The Evolution of a Legal Case

On Tuesday night's FSGP meeting, I saw Stephen G. Harvey--an attorney with Pepper Hamilton LLP--speak. He was one of the lawyers in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial (on the good guys' side). This was the local Pennsylvania trial where Intelligent Design in the schools was challenged and defeated. The trial also marked the beginning of the end for Ricky Santorum.

I found the talk interesting. I already knew most of the story since I had been following the trial, but I did learn a few new details. Quick recap:

1. Dover area school board tries to get ID creationism into its schools.
2. Teachers refuse to teach the tripe; administrators come in to read pro-ID statement to students.
3. Several families (including the Kitzmillers) sue school district for establishment violation.
4. Pro bono lawyers backed by the ACLU and NCSE come to town and kick ass.
5. Textbook and rationale proven to be recycled biblical creationism.
6. School board members and textbook suppliers caught lying on the stand.
7. Intelligent Design proven to be sectarian religion and hence unconstitutional.
8. Judge Jones writes scathing decision against ID and the board.
9. Creationist school board members swept out of office come election day.
10. And they all lived happily ever after, The End!

So what new tidbits did I learn? For one, I learned that everything (except the name) about ID was recycled creationism. For example, Mr. Harvey showed a slide which compared a page from the ID textbook Of Pandas And People next to the same page from an earlier draft of the book. Every word was exactly the same except that everywhere that the draft said "Creationism," the official textbook said "Intelligent Design." (I actually knew that part) I always knew that ID was just repackaged creationism, but I (naively) thought that at least Michael Behe's argument of Irreducible Complexity of the bacterial flagellum was original. Boy was I wrong! It turns out that that exact same argument had been used by Creation Science.

I also learned some new details about the "perjury" ("" used because perjury is technically a legal term and no charges have yet been brought) of School Board Christocrat William Buckingham. This was good!

In the year prior to the whole bruhaha, Mr. Buckingham had made numerous pro-creationist an overtly Christian statements at several school board meetings. Since the plaintiffs could win the case by simply showing that pushing religious views was the motivation behind introducing ID, Billy had to deny all such statements at the trial, under oath, which he did. Of course, the next logical question would be why he never denied making such statements when it was being reported all over the local news. Mr. Harvey asked Billy questions to the effect of (paraphrased)

"Are you saying that you were completely unaware of the statements that were being attributed to you on the front page of the newspaper that you get delivered to your doorstep every morning?" To which the pious Mr. Buckingham replied (more or less) " I had no idea!"

After nailing him down good wth several questions to that effect, Steve Harvey then brought out the old television news clip. He showed the clip to us at his talk. I had heard about it, but that was the first time I'd seen it. You can watch the whole clip here. But I have decided to only embed the "proof of perjury" remix edited by Janiebelle. Enjoy!



After showing him the clip, Harvey asked Buckingham to explain himself. He said that since the whole creationism controversy that was in the news was dominating his thoughts at the time, he let it slip in front of the cameras. Stephen Harvey was not expecting to nail his prey so early. He admitted to us that these statements slipped right past him because he was already thinking about the next question. He did realize that something big had just happened. He knew Billy had dropped a bomb when the court stenographer's jaw dropped to the floor.

GOTCHA!!!!

A Simple Turing Pattern

It all started back in September when Discovery Institute hack Casey Luskin attacked science blogger Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science. Then a couple of weeks ago he went after science blogger Carl Zimmer, the fantastic writer whose work appears in the New York Times. Among the inanities he spewed was a defense of imperfection by comparing ID to a Ford Pinto.

"Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections revealed in crash tests, not designed?"

This statement goes against the whole design argument; Is God a poor engineer who didn't heed Murphy's Law?

As ridiculous as that analogy is, Karmen at Chaotic Utopia glommed on to a doozy that all the other science bloggers had missed.

The article called evolution a "simple" process. In our experience, does a "simple" process generate the type of vast complexity found throughout biology?

I can see how this must've really irked Karmen since one of her regular features is Friday Fractals. You see, fractals are complex patterns generated from simple algorithms.



I'm afraid my fractals aren't quite as good as Karmen's since I made mine with the free software GIMP. The point remains that a fractal is a perfect example of a "complex design" that's generated by a few simple instructions.

The fun continues. Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math, Bad Math expatiated upon the theme by bringing cellular automata (CA) into the mix.

For the simplest example of this, line up a bunch of little tiny machines in a row. Each machine has an LED on top. The LED can be either on, or off. Once every second, all of the CAs simultaneously look at their neighbors to the left and to the right, and decide whether to turn their LED on or off based on whether their neighbors lights are on or off. Here's a table describing one possible set of rules for the decision about whether to turn the LED on or off.

Current State	Left Neighbor	Right Neighbor	New State
On	On	On	Off
On	On	Off	On
On	Off	On	On
On	Off	Off	On
Off	On	On	On
Off	On	Off	Off
Off	Off	On	On
Off	Off	Off	Off

There you have two examples of "complex designs" spawned by "simple processes." Before I bring up a third, I should mention that MarkCC made a point that the above CA is turing complete. Nice segue since the next image will be a Turing Pattern. This "design" is so named because it derives from the principles layed out in the great mathematician Alan Turing's 1952 paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. In it, Turing demonstrates how "complex" natural patterns such as a leopard's stripes (or any embryological development) can be generated from simple chemical interactions. This ScienceDaily article describes it thus:

Based on purely theoretical considerations, Turing proposed a reaction and diffusion mechanism between two chemical substances. Using mathematics, he proved that such a simple system could produce a multitude of patterns. If one substance, the activator, produces itself and an inhibitor, while the inhibitor breaks down or inhibits the activator, a spontaneous distribution pattern of substances in the form of stripes and patches can be created. An essential requirement for this is that the inhibitor can be distributed faster through diffusion than the activator, thereby stabilizing the irregular distribution. This kind of dynamic could determine the arrangement of periodic body structures and the pattern of fur markings.

I generated the following image using the Turing Pattern plug-in for GIMP.




The kicker is that the above mentioned ScienceDaily article is entitled Control Mechanism For Biological Pattern Formation Decoded and it's about how biologists and mathematicians in Freiburg—hence the 'German flag' color scheme on my Turing Pattern—have found an example in nature of just what Turing predicted.

Biologists from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology in Freiburg, in collaboration with theoretical physicists and mathematicians at the University of Freiburg, have for the first time supplied experimental proof of the Turing hypothesis of pattern formation. They succeeded in identifying substances which determine the distribution of hair follicles in mice. Taking a system biological approach, which linked experimental results with mathematical models and computer simulations, they were able to show that proteins in the WNT and DKK family play a crucial role in controlling the spatial arrangement of hair follicles and satisfy the theoretical requirements of the Turing hypothesis of pattern formation. In accordance with the predictions of the mathematical model, the density and arrangement of the hair follicles change with increased or reduced expression of the WNT and DKK proteins.

There you go, Mr. Luskin: an example from natural biology of a simple process generating vast complexity. To your Woo, I say Schwiiing!