Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Why is WikiPedia so slow?

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

OK, so I don't really have time to follow everything on a thead like
this, but...

On 1/5/06, Josh <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
>
> Here is a list of general scientists who support creationism:
> http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=research&action=index&page=research_physci
>
> And here is a list of just biologists:
> http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=research&action=index&page=research_biosci

OK, so I have to point out that the list of biologists is really,
really, *really* uncompelling.  If this is the best that the ICR can
do, then the conclusion that 99.9% of all biological scientists
support evolution is wrong; the figure would be more like 99.995% of
all biological scientists support evolution.  How do I conclude this? 
Well...

1) This is a really short list.  When you have a short list of people
supporting a cause, and you want this list to be as impressive as
possible, you want to make sure there are some very distinguished
people on the list.  People who do things like:  win Nobel Prizes, get
elected to the National Academy of Sciences, occupy endowed chairs in
top departments at top schools, that sort of thing.  This list is
very, very thin in that sort of person.  Or, to put it another way, I
could construct the list that matches this list person-for-person (all
42) and guarantee that I could find people who were all PhDs, and who
had all won either the Nobel Prize or the Lasker Prize and professed
belief in evolution.  If you're making an appeal to authority (which
is what this list is trying to do), it's not good if 100% of the best
authorities are against you.

2) The credentials touted for these people are pretty weak.  One of
them, for example, is  actually dead (Richard D. Lumsden).  The
problem with including dead people on a list like this should be
self-evident, I think.  In other cases, people are lauded for being
members of organizations like the Society for Neuroscience (e.g.,
David DeWitt).  The problem with that is two-fold.  First, if you
polled the members of SFN, you would find that 99.99+% of them believe
in evolution.  Second, almost anybody can become a member of a
professional society, especially SFN.  After you first enter the
society (and you do need 2 members to sponsor you), all you need to do
is continue to breathe and pay the annual dues.  Now, it would be one
thing if DeWitt were a prominent member of the society or something
(say he had a leadership role), but he isn't.  For every guy like him
in SFN, there are (probably literally) thousands who hold the opposite
point of view, and hundreds who have had more important scientific
careers.  Also, it's not nice to make fun of people's academic
affiliations, but being (say) an adjunct professor at a small college
in Tennessee that nobody has ever heard of is not a leading sign that
the person is important in the field.  Again, an appeal to authority
is only interesting if the authorities are the kind of people who make
you go, "hmm...that's not too shabby".

3) A lot of the people on this list would have professional expertise
in areas that are only quite tangentially related to evolution.  In
other words: they could be wonderful people and good scientists, but
it wouldn't mean much (to me) unless they had done substantive work to
confront the theory they oppose.  So I have a PhD, and maybe I'm not
too crazy about the consensus opinion about the role of the amygdala
in the generation of emotional states; the problem is, of course, that
my opinions need not be that well-informed on this topic, since it has
nothing much to do with things I actually do.  So in this case, I
would like to see lots of people who work in fields like molecular
genetics or bioinformatics or something where evolution is absolutely
crucial.  The problem is, I don't see those people.  Here are the
closest matches:

Daniel Criswell (MolBio from Montana)
Todd C. Wood (PostDoc in Genomics)
Ian G. Macreadie (MolBio from Monash)
Andre Eggen (Molecular Genetics)
Lane Lester (Genetics)
Arthur Jones (Developmental Biology, Birmingham)

Of these people Jones would appear to believe in evolution, since his
field of interest is on speciation in fish.  Dunno about the others. 
I think the most interesting of this bunch is Wood,  who did a (brief)
post-doc in bioinformatics in 2000.  The number of bioinformatics
people who don't believe in evolution must be vanishingly small, since
evolution is *the* organizing idea of a lot of this work.  Sure
enough, he has a bunch of creationist publications, but none that
really seem to have any empirical/data content about sequence data,
which is what you'd like to see.

So this is what I see.  This is a list of people in biology-related
fields who are creationists.  Of the  41 living  people on the list,
27 have PhDs.  Of those, 6 have PhDs in fields where I would think it
is quite surprising to find creationists.  None of these people are
prominent in the field.  If this is the best that the ICR can do, I'm
quite underwhelmed.  This is (literally) a handful of people among
(literally) hundreds of thousands of people world-wide with the same
basic qualifications.  If somebody made the statement "all molecular
biologists believe in evolution", you could presumably refute it by
pointing out these people.  But if the alternative statement would
then become "all of the 100,000 people having PhDs in molecular
biology or related fields believe in evolution except for these 6
people", I think you can see that the point is pretty weak.

jking

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