I tried to stay away from Conservapedia, but I just can’t. Despite what I said in my previous post, nobody on the web does stupid like Conservapedia. And I’m not talking about your everday, vanilla kind of stupid. No, this is spicy, arrogant stupid. It’s the stupid that comes from people who are too stupid to know they’re stupid, and my latest Conservapedia discovery serves as a perfect example of this arrogant ignorance. Stumbling around the site earlier, I eventually came across a link to the Conservapedia article on Richard Lenski, so I decided to take a peek and see if they’d found any new bullshit to throw at the man or his work. Well, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had.

The bullshit in question has been hurled at the statistical analysis used in Lenski’s inaugural PNAS paper, and it’s particularly ripe.  It opens with a heaping pile of fail:

Blount, Borland, and Lenski^[1] claimed that a key evolutionary innovation was observed during a laboratory experiment. That claim is false. The claim was based on incorrect measurements of statistical significance.

The person who wrote those words understands approximately shit about Lenski’s paper.  The claim of an “evolutionary innovation”, specifically the evolution of aerobic citrate utilization in a population of E. coli, was not based on any statistical argument.  It was based on the direct observation of the Cit+ phenotype.  Statistical methods were used in the paper to evaluate the hypothesis of evolutionary contingency, not to support the observation of aerobic citrate metabolism.  So right off the bat it’s clearer than Crystal Pepsi that the dildo who wrote this exercise in creationist self-delusion doesn’t know the first thing about the paper he/she claims to be critiquing.

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Oh boy, Bill Dembski sycophant DaveScot has published a post on Uncommon Descent entitled “Fun With Google Trends-ID vs. Darwinism vs. Creationism”.  In it, he posts the following image from Google Trends, and then smugly asks, “Any questions?”

The blue line represents search volume for the term “intelligent design”, while the red line is for “darwinian evolution”.  Well, DaveScot, I’ve got a question.  What in the hell is this supposed to demonstrate?  If it supposed to indicate some sort of public preference for ID over evolution, then you’re sorely mistaken.  Let’s see what happens if we apply Google Trends more appropriately and use “evolution” instead of “darwinian evolution”:

The red line is “evolution”, blue is “intelligent design”.  Oops.  Another epic fail for DaveScot.

Well, it appears that PNAS has sent a response to Andy Schlafly about his letter to the journal detailing “flaws” in Richard Lenski’s inaugural article. As anyone with even a fraction of cognitive ability could have predicted, PNAS has refused to publish his child-like screed. Here is the response from a member of the PNAS editorial board (emphasis mine):

From what I take to be the underlying issue from the numbered points, Mr. Schlafly’s main concern has to do with the fact that one experiment failed to yield a statistically significant result, and this happened to be the experiment with the largest sample size. Every experiment has limited power to detect a difference of any given magnitude, and so in a series of experiments some may yield non-significant results even when the null hypothesis is false. The non-significant experiment may even be the one with the largest sample size. There is nothing exceptional in this–it is a matter of chance. Nevertheless, from a statistical point of view, it is proper to combine the results of independent experiments, as Blount et al. did correctly in their original paper. If the overall result is significant, as it is in this case, then the whole series of tests is regarded as significant. Mr. Schlafly seems to suggest that experiments differing in sample size cannot be combined in an overall analysis, and if this is what he is suggesting, he is wrong. I think Letters published in PNAS should raise points that in themselves, or in conjunction with the authors’ response, should be of wide interest to the readership of PNAS or should illuminate some obscure or subtle point. The issues raised by Mr. Schlafly are neither obscure nor subtle, but are part of everyday statistical analysis at a level too elementary to need rehearsal in the pages of PNAS. Mr. Schlafly’s final comment about release of data is uncalled for. My understanding is that the authors have made the relevant materials available on their web site. This seems to me to meet the requirement that “data collected with public funds belong in the public domain.” If Mr. Schlafly believes that the disclosure is incomplete, that is an issue that needs to be argued with the original funding agency, not with the readers of PNAS.

Shorter PNAS: “We don’t print letters from mouthbreathing simpletons who cannot understand simple math or science. Please fuck off.”

Of course, the Conservapedia talk page for the PNAS response is filled with delirious wackaloons complaining that this is further evidence of a conspiracy within the scientific community to censor creationists. For example, commenter Raul offers this bleating remark:

Oh my dear God, I can’t believe this!! Where has this beautiful country gone to if even science is not reliable anymore nowadays. Hope things will change in the future. Good thing there still are people like Mr. Schlafly, who have the brains and power to stand up, and turn the people of America in the right direction again.

Andy Schlafly? Brains? Those terms should never be found together in any sentence that isn’t pointing out that the former does not possess the latter.

I need to stop reading Answers in Genesis.  The brain damage suffered from visiting their website may not be irreversible after prolonged exposure, and we can’t have that.  The latest offense to modern human thought comes courtesy of Jason Lisle, who is yet another example that a five-star ignoramus can get a PhD.  The article in question is a reply to a reader’s question about a statement in a previous article at AiG, which reads in part:

I read the feedback that Jason Lisle, Ph.D. wrote in response to the feedback concerning the article “Feedback: Does Logic Supersede the Bible?” The quote I found to be absurd was, “However, if evolution were true, if our brain and sensory organs are simply accidents of nature and if nature itself is merely an accident of a big bang, then there would be no reason to trust that our senses and memory are reliable or that there should be any order in the universe to study.” Jason Lisle. Natural selection is not an accident, it is a process. Also, why should we not trust our senses? Regardless of how they came into existence, they are still there, and working.

In response, Dr. Lisle breaks out the high-grade stupid:

Since God designed the human mind and our senses, we would expect them to be able to function properly. So, in the Christian worldview, it makes sense that our senses would reliably perceive the environment and that our mind would have the ability to be rational. But in the evolutionary worldview, the sensory organs and the brain are just chemical accidents that happened to convey survival value. Therefore, there is no logical reason to think that they should be reliable…The point is that if evolution were true, there would be no reason to think that the senses are reliable. Therefore, those people who believe in both (1) the reliability of the senses and (2) evolution are being inconsistent. They are believing in something that has no rational foundation within their own worldview.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but how exactly would unreliable sense organs “convey survival value”?  Why would eyes that don’t accurately render the external world be beneficial?  Lisle has it backwards:  if evolution is true, there is no reason to think the senses are unreliable.  He continues:

But an evolutionist does not have a logical reason to trust his senses within his own worldview. Consider the following analogy. Suppose someone was trying to solve an arithmetic problem, but rather than using a calculator or doing the arithmetic by hand, this person decided to simply throw a pair of dice instead. Whatever numbers are displayed on the dice, the person accepts as the answer to the math problem. Would this be rational?

Clearly, a person that accepted the results of a roll of dice as the answer to a math problem is not thinking rationally. Why should he trust a non-deliberate “chance” process to come up with a rational answer to anything? Likewise, if our brain is nothing more than chemistry, why trust its conclusions? If our sensory organs and brain are simply accidents that have been preserved because they had some sort of survival value, why should we think that they are truthful? Survival value does not equate to truth.

Unghh…it burns, the stupid.  Has Dr. Lisle ever studied the biochemistry of the nervous system?  Our brains and sense organs do not function by pure chance, but rather by complex biochemical pathways that respond in specific ways to stimuli.  Yes, many of the protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions that take place are stochastic to some degree, but the overall process simply isn’t comparable to a toss of the dice.  Contrary to what Dr. Lisle may say, the process is deliberate, just not in the sense that he means.  Neurons deliberately pump sodium and potassium ions to create an electric potential across their membrane to be used in creating the action potentials that signal other neurons in response to a stimulus.  This usage of “deliberate” may be a bit loose, but the activity of neurons is a purposeful process that is innate to the cell.

At some point in the future, I’ll get to the original article by Dr. Lisle that prompted the reader response.  In that piece he actually argues that logic depends on Christianity.  Right now, I’ve had enough of Dr. Lisle’s inanity for one evening.  Short exposures are key, remember, lest you suffer irreparable brain damage.

A week ago I noticed that Answers In Genesis had posted a write-up of a creationist “study” on antibiotic resistance in the bacteria Serratia marcescens. I’ve been planning on fisking the crap out of it, but then I noticed today that erv has just given it a good thrashing.  You snooze, you lose, I suppose.  But I’m not going to let that stop me.  Things aren’t going so well in lab this week, so I’m going take out my frustration on some clueless “creation science”.

The AiG article is titled, “Darwin at the Drugstore?  Testing the Biological Fitness of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria.”  Creationists don’t like to admit that beneficial mutations exist, so antibiotic resistance is a sticky subject for them.  Remarkably, they’ve tried to get around this problem by claiming that antibiotic resistance doesn’t qualify as a beneficial mutation (It’s stupid, I know, but they are creationists–stupid is par for the course).  According to this argument, mutation may give bacteria resistance to antibiotics, but that resistance comes at a cost such that sum is a net negative effect on fitness.  The “study” in question aims to provide evidence for that claim by comparing the fitness of antibiotic resistant and non-resistant strains of S. marcescens. Here is their summary: Read the rest of this entry »

Conservapedia has posted a new article discussing supposed flaws in Richard Lenski’s paper on historical contingency in E. coli evolution.  Interestingly, the “flaws” are claimed to undermine the conclusion that the evolution of aerobic citrate metabolism was historically contingent.  This is a shift from Conservapedia’s previous tact of disputing the emergence of the Cit+ phenotype altogether.  As you might expect, the new arguments are quite pathetic, and it is clear that whoever wrote the article hasn’t read or understood Lenski’s paper.  So, without further ado, let the fisking begin.

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I present to you Dr. Patrick Briney, Ph.D.  He doesn’t like evolution.  He also doesn’t like thinking, because if he did, he never would have made this video.

Excuse me, Dr. Briney, but we don’t argue that creationism isn’t science because Genesis is divine revelation.  It isn’t scientific for a variety of reasons, one of them being that the hypothesis of supernatural creation predicts nothing, hence it is compatible with any conceivable state of nature.  It is unfalsifiable to the hilt.

Georgia Purdom, one of AiG’s pet Ph.Ds, finally published her response to Richard Lenski’s inaugural PNAS paper, and I’m a bit disappointed.  We were promised a reply from Dr. Purdom over two weeks ago, which should have been plenty of time for her to cook up some white-hot stupid.  Sure, the stupid still burns in her article, but it burns like that take-out Thai curry you’ve had for lunch 3 times a week for the past several months.  It might have been hot at one point, but you just don’t notice it anymore.   But even though Purdom’s article is just YEC boilerplate, it is still infuriating to see quality research like Lenski’s soiled by clueless godbots like Georgia Purdom.

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Andy Schlafly has finally posted the text of Richard Lenski’s reply to the second request for his data.  It’s absolutely brutal (emphasis mine):

Dear Mr. Schlafly:

I tried to be polite, civil and respectful in my reply to your first email, despite its rude tone and uninformed content. Given the continued rudeness of your second email, and the willfully ignorant and slanderous content on your website, my second response will be less polite. I expect you to post my response in its entirety; if not, I will make sure that is made publicly available through other channels.

I offer this lengthy reply because I am an educator as well as a scientist. It is my sincere hope that some readers might learn something from this exchange, even if you do not.

First, it seems that reading might not be your strongest suit given your initial letter, which showed that you had not read our paper, and given subsequent conversations with your followers, in which you wrote that you still had not bothered to read our paper. You wrote: “I did skim Lenski’s paper …” If you have not even read the original paper, how do you have any basis of understanding from which to question, much less criticize, the data that are presented therein?

Second, your capacity to misinterpret and/or misrepresent facts is plain in the third request in your first letter, where you said: “In addition, there is skepticism that 3 new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000.” That statement was followed by a link to a news article from NewScientist that briefly reported on our work. I assumed you had simply misunderstood that article, because there is not even a mention of proteins anywhere in the news article. As I replied, “We make no such claim anywhere in our paper, nor do I think it is correct. Proteins do not ‘appear out of the blue’, in any case.” So where did your confused assertion come from? It appears to have come from one of your earlier discussions, in which an acoltye (Able806, who to his credit at least seems to have attempted to read our paper) wrote:

“I think it might be best to clarify some of Richard’s work. He started his E.Coli project in 1988 and has been running the project for 20 years now; his protocols are available to the general public. The New Scientist article is not very technical but the paper at PNAS is. The change was based on one of his colonies developing the ability to absorb citrate, something not found in wild E.Coli. This occurred around 31,500 generations and is based on the development of 3 proteins in the E.Coli genome. What his future work will be is to look at what caused the development of these 3 proteins around generation 20,000 of that particular colony. …”

As further evidence of your inability to keep even a few simple facts straight, you later wrote the following: “It [my reply] did clarify that his claims are not as strong as some evolutionists have insisted.” But no competent biologist would, after reading our paper with any care, insist (or even suggest) that “3 new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000” or any similar nonsense. It is only in your letter, and in your acolyte’s confused interpretation of our paper, that I have ever seen such a claim. Am I or the reporter for NewScientist somehow responsible for the confusion that reflects your own laziness and apparent inability to distinguish between a scientific paper, a news article, and a confused summary posted by an acolyte on your own website?

Third, it is apparent to me, and many others who have followed this exchange and your on-line discussions of how to proceed, that you are not acting in good faith in requests for data. From the posted discussion on your web site, it is obvious that you lack any expertise in the relevant fields. Several of your acolytes have pointed this out to you, and that your motives are unclear or questionable at best, but you and your cronies dismissed their concerns as rants and even expelled some of them from posting on your website. [Ed.: citation omitted due to spam filter] Several also pointed out that I had very quickly and straightforwardly responded that the methods and data supporting the evolution of the citrate-utilization capacity are already provided in our paper. One poster in your discussions, Aaronp, wrote:

“I read Lenski’s paper, and as a trained microbiologist, I thought that it was both thorough and well done. His claims are backed by good data, namely that which was presented in the figures. I went through each of the figures after Aschlafly said that they were uninformative. Actually, they are basic figures that show the population explosion of the bacterial cultures after the Cit+ mutation occurred. These figures show that the cultures increased in size and mass at a given timepoint, being able to do so because they had evolved a mechanism to utilize a new nutrient, without the assistance of helper plasmids. … Lenksi’s paper, while not the most definite I’ve seen, is still a very well-researched paper that supports its claims nicely.”

(As far as I saw, Aaronp is the only poster who asserted any expertise in microbiology.) As further evidence of the absence of good-faith discussion about our research, in the discussion thread that began even before you sent your first email to me, I counted the words “fraud” or “fraudulent” being used more than 10 times, including one acolyte, TonyT, who says bluntly that I am “clearly a fraudulent hack.” In the discussion thread that also includes comments after my first reply, the number of times those same words are used has increased to 20, with the word “hoax” also now entering the discussion. A few posters wisely counseled against such slander but that did not deter you. I must say, it is surprising that someone with a law degree would make, and allow on his website, so many nasty comments that implicitly and even explicitly impugn my integrity, and by extension that of my collaborators, without any grounds whatsoever and reflecting only your dogmatic adherence to certain beliefs.

Finally, let me now turn to our data. As I said before, the relevant methods and data about the evolution of the citrate-using bacteria are in our paper. In three places in our paper, we did say “data not shown”, which is common in scientific papers owing to limitations in page length, especially for secondary or minor points. None of the places where we made such references concern the existence of the citrate-using bacteria; they concern only certain secondary properties of those bacteria. We will gladly post those additional data on my website.

It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]

One of your acolytes, Dr. Richard Paley, actually grasped this point. He does not appear to understand the practice and limitations of science, but at least he realizes that we have the bacteria, and that they provide “the real data that we [that’s you and your gang] need”. Here’s what this Dr. Paley had to say:

“I think there’s a great deal of misunderstanding here from the critics of Mr. Schlafly and obfuscation on the part of Prof. Lenski and his supporters. The real data that we need are not in the paper. Rather they are in the bacteria used in the experiments themselves. Prof. Lenski claims that these bacteria ‘evolved’ novel traits and that these were preceded by the evolution of ‘potentiated genotypes’, from which the traits could be ‘reevolved’ using preserved colonies from those generations. But how are we to know if these traits weren’t ‘potentiated’ by the Creator when He designed the bacteria thousands of years ago, such that they would eventually reveal themselves when the time was right? The only way this can be settled is if we have access to the genetic sequences of the bacteria colonies so that we can apply CSI techniques and determine if these ‘potentiated genotypes’ originated through blind chance or intelligence. But with the physical specimens in the hands of Darwinists, who claim they will get around to the sequencing at some unspecifed future time, how can we trust that this data will be forthcoming and forthright? Thus, Prof. Lenski et al. should supply Conservapedia, as stewards, with samples of the preserved E. coli colonies so that the data can be accessible to unbiased researchers outside of the hegemony of the Darwinian academia, even if it won’t be put to immediate examination by Mr. Schlafly. This is simply about keeping tax-payer-funded scientists honest.”

So, will we share the bacteria? Of course we will, with competent scientists. Now, if I was really mean, I might only share the ancestral strain, and let the scientists undertake the 20 years of our experiment. Or if I was only a little bit mean, maybe I’d also send the potentiated bacteria, and let the recipients then repeat the several years of incredibly pain-staking work that my superb doctoral student, Zachary Blount, performed to test some 40 trillion (40,000,000,000,000) cells, which generated 19 additional citrate-using mutants. But I’m a nice guy, at least when treated with some common courtesy, so if a competent scientist asks for them, I would even send a sample of the evolved E. coli that now grows vigorously on citrate. A competent microbiologist, perhaps requiring the assistance of a competent molecular geneticist, would readily confirm the following properties reported in our paper: (i) The ancestral strain does not grow in DM0 (zero glucose, but containing citrate), the recipe for which can be found on my web site, except leaving the glucose out of the standard recipe as stated in our paper. (ii) The evolved citrate-using strain, by contrast, grows well in that exact same medium. (iii) To confirm that the evolved strain is not some contaminating species but is, in fact, derived from the ancestral strain in our study, one could check a number of traits and genes that identify the ancestor as E. coli, and the evolved strains as a descendant thereof, as reported in our paper. (iv) One could also sequence the pykF and nadR genes in the ancestor and evolved citrate-using strains. One would find that the evolved bacteria have mutations in each of these genes. These mutations precisely match those that we reported in our previous work, and they identify the evolved citrate-using mutants as having evolved in the population designated Ara-3 of the long-term evolution experiment, as opposed to any of the other 11 populations in that experiment. And one could go on and on from there to confirm the findings in our paper, and perhaps obtain additional data of the sort that we are currently pursuing.

Before I could send anyone any bacterial strains, in order to comply with good scientific practices I would require evidence of the requesting scientist’s credentials including: (i) affiliation with an appropriate unit in some university or research center with appropriate facilities for storing (-80ºC freezer), handling (incubators, etc.), and disposing of bacteria (autoclave); and (ii) some evidence, such as peer-reviewed publications, that indicate that the receiving scientist knows how to work with bacteria, so that I and my university can be sure we are sending biological materials to someone that knows how to handle them. By the way, our strains are not derived from one of the pathogenic varieties of E. coli that are a frequent cause of food-borne illnesses. However, even non-pathogenic strains may cause problems for those who are immune-compromised or otherwise more vulnerable to infection. Also, my university requires that a Material Transfer Agreement be executed before we can ship any strains. That agreement would not constrain a receiving scientist from publishing his or her results. However, if an incompetent or fraudulent hack (note that I make no reference to any person, as this is strictly a hypothetical scenario, one that I doubt would occur) were to make false or misleading claims about our strains, then I’m confident that some highly qualified scientists would join the fray, examine the strains, and sort out who was right and who was wrong. That’s the way science works.

I would also generally ask what the requesting scientist intends to do with our strains. Why? It helps me to gauge the requester’s expertise. I might be able to point out useful references, for example. Moreover, as I’ve said, we are continuing our work with these strains, on multiple fronts, as explained in considerable detail in the Discussion section of our paper. I would not be happy to see our work “scooped” by another team – especially for the sake of the outstanding students and postdocs in my group who are hard at work on these fronts. However, that request to allow us to proceed, without risk of being scooped on work in which we have made a substantial investment of time and effort, would be just that: a request. In other words, we would respect PNAS policy to share those strains with any competent scientist who complied with my university’s requirements for the MTA and any other relevant legal restrictions. If any such request requires substantial time or resources (we have thousands of samples from this and many other experiments), then of course I would expect the recipient to bear those costs.

So there you have it. I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior. And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve. However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange.

Sincerely,
Richard Lenski

P.S. Did you know that your own bowels harbor something like a billion (1,000,000,000) E. coli at this very moment? So remember to wash your hands after going to the toilet, as I hope your mother taught you. Simple calculations imply that there are something like 10^20 = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 E. coli alive on our planet at any moment. Even if they divide just once per day, and given a typical mutation rate of 10^-9 or 10^-10 per base-pair per generation, then pretty much every possible double mutation would occur every day or so. That’s a lot of opportunity for evolution.

P.P.S. I hope that some readers might get a chuckle out of this story. The same Sunday (15 June 2008) that you and some of your acolytes were posting and promoting scurrilous attacks on me and our research (wasn’t that a bit disrespectful of the Sabbath?), I was in a church attending a wedding. And do you know what Old Testament lesson was read? It was Genesis 1:27-28, in which God created Man and Woman. It’s a very simple and lovely story, and I did not ask any questions, storm out, or demand the evidence that it happened as written at a time when science did not yet exist. I was there in the realm of spirituality and mutual respect, not confusing a house of religion for a science class or laboratory. And it was a beautiful wedding, too.

P.P.P.S. You may be unable to understand, or unwilling to accept, that evolution occurs. And yet, life evolves! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove] From the content on your website, it is clear that you, like many others, view God as the Creator of the Universe. I respect that view. I find it baffling, however, that someone can worship God as the all-mighty Creator while, at the same time, denying even the possibility (not to mention the overwhelming evidence) that God’s Creation involved evolution. It is as though a person thinks that God must have the same limitations when it comes to creation as a person who is unable to understand, or even attempt to understand, the world in which we live. Isn’t that view insulting to God?

P.P.P.P.S. I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.” That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another. Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong. For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’” You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.

Schlafly is upset about Lenski’s response, telling his readers to “Take a good look at the attitude our tax dollars are paying for.”  Well Andy, you deserve it, and federal funding does not come with a stipulation that dipshit cranks be treated gingerly and with respect. So, kudos to Richard Lenski.  I think most scientists of his caliber would have simply deleted Schlafly’s email.  But instead he replied with appropriate vitriol.  Bravo.

Joel Barofsky has written a baffling post at Uncommon Descent. In it, he attempts to argue that naturalism offers no reasons to protect the environment, but intelligent design does. Gag. His post is dedicated to the failure of naturalism to provide motivation for going green. He has a second post planned espousing the need for ID in environmentalism. If the first post is any indication, the follow-up will be a real gut buster.

Barofsky offers three alleged “naturalistic arguments” for addressing climate change. Unfortunately, he never defines what he means by “naturalism”, so it is hard to address his claims without running the risk of putting words in his mouth. With that risk in mind, I will take “naturalism” to be the view that the natural universe is all that exists, that there is no “supernatural” realm. Assuming I have Barofsky’s concept of naturalism correct, let’s take a look at his discussion of these naturalistic arguments for environmental protection.

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