You’re about to travel through another dimension, a dimension not of logic and reason, but of political influence and deep pockets. Your are journeying into a land where up is down, and more pollution is less pollution. If you could read that signpost through the smog, you would know you’ve entered the Alabama Department of Environmental Management Twilight Zone

In the past two days, there have been three major reports concerning the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) that makes me wonder what kind of wacky weed these guys must be smoking.

First, there were two yesterday concerning Alabama’s air quality. In the first, we learn of the State of Alabama’s proposal to codify ADEM’s illegal practice of allowing the largest air polluters in Alabama to exceed the maximum limits set by the US Clean Air Act.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management has been seeking federal approval for the rule change since 2003, when ADEM’s Environmental Management Commission adjusted the existing smokestack law at the behest of major air polluters in the state, including the power, paper, chemical and cement industries.

The rule change that’s mentioned is one in which ADEM routinely allows some large polluters in the state to exceed the limit of soot they discharge into our air by an average of 2%. In 2005, the ADEM practice was ruled illegal in federal court, although ADEM and other State entities have been in negotiations with the EPA to allow the practice (which is actually still occurring). Interestingly, ADEM is selling this proposal as an effort to improve air quality, and Alabama Governor Bob Riley is in a buying mood:

Riley’s office argued that the new rule change “ensures that air quality (in the state) will continue to improve.” The governor’s e-mails also state, “we are not asking for a relaxation of air quality regulations. In fact, Alabama has proposed more stringent standards for our state.”

Dear Mr. Governor, allowing more pollution isn’t actually more stringent. You see, pollution is generally bad, so any standards that allow more of it would actually be less stringent. I know the whole more/more thing has a cool syntactic symmetry, but sometimes you have to leverage the actual meanings of words to make your arguments less insane.

When you think about how ADEM and the Governor’s office could claim that allowing more pollution into Alabama’s air would improve Alabama’s air quality, you have to ask yourself just what would motivate seemingly bright and intelligent people to act so stupidly. It turns out that there’s a clue:

… the rule change the judge objected to came about because the state’s biggest power providers – including Alabama Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority – and other industrial polluters asked for it.

Oh, right. If big polluters ask for it, it must be a good thing.

In the second report yesterday, we learned about ADEM’s failed attempt from the 1990′s to block the use of electronic pollution monitoring equipment, in favor of using trained monkeys to spot excess soot emitted from smokestacks. OK, trained monkeys may be a bit over the top, but given that ADEM wants to use “trained smoke readers” instead of more reliable and precise monitoring instruments, the metaphor is completely appropriate.

The report points out that critics of this Monkey’s Eyeball method makes it impossible to effectively monitor and enforce federal clean air standards. The EPA, for it’s part, would rather have something called “credible evidence” of whether a company was complying with clean air limits. ADEM, however, would prefer the Monkey’s Eyeballs to modern measuring instruments, because they think it would be impossible to requiring polluters to meet clean air standards.

And finally, there was a report today about how ADEM testing over the past year show high levels of mercury contamination in some species of fish. Mercury contamination has been linked to several birth defects and developmental disabilities, and the ADEM is pointing out that this is a particularly good year to avoid eating largemouth bass caught in south Alabama. Of course, what is missing from the report is the fact that the largest source of mercury contamination in lakes and streams is industrial air pollution that eventually falls as contaminated rainwater, pollution that is commonly emitted from coal-fired power plants like the ones that ADEM is OK with emitting more soot.

So – there you have it – the perfect storm that is the ADEM twilight zone: ADEM wants us to believe that more pollution will give us better air quality. They also want us to believe that trained monkeys are capable of monitoring soot emissions as well as automated instruments. And finally, they want us to make sure we don’t eat the contaminated fish.

Herein lies the critical flaw of science when studying the creation of our world. Science cannot observe and therefore cannot test the creation, nor can scientists examine any of the so-called “Big Bang” scenarios. These singular events are far beyond any application of the scientific method. Since they happen but once, they can never be reproduced or observed by any scientist.

Observation and reproduction of studies and experiments are essential to the scientific method. Therefore, because the creation and associated theories cannot be observed or tested, responsible scientists will avoid aggressive assaults upon that which they cannot test by present methodology.

[emphasis added]

Again, this writer is probably well-meaning, and most likely educated. But as in previous instances, this is another great example of why we absolutely must improve science education – not only in Alabama, but throughout the US.

In this instance, the writer’s argument suffers from two fatal errors. First, he conflates Darwin’s Theory of Evolution with cosmology, and in particular “Big Bang” theories in Physics. Evolution makes no claims whatsoever concerning the origin of the universe. Instead, it’s simply a coherent, tested, and testable biological theory about how species change and adapt over time. For nearly 150 years, it has been the unifying theory of biology, and while biology and physics are indeed both sciences, Evolution only has cosmological importance if it violates your religious comfort zone. Scientifically Evolution and Cosmology are apples and oranges.

The second fatal flaw in the writer’s argument is the misunderstanding of the notion of historical sciences. Different sciences can be placed on a continuum ranging from experimental sciences to historical sciences. Physics is largely an experimental science, as is chemistry and psychology, and these would sit near the “experimental end of the continuum. Toward the far end, we have sciences that are largely historical in nature, such as paleontology and astronomy. Within the philosophy of science, it’s well understood that many sciences have aspects that are experimental and those that are historical. In all these cases, however, the methods and rigor used by all scientists, even those who use mathematical models and known physical properties of the universe to describe the conditions at one ten-billionth of a second after the Big Bang, are valid scientific methods.

So I ask how dumb dead matter and dumb dead light arrived at the system called vision without the input of intelligence.[sic] My answer (and the answer of most people) is: They didn’t. Darwinian evolutionists do not like that answer. But they cannot disprove it …” [emphasis added]

Another recent letter claimed that:

First of all, the last time I checked, evolution was still listed as a theory. Certain people in the scientific community seem to think that it has been proven as a fact.

Quotes like these from well-meaning (and likely reasonably well educated) people highlight the importance of improving science education. In every expressed opinion in favor of intelligent design, the authors demonstrate a clear and fundamental misunderstanding of science and what the words “Theory” and “Fact” mean within a scientific context.

There have also been a number of recent “pro-science” letters and opinion pieces. While well-meaning, these too have missed the mark with respect to the key misconceptions about science that lay people clearly demonstrate in their “pro intelligent design” tirades. Recently, the most cogent discussion to appear locally concerning some of the problems with the intelligent design movement appear in Dr. Albert Gapud’s piece (Don’t be distracted by intelligent design, May 25). To his credit, Dr. Gapud recounted the famous Dover trial (Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District et al.), but I don’t think he went quite far enough.

In the Kitzmiller opinion, the court concluded that it was unconstitutional to require teaching intelligent design in the public schools, saying:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID [Intelligent Design] Policy violates the Establishment Clause [of the US Constitution]. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

While this court decision makes it equally difficult for fundamentalist Christians as well as radical Moslems to impose their religious ideals upon our children within public schools, citing it doesn’t do anything to educate the many ID supporters who mistakenly contend that scientists “believe” in evolution, or that ID stands as a viable scientific alternative to Evolution, or that science is or should be democratic. Let’s examine each of these misconceptions.

First, scientists don’t believe in evolution, certainly not the way that religious people have faith in God. This gets back to those words I mentioned earlier, “Fact” and “Theory”, and what they mean in a scientific context. To the lay person, facts are irrefutable truths that can be proven. The situation in science is similar, with the exception that in science, facts are simply data. They are the pieces of information that are collected through careful observation and measurement. For example, it is a fact the half-life of Carbon-14 isotope is 5,730 (plus or minus 40) years. It’s also a fact that many species that existed in earlier times are now extinct. Given enough facts (or data), scientists will attempt to organize them into a conceptual framework that describes them, and explains how they came about. These conceptual frameworks are known as theories.

Theories in science are as good as science gets. Interestingly, theories are also incapable of being “proven” in any way (google : falsifiability for the roots of this). What sets a scientific theory apart from a non-scientific explanation of things (like ID) is that real scientific theories (like Darwin’s Theory of Evolution) are capable of being proven wrong.

Since Evolution makes testable predictions, and is capable of being proven wrong, you would think this is something that should cause creationists and other “evolution deniers” to rejoice. Science provides this very elegant mechanism to get rid of bad scientific theories. Instead, however, we only hear wailing and gnashing of teeth, since creationists don’t use the only vehicle by which Evolution could be properly rejected: amass a body of independently verifiable facts that refute evolution and provide a compelling, falsifiable alternative theory. Rather than searching for a scientific alternative for Evolution fundamentalist Christians (as well as fundamentalist Muslims) use political and religious arguments and stunts that waste your taxes in their attempts to refute the Theory of Evolution.

This brings us to the second point, that ID is not a viable alternative to Evolution. There are several reasons for this, but I’ll mention just two. First, as we have seen, ID isn’t really a scientific theory since it makes no testable predictions and is therefore not capable of being proven wrong. The second main reason that ID can’t possibly replace Evolution is that it simply has no explanatory power. This is due to the fact that the central claim of ID is that we cannot know how the diversity of life came about, because the development of species on Earth was the result of an intelligent designer (but not God, someone else) that worked in some mysterious ways (but not God’s way) to bring it all about.

Theory construction in science requires that your alternative to an existing theory must account for all (or at least a large proportion of) the data that supports the theory it’s intended to replace. The classic example in Physics occurred when Quantum Mechanics replaced Classical Newtonian Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics explains everything that Isaac Newton did, but it also explains phenomena that Newton could never have considered, like what happens to matter at subatomic scales. ID doesn’t even come close to explaining anything that Evolution explains without the need to appeal to supernatural intervention. Indeed, where ID absolutely needs to provide an alternative to the mechanism of natural selection, it instead offers an empty box labelled “a miracle happened here.” It’s your prerogative to believe in miracles. Just don’t teach your special brand of miracles as science in biology classes on the Federal dime.

Finally, there’s this mistaken notion that we should teach ID because it offers a counterpoint to Evolution, as if these were two great political parties engaged in some sort democratic contest for truth. Central to this mistake is the idea that it’s somehow unfair to present only one side of a story. In this case, the side of scientists who provisionally accept Evolution is presented without any sort of rebuttal by the other side. There are a couple of problems with this way of thinking about science. First of all, it is common to present competing theories in the classroom, but with respect to Evolution, there simply isn’t any scientific competition, and there hasn’t been any for almost 150 years. There are some details that scientists argue over, but there aren’t any viable alternatives waiting in the wings. Also, this argument is also typically raised by Evolution deniers who have political rather than scientific motives, and who foist the false dichotomy of Evolution versus ID upon us in an attempt to get more fundamentalist Christianity in our public schools. Science progresses by replacing old theories that fail to account for the facts with newer ones that do. In this sense, science itself uses a sort of Natural Selection to weed out bad theories to make room for better ones.

Someday, a scientist or team of scientists may come up with an alternative to Evolution. That alternative, however, won’t be any form of ID, no matter what you call the God-Designer. It will instead be some other similarly naturalistic framework that will also cause much consternation among those who want to teach about Allah, or Yahweh, or Jesus in our public science classes. Until that alternative shows up, however, we should be teaching Evolution in publicly funded science classes, and leave religious instruction to our children’s parents and clergy.

One thing I find interesting is that creationists would resort to an ineffectual tactic like this in the first place. To illustrate what I mean, I’ll first present the failed bill, and then I’ll point out why it’s both unnecessary, and couldn’t possibly help creationists get what they want, which is more talk about religion and less talk about evolution in science classes.

First, you can read the contents of the bill here.

Now, the critique:

1. In section 2, there is a claim that “existing law does not expressly protect the right of teachers identified by the United States Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard to present scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories.” This is false. In fact, the ruling of Edwards v. Aguillard states:

We do not imply that a legislature could never require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught. . . . [T]eaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.

Which means – if you have a scientific critique of a theory, you can teach it if doing so enhances the effectiveness of scientific instruction. Simple and effective – teachers are allowed to teach science in Alabama schools.

2. In section 3 the bill states that every teacher in the State of Alabama, “shall have the affirmative right and freedom to present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views in any curricula or course of learning.”

This is actually unnecessary since every teacher in the State of Alabama already enjoys this right. In fact, this right is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Regardless, there’s no harm in providing special rights for teachers, right?

3. Section 5 is the kicker. It states, “Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution of higher education, shall be penalized in any way because he or she may subscribe to a particular position on any views.”

This would be a get out of jail free card for every student for anything they want. If a student held a view that the earth was flat you would be breaking the law if you lowered his geography grade below an A+. If a student firmly believed that earth didn’t exist until they were born, you couldn’t attach a grade to that opinion if it came up on a test. In our educational system there is no metric for understanding that doesn’t require demonstration of that understanding. If you claim that dogs and cats are the same species, you’re wrong and clearly haven’t demonstrated your understanding of mammalian speciation. It’s a teacher’s duty to require demonstrations of understanding from their students, and if they have penalties for errors and mistakes in thinking, that’s part of the process.

4. Section 7 is also interesting, it says, “the protection provided by this act shall not be restricted by any metaphysical or religious implications of a view, so long as the views are defensible from and justified by empirical science and observation of the natural world.”

Since there is no empirical science or observation of the natural world that supports any metaphysical or religious claim, this section alone makes it impossible for intelligent design proponents and other creationists to increase the exposure of their views in Alabama classrooms. In other words, if you hold a view that has metaphysical or religious implications, you’re out of luck – because science can’t help you support your view.

That last part made me think a bit. Why would creationists push for an education bill that would ultimately forbid any discussion of creationism or intelligent design? Here’s why: Most people, including the bill’s sponsor Rusty Glover, don’t understand science enough to use it effectively.

More on that later.

The Alabama House of Representatives approved a bill on Tuesday that would allow the sale of “Gourmet Beers” that contain higher levels of alcohol than currently allowed by law. A group of beer enthusiasts calling themselves Free the Hops lobbied for the change, saying that without such a law, Alabamians would only be allowed to buy cheap, tasteless beers in the state.

Under the new bill, which passed by a slim margin of 48-42 in the House, beers with an alcohol content up to 13.9% could be legally sold in Alabama. Supporters of the bill say that such beers are sold in most states, and that making such beers available in Alabama would be good for state tourism. Opponents claim that the bill would kill Alabama’s children:

“We are killing our young people,” Rep. Richard Laird, D-Roanoke, said.

Arguments like this completely miss the point. Critics suggest that kids will “find a way” to drink the more expensive beers if they’re available, all the while ignoring the fact that kids don’t need beer to escape their pathetic, angst-ridden lives anyway. Instead of worrying about underage drinkers beer preferences, our lawmakers should try to remedy the social forces that drive children to drink in the first place, while improving enforcement of existing laws against underage drinking.

Beer drinking is not only legal in all 50 states, it’s a celebrated part of our culture as well as a booming industry. Underage drinking is already illegal, so increasing the menu of beers that the underaged cannot choose from shouldn’t have a large impact on underage drinking rates. Instead, providing good beer in Alabama improves the choices available to law-abiding patriotic beer drinkers throughout Alabama.

You know who you are, representative Laird.

“That’s all well and good”, the folks down Mobile, AL said, “but we have another name for this February 5th. We call it, Fat Tuesday.”

For the uninitiated, Fat Tuesday is Mardi Gras day. The final day of in a three-week jag of true Bacchanalia, parades, balls, floats, beads, and sometimes more than a modest amount of drunken debauchery.

Yup – election day is on Mardi Gras day, and there may be some contention for people’s time and attention.

So when faced with a potential collision between political responsibility and an excuse to ditch work and catch some moon pies or strings of colored beads hurled by half-naked maskers standing on gaudy meandering floats with the force of an American League starting pitcher, you can probably guess what the unanimous solution would be.

That’s right, they moved election day again.

So, unlike the rest of the State of Alabama, Mobile and Baldwin counties in the very southern parts of the state held their Super Tuesday primaries last Wednesday, which was another parade day, but certainly nothing like Fat Tuesday (nor Joe Cain day, for that matter). So we did our civic duty, we went out and voted, and we thought all was well.

But it wasn’t – because nobody bothered to inform campaigns and the legions manning their calling centers. Nope – they have been very busy, calling several times daily – during dinner, in the afternoon when nobody is going to answer them, vainly hawking this or that candidate.

It’s no use telling them that they’re wasting their money – their hard fought campaign warchests. We already voted. Now, it’s just a matter of getting to the next parade.