A few years ago I worked as tech support for an internet provider. After being there for a year and a half's worth of steady paychecks, I was suddenly informed by HR that they could no longer write my checks out to the name on my bank account because my SS card had a different name first.

I argued that the middle name on that SS card is the name on my bank account as well as the name on my birth certificate and I can use any of the names I've got if I so choose. They told me I'd have to take time off work - unpaid - to go sit at the SS office all day to get the names switched around to suit their new policy, supposedly imposed by Homeland Security. Being not very tolerant of pointless corporate/governmental stupidity, I told 'em to shove their silly policy on which of my legal names I can choose to have on my paycheck - they didn't pay me enough for that sort of garbage.

What does name-changing have to do with these debates? Well, we've seen quite a few critics recently who want to know why it is that TTers who aren't part of the DI and aren't 'Creo-bots' would still call what they're talking about "Intelligent Design." And their questions have been repeatedly answered by pointing out that it wouldn't do us any good to change the name of the approach to biology and evolution, because these very same critics - as well as hoards of others - would still claim we're part of the DI, support "The Wedge" and *are* Creo-bots. What would be the point?
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Gordy Slack wrote What neo-creationists get right, an article in which he attempts to set aside his gut reactions and dispassionately assess some points made by the opposition. From the article:

First, I have to agree with the ID crowd that there are some very big (and frankly exciting) questions that should keep evolutionists humble. While there is important work going on in the area of biogenesis, for instance, I think it's fair to say that science is still in the dark about this fundamental question. It's hard to draw conclusions about the significance of what we don't know. Still, I think it is disingenuous to argue that the origin of life is irrelevant to evolution. It is no less relevant than the Big Bang is to physics or cosmology. Evolution should be able to explain, in theory at least, all the way back to the very first organism that could replicate itself through biological or chemical processes. And to understand that organism fully, we would simply have to know what came before it. And right now we are nowhere close. I believe a material explanation will be found, but that confidence comes from my faith that science is up to the task of explaining, in purely material or naturalistic terms, the whole history of life. My faith is well founded, but it is still faith.

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Meteorites Delivered The 'Seeds' Of Earth's Left-hand Life, Experts Argue is a Science Daily article peppered with a tale about space travel. The travelers were amino acids and the vehicles meteors. The crash landing may explain one of life's unusual features- chirality. As the author explains with rare exceptions "left-handed "L-amino acids" dominate on earth." A five to ten per cent excess in L-amino acids, observed on surfaces of meteorites, inspires confidence in this chirality explanation. Add some meteorite amino acids to the much famed primordial soup, cook in some desert like temperatures, add some water and presto- you get ingredients for a cell.

Given a spate of recent comments advising on the wisdom of doubting the religious persuasions of one's parents and even getting the parents themselves to indulge in this doubt-fest, I thought it might be a good opportunity for some to practice what they preach. After all most religions have an origins story to go with their value systems and other religious matters. Religious critics have their own origins story. Life emerged through tentative but unidentifed processes, formed an initial cell and evolved from there. So this is an opportunity for abiogenesis enthusiasts to weigh in with their own doubts. If you don't have them express them anyway. If doubting one's own religious convictions is healthy, doubting an origins story, which does not live up to its empirical billing, is healthier still.

After watching as a number of threads descended into chaos from interesting starts, an underlying oddity seems to beg attention from the fisticuffs over word usage that has become so prevalent of late. In the Post-Wedge World the perennial dueling metaphysics hasn't waned one bit, but something new has come to the fore.

We've been mixing it up with a commenter who calls himself "aiguy" to identify with the field of computer science called "Artificial Intelligence." It would appear that he has a problem with ID's use of the word "Intelligent" to describe its focus. Aiguy tells us that we have no definition of intelligence for either AI or ID, but he wants ID to drop the term anyway, perhaps so he can feel better about the use of it in his own discipline of science. Who knows?

If it were just this one critic who was bent by the terminology it would just be a single critic with a single issue about terminology. Instead, aiguy is just the latest in a string of critics who have lodged complaints in recent months about ID's use of the word "Intelligent" and insisted that it be dropped from the lexicon.

It strikes me that with such universal focus on the word - whether the complaint is that it's a metaphysical concept or an ill-defined term - the 'other' word has slipped under the radar into mainstream usage. Is it now okay to speak of biological systems in terms of "Design" so long as "Intelligent" isn't attached?

Christian university biology professors are keenly aware of the creation-evolution cultural war. Fueled by misrepresentation and misunderstanding by both secular atheistic scientists and fundamental Christian literalists, this controversy continues to sow unjustified and unnecessary seeds of discord and division. Both ironic and tragic, the champions of these secular and claimed Christian worldviews fail to recognize the counterproductive consequences of their flawed and self-serving pronouncements. By failing to articulate the messages of science and faith in intellectually honest and religiously credible ways, they unwittingly inflict great damage to the vital causes of rational evidence-based learning (science) and also to the credibility of Christian faith.

As a Christian biologist, I am also keenly aware that land mines abound for anyone within the Christian community possessing the temerity to speak authoritatively regarding the realities of evolution. These people tend to get run over by both extremes of the discussion - branded as an enemy of the faith by Christian fundamentalists, and professionally discredited by the secular science community for suggesting that God might have a role in creation.

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Bradford originally posted an article about naïve realism:

Naïve realism is the conviction that one sees the world as it is and that when people don't see it in a similar way, it is they that do not see the world for what it is.

Over the years, I have tried to help people see that this contentious debate is not purely a matter of "the evidence," but instead deeply involves such things as stereotypes, confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, and tribalism. We can now add naïve realism to the pot, as it may play a central role.

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An article in The Daily Gazette entitled Lee Ross's Lecture on Barriers to Conflict Resolution, is authored by Elizabeth Hipple. It discusses a concept called naive realism. From the article:

Naïve realism is the conviction that one sees the world as it is and that when people don't see it in a similar way, it is they that do not see the world for what it is. Ross characterized naïve realism as "a dangerous but unavoidable conviction about perception and reality". The danger of naïve realism is that while humans are good in recognizing that other people and their opinions have been shaped and influenced by their life experiences and particular dogmas, we are far less adept at recognizing the influence our own experiences and dogmas have on ourselves and opinions. We fail to recognize the bias in ourselves that we are so good in picking out in others.

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…A New Generation Of Denial

Today - May 1 - is official Holocaust Memorial Day. Being as I am a political leftist, I got myself into a strange back-and-forth over on DailyKos that started innocently enough when someone mentioned the Godwin aspect of the Expelled movie. Given the remembrance today, and the UMC's official apology for eugenics, I innocently mentioned that I'd like to see - sometime before I die and my promise to my godparents dies with me - an official apology by science for its support of eugenics. Particularly biological and evolutionary science.

Talk about opening a can of Holocaust Denial worms! At first I got complaints that 'science' has nothing to apologize for, since science played no part in eugenics. We know that's not true, and the truth is voluminous out there for anyone to access, so I mentioned that. Quite levelly and without rancor. Yes, 'Darwinism' was indeed used to justify eugenics in this and other countries, gladly handed to Hitler as legislative models for his racial purity policies in 1934. That's history, it's well-documented.

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Our semi-annoying, semi-enlightening commenter and sometimes contributor Thought Provoker has spent the better part of the past week valiantly attempting to defend Charles Darwin from Ben Stein's charge in the movie Expelled that Darwinism led to eugenics, and eugenics led to Adolph Hitler's eugenics laws, which led to… The Holocaust.

I admit to sensitivity on this issue, as both my Godparents were Jews, very recent immigrants from Europe. Both of them had tattoos and had lost their entire families in the Holocaust. They never had any children of their own. Can you guess why? So I got 'indoctrinated' very young in the importance of what Never Again! means.

My husband's Aunt Melba (still spry but blind at 96) was sterilized as an adolescent when she and her sister were dropped off at an orphanage back when being an orphan was considered a symptom of "undesirable genetic inheritance" in America. So both sides of this family have some eugenics horror stories in the family album and a serious commitment to making sure it never happens again.

These family stories are related. Such things were as common when I was growing up as unfortunate survivors of polio and thalidomide babies and radiation-induced cancer clusters from atmospheric bomb testing. What happened to my Godparents had its insidious roots in what happened to Aunt Melba years earlier in Oklahoma. Direct, irrefutable connections, as history amply documents in collections from Cold Spring Harbor to the Holocaust Museum.

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