Britain has some wacky beliefs, too

Perhaps my fellow Americans feel a little dismayed at the news of all those young creationist school teachers…well, a recent poll in Britain showed that people have some awfully materialist opinions about god.

Only 1% of people think of God as female, with 62% considering God to be male, the online survey conducted earlier this month of 1,050 adults in Britain found.

Weird. So god has a penis, and a Y chromosome?

Some day, they’ve got to ask people some other details of god’s physical attributes. What shade is his skin color? What color eyes does he have? At his age, does he get regular prostate exams?

When you get bored of speculating on imponderable nonsensicals, you can take a second and crash their poll: do you believe in the supernatural? Yes is winning 60:40 right now.

Creationists in the American classroom

Here’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen all week (and I’m grading genetics exams): it’s the result of a national survey of high school biology teachers.

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At least 16% of our high school teachers are young earth creationists. Furthermore, 12% our our teachers are using biology classes in public schools to teach creationism in a positive light. The majority are still pro-science, but even in the good cases, relatively little time is spent on teaching evolution.

The news isn’t all bad. One constructive discovery is that it is neither legal battles nor demanding state standards that determine how much effort is put into teaching evolution — it’s how much education the teachers have in the subject. The obvious lesson is that we ought to be encouraging more coursework for teachers; help educate the teachers, give them more material they can use in the classroom, and the students benefit.

Here’s the conclusion of the paper, which lays it all out very clearly.

Our survey of biology teachers is the first nationally representative, scientific sample survey to examine evolution and creationism in the classroom. Three different survey questions all suggest that between 12% and 16% of the nation’s biology teachers are creationist in orientation. Roughly one sixth of all teachers professed a “young earth” personal belief, and about one in eight reported that they teach creationism or intelligent design in a positive light. The number of hours devoted to these alternative theories is typically low–but this nevertheless must surely convey to students that these theories should be accorded respect as scientific perspectives.

The majority of teachers, however, see evolution as central and essential to high school biology courses. Yet the amount of time devoted to evolutionary biology varies substantially from teacher to teacher, and a majority either avoid human evolution altogether or devote only one or two class periods to the topic. We showed that some of these differences were due to personal beliefs about human origins. However, an equally important factor is the science education the teacher received while in college. Additional variance is likely to be rooted in pressures–subtle or otherwise–emerging from parents and community leaders in each school’s community, in combination with teachers’ confidence in their ability to deal with such pressures given their knowledge of evolution, as well as their personal beliefs.

These findings strongly suggest that victory in the courts is not enough for the scientific community to ensure that evolution is included in high school science courses. Nor is success in persuading states to adopt rigorous content standards consistent with recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and other scientific organizations. Scientists concerned about the quality of evolution instruction might have a bigger impact in the classroom by focusing on the certification standards for high school biology teachers. Our study suggests that requiring all teachers to complete a course in evolutionary biology would have a substantial impact on the emphasis on evolution and its centrality in high school biology courses. In the long run, the impact of such a change could have a more far reaching effect than the victories in courts and in state governments.

For the Australian readership

I got a request to try and drum up some Australian research subjects for a student’s honors thesis work — don’t worry, no knives, exotic drugs, or electrodes are involved, just filling out a short questionnaire. She’s looking for Australians who read blogs but don’t have blogs of their own, which sounds like a rather limited pool, but let’s see how many such beings there are.

Do you have a favourite blogger that you want to talk about?

I am an Honours student from the University of Queensland, Australia and I am conducting an email-based survey that looks at the experiences that blog readers have with their favourite bloggers.

To take part in this research you cannot be a blogger yourself and you cannot know the blogger offline.

AND

Please note that for ethical and legal issues you MUST be 18+ years of age and an Australian Citizen to partake in this research

If this sounds like you and you would like to participate in this original and exciting research project then please email Bo at:

s4029966@student.uq.edu.au

Participation is until August 2008
All inquiries are very much appreciated!

Scars

Hank Fox is starting one of those memes: this one asks us to tell the story of a scar.

Tell the story of a (non-surgical) scar you have somewhere on your body. Answer and tag three other bloggers.

Alas, I am a pampered child of the middle class, and I don’t have much of a history of trauma and injury. I’ve got a couple of small slashes on my forehead from when I was a toddler, when I had a series of unfortunate accidents falling headfirst onto coffee tables. My knees were shredded in typical childhood accidents. I’ve got a massive appendectomy scar that gets admiring comments from doctors when I go in for checkups — most appendectomies nowadays involve teeny-tiny incisions and don’t demand a hemisection of the abdomen. That’s about it. Boring, I know.

There is one other hairline scar on my left hand, but I already described that. Does a self-inflicted incision with a scalpel count as non-surgical?

Now I’m supposed to tag three other people…wait, I’m supposed to ask some strangers to tell me about their scars? If you did that at a party it would be considered hopelessly rude. To reduce personal culpability, I just punched my magic blogroll randomizer and it spat up three urls: Neurodudes, Amygdala, and Unfogged. Surely somebody in that mob has a notable scar, but if you’d rather not talk about it, that’s fine. And please don’t feel obligated to show us any.

Ambitious vandalism!

A couple of college students in Toronto (what is it with those ferocious godless heathens coming out of that city?) took offense at the patent absurdity of the “Bible and Bible Studies” section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult. Then they sent me a photo of the end result.

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That’s Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation sitting all alone there.

I can’t really condone this kind of behavior — think of the poor clerks who have to look everywhere to find and restore the bibles to their little ghetto — but it is funny. It’s also godless Canada, so maybe nobody noticed for a few weeks or months. Maybe nobody cared.

Here’s the other side of the story.

The book-shuffler also explains his side.

Robert Bakker plays blame-the-atheist

Robert Bakker is one of the good guys, a paleontologist who really does an excellent job of communicating enthusiasm for science. I saw him talk at St John’s University a few years ago, and he clearly inspired the kids in attendance — I greatly enjoyed the talk too, even though one of his hooks was to incessantly emphasize the religious backgrounds of famous dinosaur hunters. It’s a strategy, all right? If he can get more kids to follow through on science, more power to him.

However, he also illustrates another unfortunate phenomenon: religion turns even good scientists’ brains to mush. In a recent interview on Laelaps, he said some awesomely stupid things.

[Read more…]

Tennessee passes a “Bible in Schools” act

While I think a non-sectarian comparative religion course would be a fine idea for our public schools, I don’t trust these bozos at all. Tennessee legislators want to stuff a bible studies class into the curriculum.

“Our government school teachers cannot constitutionally preach the Bible, but they can teach the Bible,” Herron said.

“I want students to study the greatest and most popular book in history. I want young people to understand how the Bible has enormously impacted literature, art, music, culture, history and politics. A Bible course will help students understand our culture and our highest and best values.”

A Bible class is not non-sectarian. A course that begins with the premise that the Bible is the greatest book in history is not unbiased. This is a completely phony bill that is trying to smuggle religious instruction into the public school system.

As usual, I expect the politicians to be completely oblivious to their religious agenda.

Two book lists

I’ve been sent two lists of “10 Books That Screwed Up the World”, and I’m not very impressed with either of them. The first is from a new book by Benjamin Wanker Wiker of the same title, published by Regnery Press, the imprint of right-wing wackaloons everywhere. Here’s Wiker’s list:

  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Discourse on Method, Descartes
  • Leviathan, Hobbes
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • The Descent of Man, Darwin
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey

Here’s another list, which seems to be inspired by Wiker’s, but with a few substitutions.

  • Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger
  • Democracy and Education, Dewey
  • Baby and Child Care, Spock
  • The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • Darwin’s Black Box, Behe

Bleh. A list of books that screwed up the world ought to include books that have actually had some major impact for the worse on the lives of large numbers of people: I can definitely see that for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the Malleus Maleficarum. Others, not so much. Coming of Age in Samoa may have confused the discipline of anthropology for a while, but putting it on the same list as Mein Kampf is simply ridiculous. The work of Marx has been potent and maybe deserves to be on these lists because we’re still living with the ideological struggle that it was part of…but really, it ought to include both sides, and Adam Smith’s work doesn’t seem to be here.

Darwin’s book is a science text that describes an empirical reality. To claim that it screwed up the world is like declaring that Newton’s Principia, because it described difficult facts, hurt us. It’s only on the list because Wiker is a Discovery Institute cretin.

Kinsey is on the list because he makes homophobic wingnuts feel uncomfortably icky. I don’t think that making the likes of Benjamin Wiker feel all squirmy in his pants qualifies as screwing up the world.

And Behe? You’ve got to be kidding. His book is inconsequential noise, error after error larded with silly egotism. It’s the work of a popular crackpot; if you’re going to include that, then we need to include the works of Velikovsky and Chopra and every astrologer, acupuncturist, homeopathist, quack, and faith healer ever written.

And most damning of all, it is impossible to take these lists seriously when they’ve left off the works that have been overwhelmingly influential, incredibly widely read, and have led billions of people into delusion and stupidity: the Christian bible and the Koran. Toss in the Book of Mormon and Dianetics and any holy book you can imagine as equally fit for condemnation. Isn’t it glaringly obvious that both lists omit any work that is explicitly religious? It’s another example of unthinking privilege handed to theological gobbledygook.