Among the multitudes who have now seen Flock of Dodos was a woman who recognized one of the faces on the screen, and she wrote Randy Olson with a little anecdote that you might find amusing, and a little bit sweet and charming.
Just watched the film, congratulations to Randy Olson for a well documented
documentary of a topic that deserves greater coverage.Dr. Mike Behe was the first guy I ever dated, at the tender age of 13. We were
bright kids, and Mike tutored me in math. My dad took us on our ‘dates.’ I ended up
in technology, and he took the bio-science route. When my mom called me last year to
let me know that he was at the forefront of Intelligent Design, I was relatively
dumbfounded. Yes, we went to Catholic school, and yes, we were both science geeks,
but his philosophy and purported science and evidence is completely contradictory to
what we mutually pursued as adolescent theory. I am touching a book on my bookshelf
on Paleoanthropology that I know we both digested, and can’t for the life of me
figure out how he got to where he is now. Must be Lehigh College; California helps
you have a broader non-provincial perspective. Tell Mike he needs to get out of the
sticks.
Yes, she gave permission to post this publicly, as long as we didn’t reveal her name; if Dr Behe wants to get in touch with his old sweetie, he should talk to Randy Olson, not me. Personally, I wouldn’t blame Lehigh, which really isn’t that bad of a place—pin the problem on religion, not geography.
If any of my old Sunday School pals want to write in and rebuke me for leaving the church, I’ll post that in fair return. If you want anecdotes from my old girlfriends, though, you’re out of luck—I married the only one who mattered, and she’s not going to have any surprising stories about how I changed, and there will definitely be no accounts about how we tutored each other in biology.
That “family blog” thing again, right?
OK. I Need NOT never ever got publicity.. Suprising stories about how stupid things i have done and how i have changed (and most dangerous: those which are not changed a bit.)
OK, not so many storytellers (and still few too many..)
OK. I Need NOT never ever got publicity.. Suprising stories about how stupid things i have done and how i have changed (and most dangerous: those which are not changed a bit.)
OK, not so many storytellers (and still few too many..)
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence.
Say, but I do know someone who knew YOU when you were a kid, PZ!
Hahahahahahaha!!!
The unnamed woman said:
Anybody else find this curious? I’ve never known any bright kids who needed tutoring at all.
You are quite right. This anecdote says that Behe was a normal teenager with an interest in science who had a girlfriend. We should not use this story to argue that Michael Behe is a human being.
I knew lots of people when I was a kid. I don’t know what is amusing about that, unless you assumed that I also wasn’t a normal human being, and think you can dazzle us all with the revelation that I actually existed as a functional member of society once upon a time.
What? Bright kids study together all the time. Are they instead born with the knowledge, never needing instruction or to work with their peers?
bPer,
That is a pretty silly comment. Tutoring is used for additional instruction as well as for remedial instruction. Perhaps they where learning math beyond what they were being taught in school.
I’d always thought you were like Davy Jones, and now I learn that you’re perfectly normal. Man, I’m a little crushed now.
Hey, maybe Master Bater is sharing a room in Arkham asylum with one of my old pals from Innsmouth , if that would make you feel better.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence.
That depends on what kind of conclusion you’re trying to draw. If an eyewitness claimed to have seen O.J. Simpson kill Nicole, I hope you wouldn’t say “anecdotes are not evidence.”
Bright kids get tutoring all the time. Frankly, I think that’s one of the things that makes them bright; they know what their limitations are, and seek help on those areas.
I don’t mean to brag, but my 10 and 13 year old kids know their limitations, and study to make them less of an obstacle.
Bright kids don’t avoid tutoring and mentoring; they seek them.
By the way, I think this posting (if it’s true) bolsters exactly what I said the other day: Behe knows the ID he peddles is bogus. He’s smart, and for some twisted reason, he’s representing something as the truth that he certainly knows is not.
That’s what makes ID even more galling for me; these hucksters know exactly what they’re doing.
In high school, we didn’t have an AP Physics course. One very intelligent kid from my class had independently taught himself the material and took the exams. He held tutoring sessions for others who wanted to take the exam as well.
“…there will definitely be no accounts about how we tutored each other in biology.”
Dang it.
Son of a bitch! I really wanted to see Behe at the pearly gates in his nightgown made of irreducible cotton.
Dammit, RavenT beat me to it.
Prof. Myers @#5:
Darrell @#6:
The use of the word ‘tutoring’ here implied something else to me – that’s why I asked if anyone else found it curious. Evidently I am the only person who thought so.
Dr. Myers, please don’t try to put words in my mouth. I did not state that bright kids are born fully taught. To ask such an absurd question is really beneath you.
We all know that “tutor” can be a synonym for “teach”, but the most common use of “tutor” in a high-school context refers to remedial assistance for a student struggling with a subject. And in this case, Behe was the tutor. In my experience, student-to-student “tutoring” has always referred to remedial assistance. Again in my experience, “mentoring” is the colloquial term used in the high-school context to mean providing special or supplementary teaching to gifted students. Can a person be a mentor to a student struggling with a subject? Sure, but it isn’t the word commonly used for that.
Now in this case, could she have been describing one gifted student showing another some advanced math he had picked up? Certainly this could have been the case, as is commonly seen in study groups or when math and science geeks hang out together. If this is what she meant, fine, but it seems an odd use of the word to me.
I’m perfectly bright, thank you (I was on an IP part of the way through elementary school and all the way through high school for the “gifted” types), and I still needed plenty of tutoring (remedial help) in math. Math is something that seriously doesn’t come easily for me; I’m dyscalculic. When tested in grade 8, I was at or below grade level in math, but off the scale on the tests (which would have pegged me at first-year university level or better) in language skills, critical thinking, and logic.
I guess you’ve never heard of anything called a “dual exceptionality,” huh, or that most learning-disabled people are actually relatively bright…
So yes, it’s perfectly legitimate to say that bright kids might need tutoring. I can further say that some math teachers don’t do a very good job of accommodating students’ varying learning styles, which might require tutoring even for a student with a facility for apprehending the material.
In other words, you can stop quibbling about semantics now.
That depends on what kind of conclusion you’re trying to draw. If an eyewitness claimed to have seen O.J. Simpson kill Nicole, I hope you wouldn’t say “anecdotes are not evidence.”
Ok, but can i say:
“If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
This may be a shock to you, but being bright doesn’t necessarily involve being immediately competent at any and all forms of intellectual activity.
Who’d have thought?
I think Behe fell into The Pit of Incredulity.
We’ve talked about this before… Some folks just can’t wrap their minds around the enormity and scale of the geological and biological processes that yield the evidence which supports the Theory of Evolution. As a result, the more they think about it, the less likely it seems.
For a person like Behe, trained in sciences, this train of thought leads to significant cognitive dissonance. Eventually he reaches the tipping point, and he invents or accepts new beliefs to relieve the dissonance, and holding a god-belief makes it easier to do so.
bPer (#4) I don’t mean to pile on, but I have to chime in on the side of “I, too, have known bright kids who needed tutoring.” I was one of them, and it was tutoring, not mentoring, that I received. Mentoring implies a very different kind of relationship, in terms of nature and duration. (That’s true where I come from, anyway. Perhaps colloquial usage varies somewhat from region to region…)
Wow. bP is a gem. Where’d we pick this one up from?
Geez Steve, it seemed like an honest observation and question to me. It’s just that most of us disagree with the observation, and have answered the question with some form of: “Actually, no.” :-)
Actually coupled with his ‘unamed woman’ phrase, I inferred that bPer was making more of a snide comment intended to cast doubt on the story.
Perhaps it was just a matter of unfortunate phrasing, or not.
I do not for one moment think that Behe believes what he peddles. He’s a liar, not a fool. If he sucks at defending ID, well, consider what he’s defending…
And don’t be mean to bPer – I don’t think the post was meant to be snide. Touchy bunch, ‘aint ya?
I’m going to back bPer on the fact that,at least for those of us from certain times and eras, “tutoring” is a phrase for remedial work. “Mentoring” is a new one to me in this context (extra learning), we used to call it “teaching”.
Can someone tell me the correct pronunciation of Dr. Behe’s last name?
Is it BEE or BAY or BAY-hee or something else?
Behe (Beehee). It is interesting to see the comment from Mike’s old flame. It corroborates what a friend said about him. They went to grad school (UPenn) together and Behe passed for normal 25 years ago. However, it came out at the Dover trial that he was collaborating with arch creationists later in the 1980s. It is not clear, to me, that he is a liar instead of self-deluded.
One of the “Bacons” (Francis? Roger?) opined that when smart people take a wrong turn- they go further, faster than the rest of us.
Hmmm. Possibly, but that doesn’t make sense to me. We should ask ourselves what possible motivation could he have to back something in which he does not believe and, by doing so, expose himself to the scorn and derision of a vast proportion of the science-educated community? Is he really betting his entire career on a scientifically untenable position, on the presumption that the creationist movement is likely to win the cultural and political war against the teaching of evolution?
Kseniya: Is he really betting his entire career on a scientifically untenable position, on the presumption that the creationist movement is likely to win the cultural and political war against the teaching of evolution?
I would suspect that he is actually betting his career on the prediction that the war will still be going strong for many years to come. Think of it as intellectual war profiteering
I think the comment about when smart people take a wrong turn, they go “wrong-er” further and faster…is a fair comment and probably explains a lot. It isn’t like it hasn’t happened before, elsewhere.
But I think there is also a degree of ego-protection involved in Behe’s stance. He came up with this idea as a genuinely-held hypothesis, I’m willing to bet, but by now he has invested a great deal of himself into it, as well as gotten a lot of ego-stroking from other ID proponents out of it. Alliances and enmities have been firmly declared. Now, even when the evidence is firmly against ID, he has to ignore/explain away/misperceive that evidence, or suffer the blow to his own emotional investment and world view — which contributes to what the non-invested world would easily term “dishonesty”.
Is he actually aware of this? That, I don’t know. But it’s not like we haven’t seen that kind of thing ever before, either. It happens even in legitimate and earnest researchers.
He has tenure. There’s very, very little he could do to threaten his career if he’s satisfied with a ‘career’ generating no real accomplishments.
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
-Saul Bellow
Maybe he just believes in the wise teachings of the sage L. Ron:
Make money. Make more money.
Maybe he just believes in the wise teachings of the sage L. Ron:
Make money. Make more money.
Maybe I should have said “reputation” instead of “career” …
“… (I) can’t for the life of me figure out how he got to where he is now. Must be Lehigh College; California helps you have a broader non-provincial perspective. Tell Mike he needs to get out of the sticks.”
Please understand that it’s not Lehigh University that got him where he is now. The biology department at Lehigh considers him an embarassment, but they can’t get rid of him because he’s a tenured professor. See this letter on the department website:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm
as a lehigh grad i 2 am embarrassed by behe:-(