Baloney Detecting Exercise for Students

Jeff Barbour’s brief history of everything was published on Universe Today.  His essay, entitled “Where does intelligent life come from?” paints a short but sweeping panorama from the Big Bang to humans.  Its style is somewhat like watered-down Carl Sagan or gilded Neil deGrasse Tyson (see 09/29/2004 entry).  Here’s a sample about the origin of life:

Although breeder stars formed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, life here on Earth took its time.  Our Sun – a third generation star of modest mass – formed some nine-billion years later.  Life-forms developed a little more than one billion years after that.  As this occurred, molecules combined to form organic compounds which – under suitable conditions – joined together as amino acids, proteins, and cells.  During all this one layer of complexity was added to another and creatures became ever more perceptive of the world around them.  Eventually – after more billions of years – vision developed.  And vision – added to an subjective sense of awareness – made it possible for the Universe to look back at itself. (Emphasis added in all quotes.)

Barbour makes no hint that a Creator might have had anything to do with any stage of this scenario, except for a brief mention in a footnote, surrounded by some strange statements (indicated by [?]):

That life develops from less sophisticated to more sophisticated forms is a question beyond scientific dispute.  Precisely how this process takes place is an issue of deep division in human society.  Astronomers – unlike biologists – are not required to hold any particular theory on this issue. [?]  Whether chance mutation and natural selection drives the process or some unseen “hand” exists to bring such things about is outside the realm of astronomical inquiry.  Astronomers are interested in structures, conditions, and processes in the universe at large.  As life becomes more salient to that discussion, astronomy – in particular exobiology – will have more to say about the matter. [?]  But the very fact that astronomers can allow nature to speak on such issues as a sudden and instantaneous “creation ex nihilo” in the form of a Big Bang shows just how flexible astronomical thinking is in regard to ultimate origins. [?]

High schoolers might be offended by the offhand way Barbour makes them seem dumber than bacteria: “Consider the high school chemistry lab experiments where hydrogen and oxygen gas are combined, heated then explode.  Primitive life forms had to learn to handle this very volatile stuff in a far safer manner – putting phosphorus to task in the conversion of ADP to ATP and back again.”  How said primitive life forms learned how to invent ATP synthase (see 02/23/2005 entry), or any of the other molecular machines in the simplest life forms we know about (see 03/14/2005 and 03/11/2005 entries), he does not explain. 

There’s nothing new or original here that makes this embarrassing litany of shameless bravado worth mentioning, except as an exercise for young Baloney Detectors who had better get armed against stupidity while young, because they’re going to get a lot of it in public school or on TV.  This piece is so lame, so full of deification of Nature and glittering generalities and bluffing, one wonders if Barbour wrote it in mockery of Tyson and the cosmic evolution genre in general.  Since he apparently was dead serious, we might as well have some fun with it.  It should make your Baloney Detector click like a Geiger counter in Chernobyl.  The hard part is trying to figure out which lines would not win Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week.
    Parents, teachers, print out Barbour’s little fairy tale, print out the Baloney Detector, get colored pens and have at it.  How many times does he confidently assert things without evidence?  How many wiggle words are there (maybe, probably, might have, etc.)?  How many times does he personify Nature or lower life forms, empowering them with creative genius just because there is a need?  How many times does he wave the magic wand of millions of years, as if time alone works wonders?  How many cases of miracle words or phrases (arose, emerged, joined, formed, took form) does he use?  How many claims are contradicted by observational evidence? (surfing through Creation-Evolution Headlines archives can be helpful here).
  Younger students might like to draw silly cartoons in the margins, or put on a puppet show, perhaps with Miss Piggy reading selections of this essay with Shakespearean flair, and Kermit interrupting occasionally to ask tough questions.  Maybe Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker would work as well.  When done having fun, click on the “Discuss this story” link at the end of the Universe Today article and let other readers, many not as precocious as your student, be granted at least a modicum of enlightenment.