Hi, Joe!

William Cronon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that placed the recent labor troubles in Wisconsin in historical context — he explained how many of the progressive policies in that state were actually the product of Republican lawmakers, that the state has long been a battleground between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican party, and that a good part of the liberalism in the state is due to a reaction against the autocratic hand of Joe McCarthy, who violated the traditions of the state and its people and basically inspired a lot of revulsion. And it concludes by pointing out that Governor Walker is making the same mistakes as McCarthy, forgetting the lessons of good government.

It’s a great essay, even-handed and informed, and reminded me that yes, once upon a time, Republicans weren’t the party of insane corporate tools who got their instructions direct from god, and that there are common principles of good government that liberals and conservatives could agree on.

The response has been interesting (in the sense of the Chinese curse) for Cronon. The Wisconsin Republican party is dunning him with an open records request demanding all emails that he has received mentioning any of the players in the recent labor conflicts in Wisconsin. Why? Because they’re planning a witch hunt with Cronon as the prey, and they want to find any damning connection that will allow them to claim that Cronon is an apparatchik and propagandist, rather than an independent historian with a serious scholarly focus. Cronon himself has put together an analysis of the request — it’s an effort to silence a critic with intimidation.

Well, hello there, Joe McCarthy! How nice of the Rethuglicans to confirm the comparison in his op-ed for him.

You should read Cronon’s own discussion, but also, Gary Farber has assembled a thorough discussion of the tangled path from history professor to stage-prop villain. His greatest crime may have been exposing to the light of day a quiet organization, ALEC, that has been drafting the most conservative legislation for our government in collaboration with the wealthiest corporations in the country.

You just knew there was going to be a connection to greed and big money in there, didn’t you?

Are teachers overpaid?

Let’s compare teacher salaries in different countries and find out.

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(Click for larger image)

You go, USA! Looks like we need to bust up some teachers’ unions and get those pay scales down even lower.

(That’s sarcasm, for any Republicans/Teabaggers/Libertarians who might show up and find that kind of thing difficult to read. We’re starving our teachers; it’s not a job that earns significant returns on the major educational investment it takes.)

How not to write an atheist book

Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse are coming out with a book called Reasonable Atheism, and they argued for some form of accommodationism in a recent blog entry. I left a brief comment in which I pointed out that they had misrepresented the Gnu Atheists in one section. This has prompted a rebuttal to various atheist arguments against their position, which is fine, except…well, let me show you. Here’s an excerpt of their long post.

Our claim, to be clear, is that the epistemic evaluation of beliefs is a task that is conceptually distinct from the epistemic evaluation of believers.  Of course, the two tasks are not unrelated.  But the aim of determining the truth of a statement is distinct from that of assigning epistemic blame or praise to a cognitive agent.  The former is simply a matter of determining what the best evidence suggests.  The latter is inherently a matter of assessing what the agent believes in light of the evidence she has, and her grasp of the evidence.

Our identification and analysis of that conflation, has gone almost entirely without comment.  And where there has been mention of it, the comments confirm the need to make the distinction explicit.  

To cite one example, P.Z. Myers includes in his response the claim that we have overlooked “the possibility that we’re dealing with bad ideas held for irrational reasons.” (Feb 7, 2011 10:36:49 PM)  He thereby places his foot firmly in the bucket.  The terms he italicizes in the phrases “bad ideas” and “irrational reasons” admit of the ambiguity we described.  To explain, Abby’s idea can be bad for at least two reasons: (1) it is false, or (2) it is unsupported by the evidence Abby has.  Myers’ term “irrational reason” is difficult to parse, since, typically it is agents and their actions that are assessable as rational or not; however, we suspect that Myers’ intended meaning is this: an irrational reason is one that an agent ought not endorse (or cite, or employ when drawing inferences, etc.).  Thus clarified, “irrational reasons” similarly involves the imprecision we identify.  Abby’s reason can be “irrational” for being (1) based on a false assessment of the relevant facts, or (2) unsupported by Abby’s own conception of the relevant facts. 

Dear sweet goddess of academic loquaciousness, is the whole book written in that style? Is anyone going to be able to read it? Those three paragraphs nearly killed me with their preening opacity! And, near as I can tell, all they’re doing is fussing over the conjunction of two words that they found incomprehensible.

I have now lost all interest in reading their work, because 1) it looks like it will put me to sleep, and 2) since I value truth, I have to point out that the third, fourth, and fifth words in the quote above are damnable lies. Lies, I tell you! Lies so perfidious that they’re probably planning to sneak off your screen and bugger your cats behind your back, while telling you that they’re praying to the saints above. Don’t trust them, not one bit. You might want to scroll them away so they don’t cause trouble.

I must be doing it wrong

I’m teaching human physiology this term, and those of you who have done it or taken it know that this kind of course is a strain to get through the huge volume of material. I think I must simply be a horrible teacher, though, because here’s an online physiology course that does a much better job than I do.

Here’s Your Chance To Skip The Struggle
and Master Human Anatomy & Physiology
In 3 Days Or Less… 100% Guaranteed

Wow. And guess what…it’s a $1985.00 value, available now for a limited-time only for the low, low price of only $37. And it’s been shown on the Martha Stewart show!

If that’s not enough for you, it has testimonials.

This might just be the best investment in my career as a chiropractor I’ve made in a long time.

I’m sold. Maybe I should just plunk down my $37 now and photocopy the images, hand ’em out in class, and be done with the whole course before spring break, and then I can spend the rest of the semester sipping pina coladas while loafing about in my underwear.

I noticed something disturbing. The CDs are illustrated with one photo and signature of Dr Ross, but the ad copy on the web has a different photo and signature of Dr Ross.

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What have you done with the real Dr Ross, you bastards?

Oh, no! My human physiology course will never be able to compete!

We’ll be getting to human reproduction sometime near the end of the term, but I don’t think we’ll have any demonstrations like this:

More than 100 Northwestern University students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her fiancee during an after-class session of the school’s popular “Human Sexuality” class.

The woman said she showed up at the Feb. 21 lecture in the Ryan Family Auditorium in Evanston expecting just to answer questions, but was game to demonstrate. The course’s professor on Wednesday acknowledged some initial hesitation, but said student feedback was “uniformly positive.”

It’s unusual, but seems like an entirely reasonable exercise given that class’s subject matter and the willingness of the volunteer.

What most impresses me, though, is that Northwestern administrators are not freaking out.

And Northwestern defended the class and its professor.

“Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines,” said Alan K. Cubbage, vice president for University Relations. “The University supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge.”

Commendable.

If you still want the entertaining spectacle of someone freaking out, though, look no further than the crazies at the Illinois Patriarchy Institute.

We’re still trying to hire someone for a tenure track biology position

Way back in October, I told you we were trying to hire a new cell biologist. We had a very successful search, found a whole lot of brilliant candidates, and then brought a few of them out for interviews, where they shone like stars and dazzled us with their potential…and then they all turned down our offers. We should have mentioned in our criteria that working here demands that you be slightly mad — only slightly, though, just enough to be committed to undergraduate education in spite of a remote rural location, but not enough to be be, you know, committed. It probably didn’t help to be holding interviews in the middle of one of the worst winters since I moved here (by the way, I interviewed for my job in July).

So we’ve extended the job search. This is what we’re looking for:

Preferred: Preference will be given to applicants who have an area of expertise relevant to our pre-health professional students and complementary to existing faculty interests. These might include, but are not limited to: immunology, pathophysiology, cancer biology, bioinformatics, and cell signaling.

Duties/Responsibilities: Teaching undergraduate biology courses including a sophomore-level cell biology course, an upper-level genetics elective course, an elective in the applicant’s area of expertise, and other courses that support the biology program; advising undergraduates; conducting research that could involve undergraduates; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the biology program, the division, and the campus.

Our new deadline is 21 February, when we’ll begin reviewing applications. We aim to bring people in for interviews in March — maybe the glaciers will have retreated a little bit by then. If you applied earlier, we still have your application on file; if you’re still interested, you can contact us and let us know that you still want to be considered.

It’s in the Daily Mail, so I’m confident it got everything wrong

Actually, I know they got a lot wrong. The Mail reports that a study “proves” students believe everything they read on the internet. They cite some work done with the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site, which they claim was created as part of a study to test student gullibility. This is wrong; that site has been available for years, and it’s a satire and humor site; look at the rest of zapatopi.net to see what I mean.

Also, I actually use the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus every semester, in the first lecture of our introductory biology course! After giving an overview of the scientific method and how to ask good scientific questions, I use it as an example: I show them the page, read a few excerpts, and ask them what they think…and always the majority of students are skeptical. The few who will grant it tentative plausibility always follow up with specific questions about the site and about where they can get additional information to confirm it.

Then we discuss how to validate scientific information, what we look for to trust a source, and further, I ask them to think more deeply about how, if the website passed a routine sniff test, we’d also go on to test unusual claims in nature. My experience has been that students are much more rational and practical about evaluating material on the web than we’d give them credit for (of course, there are also always a few students who still turn in papers with wacky web sites cited as sources — but they’re a minority).

And speaking of sources that rely on the gullibility of readers for credibility…the Daily Mail should not be casting aspersions. If you want to know everything you need to know about the Daily Mail, read this horrifying story.

It’s an epidemic!

Several people have sent me messages of despair lately. They’re working in universities which, like every university in the country, is struggling with tight budgets and declining support from the state government, and a citizenry that seems to be a sucker for every pseudoscientific scam some scoundrel will sell, and what is the academic administration doing? They’re joining in the con!

Look here at the University of Maryland School of Medicine: they’ve opened something called the Center for Integrative Medicine, where prospective doctors can go to learn how to gather Qi, or how to relieve back pain by twirling little needles. It’s complete quackery operating under the imprimatur of a respectable university, and I guarantee you it’s better at gathering grant money from the privileged quack corners of our federal grant system than it is at finding any magic Qi.

The University of Michigan Health System is also propping up an Integrative Medicine department. Their big obsession is Anthroposophy, one of the bastard mystic cults spawned in the early years of the 20th century, and yes, it is total loony wackitude. We actually have institutions of higher learning promoting Rudolf Steiner? Madness.

Now if I were truly shortsighted, I could take some joy in the fact that competing universities are scuttling their intellectual credentials with this crap, except that the University of Minnesota is just as bad. We have a Center for Sprituality and Healing that teaches nurses how to diagnose and treat disease by waving their hands over their patients, and brings in speakers like Deepak Chopra and the Dalai Lama to say “Woooooooo” to large audiences. It’s a disgrace and an embarrassment.

One thing Americans can take pride in is the fact that we have a prestigious university system that draws in students from around the world — something that Obama even mentioned in his state of the union address. It is still true, and I can attest to the quality of the faculty at our universities (although I will refrain from jingoism — the United States is not unique in possessing great minds). However, what I also see is rot setting in. Universities are being starved by the government, and they’re abandoning rigor and standards of excellence to pander.

Pay heed. This can’t last. We can’t pretend to be world leaders in science and knowledge while our best schools are turning their back on reason and evidence to sell magic charms and superstition to the populace.

Aaargh, it’s international! Take a look at what the Science Museum in London is doing — whitewashing homeopathy.

Bad science education in the US

I am completely unsurprised by the recent report on the state of evolution in the American science classroom. It confirms entirely my impressions from years of freshman college students and from previous studies of the subject, and puts specific numbers and issues to the problem.

The short summary: public schools suck at teaching basic biology. You already knew this, too, though, didn’t you? The question has always been, “How bad?”

We can now say how many high school biology teachers do a good job, teaching the recommendations of the National Research Council and also, by the way, obeying the requirements of most state science standards: 28%. About a quarter of our biology teachers are actually discussing the evidence that evolution occurred and using evolution as a theme to integrate the components of a good year of biology instruction. And since most school curricula only include one year of life science, that effectively means that only about a quarter of our high school graduates are even exposed to evolutionary biology.

There’s also another problem. 13% of our biology teachers are openly and unashamedly creationists who teach creationism in the classroom. That number varies, by the way, with the political leanings of the citizens of the school district: 40% of the teachers in conservative school districts reject evolution entirely, while “only” 11% in liberal areas do. This is a disaster. This is active, ongoing miseducation and misrepresentation of science by the teachers we entrust with our children.

What about the rest? 60% of our teachers do nothing: they teach the bare minimum of evolution that they can get away with, focusing on details of genetics and molecular biology that allow them to avoid the more obvious implications (which shouldn’t happen, either; the molecular evidence for evolution is powerful stuff), or they allow it to slip off the schedule of lesson plans. They’re afraid, and rightly so, of aggressive, nasty, privileged religious parents who will make their life hellish if they do their job properly.

The paper did surprise me in one way. It made a very strong statement about those timid teachers in the 60%:

The cautious 60% may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists. The strategies of emphasizing microevolution, justifying the curriculum on the basis of state-wide tests, or “teaching the controversy” all undermine the legitimacy of findings that are well established by the combination of peer review and replication. These teachers fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments, even if unintentionally.

Are you a teacher who avoids the subject of evolution because of the crapstorm of chaos that follows from the public if you do? Consider yourselves rebuked. You really aren’t helping.

What are we going to do about this? The authors have two major suggestions, and here’s where I get to feel rebuked. One problem is that many of the timid teachers also do not feel adequately trained to address evolution well, and that’s a significant factor in their reluctance to press the topic (creationist teachers, on the other hand, are full of unwarranted certainty and lie to their students with confidence). So they recommend that there be more thorough training in evolution for pre-service teachers, with at least a requirement for one course in evolution. I think I can say that my university does a good job at that, at least: our secondary education majors get a rigorous exposure to evolutionary biology in our program. If you’re looking to hire new science teachers, look to UMM graduates!

Another suggestion, though, is that scientists and science organizations ought to be doing more outreach and assistance. That’s tough, since our time is tight, but we know that would be a good goal. When a group of us put together the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education, for instance, one of the goals was to provide speakers and yearly seminar courses to help teachers learn more about evolution, and we did a good job the first year. But that effort was made at a time when there was active pressure from creationist groups to influence the state science standards, and as that pressure eased off, so did we, and we’ve been slacking ever since. The framework is there so we could fire it up again quickly, but maybe we ought also to be maintaining good science education in these lulls between storms, too.

There’s an interesting interview with the authors on Ars Technica — check it out.

Berkman MB, Plutzer E (2011) Defeating creationism in the courtroom, but not in the classroom. Science 331:404-405.