It’s definitely ‘scholarly’ practice among ID supporters.
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One further point:
To the extent that there is a problem of Christians feeling a career in biology is unsuitable for them, it appears that a major reason is the perception that the theory of evolution is incompatible with their religious beliefs. In that regard, this lecture can only exacerbate the problem.
An astute and objective Christian should also note that Dawkins, Coyne and Myers do not typically misrepresent scientific research to support their views on religion, whereas that seems to be a bad habit that Buggs and other members of the DI have trouble breaking. Such a Christian would probably be better off with a supervisor who prioritizes scientific integrity over allegiance to a religious position.
Well, gee. Wouldn’t it be great if some expert in phylogenetics could answer that question for “Eddie”? Then he might not have to waste more time thinking about an unimportant lecture.
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Apart from an antagonistic vocal minority, I think most professors are looking for talent and students are looking for interesting opportunity. Some PI’s are aloof, and others take great satisfaction in mentoring. Most do not much care whether students go to raves or church on the weekends, as long as the petri dishes are handled on schedule.
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Even a minority can have a significant effect on the lives of some students, if they are antagonistic enough, intimidating enough, and hurtful enough. And the minority is large enough that many commenters on higher education have noticed it. Buggs isn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. It’s only a minority of male professors who take advantage of female students, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t speak out about it. And Buggs was quite on topic to mention the subject in a lecture in which he was asked specifically by a superior to address issues of faith and science.
Just a minor note about communication:
Since there are scores of possible meanings for the abbreviation “PI”, it would help if you specify which meaning you have in mind. I’m guessing you mean “principal investigator”, but if so, why did you switch from “professors” to “PIs”?
I’m on the Arts side of campus, and the term is never used there. But even some on the science side aren’t familiar with the term. For example, see this:
Asked 2 years, 5 months ago
Modified 2 years, 5 months ago
Viewed 17k times
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I am a senior in undergrad who is a physics major applying to PhD programs. I keep on hearing people saying get rec letters from PIs or contact and have a good relationship with PIs.
In the case above, the questioner got his answer, but if bright physics undergrads aren’t immediately familiar with the term, it might be better to spell out the words, or use another term. Also, since the answer on the same page indicates that the term is primarily an American one, and many readers here are from other countries, translation can never hurt.
See the linked page for examples of others who did not know what the term meant or stated that it means different things in different places.
By what metric is the parallel poor? You need to understand the purpose for which congruence of phylogenetic trees is invoked. Phylogenetic congruence has implications for tree support both in terms of being able to say whether there even is a tree(the data supports common descent), and for how strongly a particular tree is supported over others. One can have very difficult to resolve nodes in a tree, which means we can be much less certain about which tree is the correct one, but still have that same data strongly imply that there is tree structure in the data.
To make another analogy, I can have data that strongly implies that I am related to a bunch of people, but that same data can be very ambiguous about the exact relationships among us. Exactly which person I am most closely related to can not be stated with much certainty, and in that sense the uncertainty in the data can be “significant”. But on the other hand, the data could simultaneously make it absolutely clear that we are related. There could be two people in the same population that lived many thousands of years ago to which we could tell I am directly related. And I could be one or two generations more closely related to person A than to person B, but the data could be ambiguous with respect to telling me this because of the number of generations between us.
Notice how Buggs told you none of this.
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You’re sidestepping the fact that some biology teachers do use their position as a bully pulpit to belittle Christianity. Even if they are only a small minority, they are wrong to do so. Please state whether you agree or disagree with this.
And by the way, it isn’t only in biology departments where this happens. I’ve seen Christians bullied by atheist professors in Religious Studies courses. In one particular case, two Christian students, who did not know each other but happened to have the same professor, complained to me independently about the hostile environment created by one of the profs, who was a Marxist, atheist deconstructionist. I later confirmed firsthand that this professor had a definite chip on his shoulder; he thought the purpose of Religious Studies departments should be to persuade students that religion is a destructive delusion, and his teaching habits reflected that. He told me himself. If that kind of negativity in the classroom was directed to women or blacks or homosexuals, the professor would have found himself under investigation by university authorities. But conventionally religious people, it seems, are sometimes regarded as fair game, since the practice goes on often enough that people in fields as diverse as plant biology (Buggs) and religious studies (myself) have heard about it and confirmed it.
As someone who has investigated his own family origins and found conflicting biographical data, I understand your point. But you’re evading the point that, at least in principle, if the discrepancies are great enough, they could lead to doubt about whether a tree exists. For example, in a discussion (I believe it’s still up on the web somewhere, though it has been years since I looked at it) with Dawkins and others, Craig Venter (who knows a thing or two about genetics) suggested that “bush” was a better metaphor (at least for the early stages of life) than “tree”. So data might point to some relationship, but not necessarily a tree relationship.
The insinuation of dishonesty is unwarranted. Buggs was not concealing anything, but merely raising the question why the predicted near-match of trees did not manifest itself. One possible answer, logically speaking, is that there is no tree to which all the data point. I myself find common descent very plausible on general grounds and see no reason to doubt it, but I’m not at all offended by someone who presents considerations that might cast doubt on it. Unless scientists are lying about their boast that science is always revisable, that nothing should be accepted merely on the basis of majority opinion and that even the most well-received current views could be wrong, they should have no objection to Buggs raising this kind of fundamental question. Of course they don’t have to agree with his answer, and I certainly do not expect anyone here will do so. But it’s healthy in any field (science, history, medicine, economics, etc.) to every now and then review the basis of our current certainties.
I think someone should be able to express whatever opinion on religion they want. Biology teachers are not exempt.
You are curiously silent about the fact that Buggs has been exposed as using a professorial lecture (Would that be considered a “bully pulpit”? So many questions.) to spread falsehoods, with the intention of promoting creationism. But I think we all know why you are silent, don’t we?
No. He lied by claiming that evolutionary biologists who accept common ancestry (i.e. all of the ones who are not themselves liars) claim that there should not be a single gene that does not show a tree pattern.
He then gives examples of genes that do not follow this pattern.
The conclusion that one would reach if one believed his initial lie is obvious, as is his intent to deceive those (such as yourself) who are not aware that it is a lie.
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In a biology class, in a publicly funded university?
By extension, should biology teachers be allowed to express, in class, whatever opinion they want on homosexuality, race, political parties, the “proper place” of women, etc.?
Please specify which non-biological subjects biology teachers in a public institution should be allowed to express opinions on, and which ones they should be forbidden from expressing opinions on, and philosophically and legally justify the distinctions you are making.
No. This was a public lecture, and non-compulsory. No one had to attend. No one there would have felt they had to agree with the professor, on pain of being discriminated against in grades or for letters of recommendation to get into graduate school, etc. Further, he was asked to speak about his views on the relation of biology to religion. He did not shove his ideas into a course. So there was no bully pulpit. On the other hand, teaching students who need a course to get their degree, and who fear the professor’s power of grading (and of refraining from letter-writing), that the Bible is a pile of bunk and no intelligent person could take it seriously – that is using a biology class as a bully pulpit.
I see; so when Buggs overstates a point about what would be expected from gene trees, he must be lying (not oversimplifying e.g. for pedagogical reasons); but when Dawkins overstates a point (as in the lecture I linked to), he is not lying but making a slightly inaccurate generalization (oversimplifying for pedagogical reasons, perhaps)? Why does one inaccuracy generate the charge of “lying” and another not? It wouldn’t have anything to do with your religious agreement with Dawkins and your religious disagreement with Buggs, would it?
I will remind you how indignant many people here were when James Tour accused many biologists of “lying” about the origin of life. To his credit, Tour withdrew that word later. I wonder if anyone here will withdraw the word “lying” in the case of Buggs. Fat chance, I’d say.
No I am disputing that we are in that situation. Notice that Buggs also didn’t anywhere say we are in that situation.
Your concern for prokaryote evolution within the first billion or so years of life’s origins hardly seems apposite. And in any case, even there, there is still support for a tree despite it getting more blurry:
We set out to address the above question as objectively as possible, first of all dispensing with any pre-selected standard of tree-like evolution. The analyzed FOL consisted of 6,901 maximum likelihood phylogenetic trees that were built for clusters of orthologous genes from a representative set of 100 diverse bacterial and archaeal genomes [1]. The complete matrix of topological distances between these trees was analyzed using the Inconsistency Score, a measure that we defined specifically for this purpose that reflects the average topological (in)consistency of a given tree with the rest of the trees in the FOL (for the details of the methods employed in this analysis, see [21]). Although the FOL includes very few trees with exactly identical topologies, we found that the topologies of the trees were far more congruent than expected by chance. The 102 Nearly Universal Trees (NUTs; that is, the trees for genes that are represented in all or nearly all archaea and bacteria), which include primarily genes for key protein components of the translation and transcription systems, showed particularly high topological similarity to the other trees in the FOL. Although the topologies of the NUTs are not identical, apparently reflecting multiple HGT events, these transfers appeared to be distributed randomly. In other words, there seem to be no prominent ‘highways’ of HGT that would preferentially connect particular groups of archaea and bacteria. Thus, although the NUTs cannot represent the FOL completely, they appear to reflect a significant central trend, an attractor in the tree space that could be equated with the STOL (Figure 1).
[Figure 1]
The central tree-like trend in the phylogenetic forest of life. The circles show genomes of extant species and the grey tree in the background shows the statistical central trend in the data. For the purpose of illustration, the figure shows an ‘FOL’ made of 16 trees with 20 deviations from the central tree-like pattern.
He didn’t show that it didn’t manifest itself. You clearly don’t understand the subject matter. Nowhere does he show what degree of match is “predicted”, nor does he test whether the observation matches the prediction.
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Yes.
Yes.
I support academic freedom. You don’t?
Because Dawkins statement was an obvious misstatement which he has corrected and not repeated, whereas Buggs is deliberately and repeatedly misrepresenting the predictions of a theory in order to mislead people and make them more likely to accept creationism.
Also, Dawkins statement was essentially correct: The observed tree patterns of genes is what would be predicted by common ancestry. Buggs, OTOH, is stating the opposite, and he is incorrect.
Or are you still unclear on this point and maintaining the position that it is just an “interesting idea, if true”?
There is also an obvious difference between someone making off-the-cuff, improvised statements during a video interview, and someone delivering a prepared, formal professorial lecture.
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Fine. Then why don’t you write to him and ask for clarification: “Dr. Buggs, what degree of match do you think evolutionary theory would predict, regarding the organisms you are discussing in this video?
And how would you verify that the match had not been achieved?” You’re a free agent; nothing is stopping you. Get back to us when you have his answer. You might be surprised; if you write to him politely and showing genuine intellectual curiosity about his position, he might write you a very friendly and clear and pertinent reply. But how often has anyone here (other than Joshua) personally approached ID proponents in a friendly, collegial way, and asked for a conversation, as opposed to throwing down a gauntlet or shaking a fist at them from a distance?
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Then Buggs was concealing the known reasons why such trees do not match exactly, as well as the extent of their matching.
Of course not. You don’t know enough to decide whether Buggs’s considerations actually do cast doubt on it.
I’m only offended by some-one telling me blatant lies when I know they are blatant lies.
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Yeah, @Rumraket. And, while you’re at it, why not write the head of the Flat Earth Society a polite letter asking them to explain exactly what shape they they think the earth actually is, and how they verified it?
Now, now. Don’t deny “Eddie” due credit. I think he knows exactly what he is doing here. How could he not? Along with Buggs, I am incredulous that someone of their credentials (even if unverified in “Eddie’s” case) do not know how raising unjustified doubts about evolutionary theory helps promote their religious agenda. And even you or I are not fooled, there are still folks like @colewd looking on who only know someone is wrong if they outright admit it.
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Pardon me but isn’t it you who should be asking him those questions? You’re the one who first watched his lecture and then linked it here, now having revealed how it gave you a host of misleading impressions you’re now forced to concede he didn’t anywhere substantiate.
I think you now owe it to yourself to spend some time thinking about how it’s possible for you to watch a “lecture” and end up with a set of conclusions that was not actually supported.
Then the next we can do is you watch a James Tour “lecture” on origin of life research, and then you come here to tell us as clearly and unambigously as you can what impression you got from it. Then we do this same exercise all over again, and extract in painstaking detail that none of the impressions the talk left you with, were actually supported.
Then we go on to discover this is uncannily common with ID-associated presenters. They are so very good at not exactly saying, nor even supporting, the conclusions their viewers are left with.
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Does “academic freedom” mean the right of any university teacher to say anything he likes on any topic under the sun, in a classroom setting? Or does it pertain only to the right to make statements, ask questions, challenge orthodoxies, in areas where the professor has shown some research competence or at least great knowledge?
Let’s say that you mean the former: absolute freedom for all professorial speech within the classroom. OK, let’s test your commitment to such freedom.
Suppose, at your university, a biology professor (or any other kind of professor) says that women are by nature different from men, as is obvious from anatomy and physiology and behavior, and that nature has assigned women to different roles than men, and that women are best off in the kitchen and the bedroom, or at best only in “nurturing” professions, leaving men to go out to be engineers and physicists and economists and so on. Now, suppose a group of angry students in his class (they needn’t be female; they might even all be male) write a letter of protest saying that he is creating an uncomfortable atmosphere for female students in the class, and that the university should not allow him to do that. (Such protests, you know perfectly well, have happened at many schools, especially in the USA regarding race questions.) They call for this professor to be fired, or denied tenure, if he persists in this behavior. A university tribunal finds in favor of the students and disciplines or fires the professor.
Are you going to get involved, before, during, or after the tribunal’s judgment? Will you stand up for the rights of the professor to make remarks which most of your colleagues deem intolerably sexist? Will you write letters, go to hearings, etc., offering your defense?
Would you defend Jordan Peterson’s refusal to go along with “woke” insistence regarding gender pronouns? Would you say that he should suffer no discrimination from university employers for holding and expressing his views? (I know he’s gone now, but we are discussing a principle.) Would you say that if your Canada Council (or whatever it’s called these days) passes a rule that all research grant proposals must employ the new “polygendered” language – meaning someone like Peterson would have all his research grant proposals rejected, for not kowtowing in his verbal expression – that would be a violation of academic freedom? Would you fight the Council over that? Maybe even donate money to a Charter of Rights challenge over the rule?
You may recall a past discussion here where, when I advocated freedom of speech for dissident academics regarding subject-matters in their field, I was attacked vigorously by an American biology prof who thought there should be no freedom of speech for views that he considered sexist, racist, etc. not even in subject-areas where the professors had expertise and purely theoretical research interests. He wasn’t just saying that professors shouldn’t make gratuitous off-topic negative remarks in class about women or blacks etc. (Which I agreed with.) He was saying that they shouldn’t be hired if their research looks like as if it might lead to politically incorrect conclusions. Did you join hands with me then in opposing that view? Maybe you did, and I don’t remember; you can point out the places.
I don’t believe a teacher should create or allow an atmosphere in class that makes students feel demeaned or attacked.
That does not mean that teachers should be prohibited from expressing ideas that students will find uncomfortable or challenging to their own beliefs.
I fully accept that it is not always easy or even possible to know where the line is drawn between those two principles, and that this is a topic of active discussion and considerable controversy in academia.
And if you want to say more, I suggest you start a new thread, and stop trying to distract from the embarrassing debacle you have created for yourself in this thread.
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Via his notorious inability to recognise ‘unknown unknowns’:
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Sorry. PI = Principle Investigator. Here, they do most of the hiring and firing, secure funding, and direct research.