cdesign proponentsists

PBS's science program NOVA on Tuesday night ran a by turns edifying and irritating special on the creationist shenanigans that occurred in Dover, PA, in 2005. A couple of fundamentalist Christian knuckleheads called Bonsell and Buckingham tried to smuggle their religion into high school biology class there, an attempt that resulted in a federal bench trial and a 139-page creationist smackdown authored by John E. Jones III, a conservative Republican judge.

An unrepentant Buckingham, who apparently lied under oath at trial, is interviewed calling Judge Jones a “jackass,” and it's reported that Jones and the parents and science teachers who complained against the creationist scam artists received death threats during the proceedings. Feel the Christian love.

All because the creationists are too willfully ignorant to appreciate the elegant and ingenious manner in which the God they claim to worship went about introducing life on Earth: biological evolution.

The two-hour program, which is available for viewing online starting tomorrow, is not kind to the creationists; but neither was Judge Jones's opinion, which referenced the “breathtaking inanity” of the creationist members of the local school board and noted that

It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the [“intelligent design”] Policy.

The so-called intelligent design policy — which has been famously and accurately described as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo” — consisted of the mandated reading in biology class of a fatuous anti-evolution diatribe and the placement in the school of several dozen copies of a creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People.

The books, which Bonsell and Buckingham at one point claimed appeared out of nowhere — creatio ex nihilo, as it were — it turns out were purchased by Bonsell's father with tithes solicited by Buckingham through his church.

One of the more amusing episodes in the special concerned documents obtained by the plaintiffs during pre-trial discovery, documents that showed the evolutionary precursors of the text in Of Pandas and People. The text, which originally contained dozens of references to “creation” and “creationists,” was modified to substitute various permutations of the term “design,” ostensibly so as not to offend the long string of federal and State judicial opinions which have essentially declared creationism and “creation science” to be religious shams masquerading as science and, as such, their inclusion in public school curricula a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Click to see a funny graph. (1987 is the year the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Louisiana creation science [sic] decision, Edwards v. Aguillard. Incidentally, Justice Scalia's Edwards dissent contains possibly the most palpably ridiculous argument ever memorialized on the pages of the United States Reports.)

In one particularly awkward textual substitution, the expression “cdesign proponentsists” appears, an attempt to simply replace “creationists” with “design proponents.”

What makes this especially comical is the reliable demand anti-evolutionists are constantly making, which is for scientists to produce “transitional forms,” that is, creatures intermediate between, for example, land mammals and whales, dinosaurs and birds, or fish and amphibians.

Whenever such creatures are produced — and they are numerous — creationists either somehow deny their status as transitional forms or else demand additional transitional forms representative of the newly created transitional “gap.” So the comedy inheres in the status of “cdesign proponentsists” as a transitional form, hard evidence of the evolution of creationism to intelligent design (without any new data or novel argumentation).

Much of the NOVA special is devoted to reenactments of the bench trial, and especially the testimony of the star creationist witness, Michael Behe. Behe is shown engaging in the time honored creationist device of misrepresenting the work of a scientist, David DeRosier, a professor of biology at Brandeis University.

DeRosier, who has devoted considerable study to the flagellum, the part of a cell which makes it move about, made the mistake of referring to it metaphorically as “a machine.” Behe takes DeRosier's characterization literally, and uses the flagellum as the centerpiece of his “theory” that Jesus the Millwright installed the flagellum into creation fully formed. Behe further alleges that the flagellum is “irreducibly complex,” meaning that if any of its constituent proteins are removed, it's useless for any other purpose.

DeRosier himself turns up to expose Behe's buffoonery, and gives examples of “reducibly complex” flagella, that is, structurally similar yet missing constituent proteins and performing different functions. Behe declined to participate in what his colleagues at Seattle's Discovery Institute — where the cheap tuxedo is maintained — have termed a “propaganda piece.”

In another trial reenactment, a lawyer for the plaintiffs piles Behe's witness box with articles and books discussing the evolution of immune systems, literature Behe essentially claimed didn't exist. He continues to insist that it's “unsatisfactory,” or something.

Then lawyers for the Thomas More Law Center, the "Christian answer to the ACLU" who represented the defendant creationists, complain that Judge Jones overreached in his decision by declaring that intelligent design is not science, despite their specifically having asked him to rule on that very question. There's just no pleasing some people.

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial, will be viewable at this link. Trial documents and Judge Jones's opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District are archived here.

And TalkOrigins, the internet's premiere biology clearing house, has the complete trial transcripts at this page. The cross examination (“with cheerful mercilessness”) of Michael Behe by Eric Rothschild of Pepper Hamilton is particularly entertaining.

Pitchfork waving peasants

Derrick Nunnally, one of the few regularly worthwhile reads at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, cracks me up.

Commenting on a Wisconsin State Journal report of a teenage beer drinkin' party staged at a farm shed in Waunakee that resulted in a stand-off with police featuring an axe and a sledgehammer, Nunnally deadpans, “Somehow, no pitchfork is (yet) part of the accusations.”

Perhaps Mr. Nunnally spends so much time with lawyers he's inherited their sardonic irreverence. The right lawyers, that is. As a general proposition, spending too much time with lawyers can come to no good at all. Or so I'm told by the girls I go out with.

Conflicts from A to Ziegler

Here's a nifty website assembled by our friends at One Wisconsin Now, providing some background and a series of informative links pursuant to the trials and subsequent (and ongoing) tribulations of Wisconsin's newest Supreme Court Justice, Annette K. Ziegler:

Conflicts from A to Ziegler

(Fix the typos, folks!)

Ziegler, who is married to the eponymous wealth management mogul J.J., presided over cases in her previous incarnation as a Washington County Circuit Court Judge, during which she failed on numerous occasions to disclose her financial interests in the parties before her, notably the West Bend Savings Bank, on whose Board of Directors J.J. sits.

Annette Ziegler notoriously referred to her failure to disclose the relationships as the performance of a "gut check," in spite of her reputation among conservative supporters as an alleged "strict constructionist," a judicial disposition which may or may not include for the literal interpretation of State judicial ethics guidelines and related statutory provisions.

Ziegler has since proffered a certain degree of repentance and a specified number of dollars — 17 thousand of them in penalty and costs, to be exact — for violating conflict of interest rules, but isn't out of the thicket yet.

Next Monday, November 19, a public hearing will be held in West Bend in furtherance of this formal request for additional documentation. Justice Ziegler has succeeded in placing her new colleagues on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the distinctly awkward position of potentially subjecting her to further disciplinary action.

The cynical wager, however, is she'll emerge relatively unscathed.

The limits of due process

Due process is not easy to define, although it's a concept that figures prominently in our country's constitutional scheme. Criminal defendants in particular are guaranteed due process by both the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, the former on the part of the feds and the latter the States.

Briefly, the government is empowered to deprive you of life, liberty, or property, but not without extending to you the benefits of whatever legal procedures are due. And while it's not easy to define due process, it's very easy to show examples of it.

Comes now the Wisconsin District I Court of Appeals with an extension of the benefits of process everyone can agree was due to the defendant. Arguably, well and way beyond what was due.

Anderson was convicted of two counts of third-degree sexual assault of a four-year-old girl. That assault, according to the victim's testimony, involved sodomy — in the literal sense, not in the euphemistic common law sense, which includes for activities aside from anal intercourse.

Apart from some very narrow exceptions, defendants facing sexual assault charges are not permitted to present evidence of the victim's past sexual activity. In this case, Anderson wished to present evidence that his mother had once observed the victim simulating cunnilingus on a Barbie doll.

Anderson claimed that, by not being allowed to have this evidence recorded, he was denied his own constitutional right to the presentation of an effective defense. That's correct: Anderson considered his mother's claimed observation a defense against charges he'd sodomized a four-year-old girl.

Such are the ways of the law.

In any event, the judge who presided over Anderson's trial — it was a bench trial, where the judge additionally assumes the fact finding role of the jury — discounted the credibility of Anderson's mother's testimony in favor of the victim's mother's claim that not only did the incident never take place, the child never even played with dolls.

As for the evidence that Anderson's right to due process was more than justly satisfied, the court's lengthy analysis of his purported defense is available here (.pdf; 12 pgs.).

And, of course, outside the referent legal paradigm, the notion that a four-year-old licking the crotch of a Barbie doll constitutes sexual activity in the first place is, to put it charitably, vaguely preposterous. Which is why this defendant may never claim he was not afforded due process pursuant to the court's extended treatment of what is, it seems to me, a pretty wild claim.

Accordingly, Anderson was deprived of several years' worth of liberty.

I don't read blogs

For a while I was, on occasion, looking at a few of the local self-styled “conservative” blogs. But it was a bad habit and I gave it up. My life is richer for lack of that particular component.

They are, for the most part, pointless, ridiculous, humorless — intentionally, at least — and, ultimately, annoying as hell.

It was like watching a low rent Bill O'Reilly, or some idiot televangelist (respectively, a physical impossibility and a redundancy): mildly amusing at the outset, but eventually just ... annoying as hell.

With one or two exceptions they have nothing interesting to say and as far as I'm concerned they are little more than fodder for ridicule. They never were anything else.

I appreciate that others will continue to monitor them, and continue to limn their hypocrisy, their breathtaking myopia, their selective deployment of data, and — especially — their phony self-righteous outrage.

Indeed, my stalwart associate Tim Rock provided some genuinely instructive entertainment the other day pursuant to just about exactly the foregoing criteria. The reader may follow the links here and here. Res ipsa loquitur, as they say: the thing speaks for itself.

Personally, I don't find it offensive because some xenophobic rube actually went over to a group of people conversing in Spanish at the Wal*Mart and told them to speak English or get out of the country. And I don't even find it offensive that a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist actually compared said xenophobic rube to — get this — H.L. Mencken.

In fact, for anyone who appreciates literature, or, at least, trenchant and stylish prose, that may have been the most offensive observation ever perpetrated on the internets.

But really, it's typically addlepated and nonsensical bluster and not worth any further effort. Selah.

eta: I'd be remiss not to hook up my good buddy the Brawler.

Cheese hat