Current mood:	nerdy
Entry tags:	judaism, orthodox, science

Aish can't have it both ways
One of Aish HaTorah's tactics in their attempts to sway Jews to believe that their fundamentalist conception of Judaism is correct involves selectively using science to "prove" the veracity of Biblical or Rabbinic claims. A prime example of their selectivity is their attitude towards genetics and evolution. See, for example
Not by Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, which attempts to sell a book convince us that random mutations could not possibly account for the variation seen in biology.

Up to this point, they could be logically consistent. Anti-evolutionists have been forced by scientific demonstration to accept that genetic changes do occur on a microscopic scale. They try to differentiate between macro-evolution (a change from one species to another) and microscopic evolution (bacteria acquiring antibiotic resistance through mutations). However, three of the articles on their website give up a logical inconsistency: They are Abraham's Chromosomes, Jewish genes and The Cohanim-DNA Connection. Specifically, all of them try to date the deviations of the genes of interest from the general population. While I did not read the scientific papers upon which the articles and the books they're trying to sell are based, I'm pretty sure of where they come from. Geneticists date genes based on an estimate of the probability of a given type of mutation to occur. The assumption that goes into the model is that the mutation is random. (Remember, dating genes involves looking backwards. The mutations may or may not have been biased by natural selection, but, when they first happened, they happened randomly, so an unbiased random mutation model can be used). You might say that this is microevolution - or, just randomness, not even evolution! However, the same mathematical models are used to determine the times between variations in species, given the genes that encode similar proteins. So, either the mathematical models are wrong (in which case, the dating of all the "Jewish genes" is bogus), or, one of the major "contested" assumptions of evolution is for real. You can't have it both ways.

UPDATE on Aish: Apparently, even some of the common modern apologetics are no longer kosher enough for Aish. Following the scandal surrounding the Chareidi bans on Torah-and-science books by Rabbi Nosson Slifkin (aka "the Zoo Rabbi"), Aish began re-evaluating some of their own Torah-and-science web pages, including an essay on the age of the universe that includes the argument that a day of creation is not a literal day. (Thanks to (Jewish Whistleblower via Canonist via commenter shaya) via a comment on Hirhurrim).

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Last Pesach, DW and I were talking about quinoa, the grain which is not considered chametz or kitniyot, and is thus permitted. While I can't recount the conversation verbatim, it went something like this:

Me: So, when do you think they'll decide quinoa is kitniyot?
DW: They can't do that. It's even on Aish's website that it's allowed.
Me: They could just take it down and claim it was never there.

While that hasn't happened yet, when it does, I'll be the first to say "I told you so."