A modest proposal for the future of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving

I think I’ve come up with a compromise that may put an end to the controversy that surrounds the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving.

For those unfamiliar with the situation, the Memorial Carving, the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world, adorns the broad side of Stone Mountain, a granite-like monadnock located on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. It depicts three heroes of the Confederacy, its president, Jefferson Davis, and two of its most celebrated generals, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.

The idea for such a sculpture was hatched by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1912 when Stone Mountain was pretty much a private reserve of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. It was cross-burning central.

After several attempts to get the project off the ground, the effort was abandoned in 1928. It would have remained little more than a partially completed sculpture of Lee’s head, had it not been for the Georgia General Assembly’s decision in 1960 to revive the endeavor.

I’m not quite sure how much this was an act of segregationist defiance by a yet another southern state reluctant to give up on Jim Crow or how much it was a bizarre tourist industry vision to transform the mountain and the surrounding area into an ante-bellum theme park. The line between out-and-out racism and gross racial insensitivity is a thin one sometimes.

In any event, a dedication ceremony for the Confederate Memorial Carving was held in May of 1970, which makes the monument a relatively recent addition to our cultural heritage, if you can call it that.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church massacre in Charleston last month, there have been calls, most notably by the NAACP, to have the carving removed from the side of the mountain.

Opposition to expunging the sculpture have been widespread, too. Some of it, no doubt, emanates from racist quarters or a misguided pride in the cause of the Confederacy that turns a blind eye to the fact that it was, at its core, a struggle to preserve the “special” institution of slavery.

Some of the opposition, though, has to do with not wanting to endorse a program of historical revision that comes across a lot of like the feeding of the “memory hole” described by George Orwell in his novel 1984. I can grok that.

But when it comes to a compromise for the Confederate Memorial Carving, it is memory itself that may come to the rescue.

It is a little remembered fact that Jefferson Davis decided to “hastily put on one of his wife’s dresses” in order to try to escape capture by Union forces in May of 1865. That he was still dressed this way when he was taken into custody was the source of an abundant amount of public ridicule at the time.

So, I say, instead of jettisoning Jeff from the side of Stone Mountain, dress him up in a nice period bonnet. This could be done with an installation using a frame anchored (non-destructively) in the sculpture itself, decked out with durable, brightly colored fabric.

It would serve as a visible reminder that, while these three men were heroes of the Confederacy, they were not victorious ones.

Ham-on-Nye: What we have here is not, at least not entirely, a failure to communicate

I really don't have anything to add to the "who won and who lost" discussion about this week's Ham-on-Nye debate. So here's an analysis, not of the debate itself, but of some of the analysis of the debate, much of which has been laying the blame for the significant public rejection of the theory of evolution here on poor science communication. "Bad Astronomer," Phil Plait's opinion piece on the Slate website is a good example of this kind of criticism.

I would be one of the last people to claim that science communication does not need improvement. Improving science communication is important to me and to the organization I run, the Atlanta Science Tavern. But there's a lot more at issue here than whether the way we go about communicating the science evolution has been good or bad.

From what I've read, public science communication in the U.S. is not all that different from informal science education in much of Europe where evolution is widely accepted. The reality of anthropogenic climate change isn't such a hard-sell in Europe, either. But, interestingly enough, rejection of vaccination as a safe and effective public health measure is commonplace both here and abroad. Vaccination, in particular childhood vaccination, is considered by a large fraction of both populations to be dangerous, in spite of concerted efforts to educate the public to the contrary. The reason this is happening is because the question of vaccination safety and effectiveness has ceased to be a scientific issue in the last dozen years or so and instead has become a political one. This is an important distinction.

Revival meeting during the Second Great Awakening

So we need to appreciate the political dimension of our "evolution problem" in order to address it properly. Rejection of evolution here, much like the denial of climate change, is rooted in our political and cultural history, a history marked by "Great Awakenings" of religious fervor and a stubborn insistence that America is in some respects exceptional and that the rules that apply elsewhere in the world, however rational, do not necessarily apply here.

The implication is that the kind of difficulty that we experience in trying to maintain the integrity of the science curriculum in public schools, has a lot in common with the challenges we face in enacting rational gun control laws or sensible policies that ensure access to necessary health care for all our citizens. Of course, better communication, whether on the theory of evolution or the costs of gun-related crimes and accidents or the benefits of a healthy populace, is an important part of solving these problems. But it is not the entire solution, maybe not even most of it.

So, by all means, let's redouble our efforts to improve science communications. But it is important to keep in mind that the struggle here is primarily political and that it has more to do with values beliefs and less to do with knowledge and understanding.

Open Mindedness and the Teaching of Science in Public Schools

This essay began as my contribution to a discussion on the Atlanta Science Tavern message board having to do with the topic of a recently announced meetup, The Christian Right's Assault on Public Education and the Science Curriculum, featuring Katherine Stewart, author of the book, The Good News Club. One of our members Deb spoke out about what she felt was the threat posed by the kind of close mindedness which would prevent including creationism, for example, in the public science classroom. What follows is an edited version of my response to her.

I wanted to add to this lively exchange by trying to focus the discussion to see if we can make some headway with the issue at hand - or at least what I believe to be the issue at hand - and that is the proper way to go about formulating the science curriculum for public primary and secondary schools.

Let’s begin by turning our attention to Deb’s concern about the price we pay by closing our minds to alternative points of view in science and elsewhere. In some respects I couldn’t agree more, open mindedness is a personal virtue, one that I aspire to in my own life. I hope that I can live up to Deb’s expectations for me!

Of course, our striving for open mindedness has to be tempered with what I would call discernment. Each day we have to entertain a myriad of choices, but ultimately we have to make final decisions, sometimes critical ones having to do with our own welfare or that of other people. Good judgement is the balancing act we perform that results from maintaining an open mind while relying on significant lessons we have learned about what sources of information and advice we can trust as we go about selecting between alternative courses of action.

In addition, I would agree with Deb that it is incumbent upon us to inculcate open mindedness in our children, and I do believe that the schools, both public and private, have an important role to play in this process. That said, schools are also a way for us confer upon our children the hard-won rewards of our experience, not only as individuals, but as a culture and as a civilization. To lay before them a set of options without offering them the benefit of our collective knowledge would be a disservice, perhaps even a crime.

Nowhere is this obligation clearer than in the K-12 science curriculum. That is because, unlike other other fields of human endeavor, after centuries of struggle, the scientific enterprise has answered fundamental questions about the nature of the world beyond any reasonable doubt. The confidence of these positions is embodied in what is called the scientific consensus. While acknowledging that scientific “truths” such as these are always provisional, we understand them to be of a different quality than competing opinions and so raise the bar as to what will be the foundational knowledge that we choose to transmit to young and growing minds.

To understand this better, I think that it is useful for us to consider another element of the science curriculum and that is the germ theory of disease. I ask that the participants in this discussion to test the validity of their approaches by considering how well they fare in this analogous context.

Louis Pasteur photographed
by Pierre Lamy Petit

The germ theory of disease, the idea that disease originates, at least in large part, as the result of infection by microbes was, like Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, a triumph of 19th century science. This is not to say that it reached its current form then. Viruses were unknown to Louis Pasteur. Likewise, the injuries that can result from chronic exposure to, say, low-level radiation or pesticide residues were unanticipated by Pasteur. No doubt, much of the harm that befalls us is self-inflicted, indicative of bad “lifestyle choices” having to do with diet, for example or the use of addictive drugs and has nothing to do with germs.

Nonetheless, the germ theory has become enshrined as part of the scientific canon and recognized as the undisputed scientific consensus. More than a theoretical notion, Pasteur’s and Robert Koch's legacy has been the foundation for the development of medical therapies - everything from the practice of asepsis in hospitals, to childhood vaccinations to antibiotic drugs - that have saved hundreds of millions of lives.

Quartz (Rob Lavinsky / IRocks.com) 

Be that as it may, a controversy still swirls around the germ theory of disease, not in the scientific community, but in a variety of sectors of the public mind. Some of these challenges have to do with an understanding of the very origin of disease itself, with the blame laid not with bacteria and viruses but with such things as an imbalance of energy fields in our bodies or the misconfiguration of our spines. More commonly the controversies have to do with what constitutes effective treatment of disease, with homeopathy and crystal healing being offered notably as competing "alternative" therapies. There is even significant opposition from some quarters to vaccination as a safe and effective public health measure.

I want to emphasize that the question I am posing is not whether there is some documented basis to these competing claims - I am confident that the list of citations is endless - but whether they should be introduced into the public school curriculum to balance the teaching of the germ theory of disease.

Two-year old Rahima Banu of Bangladesh,
the last person infected with
naturally occurring Variola major, in 1975

Would we be derelict not to include our classroom discussions the presentation of homeopathy, crystal healing, chiropractic as effective alternatives to the treatment of human ailments, on a par with antibiotics and accepted surgical practice? Are we obligated to teach this controversy? Should we instruct our children in elementary school that they should be suspicious of the vaccinations that their family doctors give them, telling them that there are some people who say vaccines are not only ineffective but even dangerous?

Furthermore should the science curriculum in this regard be expanded to include a discussion of the “ultimate” cause of disease, causes that in some immaterial sense precede its origins in entirely natural processes?

Should students in a high school  biology class learn that disease might find metaphysical roots in the karmic balancing of accounts from our past-life transgressions? Should they be taught that cancer, for example, could be construed as the fruit our original sin and proof of our fundamentally corrupt nature? There are not an inconsiderable number of people, if the popularity of Oprah's book selections is any indication, who believe that the ailments that beset us, including those that torment the tiniest infants, emanate from our failure to maintain a positive attitude about ourselves and about the world around us. Should these points of view be included in our biology textbooks?

So, in closing this addition to the discussion, I ask for you to put the particulars of evolution debate aside and consider the analogous question about teaching a different scientific theory - with an open mind of course. I look forward to hearing whether you see the parallels as being applicable to the original debate and how concerns about “teaching the controversy” might apply here.


Open Mindedness and the Teaching of Science in Public Schools by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.

Dinesh D'Souza, in the Dark about Dark Matter and about Science

Of all the attacks leveled against science by the religious faithful, the most insidious are the ones that cast religion and science as comparable approaches to understanding natural the world.  In a debate with Christopher Hitchens at Notre Dame this past January conservative author and speaker Dinesh D'Souza showcased a variation of this kind of "we're just two peas in a pod" claim and, in doing so, succeeded in demonstrating a genuine failure to understand how science really works.  In the process, he does no great service to religion, either.

In making his case for a faith-based approach to science, D'Souza proposes that the existence of God can be employed as a working hypothesis much like any other.  And, as with any provisional hypothesis, he says it should be embraced when it helps account for phenomena which have otherwise resisted explantion.  Seeking confirmation of this God of the gaps argument - familiar to us from the Intelligent Design controversy - D'Souza turns to astrophysics for an illustration of how science relies on the same kind of speculative thinking that religion does.  Here is the background on the example he finds there to exploit.

Galaxy cluster ACO 3341, located
almost 500 million years away
(European Southern Observatory)

The Mystery of the Missing Mass
In the 1920s, not long after galaxies outside our own Milky Way were first identified, they were seen to arrange themselves into clusters, orbiting about one another, presumably, under the influence of their mutual gravitational attraction.  Indeed, the working of gravity in these far, far away places was not unexpected.  Contrary to popular conception, Isaac Newton's stroke of genius had not been in observing a falling apple - he was hardly the first to notice that things fall - but in his bold conjecture that the force responsible for causing his proverbial knock on the head was the very same force responsible for the motion of the planets about the Sun.  Newton's theory proposed that gravity was universal, applying uniformly to everything, everywhere; to the objects of our everyday experience; to the planets and moons of our solar system; and, presumably, to galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of billions of stars, located millions of light-years away.

What took astronomers of the 1930s by surprise was that, when the amount of stuff in these galactic clusters was finally tallied, gravitational accounts did not balance.  A census of the visible matter contained within them - stars and dust clouds and other such "luminous" things - resulted in a total mass insufficient to bind them in their mutual orbits.  According to calculations the galaxies in these clusters should be flying apart at breakneck speed.  The physicists faced a quandary: either Newton had got it wrong, and the force of gravity he proposed was, in fact, not universal, or their exhaustive attempts to catalog the constituents of these galactic clusters had left a significant amount of matter unaccounted for.

Bullet Cluster, best evidence
to date for the existence of
dark matter.

At first this astrophysical mystery went by the name "missing mass" and it was presumed to be an artifact of limitations of the observational techniques available at the time.  Perhaps, for example, large numbers of dead or dormant stars had gone unobserved and, therefore, uncounted in the celestial tally.  But even when astronomers refined their efforts at detection, their gravitational bookkeeping kept coming up short.  To make matters worse, after a few decades passed, new astrophysical puzzles were encountered that also hinted at the existence of missing matter in other astrophysical contexts.  Finally, and reluctantly, a working hypothesis came to be accepted.  The vexing missing mass was assumed to be bound up in a heretofore undetected kind of "dark matter" which was characterized solely by its heft and its failure to shine. Of what it was actually composed, no one had a clue.

Next generation detector,
Xenon Dark Matter Project

Desperately Seeking Dark Matter
Now, according to D'Souza, in the same way that physicists have proposed the existence of dark matter as an explanation for an enigmatic phenomenon, the stability of galactic clusters in spite of an apparent insufficiency of mass, so too can we rely on the hypothesis of God to explain other mysteries of the physical world.  He contends that such "presuppositions" are valid elements in the construction of scientific theories because they yield immense explanatory payoff; disconnected pieces of a puzzle fall into place and suddenly everything makes sense.

Is D'Souza right?  Are "materialist" scientists and those who defer to faith-based hypotheses playing by the same rules?  To see how the their approaches differ, consider this observation from a recent physics arXiv blog post - First Evidence That Mirror Matter May Fill the Universe? - regarding ongoing efforts to solve this problem.

Astronomers call this hidden mass 'dark matter' and physicists around the world are engaged in an increasingly desperate race to find evidence of it here on Earth. [emphasis added]

Now imagine, for a moment, an analogous report on the state of current investigations into some phenomenon or other "explained" by D'Souza's God presupposition:

Scientists call this hidden cause 'God' and researchers around the world are engaged in an increasingly desperate race to confirm His existence.

This comparison, of course, strikes us as ridiculous on its face; no one has ever embarked upon a search for God in order to confirm or refute a physical theory.  Good Lord, how could such a search even be conducted?  Perhaps more significantly, no teams of researchers have ever engaged in a desperate race to reveal God's existence.

What D'Souza fails to appreciate in his casting dark matter as just another presupposition is how unpalatable resorting to such a hypothesis is to physicists, one which they entertain reluctantly because the alternative, a rejection of Newton's theory of universal gravitation, would be even more distasteful.  They tolerate "dark matter" as a convenient fiction, but won't rest easy until the composition of this mysterious substance is revealed, or until a more acceptable explanation steps up to replace it.

History confirms how earnest physicists have been in wrestling similar "presuppositions" to the mat.  Interestingly enough, three examples involve a search for missing mass of one variety or another.

Neptune from the Voyager 2
flyby (1989).

A Missing Planet Found
The first hidden matter search came about with the discovery of Uranus by Sir William Herschel in 1781.  With Newton's theory in hand, astronomers were able to calculate the orbit of the newly discovered planet, but by the early 19th century it had become clear that discrepancies existed between the predicted trajectory of Uranus and that which had been meticulously observed.  These scientists were presented with a dilemma not unlike the one that their counterparts would face a century later: either Sir Isaac had gotten things wrong with his theory of gravity or a very significant mass had gone missing.  Perhaps it took the form of a yet undetected outlying planet which was perturbing the motion of Uranus in its path around the Sun?

As disagreement between theoretical calculations and observational evidence became more and more convincing, a desperate race ensued.  The hidden culprit, the planet Neptune, was revealed by Urbain LeVerrier in 1846.

First neutrino detection
in a bubble chamber (1970).

A Missing Particle Detected
In a second example of a missing mass mystery, by 1930 the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei into constituents components had been long-observed and carefully measured, yet, as a result, a vexing question arose.  When the energies of all the particles emerging from the site of such a decay were added up there was an unexpected energy shortfall.  Either a new kind of particle had fled the scene undetected, carrying with it just the right amount of energy (and, according to Einstein, mass) or the long-cherished principle of conservation of energy - far more fundamental for physics than even Newton's universal gravitation - would have to be abandoned.

This fugitive particle, dubbed the neutrino by Enrico Fermi in 1934, eluded capture for more than two decades; science did not breathe a sigh of relief until Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines detected it directly in 1956.

Schematic of Earth moving
through the hypothetical aether.

The Aether goes Missing - with a Payoff
As a final example of the search for a missing substance - and an illustration that presuppositions demand verification - consider the state of the physics of electromagnetic radiation - i.e. light - in the late 19th century.  About the time of the American Civil War James Clerk Maxwell, in what has become to be regarded as the first unified field theory of physics, demonstrated mathematically that light traveled as a wave, not unlike the way waves spread across the surface of a body of a water.  In much the same way that other wave phenomena required a supporting medium - for example, some gas or mixture of gases for sound - it was presupposed that a medium was necessary for the propagation of light, something that pervaded every nook and cranny of space.  Confident in this hypothesis, physicists even gave the conjectured substance a name; it was called the luminiferous (light-bearing) aether.

An ingenious experiment to detect the existence of this mysterious stuff was undertaken by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887.  It failed utterly, but with that failure was planted the seed of Einstein's theory of special relativity which would blossom less than 20 years later.

As these examples illustrate, what Dinesh D'Souza does not understand is that for scientists a presupposition, better characterized as a working hypothesis, is not the end of an investigation, but a starting point.  Presupposing the existence of God as an explanation, as D'Souza suggests, offers no avenue for further research, it is nothing more than prescription for investigative complacency;  one might as well hang a "gone fishin'" sign on the laboratory door.  Regardless of the spiritual rewards that some derive from a belief in God, as a scientific hypothesis it is worse than a blind alley; positing God as an explanation discourages further research, sometimes benignly, by declaring, falsely, that a difficult problem has been solved, and at other times malignly, by intimidating those who dare to seek honest answers based in physical law.

It is important to point out that D'Souza's attempt to exploit the dark matter hypothesis as evidence of the comparability of scientific and religious reasoning about the world is just the latest round in the assault on science by those who, like him, feel that a purely materialist view of nature is incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs.  In the late 1980s they took aim at the theory of evolution with their Intelligent Design hypothesis and were, in short order, discredited.  Probing for vulnerabilities elsewhere they have recently turned their sights on astrophysics and neuroscience, hoping for more favorable battlefields.

But, as Ken Miller, professor of biology at Brown University and a practicing Roman Catholic, noted in his essay, The Flagellum Unspun, which convincingly refutes claims of "irreducible complexity", the cornerstone of Intelligent Design theory,

... the struggles of the intelligent design movement are best understood as clamorous and disappointing double failures – rejected by science because they do not fit the facts, and having failed religion because they think too little of God.

Sadly, Dinesh D'Souza seems compelled to repeat this same mistake, looking for confirmation of his belief in God in the wrong places, misrepresenting the enterprise of science and futilely struggling to insert the Deity in the forever-narrowing gaps in our understanding of the natural world.


Dinesh D'Souza, in the Dark about Dark Matter and about Science by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.