply into thousands of identical clones. This process converts the naïve helper T-cells into effector helper T-cells. These have no direct killing power, but regulate the immune response by releasing cytokines that attach to specific receptors on other immune cells to improve their killing ability and help them multiply.

Since there are only a limited number of cells in the adaptive immune system that can identify a specific microbe, it is important for them to be able to increase their population quickly in response to attack. In addition, some of the activated helper T-cells remain within the lymph nodes to act as memory cells so the immune system can respond faster the next time. The immune system demonstrates a measure of intelligence through helper T-cells. By knowing which specific reserves to multiply and mobilize in defending the body both during the present and future infection, it is able to adapt over time.

Just like the helper T-cell, the cytotoxic T-cell also has about a hundred thousand specific T-cell receptors on its surface that can detect only one specific antigen. After migrating to the secondary lymphoid tissue, dendritic cells that are infected with a virus or bacteria place foreign antigens on their surface so that a passing naive cytotoxic T-cell can attach to it and become activated. With the release of cytokines from either the dendritic cells or nearby helper T-cells that have responded to the same antigen, the cytotoxic T-cells grow and multiply into thousands of identical clones. The effector cytotoxic T-cells are now able to destroy any other host cell that has been infected by the same virus or bacteria. They use their specific receptors to identify and attach to the foreign antigens on their surface and then release deadly chemicals and enzymes to kill them and prevent the spreading of infection.

Like all lymphocytes, B-cells are made in the bone marrow, but unlike T-cells, they remain there to mature. Once released, they migrate back and forth between the secondary lymphoid tissue and the blood patrolling for antigens. Each B-cell has about a hundred thousand specific B -cell receptors on its plasma membrane that allow it to identify and attach to just one specific antigen. The molecular structure and shape of the part of the receptor that attaches to the antigen is identical to the antibodies the B-cell will produce when it activates. Unlike T-cells, B-cells do not need other cells to present them with antigens and when an antigen attaches to its specific receptors, it is brought into the B-cell.

The captured antigen is then processed and placed back onto the cells surface. When the now activated B-cell connects with an effector helper T-cell that has been activated by the same antigen, the latter releases cytokines that attach to receptors on the B-cell and stimulates it to multiply and become numerous identical plasma cells. Each of these plasma cells can produce millions of identical antibodies, shaped to react to the specific antigen that started the immune process in the first place. In addition, just like for the effector helper T-cells, some of the effector B-cells become memory cells that are stored in the secondary lymphoid tissue so the body can react faster the next time it becomes infected by the same microbe.

Just as a walled medieval town had to have enough defenders to prevent itself from invaders, so too, the body's immune system must have enough specific cells and proteins to protect itself from serious infection. We have seen that without the right amounts of each of the cells and proteins of the innate immune system, our earliest ancestors could not have survived long enough to reproduce. The blood must have at least 500 million helper T-cells per liter to be sure that there's enough help for cytotoxic T-cells to kill enough infected cells and for B-cells to produce millions of different antibodies which altogether can detect about ten billion different antigens. How do we know this? HIV.

HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, targets helper T-cells and when chronic HIV infection causes their level in the blood to drop below 200 million per liter, the person is said to have AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). A person with HIV-AIDS usually has not only severe infections caused by the usual pathogenic microbes, but also opportunistic infections. These infections usually do not cause infection in a person with normal immunity. HIV-AIDS can affect almost every organ system in the body and often results in the formation of different types of cancer as well. Having a helper T-cell blood count below 200 million per liter is not sufficient for allowing the adaptive immune system to do its job and is equivalent to not having enough defenders to help protect a walled medieval town from invasion and destruction. The result: usually death from overwhelming infection and sepsis.


Evolutionary biologists have imaginative theories about how the adaptive immune system came into being, but none of those really accounts for all of the irreducibly complex parts needed for it to work properly, nor the natural survival capacity needed to assure that there are enough of each of them to survive. Next time we will look at how the proteins of the adaptive immune system, the antibodies, work to provide the body's defense with additional intelligence, firepower, and precision accuracy.

Yet more on human exceptionalism.

Dolphin Males Force Dolphin Females into Gang Intercourse
Wesley J. Smith February 8, 2016 2:46 PM

One of the distinctions separating humans from animals is that we are a species capable of morality. Only we create moral codes through rational means -- which is one reason they differ from society to society.

Animals are amoral. Whatever morality they appear to show -- often anthropomorphized by observers -- comes from instinct, not rational discourse or deliberation worked out and changeable over time.

With that in mind, dolphins are often romanticized as gentle sweethearts. But males force females into situations of gang forced intercourse, and may kill unrelated young. From the BBC story:

Small teams of males were usually part of larger "super-alliances" of up to 14 males.

It is also clear that the females are not particularly willing participants. "Male aggression toward a consort included chasing, hitting with the tail, head-jerks, charging, biting, or slamming bodily into the female," Connor and colleagues wrote in their 1992 paper.

The females frequently "bolted", but only managed to escape the males once in every four attempts. "Over the course of the year, a female will be herded by lots of different alliances over many different months," wrote Connor and colleagues

The males also apparently kill the young:

During 1996 and 1997, 37 young bottlenose dolphins washed up on beaches in Virginia. Superficially, there appeared to be nothing wrong with them, but necropsy revealed evidence of "severe blunt-force trauma".

The injuries were mainly to the head and chest, "and multiple rib fractures, lung lacerations, and soft tissue contusions were prominent," according to a study published in 2002. There was lots of evidence that adult dolphins were responsible for the deaths.

Notice, in the first instance, I didn't use the term "rape." That is because an animal cannot commit rape, which is a crime that involves moral turpitude. The same would apply to the term "murder."

The dolphins forcing themselves onto unwilling females, and killing the young, isn't wrong. It is merely dolphins being dolphins.


Of course, when humans do such things, they are judged rightly as monsters. That is because we are exceptional.