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Morris also makes heavy use of the “taking a quote out of context” strategy favored by creationists. His quotes are often from secondary sources and are incomplete.

A more scholarly (i.e. intellectually honest) approach would be to cite actual evidence to support a point. If you are going to cite an authority, then make sure the quote is relevant, in context, and complete.

And even better, cite a number of sources to show that the opinion is representative. Rather we get single, partial, and often outdated quotes without context.

(nature is not, it turns out, cleanly divided into “kinds”, which have no operational definition). He also repeats this canard: Such variation is often called microevolution, and these minor horizontal (or downward) changes occur fairly often, but such changes are not true “vertical” evolution. This is the microevolution/macroevolution false dichotomy. It is only “often called” this by creationists – not by actual evolutionary scientists. There is no theoretical or empirical division between macro and micro evolution. There is just evolution, which can result in the full spectrum of change from minor tweaks to major changes.

Morris wonders why there are no “dats” – dog-cat transitional species. He misses the hierarchical nature of evolution. As evolution proceeds, and creatures develop a greater and greater evolutionary history behind them, they increasingly are committed to their body plan. This results in a nestled hierarchy of groups – which is reflected in taxonomy (the naming scheme of living things).

once our distant ancestors developed the basic body plan of chordates, they were committed to that body plan. Subsequent evolution resulted in variations on that plan, each of which then developed further variations, etc. But evolution cannot go backward, undo evolutionary changes and then proceed down a different path. Once an evolutionary line has developed into a dog, evolution can produce variations on the dog, but it cannot go backwards and produce a cat.

Stephen J. Gould described this distinction as the difference between disparity and diversity. Disparity (the degree of morphological difference) actually decreases over evolutionary time, as lineages go extinct and the surviving lineages are committed to fewer and fewer basic body plans. Meanwhile, diversity (the number of variations on a body plan) within groups tends to increase over time.

the kind of evolutionary changes that were happening in the past, when species were relatively undifferentiated (compared to contemporary species) is indeed not happening today. Modern multi-cellular life has 600 million years of evolutionary history constraining their future evolution – which was not true of species at the base of the evolutionary tree. But modern species are indeed still evolving.

Here is a list of research documenting observed instances of speciation. The list is from 1995, and there are more recent examples to add to the list. Here are some more. And here is a good list with references of more recent cases.

Next Morris tries to convince the reader that there is no evidence for evolution in the past, focusing on the fossil record. He repeats the false claim (again, which I already dealt with) that there are no transitional fossils: Even those who believe in rapid evolution recognize that a considerable number of generations would be required for one distinct “kind” to evolve into another more complex kind. There ought, therefore, to be a considerable number of true transitional structures preserved in the fossils — after all, there are billions of non-transitional structures there! But (with the exception of a few very doubtful creatures such as the controversial feathered dinosaurs and the alleged walking whales), they are not there.

I deal with this question at length here, pointing out that there are numerous transitional fossils for the evolution of terrestrial vertebrates, mammals, whales, birds, turtles, and yes – humans from ape ancestors. There are many more examples, these are just some of my favorites.

Much of what follows (as you can see it takes far more space to correct the lies and distortions of Morris than it did to create them) is classic denialism – misinterpreting the state of the science, and confusing lack of information about the details of evolution with lack of confidence in the fact of evolution. Here are some examples – he quotes Niles Eldridge: “It is a simple ineluctable truth that virtually all members of a biota remain basically stable, with minor fluctuations, throughout their durations. . . .“ So how do evolutionists arrive at their evolutionary trees from fossils of organisms which didn’t change during their durations? Beware the “….” – that means that meaningful parts of the quote are being omitted. I happen to have the book (The Pattern of Evolution) from which Morris mined that particular quote. Here’s the rest of it: (Remember, by “biota” we mean the commonly preserved plants and animals of a particular geological interval, which occupy regions often as large as Roger Tory Peterson’s “eastern” region of North American birds.) And when these systems change – when the older species disappear, and new ones take their place – the change happens relatively abruptly and in lockstep fashion.”

Eldridge was one of the authors (with Gould) of punctuated equilibrium theory. This states that, if you look at the fossil record, what we see are species emerging, persisting with little change for a while, and then disappearing from the fossil record. They theorize that most species most of the time are at equilibrium with their environment, and so do not change much. But these periods of equilibrium are punctuated by disequilibrium – periods of change when species will have to migrate, evolve, or go extinct.

This does not mean that speciation does not take place. And if you look at the fossil record we see a pattern of descendant species emerging from ancestor species over time – in a nice evolutionary pattern. Morris gives a complete misrepresentation of Eldridge’s point – once again we see intellectual dishonesty in his methods of an astounding degree.

Regarding the atheism = religion comment, it reminds me of a great analogy that I first heard on twitter from Evil Eye. (paraphrase) “those that say atheism is a religion, is like saying ‘not collecting stamps’ is a hobby too.”

Morris next tackles the genetic evidence, writing: More often is the argument used that similar DNA structures in two different organisms proves common evolutionary ancestry. Neither argument is valid. There is no reason whatever why the Creator could not or would not use the same type of genetic code based on DNA for all His created life forms. This is evidence for intelligent design and creation, not evolution.

Here is an excellent summary of the multiple lines of molecular evidence for evolution. Basically, if we look at the sequence of DNA, the variations in trinucleotide codes for amino acids, and amino acids for proteins, and transposons within DNA we see a pattern that can only be explained by evolution (or a mischievous god who chose, for some reason, to make life look exactly as if it had evolved – a non-falsifiable notion).

The genetic code is essentially comprised of four letters (ACGT for DNA), and every triplet of three letters equates to a specific amino acid. There are 64 (4^3) possible three letter combinations, and 20 amino acids. A few combinations are used for housekeeping, like a code to indicate where a gene stops, but the rest code for amino acids. There are more combinations than amino acids, so most amino acids are coded for by multiple combinations. This means that a mutation that results in a one-letter change might alter from one code for a particular amino acid to another code for the same amino acid. This is called a silent mutation because it does not result in any change in the resulting protein.

It also means that there are very many possible codes for any individual protein. The question is – which codes out of the gazillions of possible codes do we find for each type of protein in different species. If each “kind” were created separately there would not need to be any relationship. Each kind could have it’s own variation, or they could all be identical if they were essentially copied (plus any mutations accruing since creation, which would be minimal). But if life evolved then we would expect that the exact sequence of DNA code would be similar in related species, but progressively different (through silent mutations) over evolutionary time.

This is precisely what we find – in every protein we have examined. This pattern is necessary if evolution were true. It cannot be explained by random chance (the probability is absurdly tiny – essentially zero). And it makes no sense from a creationist perspective. This same pattern (a branching hierarchy) emerges when we look at amino acid substitutions in proteins and other aspects of the genetic code.

Morris goes for the second law of thermodynamics again – in the exact way that I already addressed. He responds to scientists correctly pointing out that the Earth is an open system, by writing: This naive response to the entropy law is typical of evolutionary dissimulation. While it is true that local order can increase in an open system if certain conditions are met, the fact is that evolution does not meet those conditions. Simply saying that the earth is open to the energy from the sun says nothing about how that raw solar heat is converted into increased complexity in any system, open or closed. The fact is that the best known and most fundamental equation of thermodynamics says that the influx of heat into an open system will increase the entropy of that system, not decrease it. All known cases of decreased entropy (or increased organization) in open systems involve a guiding program of some sort and one or more energy conversion mechanisms.

Energy has to be transformed into a usable form in order to do the work necessary to decrease entropy. That’s right. That work is done by life. Plants take solar energy (again – I’m not sure what “raw solar heat” means) and convert it into food. That food fuels the processes of life, which include development and reproduction. Evolution emerges from those processes- therefore the conditions that Morris speaks of are met.

But Morris next makes a very confused argument: Evolution has neither of these. Mutations are not “organizing” mechanisms, but disorganizing (in accord with the second law). They are commonly harmful, sometimes neutral, but never beneficial (at least as far as observed mutations are concerned). Natural selection cannot generate order, but can only “sieve out” the disorganizing mutations presented to it, thereby conserving the existing order, but never generating new order.

The notion that evolution (as if it’s a thing) needs to use energy is hopelessly confused. Evolution is a process that emerges from the system of life – and life certainly can use solar energy to decrease its entropy, and by extension the entropy of the biosphere. Morris slips into what is often presented as an information argument.  (Yet again – already dealt with. The pattern here is that we are seeing a shuffling around of the same tired creationists arguments.) It is first not true that most mutations are harmful. Many are silent, and many of those that are not silent are not harmful. They may be neutral, they may be a mixed blessing, and their relative benefit vs harm is likely to be situational. They may be fatal. And they also may be simply beneficial.

Morris finishes with a long rambling argument that evolution is religion. Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality . . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today. Morris ties evolution to atheism, which, he argues, makes it a religion. This assumes, of course, that atheism is a religion. That depends on how you define atheism and how you define religion – but it is mostly wrong. Atheism is a lack of belief in one particular supernatural claim – that does not qualify it as a religion.

But mutations are not “disorganizing” – that does not even make sense. It seems to be based on a purely creationist notion that species are in some privileged perfect state, and any mutation can only take them farther from that perfection. For those who actually understand biology, life is a kluge of compromises and variation. Mutations are mostly lateral moves from one chaotic state to another. They are not directional. But they do provide raw material, variation, for natural selection. Natural selection cannot generate variation, but it can select among that variation to provide differential survival. This is an old game played by creationists – mutations are not selective, and natural selection is not creative (does not increase variation). These are true but irrelevant, because mutations increase variation and information, and selection is a creative force that results in the differential survival of better adapted variation.

Here is another debating lesson -- before engaging in public not only should one read the materials that they are critiquing, they should also read the materials that they cite in support of their own arguments. This is not the first time that Bob Ward has put out misleading information related to my work.  Ever since we debated in public at the Royal Institution, Bob has adopted guerrilla tactics, lobbing nonsense into the public arena and then hiding when challenged to support or defend his views.  As readers here know, I am all for open and respectful debate over these important topics.  Why is that instead, all we get is poorly informed misdirection and spin? Despite the attempts at spin, I'd welcome Bob's informed engagement on this topic. Perhaps he might start by explaining which of the 10 statements that I put up on the mathematics and logic underlying climate pragmatism is incorrect.

In comments to another blog, I've identified Bob as a PR flack. I see no reason to change that assessment. In fact, his actions only confirm it. Where does he fit into a scientific debate?

Thanks for the comment, but I'll take the other side ;-)First, this is a policy debate that involves various scientific, economic, political analyses coupled with various values commitments including monied interests -- and as such, PR guys are as welcome as anyone else.That said, the problem here is not that Ward is a PR guy, but that he is trying to make his case via spin and misrepresentation. That gets noticed pretty quickly by anyone paying attention and is easily shot down.

Someday, all the fossil fuels that used to be in the ground will be burned. After that, in about a millennium, the earth will dissolve most of the resulting carbon dioxide into the oceans. (The oceans have dissolved in them “40 times more carbon than the atmosphere contains, a total of 30 trillion tons, or 30 times the world’s coal reserves.”) The dissolving will leave the concentration in the atmosphere only slightly higher than today’s. Then “over tens of millennia, or perhaps hundreds” the earth will transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, “eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene.” This will take an eternity as humans reckon, but a blink in geologic time.

It seems, Laughlin says, that “something, presumably a geologic regulatory process, fixed the world’s carbon dioxide levels before humans arrived” with their SUVs and computers. Some scientists argue that “the photosynthetic machinery of plants seems optimized” to certain carbon dioxide levels. But “most models, even pessimistic ones,” envision “a thousand-year carbon dioxide pulse followed by glacially slow decay back to the pre-civilization situation.”

humans can “do damage persisting for geologic time” by “biodiversity loss”—extinctions that are, unlike carbon dioxide excesses, permanent. The earth did not reverse the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today extinctions result mostly from human population pressures—habitat destruction, pesticides, etc.—but “slowing man-made extinctions in a meaningful way would require drastically reducing the world’s human population.” Which will not happen.

To avoid mixing fact and speculation, earth scientists are, Laughlin says, “ultraconservative,” meaning they focus on the present and the immediate future: “[They] go to extraordinary lengths to prove by means of measurement that the globe is warming now, the ocean is acidifying now, fossil fuel is being exhausted now, and so forth, even though these things are self-evident in geologic time.”

Climate change over geologic time is, Laughlin says, something the earth has done “on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” People can cause climate change, but major glacial episodes have occurred “at regular intervals of 100,000 years,” always “a slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today’s.”

Six million years ago the Mediterranean dried up. Ninety million years ago there were alligators in the Arctic. Three hundred million years ago Northern Europe was a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. “One thing we know for sure,” Laughlin says about these convulsions, “is that people weren’t involved.”

Organized by the New Economics Foundation and the Working Group on Climate and Development, the report (in PDF) is actually pretty good and contains much valuable information on climate change and development (that is, once you get past the hype of the press release and its lack of precision in disaggregating climate and vulnerability as sources of climate-related impacts). The participating organizations have done a nice job integrating considerations of climate change and development, a perspective that is certainly needed. More generally, the IPCC suffers because it no longer considers “policy options” under its mandate. Since its First Assessment Report when it did consider policy options, the IPCC has eschewed responsibility for developing and evaluating a wide range of possible policy options on climate change. By deciding to policy outside of its mandate since 1992, the IPCC, ironically, leaves itself more open to charges of political bias. It is time for the IPCC to bring policy back in, both because we need new and innovative options on climate, but also because the IPCC has great potential to serve as an honest broker. But until it does, its leadership would be well served to avoid either the perception or the reality of endorsing particular political perspectives.

a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by oil company Exxon) of 500 scientists "whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares" turns out to be nothing of the kind: as soon as these scientists found out what the institute was saying about them, many angrily demanded that their names be removed. Twenty months later, they are still on the list. The fourth example shows how, during the Bush presidency, White House officials worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn't like and to doctor official documents about climate change.

he authors disagree with Lever-Tracy's observation that the lack of interest in climate change among sociologists is driven by a widespread suspicion of naturalistic explanations, teleological arguments and environmental determinism.

While conceding that Lever-Tracy's observation may be partially true, the authors argue that more important processes are at play, including cautiousness on the part of sociologists to step into a heavily politicized debate; methodological differences with the natural sciences; and sensitivity about locating climate change in the longue durée.

Secondly, while Lever-Tracy argues that "natural and social change are now in lockstep with each other, operating on the same scales," and that therefore a multidisciplinary approach is needed, Grundmann and Stehr suggest that the true challenge is interdisciplinarity, as opposed to multidisciplinarity.

Thirdly, and this possibly the most striking observation of the article, Grundmann and Stehr challenge Lever-Tracy's argument that natural scientists have successfully made the case for anthropogenic climate change, and that therefore social scientists should cease to endlessly question this scientific consensus on the basis of a skeptical postmodern 'deconstructionism'.

As opposed to both Lever-Tracy's positivist view and the radical postmodern deconstructionist view, Grundmann and Stehr take the social constructivist view, which argues that that every idea is socially constructed and therefore the product of human interpretation and communication. This raises the 'intractable' specters of discourse and framing, to which we will return in a second.

Finally, Lever-Tracy holds that climate change needs to be posited "firmly at the heart of the discipline." Grundmann and Stehr, however, emphasize that "if this is going to [be] more than wishful thinking, we need to carefully consider the prospects of such an enterprise."

The importance of framing climate change in a way that allows it to resonate with the concerns of the average citizen is an issue that the Breakthrough Institute has long emphasized. Especially the apocalyptic politics of fear that is often associated with climate change tends to have a counterproductive effect on public opinion. Realizing this, Grundmann and Stehr make an important warning to sociologists: "the inherent alarmism in many social science contributions on climate change merely repeats the central message provided by mainstream media." In other words, it fails to provide the kind of distantiated observation needed to approach the issue with at least a mild degree of objectivity or impartiality.

While this tension is symptomatic of many social scientific attempts to get involved, we propose to study these very underlying assumptions. For example, we should ask: Does the dramatization of events lead to effective political responses? Do we need a politics of fear? Is scientific consensus instrumental for sound policies? And more generally, what are the relations between a changing technological infrastructure, social shifts and belief systems? What contribution can bottom-up initiatives have in fighting climate change? What roles are there for markets, hierarchies and voluntary action? How was it possible that the 'fight against climate change' rose from a marginal discourse to a hegemonic one (from heresy to dogma)? And will the discourse remain hegemonic or will too much pub¬lic debate about climate change lead to 'climate change fatigue'?

In this respect, Grundmann and Stehr make another crucial observation: "the severity of a problem does not mean that we as sociologists should forget about our analytical apparatus." Bringing the analytical apparatus of sociology back in, the hunting season for positivist approaches to knowledge and nature is opened. Grundmann and Stehr consequently criticize not only Lever-Tracy's unspoken adherence to a positivist nature-society duality, taking instead a more dialectical Marxian approach to the relationship between man and his environment, but they also criticize her idea that incremental increases in our scientific knowledge of climate change and its impacts will automatically coalesce into successful and meaningful policy responses.

Political decisions about climate change are made on the basis of scientific research and a host of other (economic, political, cultural) considerations. Regarding the scientific dimension, it is a common perception (one that Lever-Tracy seems to share) that the more knowledge we have, the better the political response will be. This is the assumption of the linear model of policy-making that has been dominant in the past but debunked time and again (Godin, 2006). What we increasingly realize is that knowl¬edge creation leads to an excess of information and 'objectivity' (Sarewitz, 2000). Even the consensual mechanisms of the IPCC lead to an increase in options because knowledge about climate change increases.

Instead, Grundmann and Stehr propose to look carefully at how we frame climate change socially and whether the hegemonic climate discourse is actually contributing to successful political action or hampering it. Defending this social constructivist approach from the unfounded allegation that it would play into the hands of the climate skeptics, the authors note that defining climate change as a social construction ... is not to diminish its importance, relevance, or reality. It simply means that sociologists study the process whereby something (like anthropogenic climate change) is transformed from a conjecture into an accepted fact. With regard to policy, we observe a near exclusive focus on carbon dioxide emissions. This framing has proven counter productive, as the Hartwell paper and other sources demonstrate (see Eastin et al., 2010; Prins et al., 2010). Reducing carbon emissions in the short term is among the most difficult tasks. More progress could be made by a re-framing of the issue, not as an issue of human sinfulness, but of human dignity. [emphasis added]

These observations allow the authors to come full circle, arriving right back at their first observation about the real reasons why sociologists have so far kept silent on climate change. Somehow, "there seems to be the curious conviction that lest you want to be accused of helping the fossil fuel lobbies and the climate skeptics, you better keep quiet."

in complex systems, "no matter how effective conventional safety devices are, there is a form of accident that is inevitable" - hence the term "normal accidents".

system accidents occur with many technologies: Take the example of a highway blow-out leading to a pile-up. This may have disastrous consequences for those involved but cannot be described as a disaster. The latter only happens when the technologies involved have the potential to affect many innocent bystanders. This "dread factor" is why the nuclear aspect of Japan's ordeal has come to dominate headlines, even though the tsunami has had much greater immediate impact on lives.

It is simply too early to say what precisely went wrong at Fukushima, and it has been surprising to see commentators speak with such speed and certainty. Most people accept that they will only ever have a rough understanding of the facts. But they instinctively ask if they can trust those in charge and wonder why governments support particular technologies so strongly.

Industry and governments need to be more straightforward with the public. The pretence of knowledge is deeply unscientific; a more humble approach where officials are frank about the unknowns would paradoxically engender greater trust.

Likewise, nuclear's opponents need to adopt a measured approach. We need a fuller democratic debate about the choices we are making. Catastrophic potential needs to be a central criterion in decisions about technology. Advice from experts is useful but the most significant questions are ethical in character.

If technologies can potentially have disastrous effects on large numbers of innocent bystanders, someone needs to represent their interests. We might expect this to be the role of governments, yet they have generally become advocates of nuclear power because it is a relatively low-carbon technology that reduces reliance on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, this commitment seems to have reduced their ability to be seen to act as honest brokers, something acutely felt at times like these, especially since there have been repeated scandals in Japan over the covering-up of information relating to accidents at reactors.

Post Fukushima, governments in Germany, Switzerland and Austria already appear to be shifting their policies. Rational voices, such as the Britain's chief scientific adviser John Beddington, are saying quite logically that we should not compare the events in Japan with the situation in Britain, which does not have the same earthquake risk. Unfortunately, such arguments are unlikely to prevail in the politics of risky technologies.

firms and investors involved in nuclear power have often failed to take regulatory and political risk into account; history shows that nuclear accidents can lead to tighter regulations, which in turn can increase nuclear costs. Further ahead, the proponents of hazardous technologies need to bear the full costs of their products, including insurance liabilities and the cost of independent monitoring of environmental and health effects. As it currently stands, taxpayers would pay for any future nuclear incident.

Critics of technology are often dubbed in policy circles as anti-science. Yet critical thinking is central to any rational decision-making process - it is less scientific to support a technology uncritically. Accidents happen with all technologies, and are regrettable but not disastrous so long as the technology does not have catastrophic potential; this raises significant questions about whether we want to adopt technologies that do have such potential.

There are only two realistic outcomes here. One is that the carbon tax proposal is scrapped. With this speech it seems highly unlikely that Gillard will be the one doing any scrapping.  So it would probably be via an election or a change in leadership, such as if Kevin Rudd becomes captain of the Brisbane Broncos. The second possible outcome is that the carbon pricing is watered down so far that its enactment allows Labor to claim success while limiting any actual impact from the tax on the economy.  Of course, that would undercut its stated purpose -- to transform the economy.

A better strategy is the one proposed in The Climate Fix -- start with a very low carbon tax, one that is politically acceptable, and use the proceeds to invest in innovation. The carbon price would rise over time as the fruits of innovation make it politically acceptable to raise that price.  I expect that Australia will soon provide (yet aonpther) lesson in how not to try to put a price on carbon.