Published in November 2009 in the Post Register.
There are a lot of papas in eastern Idaho and a lot of Toms, but there’s only one Papa Tom’s.
The popular pizza restaurant has a complicated business genealogy, but its owners have a simple approach – make good pizza and sell it for a reasonable price.
It’s a family business, originally started by Tom Mueller (he’s “Papa) and now run by son Tim, Tim’s brother, Mike, and other members of the extended family. Tom Mueller’s business roots in Idaho Falls go back to 1964 and his restaurants extend back nearly as far. Papa Tom’s opened in 1983, a remnant of a couple of places old-timers will remember well – the Gaslamp and the Gay 90s.
Those were part of a pizza chain out of Moscow that eventually disappeared, but Tom Mueller took the sauce recipe – it has just a little kick to it – and opened Papa Tom’s.
“We’re pretty old school still,” says Tim Mueller. That includes the old slate-lined pizza ovens that date back to the 1970s. “A lot of people use conveyors now.”
Pizza is still a good business, even though profit margins have tightened some. Cheese prices are all over the place and have been known to spike by 50 cents a pound in just a few months. It may not seem like much, but when you go through 1,300 pounds of cheese a week, that’s a lot of, um, dough.
There’s a pool table in the corner that gets some play, but Papa Tom’s is mostly a family joint where the grandkids of the restaurant’s longtime customers are beginning a third generation of tradition. A lot of competitors have come and gone in the meantime.
“We just want people to be comfortable when they come in,” Mueller says.
The menu includes sandwiches and a wide pizza variety, but you’re not going to get exotic California-style wimpy pizzas at Papa Tom’s, or Chicago-style deep dish for that matter. This is straight-ahead, thin crust pizza that bubbles when they bake it and crunches on the cutting board. It’s been that way for more than a quarter-century now.
Archive for October 2009
Published in the Post Register in November, 2009.
SHELLEY – It’s Halloween afternoon, and in the banquet room at Lazy D’s Dracula is holding court on the literature of Bram Stoker.
In the kitchen, the former owner of a gun holster manufacturer is slicing beef while a nice lady who does community theater runs the fryer. It’s just another Saturday afternoon in downtown Shelley.
Dracula is Deneb Pulsipher. Dressed in full vampire regalia, he’s talking to a small group gathered to learn more about the high art of vampire novels. The former holster maker is Devon Kerbs, who moved from Phoenix to open Lazy D’s last year. Ronnie Jaynes is involved with live theater at the Virginia playhouse next door when she’s not preparing fresh-cut fries and hamburgers.
Kerbs learned his cooking craft on a dude ranch in Monument Valley and as co-owner of a barbecue place in Phoenix. Tired of the big city and with family in eastern Idaho, he bought a restaurant on Shelley’s main drag last year and opened Lazy D’s. Things were going along just fine until the health inspector told him he’d need to replace the floor and kitchen before opening.
He’s particularly proud of his Philly steak sandwich, but the big draw is his fresh-cut fries, including the four-pound “family fries” special. Kerbs has a secret, but he’s willing to share – he hand cuts and pre-fries the potatoes them every morning, chills, them,then gives them another quick bath in extra-hot oil before serving. Nothing served in the restaurant has ever been frozen, he says, and everything is cooked to order. He goes through 100 pounds of potatoes a day.
“I don’t even own a heat lamp,” he says.
Waitress Carrie Darrington tells us about the “woosh” – a concoction of whipping cream, Italian flavoring and soda that was invented by a customer. Lazy D’s has gone from serving a handful of flavored Italian sodas to 20 flavors.
It’s not just a burger joint – there are pastas and salads on the menu, too, featuring Kerbs’ own sauce recipes. But when in doubt, get the fries.
Published in the Post Register in November, 2009.
First, let’s get one thing straight – the word “gyro,” when referring to the savory Greek sandwich, is pronounced “YEAR oh.”
Not “JIE roh” or “HEE roh,” or even “YEE roh.” Of course, the Greeks would pronounce it altogether differently, but we’re not in Greece, are we?
“They’re called everything in the book,” says Melanie Olsen, who helps manage Tom’s Gyros and Burgers in Idaho Falls.
Since 1989, Greek immigrants Tom and Dina Manolis have been serving gyros, hamburgers and other delicacies from their restaurant between North Yellowstone Highway and Holmes Avenue. They also have a restaurant in Pocatello and bought the former Wrangler Restaurant on Holmes a few years back, turning it into Tom’s 2.
A gyro is made from a combination of lamb and beef mixed with seasonings and baked, then shaved into strips before going into a soft pillow of pita bread, lettuce, tomatoes and a nice slathering of yogurt sauce. There is some controversy about the real origins of the gyros, but it appears that it is not exactly a traditional Greek dish – it probably has its origins in the Turkish Doner Kabab sandwich – but seems to have emerged in New York in the 1970s. The name likely comes from the fact that the meat is turned in the motion of a, yes, gyroscope. (We use as our authoritative source the web site “whatscookingamerica.net.”)
Enough history of the food. The proof is in the eating, and a gyro sandwich is sloppy but delicious. More interesting is the history of the Manolis, who came to the U.S. as teenagers, he at 14, she at 18. In between, Tom Manolis was introduced to Dina on a return trip to Greece and the rest, as they say, is local culinary history. Their daughter, Ellie, was working at the restaurant the day of our visit.
There are people, we are told, who have been going to Tom’s for years and never eaten a gyro, preferring a cheeseburger instead. The closest you’re going to come to vegetarian fare at Tom’s is a pile of fries and gobs of fry sauce.
In the kitchen, 12-year veteran Teresa Kirkham is frying hamburgers through the flames of the grill as the late lunch crowd queues at the counter. Meanwhile, the gyro meat turns silently on its spit, awaiting another shave.
Evolutionists say their theory is a fact but they don't know how it happened. Beyond vague speculation about natural selection acting on blind biological variation, evolutionists have no idea how most of biology's wonders arose. Some animals are equipped with their own sonar tracking kits that outperform our best military equipment. Did this just evolve? Perhaps, but we don't have scientific evidence for it. Evolution does not seem like a good theory so evolutionists, like a good debater, shift the burden of proof.
One argument Darwin used is the anthropomorphic warning which you can read about here. Another argument Darwin used is that there really isn't any problem for evolution so long as evolution cannot be disproved.
Can you imagine a scientist proposing a dubious theory and then claiming it is true because an impossible falsification criterion has not been met? This is precisely what Darwin did. He wrote:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.
This was hardly a concession. Darwin may sound generous here, allowing that his theory would “absolutely break down,” but his requirement for such a failure is no less than impossible. For no one can show that an organ “could not possibly” have been formed in such a way. So in short order Darwin reduced what seemed to be a dilemma for his theory into a logical truism.
Evolution was protected from criticism and all that was needed to explain complexity was a clever thought experiment. Darwin so lowered the requirements that anyone with a pen and a vivid imagination can now claim to have solved the problem of complexity. It is now common to see in the evolution literature vague explanations, which rely on such dubious mechanisms as “chance” or “opportunism,” put forth as though they are solutions to the problem of complexity.
Published in the Post Register November, 2009.
It’s another busy mid-day on the weekend at Smitty’s, an Idaho Falls institution whose owners and customers span generations.
The eggs Benedict at Smitty’s is wildly popular, but at least once you must try the German pancake (also known as a “Dutch baby”). This bowl-shaped eggy dish fills a large plate to overflowing, edging over the sides before curving upward. Eaten with lemon juice and powdered sugar (or sometimes an apple mixture), the German pancake is as much an event as a meal.
“Whenever someone orders it, people all over the restaurant want to know what it is,” said manager Rosie Seymour.+and+Josh+Bryson.jpg)
Originally a franchise, Smitty’s became part of the local fabric in 1971 when Leo and Cleo Werner purchased it. Today, the Werners’ daughter, Darlene Seymour, and granddaughter, Katrina Lott, own and run the business. Three of the servers at Smitty’s have been working there for more than 20 years each.
Besides the food and familiar faces, Smitty’s is known for the oil paintings of local artist Werner Gisin, who died in 2006. The restaurant once sold Gisin’s paintings, but now they’re just there to look at.
“All of the paintings my mom liked would sell,” said Lott. “So we bought the ones we wanted to keep.”
Over the years, Smitty’s has become known as a breakfast place, but Lott is trying to recapture the dinner crowd with new menu choices geared toward a little younger crowd. A good share of the regular clientele at Smitty’s consists of children or grandchildren of people who started coming here in nearly 40 years ago.
“I hear that a ton,” Lott said. “We know a lot of people not necessarily by name but by what they order.”
The restaurant business is unforgiving and fickle. Does Lott every get up in the morning and not feel like going to work?
“Never,” she says.
It's not my dog, it didn't bite you, and besides you hit the dog first anyway. --Anon
An evolutionist has criticized my previous post about Darwin's warning that we must not anthropomorphize God. Darwin argued repeatedly that God would never have created this inefficient and capricious world, but when it came to complex designs such as the eye, Darwin suddenly backtracked.
In his book Darwin made several failed attempts to reckon with the problem of how his blind process of evolution could create such wonders as the eye. The idea that the eye evolved on its own seemed absurd, but Darwin argued that while it is tempting to see God as the master engineer who crafted complex organs such as the eye, this would make God too much like man.
Darwin agreed that the perfection of the eye reminds us of the telescope which resulted from the highest of human intellect. Was it not right to conclude that the eye was also the product of a great intellect? This may seem the obvious answer but Darwin warned against it, for we should not "assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man." Better to imagine the eye as the result of natural selection's perfecting powers rather than having God too much involved in the world.
So according to Darwin, God would never create inefficient designs, God would never create capricious patterns, and besides we can't know the mind of God anyway. It seems contradictory but nonetheless my critic complains:
Religion drives your 'science' Mr Hunter (although you don't ever seem to have really done any) every bit as much as the people at Answers In Genesis or ICR. You have an agenda, an a priori commitment to defending your favourite set of ancient fables, and folklorish poetry.
So in other words, I believe in ancient fables and folklorish poetry, these beliefs drive my scientific research, and besides I haven't done any scientific research anyway.
It's not my dog, it didn't bite you, and besides you hit the dog first anyway.
It's not my dog, it didn't bite you, and besides you hit the dog first anyway. This funny example of childish reasoning is reminiscent of the arguments for evolution. For example, evolutionists say that God would never create inefficient designs, God would never create capricious patterns, and besides we can't know the mind of God anyway. In other words, we must not think this complex world was designed or created because there are inefficiencies and confusing patterns, and besides we could never know how God would design a world anyway. Evolutionists simultaneously claim (i) we know how God would create and (ii) we can't know how God would create. And why can't we know? Because to know how God would create it is to project human qualities onto God and, evolutionists warn, we must not do that.
On the other hand, Antoine Arnauld warned that the seventeenth century theodicies (solutions to the problem of evil) were guilty of anthropomorphizing God. The Jansenist rejected the theodicies of Malebranche and Leibniz which he thought subjected God to human reasoning.
But it was in the hands of the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume where the anthropomorphic warning found its application in evolutionary thought. Hume had argued that God could not have designed this world for all its misery. After all, wrote Hume, "A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures," and nature is so arranged so as "to embitter the life of every living being."
Hume obviously was not concerned about Arnauld's warning as he assumed he knew what God would and would not create. Indeed, Hume amazingly retooled Spinoza's version of the warning to attack design from the rear. Not only did the problem of evil rebuke design, but any such appeal to design was faulty to begin with because we can't know God anyway:
we ought never to imagine that we comprehend the attributes of this divine being, ... let us beware, lest we think that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections ... He is infinitely superior to our limited view and comprehension; and is more the object of worship in the temple, than of disputation in the schools.
Christ in the House of His Parents
This week Celeste Biever, writing for the NewScientist, perpetuated the Inherit the Wind myth. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee wrote the play to illustrate the threat to intellectual freedom posed by the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s McCarthy era. They used as their platform a highly fictionalized version of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 which relied heavily on the discredited warfare thesis (which holds that science and religion are locked in a deep conflict). Inherit the Wind has now become a propaganda instrument in the hands of evolutionists and Biever further propagated the lie this week when she informed her readers that the play rightly illustrates opposition to evolution as ignorant and fundamentalist.
But Biever did not stop there. She then added some propaganda of her own as she recounted what has become yet another evolution propaganda instrument: the 2005 Dover trial on the teaching of intelligent design.
In that trial lawyer Eric Rothschild asked Michael Behe about the definition of science. Wasn't Behe's definition of science too broad? Biever erronously recounted that Behe had to agree that astrology would come under his definition of science, and the court erupted in laughter. That is as false and misleading as is her interpretation of Inherit the Wind.
When I pointed this out evolutionists came rushing to her defense. One evolutionist in the know, who was at the trial, asked about my source. He writes:
There were no recordings allowed of the trial, but I know for sure that I and several others laughed, or at least giggled, when the astrology thing from Behe's deposition (where Behe had said, flat out, that astrology qualified as a scientific theory under his definition of theory) came up. If I recall correctly the astrology thing was included in the newspaper stories the reporters wrote that night for the next morning. It definitely made an impression on the audience, and the reporters sitting over in the jury box.
PS: The right answer answer to the astrology question was "no, it's not science."
My source was at the trial and tells me that Biever is engaging in Whig history. My source did not tell me there was dead silence. Were there a few people in the back row giggling? That certainly is possible, but the courtroom did not erupt in laughter. That simply is a false, self-serving misrepresentation.
But this giggling evolutionist does not stop there. He says that the reason for the eruption of laughter (which didn't happen) is that Behe "said, flat out, that astrology qualified as a scientific theory" (which didn't happen).
In this case the evolutionary lie cannot hide behind hearsay. Fortunately we have the transcipts of precisely what was said. Rothschild was pursuing another one of his absurd line of questionings and Behe was trying to set him straight.
Rothschild asked if astrology qualifies as science according to Behe. Rothschild, who probably never heard of the Chaldeans, was entering foreign territory. He may have thought he had cleverly made his case, but in fact he was revealing how sophmoric is evolutionary thought. This is not about angry fundamentalist mobs with pitchforks and torches.
Behe made it clear that tarot cards and mind readers don't cut it. But he also explained what historians and philosophers already know: whether astrology qualifies as science is a question that is more subtle than simply rejecting this morning's horoscope. Behe did not "flat out" say anything--he gave extended responses which were appropriate given the questions posed to him.
For instance, what if (as some claim) there are significant statistical correlations between the celestial objects and earthly events? Should we disallow, a priori, any such empirically-based conclusion? Should we smear any such investigation as non scientific? Behe makes it clear that his definition of science allows for such empirically-based approaches.
I have difficulty believing that such correlations exist (though I have never looked at the data) but, with Behe, it is also not clear to me that such an investigation must be considered as non scientific simply because we do not have a causal mechanism. If that were the case then Darwin and Wallace were not doing science either.
Of course there are examples of astrology that do make religious assumptions up front (such as with the Chaldeans). In these cases the astrology is no different than evolution, and the evolutionist's rebuke to astrology becomes hypocritical.
The bottom line is that questions of astrology immediately raise more questions. It is not particularly amenable to black/white answers as evolutionists would have it. For instance, how much up front restriction should we place on the answer? Should empirical investigation be allowed even if a causal mechanism is not known? Should we allow ourselves to ask dangerous questions? Here is the part of questioning where Behe reiterates his empiricism:
Q And using your definition, intelligent design is a scientific theory, correct?
A Yes.
Q Under that same definition astrology is a scientific theory under your definition, correct?
A Under my definition, a scientific theory is a proposed explanation which focuses or points to physical, observable data and logical inferences. There are many things throughout the history of science which we now think to be incorrect which nonetheless would fit that -- which would fit that definition. Yes, astrology is in fact one, and so is the ether theory of the propagation of light, and many other -- many other theories as well.
Q The ether theory of light has been discarded, correct?
A That is correct.
Q But you are clear, under your definition, the definition that sweeps in intelligent design, astrology is also a scientific theory, correct?
A Yes, that's correct. And let me explain under my definition of the word "theory," it is -- a sense of the word "theory" does not include the theory being true, it means a proposition based on physical evidence to explain some facts by logical inferences. There have been many theories throughout the history of science which looked good at the time which further progress has shown to be incorrect. Nonetheless, we can t go back and say that because they were incorrect they were not theories. So many many things that we now realized to be incorrect, incorrect theories, are nonetheless theories.
Rothschild next undercuts his line of inquiry when he asked Behe "Has there ever been a time when astrology has been accepted as a correct or valid scientific theory," apparently oblivious to the actual history of astrology.
Do lawyers know about Kepler? Apparently not. Rothschild later pursued the ridiculous line of reasoning that design, like geocentrism, it is based merely on appearances:
Q Now, you gave examples of some theories that were discarded?
A Yes.
Q One was the ether theory?
A Yes.
Q And the other was the theory of geocentrism, right?
A That's correct.
Q And what you said yesterday was that there was some pretty compelling evidence for observers of that time that that was good theory, right?
A Yes, sure.
Q Look up in the sky, and it looked like the sun was going around us, correct?
A That's right.
Q And we know now that those appearances were deceiving, right?
A That's correct.
Q So what we thought we knew from just looking at the sky, that's not in fact what was happening, right?
A That's right.
Q So the theory was discarded?
A That's correct.
Q And intelligent design, also based on appearance, isn t it, Professor Behe?
The notion that we should exclude from science theories that are based on appearances is silly. If, on the other hand, Rothschild's point was merely that ID might be false, then so what? No one has claimed otherwise. It is naturalistic evolution, not ID, that is not falsifiable.
I once asked Rothschild about the problem that evolution entails religious premises. Does that make the teaching of evolution unconstitutional? Would he like to learn more? Not a chance.
An Enlightenment tradition that paralleled deism was the growing sentiment against supernatural miracles. In the early eighteenth century the debate raged in England and, once again, theological concerns were at the center of the move toward naturalism. Thomas Wollaston and Peter Annet, for instance, put forth a series of arguments against miracles and their tracts numbered in the tens of thousands. Wollaston ridiculed the idea of Jesus casting devils out of a madman and into a herd of pigs: "I could even now laugh at the thoughts of the Hoggs running and tumbling down-hill as if the Devil drove them."
As with the deists, Wollaston and Annet found divine intervention, this time in the form of miracles, to be theologically awkward. God has infinite knowledge, including foreknowledge, and power and wisdom. Hence God must be capable of so arranging and designing the natural order from eternity so as to accomplish his aims without violating the natural order.
Furthermore, as Annet argued, God's immutability mandates naturalism. God was the cause, and the laws of nature were the effect. A change in the effect—the natural order—means a change in the cause. But God does not change. And if such a change were required it would reveal a blundering creator, or worse:
If God ever determined for moral ends and reasons to interpose, if needful, by a different method, than that of his standard laws; it must be either because he could not foresee the consequences, which is like blundering in the dark; or he foresaw it would be needful; and then it would be like a blunder in the design and contrivance; or he foreknew and determined his own works should not answer His own ends, without His mending work, which is worst of all.
David Hume later refined and expanded these arguments, and by the time Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle miracles were increasingly viewed as passe. Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868), the Lord Chancellor of England and advocate of natural theology, argued that miracles proved nothing but the exercise of miraculous power and they left the Creator's trustworthiness in question.
With that as background, it is hardly surprising that Darwin's theory of evolution was warmly received by cultural elites and many religious leaders. They may not have understood all of the underlying biology, but they understood the underlying metaphysics.
And it is hardly surprising that this opposition to miracles remains today as a core fundamental of evolution. This was made clear, yet again, this week by evolutionists Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers. Dawkins revealed this underlying metaphysic in an interview, as Myers recounts:
RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: You seriously do?
HH: Yes.
RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: My God. (spoken with astonishment)
HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…
RD: I've realized the kind of person I'm dealing with now.
Myers mercilously berates the interviewer for such irrationalism. This isn't about science--it never was.
History is written by the winners and yes, that means your history book is not always an objective account of how we got here. The winners, not surprisingly, are sometimes portrayed in an overly sympathetic light. Such Whig histories can be dispassionately assessed when their subject is from centuries past. When the subject is no longer controversial, and the history is long gone, then it is safe to criticize. But what happens when the subject is still hot? How can we understand and respond to Whiggish accounts that are occurring before our very eyes? This week we have yet another evolutionary retelling of history that should tell us something about evolution.
Evolutionists have always relied on fictionalized accounts of how their theory in particular, and rational thought in general, have fought through anti intellectual resistance. Not long after Darwin published his book in 1859 evolutionists were constructing what would become known as the warfare thesis, where religion was cast as being at war with science. Everyone from Columbus to Copernicus was reinvented as intellectual heroes combatting the forces of resistance.
And Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace were cast as scientific investigators who presented a new and powerful finding that conflicted with religious sentiment. In fact, evolutionary thought arose from metaphysical interpretations of nature and theological mandates, in spite of the absence of a known mechanism. As one historian put it, both Wallace and Darwin believed in transmutation, and so they sought a suitable mechanism.
The Scopes Monkey Trial
A more recent but no less fictional example is Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized account of the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee wrote the play to illustrate the threat to intellectual freedom posed by the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s McCarthy era. And what better platform to use than religious fundamentalists opposing scientific truths—even if the story is fictionalized. The play was a Broadway hit, and movie and TV versions followed. It is now a classic, and is regularly restaged everywhere from the local theater to international venues.
But few people are aware of the story behind the story. This allegory is a fictionalized account, but for many it nonetheless reveals what they believe to be the core essentials of the origins debate: objective science versus religious dogma. Particular skirmishes may have their own nuances, but isn't this the underlying framework? How important are the details of the summer of 1925 in Dayton? Inherit the Wind, so the thinking goes, is an allegory that captures the reality of political and religious dogma opposed to heroic intellectualism.
But it doesn't. John Scopes was not a humble and tireless science teacher, and he was not hauled off to jail by an angry mob of fundamentalists led by a Reverend Jeremiah Brown for trying to enlighten his science students. And no he did not, in fear for his life, contact journalist Henry Louis Mencken for help in securing a lawyer.
This is the beginning of the myth of Inherit the Wind. The reality is that the ACLU (never mentioned in the script) placed an ad in the Chattanooga Times seeking a volunteer to test Tennessee law on the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Local boosters in Dayton saw this as a wonderful opportunity to put them on the map and recruited Scopes, a coach and part-time teacher, to break the law. Of course he was never incarcerated but rather spent most of his time hob knobbing with reporters. There was no angry mob and no vitriolic preacher.
What the play did get right is that the Monkey Trial was actually a referendum on the creationism and the Bible. Technically John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, but all of that was merely logistical. The reason why the Monkey Trial is important to evolution, and the enduring message from Dayton, was that the Bible and its creationism are passe. This was established in the showdown at Dayton when the two famous lawyers squared off. Clarence Darrow called William Jennings Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert and grilled him on its foolishness.
The exchange was entirely religious (can we really believe the story of Jonah? Surely god would never do such a thing) and the result was yet another proof of evolution. It was another great moment in evolution's long history of theological mandates for a strictly naturalistic origins.
While the opposition to evolution in Inherit the Wind is portrayed as an intrusion of religion into things scientific, in fact evolution itself is the better symbol of such an intrusion. The story behind the story is that Lawrence and Lee's cultural icon is itself now part of a new kind of anti intellectualism. The widespread popularity of Inherit the Wind and its cultural stereotypes is not a sign of healthy intellectual freedom triumphing over religious intolerance. Rather, it is an unfortunate sign of yet more ignorance and intolerance, as evolutionists are cast as benevolent and objective while skeptics are cast as narrow minded fundamentalists.
This cultural stereotype is now baked in. News reporters instinctively report on the religion of anyone who would question evolutionary theories, while the naturalists are portrayed as mere scientists. With each new skirmish over the teaching of evolution in our public schools, we are treated to another round of Bible-vs-science headlines. No matter that the skeptics raise scientific concerns, they will be grilled about their religious habits and motives. Evolution, meanwhile, is assumed to be grounded in nothing but empirical observation.
The retelling of Dover
This week Celeste Biever, writing for the NewScientist, perpetuates the Inherit the Wind myth and adds a few twists of her own. In her review of the latest production of Inherit the Wind at the Old Vic in London, Biever tells us that the trial divided a tight-knit town and found the singing of gospel songs between scenes by the cast to be a great touch.
Biever happily concludes that the play properly reveals opposition to evolution as ignorant and fundamentalist but she remains concerned because the play so powerfully reminds us of the comfort provided by religion and why it is so hard for some people to accept Darwin's theory.
There you have it. For historians Inherit the Wind is a living example of the warfare myth, but for evolutionists it remains a cogent truth. And Biever adds some myth of her own in recounting the recent Dover trial. The play reminds her of the 2005 trial in Pennsylvania where the lawyer Eric Rothschild asked Michael Behe about the definition of science. Wasn't Behe's definition of science too broad? Biever erronously recounts that Behe had to agree that astrology would come under his definition of science, and the court erupted in laughter.
Had not Rothschild shown that design theory is unworkable just as Darrow had demolished the Bible? Is not Behe, along with Bryan, to be pitied as he doggedly defended his ridiculous theory?
Certainly that is the message for Biever and the evolutionists, but again reality is more complex. In fact there was no such response in the courtroom. Yes, laughter did erupt but only when Rothschild asked Behe if he thought the human body was a beautiful design. Behe hesitated and responded whimsically that he was "thinking of some examples."
The evolutionary narrative is that evolution is free of religious premises and there is no scientific basis for skepticism. The reality is precisely the opposite.
Richard Dawkins' new book about evolution is aptly titled The Greatest Show On Earth, for evolution is an incredible show. In fact it is a spectacle. Evolutionists routinely make false claims, commit logical fallacies, and contradict themselves, all with the air of absolute confidence. But this is not all. This spectacle has been on stage for centuries now, and the players have remained oblivious to their blunders. We may as well be watching a group of belligerent teenagers for some sign of intelligence. Here are some of the latest absurdities from this greatest show on earth.
Overwhelmingly powerful evidence
In a Reuters interview last week, Dawkins explained that the genetic differences and similarities between the different species are precisely as evolution would predict.
You can actually plot a picture of the pattern of resemblances and differences between every animal and plant and every other animal and plant, and you find out that it fits on a beautiful, hierarchical, branching tree, which can only sensibly be interpreted as a family tree. When you do the same thing with a different gene, you get the same tree. Do the same thing with a third gene, and you get the same tree. It’s overwhelmingly powerful evidence. And by the way, it also works for pseudogenes, which don’t do any work at all but which are still recognizably there and still readable. They too fall on the same hierarchical tree pattern.
This claim is typical but there is only one problem: it is false. From a scientific perspective it simply is not true. Evolutionists repeat this mantra so often one would think it would lose its shock value. But I still squint in disbelief as I read the words: "you find out that it fits on a beautiful, hierarchical, branching tree. When you do the same thing with a different gene, you get the same tree."
This is unequivocally, unquestionably, false. There's no nice way to put it. The scientific data are available for all to see, but evolutionists continue their march to the sea. The spectacle here is that, despite the obvious evidence, evolutionists continue to shout this absurdity ever louder, as though the problem is that their message is not being heard.
But now for the real problem. Evolutionists follow this scientifically false claim with a philosophically false claim. They misinterpret the scientific data and they then claim it proves evolution.
As Dawkins puts it, the pattern is "overwhelmingly powerful evidence." What is worse, false science or false philosophy? For even if the scientific data are as they claim, it would not be overwhelmingly powerful evidence for evolution. Yes, it certainly would be evidence, but it certainly would not be overwhelming. Not, that is, unless one brings religion into the picture. As Darwin put it, such patterns are "utterly inexplicable if species are independent creations."
Now the logic becomes clear. The failures in the pattern don't matter to evolutionists, for the species would never have been created with even a hint of a pattern. Today this remains a key argument for evolutionists.
The DNA code
At the University of Virginia this week, Dawkins issued another standard evolutionary blunder. As the university newspaper reported, Dawkins cited the fact that DNA code is universal among all living things as another obvious and compelling evidence for evolution.
But beyond vague cartoons evolutionists have little idea of how the code could have evolved. Indeed, what we do know is that the code is difficult to change--not a very good candidate for a narrative of gradual evolution.
Such scientific conundrums, however, are not part of the evolutionary reasoning. Once again, evolutionists know that if the species were independently created there would be no such consistency. There would be many codes, not a single universal code. As usual, it is religious reasoning that provides the certainty.
The fact of evolution
Also this week Dawkins was interviewed by Hugh Hewitt. Unlike most interviewers, Hewitt understands the importance of the claim that evolution is a fact. He asked Dawkins about his equating of evolution skeptics and Holocaust deniers. If informed people doubt evolution and yet Dawkins demonizes them as such extremists, then doesn't Dawkins' judgment come into question?
No, Dawkins assured that the evidence for evolution is airtight. Anyone doubting evolution really is an extremist. This overreach by evolutionists is a key to understanding the genre and Hewitt rapidly homed in the target.
It quickly became a Bogey Moment which reached its climax when Dawkins became aghast upon learning that Hewitt believes in miracles. "Do you realllllllyyyy believe that Jesus turned water into wine?" Dawkins incredulously asked. "Oh my god," exclaimed the evolutionist, "now I realize the type of person I've been dealing with."
Evolutionary thought is about as sophisticated as a pile of rocks and Dawkins' transparency revealed all. Hewitt unmasked Dawkins and the charade of Dawkins dispassionately evaluating scientific evidence for evolution was revealed.
In the first half of the eighteenth century a massive debate over miracles took place in England. Later in the century David Hume collected the arguments and for many made a persuasive case against miracles.
By Darwin's day miracles were increasingly viewed as myths and not becoming of advanced thinkers. It was one of several trends that formed the religious foundation of and mandate for evolutionary thought. Dawkins is squarely in this tradition and is astonished that anyone not in the backwoods could believe in miracles.
Of course Darwin must be right--one way or another the species must have evolved, regardless of the empirical evidence may say. Religion drives science and it matters.
Note: I took all photos, except as noted, during my visit in 1979.
When it happened in 1979, Deng Xiaoping's visit to the U.S. (during which he famously donned a cowboy hat) was obviously an earth-shattering event.
Emerging from the death three years earlier of Mao Zedong as the de factor leader of the People's Republic of China, Deng embarked on a breathtakingly swift re-opening of China to the West, coupled with the selective introduction of market-based economics. Looking back 30 years later, now that China has become a major global economic force, the enormity of the watershed year of 1979 has only become more obvious.
In October of that year, I was one of the first Westerners to openly and, near as I could tell, freely travel in the PRC, albeit all too briefly.
I’d spent two years in Hong Kong as a Mormon missionary and talked my parents into paying my way into the mainland for a quick peek instead of buying me a camera for my birthday. Another missionary and I worked our way through church and political red tape and booked a five-day trip to Canton, now called Guangzhou in the new romanized spelling. The name consists of two Chinese characters: “guang,” which means broad or wide, and “zhou,” meaning state or province.
I wrote a piece about this trip for the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah back in the early 80s, but I’ve never revisited it. Fast forward to the summer of 2009. My mother had died nearly two years before and my father had remarried and was moving out of the home where we’d all grown up. My siblings and I gradually gathered up stuff of ours that had accumulated in the basement over the years. Among the material was a box from my mission.
The fact that I’m no longer a practicing Mormon is irrelevant – two years in Hong Kong and nearly a week in Guangzhou the same year mainland China began reopening to the West is what it is – a rare moment in time. I had borrowed another missionary’s camera for the trip and, even though I was an inexperienced and poor photographer, some of the images are remarkable.
More amazing, Kathleen found a small silk hand-painted landscape in the box, which I recalled buying in an enormous department store in Canton for about five dollars U.S. The scene is of the Pearl River, which provides a seaport for Guangzhou 75 miles from the South China Sea.The silk comes from an internationally famous silk factory in Hangzhou and I feel very fortunate to still have it, particularly since I’d forgotten about it for nearly three decades. (The characters down the left side of the silk say: "China Hangzhou Silk Cloth Factory." Down the right they say: "Guangzhou West Bank.")
Even three decades removed, much of that trip is clearer to me than my last visit to the Bahamas less than a year ago. We flew from the old Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong Harbor on an old Russian-made jet with carpet coming up from the floor. The flight attendants wore the only makeup we saw during our time in China. When we landed in Guangzhou, ours was the only plane on the tarmac and the airport was deserted except for us and the Chinese authorities.
The differences between Hong Kong and Canton couldn't have been more stark. Hong Kong had more than its share of squalor and poverty, but it also was something of an economic miracle, where money flowed and there was a sizable lower middle class. Canton and its surrounding region, then and now the third-largest metropolitan area in China, was clearly poor and polluted. It had a respectable public transportation system (mostly buses powered by overhead power lines) and some beautiful public areas, including former Buddhist temples that had been converted into parks.
We stayed at the White Cloud Hotel, a clean but spartan place that is now a Best Western. It was one of the tallest buildings in the city at the time – recent pictures show it dwarfed by skyscrapers in all directions. (I took the photo on the right in 1979. The photo on the left is lifted from the hotel's current web site.) From our room we could look out through coal-smoke haze (still visible even at night in the current photo) to old colonial buildings from the 1920s – most construction had ceased during much of the communist revolution, World War II and through the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. We also could see a soccer stadium in mild disrepair -- it's now part of the New Sport Complex.
We were part of an American tour group and our visit was tightly scripted. My missionary friend and I learned that if we would begin speaking Chinese when we got off the bus we’d soon be surrounded by people who probably had never seen an American, let alone one who could speak Cantonese. It was sometimes hard to extricate ourselves from the scene to go with our tour group.
We visited a commune (including a medical facility where an abortion was being performed more or less as we watched) and many historical sites. We had an unforgettable seven-course Cantonese meal including a suckling pig (yes, they served the whole thing) and an enormous pile of sautéed sparrows in a gray sauce that was spectacularly disgusting. I was the only diner to eat one, feathers, beak and all. I don’t recall the flavor but the sensation of sinewy meat and tiny bones remains crystal clear. The pig was as delicious as the birds were appalling. There was much bok choy, rice and, alas, plum wine and Tsing Tao beer that I was forbidden to drink.
Canton struck me as how Europe must have looked in the 1920s. Sprinkled with the odd Chinese-style building, the city was mostly two- and three-story stone and brick buildings and dank alleys. The Pearl River, namesake of the “commie soda” we occasionally drank in Hong Kong, was nearly irretrievably polluted but made for a lovely scene. There were many bridges spanning the river, all of which were festooned with large placards containing political slogans very much in keeping with the spirit of socialism that still gripped the country, even as Deng began introducing selected pieces of capitalism. (The sign atop the building on the river in the picture at the top right of this blog says: "Remember, the police keep the motherland safe.")
In the rural areas there were more water buffalo than tractors plowing the fields. Both inside and outside of the city bicycles outnumbered cars perhaps 1,000 to one. Driving at night, taxi cabs would leave their lights off unless the driver determined there was some reason to flash them – usually to warn cyclists to get the hell out of the way. There are now some 10 million people living in the metropolitan area (some estimates put it as high as 18 million) – the population in 1979 was probably two-thirds that.
The children were sweet and curious and the adults were as intrigued by me as I was by them. I had spent two years among the Chinese of Hong Kong, many of whom had family in southern China and nearly all of whom spoke the Chinese dialect of Cantonese instead of the official dialect of Mandarin. The Cantonese language of Hong Kong had evolved over the years of separation from the mainland, so the Guangzhou version required me to concentrate – the people of Guangdong Province spoke a more precise dialect that didn’t include many of the contractions and shortcuts used in Hong Kong.
(The image to the right is the imprint of a "chop," a carving of the three Chinese characters that my name was translated into -- roughly, they are pronounced "poe long jee" in Cantonese. Last names go first in Chinese, and there is no "R" sound in Cantonese. Cantonese and Mandarin are written the same but spoken differently. At one time all chops were made from ivory -- my is made from plastic. The red ink is the original provided with the chop from 1979.)
We took the train back to Hong Kong when our visit was through, chugging through a green countryside of rice paddies and small villages in a vintage passenger car pulled by what appeared to be a coal-fired locomotive, though my memory could be imprecise. Looking back, I didn’t fully appreciate the rare opportunity I’d just experienced. Only months after Deng’s “re-opening,” I had been among the first Westerners to openly tour a small piece of the mainland.
I've not studied China deeply or recently enough to draw any conclusions other than the obvious -- China has made remarkable progress since I was there 30 years ago. I’ve been an amateur sinologist ever since but I’ve let too much memory go unrecorded. This small essay is simply my start in rectifying that.
What is evolution? Is it natural selection acting on random biological variation? Is it gradualism or punctuated equilibrium? Is it the slow accumulation of neutral changes that eventually become useful? No, these are all sub hypotheses of evolution. Evolution is the theory that naturalistic causes are sufficient to explain the origin of species.
The idea that the world must have arisen naturally became increasingly popular before and during the Enlightenment period a century before Darwin. Christian thinkers such as Malebranche, Cudworth, Burnet, Ray, Leibniz, Wolf and Kant argued for a naturalistic origins. These traditions grew and by Darwin's day were increasingly accepted in the Anglican broad church, and Victorian society in general.
For instance Henry Peter Brougham, Lord Chancellor of England and one of the most famous people in England when Darwin was a young man, argued for such a naturalistic origins. It is hardly a shocker that Darwin and Alfred Wallace would independently "discover" that, you guessed it, the species had arisen naturally. Funny how this new "discovery" just happened to scratch old itches.
Of course Darwin and Wallace didn't know quite how this could have happened, and so they were willing to negotiate the details. As Darwin once pointed out:
Whether the naturalist believes in the views given by Lamarck, by Geoffroy St. Hilaire, by the author of the ‘Vestiges,’ by Mr. Wallace or by myself, signifies extremely little in comparison with the admission that species have descended from other species, and have not been created immutable ...
Darwin and Wallace knew the species arose naturally because they knew the species did not arise supernaturally. Darwin did not provide incontrovertible evidence that naturalism worked, but rather that supernaturalism did not work. Their arguments against supernaturalism were, not surprisingly, straight out of that earlier Enlightenment period, but applied to biology. Yesterday's theology and philosophy had become today's science.
The greater god (it is beneath god's dignity to manually create the species), problem of evil (god wouldn't create this gritty world) and intellectual necessity (naturalism is needed for good science) were a few of the non scientific arguments that were shaping today's science.
The common thread, and key to evolution, was naturalism. This is why evolutionists refer to their idea as a fact and a theory. The "fact" is that the species arose from strictly naturalistic causes. The "theory" is how this is supposed to have happened--the details behind the fact.
And this is why evolution can sustain substantial empirical contradictions. Such contrary evidence doesn't falsify evolution, it merely falsifies sub hypotheses. A recent paper by evolutionist Stuart Newman demonstrates how well protected evolution is from the empirical evidence. Early in the paper Newman reiterates the need for naturalistic explanations for all things:
The program of advancing materialism against supernaturalism and superstition is clearly a necessary one.
This is not a call for atheism, but merely naturalistic explanations. But how can naturalism be advanced in the face of apparent scientific problems? After all:
when it comes to the innovation of entirely new structures (‘‘morphological novelties’’) such as segmentally organized bodies (seen in earthworms, insects, and vertebrates such as humans, but not jellyfish or molluscs), or the hands and feet of tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs), Darwin’s mechanism comes up short. This is a reality that is increasingly acknowledged by biologists, particularly those working in the field of evolutionary developmental biology, or “EvoDevo.”
Contrary to the expectations of the Darwinian model, the fossil record is deficient in transitional forms between organisms distinguished from one another by the presence or absence of major innovations. Niles Eldredge and the late Stephen Jay Gould emphasized this point when they propounded their scenario of ‘‘punctuated equilibria’’ almost four decades ago. And although our current knowledge of the cellular and genetic mechanisms of the development of animal forms is relatively sophisticated, it is difficult to come up with plausible scenarios involving incremental changes in developmental processes that would take an organism from one adult form (e.g., an unsegmented worm) to one embodying an innovation (a segmented worm).
And these are not the only apparent problems with evolution:
Gregor Mendel, in performing his remarkable experiments on various plants, carefully picked traits to study whose different versions were uniquely tied to alternative states of specific genes. Much genetic research in the first half of the 20th century, using a similar strategy, also identified strict gene-trait correlations (particularly with regard to simple biochemical pathways) in other organisms. This led to a deep-seated conviction that the Mendelian mode of inheritance was essentially applicable to all traits in all organisms at all stages of their evolutionary histories. But even Mendel himself, who cautiously described his most famous findings as ‘‘the law valid for peas,’’ did not suggest this, and it is demonstrably not the case.
The Mendelian paradigm deals with factors, or genes, that are associated with biological characters. As such, it focuses on the logic of intergenerational transmission of traits (the alternative forms of characters) rather than the mechanisms of character generation.
Unfortunately many evolutionists continue to insist that this failed paradigm is one of the most powerful ideas ever produced by science.
Evolution has led to many false expectations, and failures to inquire into important observations such as the incredible ability of organisms and populations to adjust to their environment:
Phenotypic plasticity, a relatively common property of developing organisms, which was appreciated by many 19th century biologists and which provided the basis for Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s (generally mischaracterized and not entirely incorrect) pre-Darwinian evolutionary concepts, is only now reentering biology after becoming an all-but-taboo subject within evolutionary theory during the 20th century.
Darwin’s theory, in holding that the competition between individuals marginally different from one another with respect to the small, inherited, morphological, physiological, or behavioral variations encountered in any natural population, has been sufficient to generate the entire array of biologically distinct types seen on the face of planet, avoided cases in which the same organism could take on different forms under different conditions. Indeed, a major impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was to marginalize the concept of phenotypic plasticity. Once the theory’s scientific hegemony was established, all phenomena that fit this description were consigned to a theoretical limbo.
Given scientific problems such as these, how can evolutionists promote their naturalistic agenda? For starters Newman encourages his fellow evolutionists to be more forthcoming about problems with their theory. A century ago physicists had the courage to acknowledge that the old ideas were not adequate, but:
The present-day neo-Darwinists provide a poor contrast to this, insofar as they persist in the hand-waving consignment of all problematic aspects of the origination of complex subcellular entities to the putative universal mechanism of random variation and natural selection. ... Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the education of generations to come is at risk of being sacrificed for the benefit of a dying theory.
While such truth in advertising is certainly laudable, note what is not on the table. For the evolutionist, sub hypotheses can be freely discarded but the core theory is not testable. After all, it is a fact, regardless of the science. Religion drives science and it matters.
Published in the Post Register in October, 2009.
Cedric’s looks like a pretty much any other American coffee shop – parking out front, booths and tables inside, kitchen in the back.
One thing that might set it apart is a decades-old recipe for scones that current owner Shelley Niemann purchased along with the business from its original owner and recipe-creator, Del Mar “Cannonball” Griffith. Another is a wall packed with photos and press clippings of Niemann’s daughter, Jody, who was a young golf phenom in the Nineties, spent a year on the LPGA tour and wound up coaching college golf.+and+Mark+Cukurs.jpg)
On a busy weekend day, the restaurant will serve 250 scones or more along with dozens of Cedric’s other specialty – a wide variety of omelets.
Manager Denice Anderson says Cannonball and his wife, Irene, still come in from time to time to make sure the scones and biscuits and gravy are still to his liking.
“So far, no complaints,” she says.
The Griffiths opened Cedric’s in 1981 and Niemann bought it in 1992. Anderson has been there for 25 years going back to the original owners.
Back in the kitchen, David Burggraf, Leroy Zimmer and Mark Cukurs are keeping the grill full of omelets and hash browns. There’s a brief lull this morning between the morning and mid-day rush, so waitresses are doing some cleaning and keeping coffee cups full at the half-dozen occupied tables.
While you’re waiting for a table you can read of Jody Niemann’s exploits, including clippings of her with Tiger Woods and Johnny Miller, among others. She competed in 22 LPGA events in 2000-01 before going into college coaching. Now married, she goes by Jody Dansie and is admission and recruitment coordinator at the University of Nevada-Reno.
Idaho Falls is fortunate to have a handful of coffee shops along the stretch of Broadway from the river to the west side of town, each offering its own specialties and particular atmosphere. Cedric’s has stepped outside the coffee shop business recently by adding an ice cream parlor in the back featuring square ice cream. You’ll be familiar with this product if you’ve ever stopped at the Rainey Creek story in Swan Valley.
In his never ending world tour evolutionist Richard Dawkins has been issuing typical arguments for evolution which are in his latest book. Here is one example:
The recurrent laryngeal nerve is a remarkable piece of unintelligent design. The nerve starts in the head, with the brain, and the end organ is the larynx, the voice box. But instead of going straight there it goes looping past the voice box. In the case of the giraffe, it goes down the full length of the giraffe's neck, loops down one of the main arteries in the chest and then comes straight back up again to the voice box, having gone within a couple of inches of the voice box on its way down. No intelligent designer would ever have done that.
Having never built a giraffe evolutionists do not actually know whether or not their recurrent laryngeal nerve is a shoddy design. In fact, it may well be that there are good reasons for the devious routing of the nerve.
But that is beside the point. Evolutionists forfeit nothing if the giraffe's recurrent laryngeal nerve has some reason to go down and back up its long neck. Regardless of the functions that are discovered, it obviously isn't efficient or elegant--it isn't an intelligent design.
Do you see the metaphysics that is deeply embedded in evolutionary thought? Regardless of how you feel about such designs, put yourself in the place of the evolutionist for a moment. Pretend that you genuinely believe that biology is an endless trail of hodge podge designs. That no creator or designer, otherwise capable of designing such incredible machines, would insert such clap traps into his designs. It would be like finding the steering wheel on backwards in a Ferrari. It makes no sense.
There are many scientific problems with evolution, but evolutionists are not in a position to contemplate any other possibility. Evolution--in one way or another--must be responsible for what we find in biology. Evolutionists have no other choice, regardless of the evidence. If you are convinced that "No intelligent designer would ever have done that" then guess what you will believe about evolution?
This argument from bad design may seem to rebuke the intelligent design theory, but it doesn't. ID is an appeal to the design in nature, not to the quality of those designs. The word "intelligent" is not a claim that the designs are smartly made--it is merely used to distinguish true design from apparent design.
We may not like a design, but that does not mean it was not designed. There may be evidence for evil or inefficiency, but that does not counter the evidence for design. Snake venom may be deadly, but it also is complex.
Judgments of the quality of a design can certainly be scientific. The efficiency, according to some metric, can be computed. The toxicity can be measured. But the use of such findings to determine whether a designer would have designed what we find in nature is necessarily not scientific. Such determinations require metaphysical assumptions.
The point here is not that evolution or ID are good or bad theories, or are true or false. The point is that, regardless of how one judges these ideas, evolution is a metaphysical theory whereas ID is an appeal to the empirical data and our scientific knowledge. This is why evolutionists are certain their theory is true. There is no way to conclude that evolution is as certain as gravity without non scientific premises at work.
Religion drives science and it matters.
Misconceptions about evolution abound and Todd Wood, who is not an evolutionist, wants to set the record straight. Wood rightly points out that there is plenty of evidence for evolution, that it is not a theory in crisis and that it does provide a research framework. But Wood also says that evolution is not a religion and "there has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory."
The question for Wood is: How are we to understand the religous foundation of evolution? How are we to understand Darwin's writings which were loaded with religious and metaphysical mandates for evolution? How are we to understand the writings of evolutionists since Darwin who have used these same arguments? How are we to understand Darwin's Principle? How are we to understand the consensus position that evolution is a fact, and the religious arguments that are used to arrive at that conclusion? Evolutionists claim their idea is a fact, and their justifications for this eyebrow raising claim--in every case--entail metaphysical claims. How are we to understand this?
And regarding the science, how are we to understand the many fundamental predictions of evolution that have gone wrong? Evolution consistently leads us down the wrong path. Its ideas about what we should find in biology so often turn out to be wrong. Yes, there are successful predictions, but there are a many important predictions that were flat wrong. How are we to understand this?
It certainly is true that there is plenty of evidence for evolution, but there is also plenty of evidence the earth if flat. There are also monumental scientific problems with both ideas. Religion drives science and it matters.
Published in the Post Register October, 2009.
One way to measure how long you’ve lived in eastern Idaho is whether you still remember the Blue Wave as the Blue Room.
Long known for its delicious hamburgers, the Blue Room was purchased by Wes and Roxanne Smith in 2001 and became the Blue Wave. Not a lot else changed, however – weekend manager Rob Hawkins says it’s still just a “nice neighborhood bar and grill,” where hamburgers fill the grill at lunchtime and folks prefer barstools to tables.
“With the recession, people still like the things that they like,” says Hawkins.
What they mostly like is what Hawkins calls “the best cheeseburger in Idaho for five bucks.”
“We do our own burger patties, hand cut the beef,” says Hawkins on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by TV sets showing baseball, football and golf.
The Smiths also own the North Highway Café and once owned Debbie’s Brother, a bar on First Street known years ago for its sandwiches. In other words, if you’re looking for a laid-back, working-class place for food and/or drink, the Smiths have you covered.
The Blue Wave makes no pretense of trying to be anything more than that “nice neighborhood bar and grill” that Hawkins talks about. There’s an antler rack stuck high on the roof outside the building, for heaven’s sake. The patrons make sure there’s never any trouble.
“That’s the thing about this place,” he said. “We just don’t have any trouble. The customers make sure of that.”
Looking to attract some new faces, the Blue Wave now serves breakfast – steak and eggs is the specialty – on weekends. But mostly, it’s still populated by a familiar crowd, some of whom go back decades to the Blue Room days. That includes Hawkins, who would pop in after softball in the 1980s. Just blocks from Tautphaus Park, the Blue Wave still is that kind of watering hole.
There aren't many down-sides to the Blue Wave, but it is a bar and, therefore, there's ample opportunity to breathe in second-hand cigarette smoke. This isn't a health warning -- the cheeseburgers will likely kill you before the smoke. But it -- the smoke -- does cling to cotton sweatshirts and wool hats, both of which I happened to be wearing during my visit. Fortunately, Kathleen was forgiving.