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Just What America Needs: Another Creationist “Museum”

CreationismKentuckyTexas

Stunning! Interactive! Engaging! Creationist!

That’s how the Institute for Creation Research might describe a new facility it proposes to build near its headquarters in Dallas. The prospective Dallas Museum of Science and Earth History” would be the “culmination of decades of study and research” by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), a group founded in 1970 by Henry Morris, co-author of the seminal “scientific creationism” book The Genesis Flood. When ICR talks about six days of creation and the flood of Noah, it means that as literal, factual, reliable history—a history that includes people and non-avian dinosaurs living together.

The ICR is soliciting funds to build this edifice as a “legacy tool that would counter the evolutionary deception that permeates our children and grandchildren’s education.” In other words, the mission of this “museum” is to ensure that children are not influenced by science, especially those aspects of science (genetics, geology, and radiometric dating, to name a few) that bolster evolution. ICR’s advertising asked, “Isn’t it about time we have a museum that shows how science confirms Biblical creation?” (No, actually, I’m not sure the time is quite right.)

One supporter described the proposed facility this way:

When visitors walk in the door they will be surprised at how different things are here. They will know, from the moment they walk in, that this is a museum that’s going to talk about the glory of God as our creator.

Different indeed. I suspect the experience here will be quite distinct from what you get when you attend other museums. Visit the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, and you are overawed by the history: within one sweep of your eyes you see the Apollo 11 capsule, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, and the Wright brothers’ plane. Visit the Gem and Mineral Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and you can see the giant, electric-blue Hope Diamond—which for some reason everyone thinks the old lady threw in the ocean at the end of Titanic. Visit the Field Museum in Chicago, and you can see a T. rex named Sue (“How do you do?”): the largest, most complete, and best preserved member of the species in the world.

But you won’t find these sorts of artifacts and specimens at the “Dallas Museum of Science and Earth History.” That’s because it’s not going to be a real museum of science and natural history, a repository of artifacts and specimens of scientific importance and a site where scientific research is conducted. Instead, it’s going to be a misleading parody of a real museum—and a glorified advertisement for the narrow, sectarian, and unscientific reading of the Bible that the ICR espouses.

A major part of the advertisement, of course, is going to be dinosaurs—lots and lots of mockups of dinosaurs, because everyone knows dinosaurs are a great way to excite children of a certain age, whether to draw them toward science, as in the Field Museum, or away from it.

Children are a prime reason for the new “museum.” ICR plans to use this facility to “reach tens of thousands of young lives each year.” Presumably these young attendees will be brought there by their parents and not on official public school field trips, although you never know what might transpire when the place has such an innocuous name as the “Dallas Museum of Science and Earth History.”

Some of these children attending will come from homeschooling households. One such parent expressed her approval this way:

As a homeschool mom, I had the hardest time coming up with resources that would teach my children the science and the faith. This is exciting to me because the kids can come here, they can touch and feel and experience science confirming what the Bible tells us.

Let that settle in for a moment…this mother claims that there is a shortage of science materials for her children. Not because there is a shortage of science resources, but because she’s holding out for the rare kind that merges the Bible—as she understands it—with the findings of science.

But we shouldn’t imagine that only homeschooled kids will romp around this “museum.” Let’s say a public-school-attending family visits. It’s easy to imagine local or out-of-town parents looking for a fun science-y place to take their kids on a weekend and finding the “Dallas Museum of Science and Earth History” via Google. And when they make their way into the building, straight away the excited kids see fossils and a big DNA sculpture and dinosaurs, including a fearsome T. rex. What’s not to like, right?

That’s the enticement. But like a glittering fishing lure, once the victim gets too close, the sharp hooks sink in.

What would such a family see? According to a map on the ICR website, visitors can expect to enter and purchase tickets in a large lobby that houses a planetarium, lecture hall, and a display of a full-sized T. rex. The entry path then leads, logically, into “Creation,” the first exhibit, followed by “History of Science” (tagline: “To do science, you have to have absolutes.” Geologists, on the other hand, know that vodka is not necessarily required; beer suffices just fine for doing science.) After taking in a mural depicting the origin of the universe, visitors meander through the Garden of Eden and a room with animals and a representation of Noah’s Ark. Dinosaurs and an exhibit of the Grand Canyon (as depicted above) greet visitors next; while all hands are agreed that there aren’t actually any dinosaur fossils in Grand Canyon rocks, ICR has been deeply involved in arguing for a creationist interpretation of Grand Canyon. Next are exhibits about fossils, ice ages (complete with a mammoth), and the Tower of Babel. Then, in what I am sure is an unintentional homage to the title of the Banksy documentary, visitors exit through the gift shop.

That’s it. Not a great variety of exhibits. The layout seems pretty small, with a footprint of only 2870 m2, compared to the Sasquatch of creation displays, Kentucky’s 5600 m2 “Creation Museum.”

Is there a market for two such facilities in this country? Kentucky’s “Creation Museum,” less than a thousand miles away from Dallas, seeks to create a new Noah’s Ark theme park, and that project is tapping into what must be a finite pool of potential donors. We will have to see if ICR can raise the fifteen million dollars it needs to get this “museum” going. ICR’s president described the situation in a promotional video:

We have the facts. We have the property. We have the architects and the consultants. We need the funds.

Well, I am willing to believe that they have the property, the architects, and the consultants: no argument there. And I am sympathetic to the ICR’s need. I, too, need the funds. As a wise man once said, “You can never be too thin or too rich—unless, of course, you’re Paris Hilton.”

At Christmas time I am often scolded that I am too negative (am I the only one who thinks it would have been funny if Ebenezer Scrooge had owned his dark side and behaved worse?). So in the spirit of the season, I’ll concede some positive things about the ICR’s proposed “museum”: the plans have what appear to be ADA-compliant wheelchair ramps, and there are numerous stalls in the women’s restroom. These are important, and I’ll give them that. The former make it easier for the disabled visitors to flee, and the latter ensures that visitors have a chance to react appropriately to the exhibits.

 

Confident Eyewitnesses Considered Credible

DNA tests have made it clear that innocent people have been sent to prison after a witness picked them out of a lineup. In fact, since 1989, more than 70 percent of 333 wrongful convictions in the U.S. have been influenced by misidentification from eyewitnesses. But researchers recently reported that the disdain for eyewitness identification is not always warranted. They found that if witnesses shown a lineup for the first time are asked to state their confidence in their choice, the identifications they are most confident of are much more likely to be of the suspect than of the innocent.

"Ignoring low confidence in the beginning is a grave error,” says lead researcher John Wixted at University of California, San Diego. “The witness is telling you that there's a good chance they're making a mistake."

At the same time, the study, published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigates a longstanding debate on how to perform a lineup—which could effectively affect confidence levels in witnesses. When a police officer wants to see if a witness will pick out a suspect from a crowd, he or she will assemble a set of photos of people who match the description of the perpetrator. If the witness chooses a suspect, that's further evidence that the police are on the right track. The fear, though, is that witnesses will pick innocent people. Numerous studies through the past few decades have examined how to structure a lineup so as to minimize that possibility, and have settled on showing people the photos one by one, instead of all together. About 30 percent of the police departments in the US have adopted this sequential method, rather than the older simultaneous method.

Wixted says, though, that some studies used to make that decision overlook an important detail. They look at the ratio of suspect identifications to mistaken identifications of innocents, but assessing the success ratio alone, Wixted explains, without accounting for confidence doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes, a witness will just pick someone randomly or will openly state that they are not sure about their identification. When studies don't weight those guesses differently than confident statements, they aren't reflecting the way lineups are usually used, Wixted says. “In the real world, they often don't even count random guesses,” he says. “Some jurisdictions do, but [in] most places if the witness is hesitant, they won't take it to court.”

In the current study, the researchers examined lineups administered by the Robbery Division of the Houston Police Department to see how the simultaneous and sequential processes compared when witness were asked to rate their own confidence. The lineups, of which 187 were simultaneous and 161 sequential, were administered by people who themselves were unaware of the suspect’s identity, and only cases in which the suspect was a stranger to the witness were included. Witnesses rated their identification confidence as low, medium, or high.

In a third of the cases, the witnesses did not identify anyone. In another third, they identified the suspect, and in the remaining cases they chose someone who was not suspected, or a “filler.” When the researchers compared the confidence rates between the suspect identifications and the filler identifications, however, they found something interesting: Very few people who chose fillers were confident of their choice—most low confidence IDs, in fact, were of fillers. By contrast, most high-confidence identifications were of the suspect. That suggests that confidence is a good indicator of whether the person identified is the suspect.

Comparing the results of the two different lineup techniques, the researchers found that employing the simultaneous method produced more confident identifications, leading to the conclusion that simultaneous identification may actually be more useful to police departments than sequential identification.

The difference between the two methods is statistically very slight, however, notes Gary Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who studies eyewitness memory. “The more important part of this article is that witness confidence did a good job of helping sort between accurate and mistaken witnesses (regardless of whether it is simultaneous or sequential),” he wrote in an email. It does not matter so much which procedure a police department uses—what matters more is that they ensure the lineup is administered by someone who does not know who the suspect is and thus cannot influence the witness one way or another, and that they take the measure of the witness's confidence on the spot. “Police departments, jurors, judges need to know that if their jurisdiction is not using double-blind lineup procedures” in which the test administrator and witness have not been told which is the suspect, “then these findings do not apply to them,” he continues. Fewer than half of US police departments use a double-blind procedure, he writes.

The study is part of a body of research suggesting that witness confidence is not as unreliable as had sometimes been thought, provided the procedure is blind and the measure is taken right away. Studies have found that in a large proportion of cases where a witness confidently identified an innocent person as the culprit in court, the witness was not so sure at the initial lineup. 

The shift in favor of measuring confidence during a lineup has not yet made it beyond the world of eyewitness identification research into the minds of the public, though. “The word, has not gotten out,” says Wixted who hopes the news that lineups done right can be helpful could someday spread as far as the idea that they are harmful.

For a White Christmas This Year, Try Alaska

The weather outside is frightful, because it is not beginning to look a lot like Christmas. In fact, only a smattering of Americans has a shot at waking up to a fresh dusting on Friday. Temperatures leading up to and forecast for December 25 run about 10 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in the U.S. Northeast, Southeast and parts of the Midwest. In fact, this Christmas Eve is expected to register as the warmest on record in many cities along the Eastern Seaboard. That balmy air eliminates the possibility for new snow in those regions. And out West, snowfall so far is absent to low unless you're in the mountains. Blame global warming? Blame El Niño? Actually, the primary factor is likely a climatic phenomenon centered over the North Atlantic Ocean that is keeping cold Arctic air in check.

Let's say that a landscape recently graced with snow will do, even if it fell earlier in December. Still, little snow lays on U.S. ground at lower elevations beyond Alaska and some patches in the Dakotas and Minnesota. Buffalo, notorious for its early season snowstorms and accumulation, just received its first snow of the year this week. And only parts of Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and Colorado show even a bit of snow in the forecast for either Christmas Eve or the afternoon of December 25. Precipitation has been down over much of the West this month until recently, and the ratio of rain to snow has been higher than usual. Ample snow and other water crystals have graced the Sierras, but subsequent rain has melted some of the white stuff to disappointing depths. And Weather Underground meteorologist and blogger Bob Henson calls the snowpack in New England so far "pathetic."

Behind this snow and rain drought is a climate phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation, currently stuck in a "positive" condition over the Atlantic Ocean, eastern U.S. and Europe. It indicates a high differential in average northern and southern Atlantic Ocean air pressures. This strong phenomenon compacts the real estate of the polar vortex—that air mass that brought relatively frigid temperatures to the Eastern Seaboard in recent winters. Absent polar air spilling into the lower 48 states, an unimpeded spring-like, jet stream carries in tropical air from the opposite direction, Henson says. That air mass could even bring miserable thunderstorms to the Northeast on Christmas Eve.

The North Atlantic Oscillation condition and the resulting strong jet stream also might for now be holding back the storms that the current "super" El Niño typically would provoke in drought-stricken central and southern California and the southern U.S. The El Niño climate phenomenon, which repeats in a maddening irregularity of every two to seven years, tends to bring milder, drier weather to the northern U.S. and stormier, cooler weather to the southern and southwestern U.S. Contrary to some reports, however, the current warm weather in the Midwest and eastern U.S. is mainly unrelated to the El Niño, except in the most northern part of the country, says Tony Barnston, chief forecaster at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.

Rather, our absurd weather derives from "a mainly unpredictable pattern of low pressure over Greenland and Iceland, and high pressure spanning from the midwestern U.S., through the eastern U.S., across the Atlantic and to western Europe," Barnston says. That pattern causes above-normal temperatures in those regions, allowing the jet stream to push farther north than usual. In the western U.S., he adds, the jet stream has held near average or dipped a little farther south than usual, causing temperatures slightly below average.



El Niño typically results in below normal winter temperatures along the southern tier states, and above average temperatures in the northernmost tier, such as northern New England, the northern Midwest and northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest. It is not unusual for this pattern to take shape no sooner than the very end of December, lasting into March. Often, the pattern also includes above-average precipitation in the southern tier and below-normal precipitation in some pockets in the north, roughly corresponding to warmer than average temperatures. "So far this year, the pattern has yielded above-average temperatures in a much larger area of the eastern U.S. than can be attributed to El Niño alone," Barnston says, "and that’s where the North Atlantic Oscillation comes in."



Global warming serves as a backdrop—scientists expect that 2015 will mark the warmest year on record globally. Arctic ice is melting faster than elsewhere on Earth, throwing off various climate phenomena, but its role in the strange December weather will remain unknown until models are run in early 2016.

One of the most bizarre features of December's weather is unseasonably mild temperature persisting throughout the month, Henson says. "Usually the last 10 days of December are colder than the first 20 days of the month," he says, "but in this case we are even warming up in the final days, which is counter to what always happens." Forecasters expect many U.S. cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Miami, to break records for the warmest Decembers.

Even more notable than the mild Midwest and East Coast weather this week is the high moisture-content in the air, as indicated by dew point temperatures rising up to 60 degrees F, Henson says. "In Maine, the dew point temperature is hardly ever above 60 degrees in December," he says. "Only a couple of spots have managed that so far this month, but dew point temperature may top 60 degrees in a couple of points in the next couple of days. If the temperature drops to dew point, then you have 100 percent humidity. It's going to feel perceptibly humid even in Boston and NY, and definitely in Washington, D.C."

White Christmas addicts might think they could fly their learjet up to Nova Scotia, but even the forecast for the Canadian province calls for rain and temperatures in the fifties. Pack a slicker. Temperatures in Montreal and Ottawa could break Christmas Eve records, so don't count on fresh snowfall in those cities either.

One still can bank on many locations in Alaska for snow on the ground, but even there, at several sites monitored by atmospheric scientist Gilberto Fochesatto of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, accumulation measures at one-third of normal. For fresh powder on extant snow, speculators might wish to spend their Christmas anchored down in Anchorage, Alaska. There's gorgeous snow in the nearby Chugach Mountains, a little worn-out snow on the ground, and the forecast calls for a handful of fresh snow in the afternoon. Merry, merry, everyone.

Southwest’s Conifers Face Trial By Climate Change

As you sit round the Christmas tree, consider the TLC you give O Tannenbaum: plenty of water and a relatively comfortable climate. Wouldn't want to dry out the tree, after all. Now consider that in the house we all live in—the planet—we’re hardly giving the same courtesy to your Christmas tree's wild cousins. (Who, I might add, are actually still alive.)

 

As the planet warms, droughts are getting even drier—and they're getting hotter too. In fact it's getting so bad that researchers are now forecasting that conifers in the arid southwestern United States could be completely wiped out by the end of the century. No more pinyon pines, ponderosas or junipers. No more forests. 

 

"It's definitely a distressing result for all of us. None of us want to see this happen. It's a bummer, honestly." Sara Rauscher, a climate scientist and geographer at the University of Delaware. She and her colleagues gathered data on how real-world evergreens in the southwest respond to drought and heat—they basically starve, unable to carry on photosynthesis or transport water. 

 

The researchers then combined those physiological data with a half dozen projections of how climate change might proceed. "But no matter what model we used, we always saw tree death." Specifically, 72 percent of the trees dead by 2050, and a near-complete annihilation by the year 2100. The results are in the journal Nature Climate Change. [N. G. McDowell et al, Multi-scale predictions of massive conifer mortality due to chronic temperature rise]

 

But we'll always have Paris, right? "Even if we used a scenario similar to what the Paris accords have agreed upon—so limiting global warming to 2 degrees—we still saw widespread die-off. It happened later in the century, but it still happened." That said, the study does not account for trees' ability to adapt, or whether new populations could find friendlier climes. That is, whether conifers in the southwest can pull up roots fast enough to beat climate change.

 

—Christopher Intagliata

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]

 

Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group

The “Dark Triad” Of Personality Traits Will Help You Get Ahead In Your Career

The Brain





Photo credit:

Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, hatred leads to suffering – or does it? Tom Simpson/Flickr; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Are you a manipulative person? Can you switch off your empathy? Are you completely obsessed with yourself? Well, science has some good news for you: These supposedly malignant traits may help you go places in your career, get a raise, and find your way into leadership positions, according to some fresh research.

Twas The Night Before Mythmas

Like my outfit? Merry Mythmas shirt available at: http://jaclynglenn.com/product/merry-mythmas/

‘Twas the night before Christmas, I sat by my tree

with a bottle of wine and a puddle of pee.

The stockings knocked over and cats everywhere,

every piece of tape adorned with their hair.

My family’s asleep, all snug in their beds;

while I do the dishes and laundry and clean till I’m dead.

I was finally asleep when I rose to loud clatter,

and really didn’t care to know what was the fuck was the matter.

Ran into the kitchen I cleaned just before,

to see a great mess on my briefly cleaned floor.

Cookies for santa left crumbs all around.

CHRISTMAS IS GREAT, I said hiding my frown.

I tried to remember, what was the reason?

Wasn’t there a purpose for this holiday season?

Is it about cleaning the mess left by my cats,

or perhaps giving iPhones to spoiled rich brats?

Oh no I remember, it’s Jesus’ day!

That’s why we see reindeer pulling santa’s red sleigh.

It sounds so crazy, that has nothing to do

with an 8 pound 6 ounce newborn infant jew.

But that’s what christmas is all about, right?

The birth of our savior on a cold winter’s night.

It’s like nothing you’ve heard ever before.

It’s just about jesus, there couldn’t be more…

No, Mithra, and Krishna, Dionysis, what’s this?

All born of a virgin, December 25th.

So what am I doing and what’s this all for?

Why did I spend all goddamn day at the store?

Shopping for presents to give to my mom

and my sister and grandma, the cats and my dog.

I’m a mess and feel stressed but it’s all about love.

It’s about family and giving, not someone or something above.

So as christmas day begins to draw near,

remember, religion isn’t needed for holiday cheer.

Christians and atheists and everyone else

get excited for presents and like to watch Elf.

So don’t try to focus on angry debate.

Drink some eggnog or coffee, spread love and not hate.

Just be a nice person, wrong or right.

Merry mythmas to all, and try not to fight.

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Superfast Computer Chip Transmits Data With Light

Computer chips have two important parts—the logic on the chip, which computes and executes programs. Then there’s the part that sends and receives—gets data to crunch, sends back the answer. And while that first part, chip logic, has gotten much faster over the years, the transmission part has lagged behind. Because data gets sent via electrical signals passing through copper. 

 

So researchers designed a chip that exchanges data with light instead. "By going into optics, we're able to relieve this fundamental bottleneck of copper, and in doing so we're able to increase the bandwidth density on the chip, so how fast the chip can take data in and out, by an order of magnitude." Chen Sun, a computer hardware researcher at UC Berkeley, and the startup Ayar Labs.

 

A metal pin on the memory chip in your computer might transmit at 1.6 gigabits per second. Sun's optical connection ups that rate to 2.5 gigabits per second. Not a huge difference on the face of it. But the killer app here is that multiple wavelengths of light—up to 11—can be used simultaneously to send data through a single fiber. Which means this technology has potential speeds of 27.5 gigabits per second—more than an order of magnitude faster than today’s standard. "So that's the extra dimension we have to scale bandwidth that we don't have with normal electrical signals." The findings appear in the journal Nature. [Chen Sun et al, Single-chip microprocessor communicating directly using light]

 

These chips with optical connections are not just high-speed—they also require less energy than the copper versions. That could be a big deal, with server farms projected to outpace every other commercial use of electricity within the next decade. Going optical could thus be a win-win: faster processing using a fraction of the energy.

 

—Christopher Intagliata

 

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] 

 

Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group 

After Eight Years, NASA’s Dawn Probe Brings Dwarf Planet Ceres Into Closest Focus

Space





Photo credit:

Ceres, as seen by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on December 10, around a crater chain called Gerber Catena. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, CC BY

More than a thousand times farther from Earth than the moon, farther even than the sun, an extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition is taking place. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is exploring dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The probe has just reached the closest point it ever will, and is now beginning to collect its most detailed pictures and other measurements on this distant orb.

 

From Blood Diamonds To Dirty Gold: How To Buy Gold Less Tainted By Mercury

Environment





Photo credit:

A speck of gold from a mine in Liberia, Africa. dw-akademie-africa, CC BY-NC

When a customer walks into a jewelry store, weddings or special occasions are usually front of mind. Rarely does that customer think of where the jewelry comes from, let alone its social and environmental costs.

Plant Viruses: From Crop Pathogens To Key Players In Bio-Nanotechnology

Technology





Photo credit:

Orchid infected with the Tobacco mosaic virus. Department of Plant Pathology Archive North Carolina State University - USDA Forest Service

Plant viruses are sub-microscopic parasites that have been studied primarily because they cause devastating diseases in crop plants. But in recent years, scientists have discovered they’re not just bad news; they also form symbiotic relationships with plants and the microbes they host.

Moreover, plant virus genomes have been engineered for use in gene delivery and are also being increasingly used as nanoparticles in bio-nanotechnology.