Guest bloggers on Pharyngula

I’ll tell you more later.

It’s later now. I’m teaching a course in neurobiology, and one of the things I’m doing is having the students blog, to recount their experiences with neurobiology outside the classroom. In past years, I’ve set up a separate blog space for them to use, but I had a conversation with Beth Noveck of the Cairns blog at Sci Foo, and she recommended just throwing the students into the hurly-burly of the wider conversation. And after thinking about it for a while, I think she’s right — toss ’em into the shark tank, and let’s see how well they do. So beginning later this week, my six students will begin putting up roughly one article a week here on Pharyngula.

I still feel a little protective, though, so a few words of warning. The students had the option of posting under a pseudonym, and most have taken one. Please don’t try to invade their privacy. Another important factor to take into account is that all these students have in common is that they’re smart enough to be UMM upperclassmen and they are interested in neuroscience — do not assume that they share my political and religious views and jump on them as proxies for me. I don’t even know what their political and religious views are. For all I know, it’s a class full of devout Reaganites … and I don’t care. They can even use this space to publicly disagree with me on something, and it won’t hurt their grades.

Most important of all, be nice. This is an experiment, and they’re the guinea pigs, and give them time to find their space and their voice. I am reserving the right to pull the plug if the obnoxiousness exceeds the productive discussion, and I will police comments to their articles a little bit more ruthlessly than the comments on my own.

For the teachers

Did anyone catch the reference to Donors Choose in Doonesbury? This is an organization that a bunch of us sciencebloggers campaigned for last year: teachers submit projects and requests for funding, and then we promote it and try to get people to make donations to support the projects.

We aren’t going to be pushing it just yet — wait until October — but this is the time for teachers to be writing up short requests and sending them in. Janet has all the details, but the rough summary is that if you’re a teacher, and you’ve got a great little idea that all you need is a few hundred dollars to make real in your classroom, you ought to write a proposal and send it in right now.

So I can’t use my personal knowledge of Cthulhu’s wishes to get out of a speeding ticket? Bummer.

I confess that I really don’t know much about this fellow, Steven D. Smith. He’s a lawyer, and he seems to be firmly in the Intelligent Design creationism camp, and that about exhausts my knowledge of the man.

As Steven D. Smith, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego, says: “The mainstream science establishment and the courts tell us, in censorious tones that sometimes sound a bit desperate, that intelligent design is just a lot of fundamentalist cant. It’s not. We’ve heard the Darwinist story, and we owe it to ourselves to hear the other side.”

I already don’t like him. He’s inaccurate — we don’t refer to IDists as fundamentalists, for the most part; we know they’re not, and we also know that many of the fundamentalists don’t like them very much — and he uses the term “Darwinist,” which throws up another big red flag.

So when Brian Leiter suggested I might find his critique of Smith amusing, I was game … but now I must also confess that I find most of the dissection of Smith’s legal philosophy and his argument that jurisprudence is heading for extinction a bit beyond me. At least, that is, until I hit this paragraph, and discovered what was amusing.

[U]nder modern conventions, academic discussion is supposed to be carried on in secular terms, meaning, for the most part, the terms of scientific naturalism and of common sense everyday experience.  In attempting to explain some happening or phenomenon, it is perfectly permissible for modern scholars to refer to religion—or to people’s beliefs in God.  By contrast, actual appeals to God, or to anything that looks metaphysically suspicious or exotic, are out of bounds.  As a result of this drastic narrowing of the range of admissible argument or explanation, claims or positions that would once have been framed forthrightly in theological terms now must be translated into more secular terms—or else abandoned.

Oh. So Steven D. Smith believes that a sign of the decline of the significance of jurisprudence is that lawyers can no longer invoke the authority of a deity in their arguments and be taken seriously. No wonder he’s on the side of Intelligent Design creationism! Since their only argument is a claim to the inside track on what’s going on inside the mind of their divine Designer, the fact that the law doesn’t treat testimony about what God told the witness or lawyer as the literal Ultimate Word really scuttles their case.

Maybe in the next Dover case the creationists can subpoena the burning bush to get around this narrowing of admissibility.

Temporary position in genetics at UMM

The University of Minnesota, Morris is hiring! We need someone to teach an undergraduate course in classical transmission genetics for the spring semester — I know, it’s short notice, and this is only a temporary position, but it would be ideal for someone who wants to pick up some teaching experience at a highly regarded liberal arts university while applying for permanent positions.

This is the course I teach in alternate years (2008 is not my year!), and I will be available to help whoever takes the job — at least, I’ll share my syllabi and exams and lab notes. It’s also an opportunity to work with a group of smart and motivated students; one of those intangible benefits here is the quality of the students who will be taking the course.

The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks to fill a part-time, one-semester position in genetics beginning January 22, 2008. Duties include: teaching undergraduate genetics course with labs. Minimum qualifications: Master’s degree in genetics or a related field and one year of teaching experience (graduate TA experience acceptable) required. Send letter of application, resume, transcripts, teaching statement, and names of three references to: Genetics Search Committee Chair, Division of Science and Math, University of Minnesota, Morris, MN 56267-2128. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Screening begins August 1, 2007. The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.

A more thorough description of the position is below the fold.

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Ah, old memories

Back when I had an ungodly commute to work and had to get up at 5am to knock back a quart of coffee before staggering out to the bus and train, I’d sometimes flip through the channels on the TV to see what was happening. And at that hour of the morning, what you’d find is quack ads, infomercials, and the televangelists. I confess, some of my favorites were Ken Copeland (an awe-shucks country boy who looked like a few generations of inbreeding and moonshine abuse had shriveled his brain) and Benny Hinn (head-thwacking con man in a shiny white suit) — I’d watch them, awed that anyone was actually gullible enough to believe that crap. I haven’t seen them in years, but now Revere brings back old memories with a video from The Chasers.

The code is interesting: “plant a seed” actually means “give me lots of money now”.

Transitions

Whenever I spot some old thread suddenly getting a surge of new comments, I can guess what has happened: a creationist or two has come to visit. That’s happening right now on this very short article that mentions the peppered moths; we’re up above 200 comments now, and it seems to have very little to do with moths anymore. Instead, we’ve got a creationist complaining about the absence of transitional species and the Cambrian ‘explosion’, with a little quote-mining of Richard Dawkins. You commenters are taking care of him ably, but there are just a few things I want to mention, and a few questions I want to ask of the creationists.

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