Anoka, our little blight on the prairie

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on One Town’s War on Gay Teens, featuring Minnesota’s own Anoka school district, where Michele Bachmann and the Minnesota Patriarchy Council hold sway. I recommend it highly, but I also warn you: it’s a hard read, since it personalizes the kids who killed themselves after incessant taunting and bullying. I choked up a few times myself.

I’m going to leave out any discussion of the kids, because I hate crying on my keyboard — go read it yourself, if you think you can take it — and want to focus on one issue. The Anoka school district claims that it has no responsibility at all in these deaths, and instead blames gay activists for driving these kids to suicide; how, I don’t know. It’s probably a variant of the same accusation atheists face, that it’s their own fault for being themselves and provoking critics by openly existing. They also occasionally mention that right-wingers are responsible, but that rings hollow, since at every step the district has been dancing to the fundamentalist Christians’ tune.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. “We are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very frustrating,” says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district as the victim in this fracas. “People are using kids as pawns in this political debate,” he says. “I find that abhorrent.”

Read further into the article, and there are all these little revelations that show that the district has been pandering thoughtlessly to the Religious Right all along; they are so thoroughly steeped in the cult of Christian conservatism that they are unconscious of the problem.

It had been a hard day: the annual “Day of Truth” had been held at school, an evangelical event then-sponsored by the anti-gay ministry Exodus International, whose mission is to usher gays back to wholeness and “victory in Christ” by converting them to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when a federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school students’ Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by their First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the Family, has been renamed “Day of Dialogue.”) Local churches had been touting the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of homosexuality.

Every goddamn school district in this state gets these lying whores for Jesus showing up to do “assemblies”. Here in Morris we’ve had the “You can run, but you can’t hide” ministries show up, or other variants. They’ve usually got some ridiculous “cool teen” schtick — they’re body-builders or wrestlers or rappers — and they bill themselves as presenting a positive, anti-drug message, something that they can superficially pretend is secular, and then they turn on the prayer and Jesus babble, and it’s transparent as hell — these are simply evangelical Christians in crappy camouflage, and the schools just let them sail on in and preach to the students.

It seems to happen at some school around here every year. It’s repulsive. I often don’t hear about it until after the fact, because here’s another giveaway: they don’t advertise publicly, they advertise in the churches.

So the Anoka school district wants to claim that the anti-gay bullying is not their fault, but they annually have a “Day of Truth” led by Exodus International or now, Focus on the Family (as if that’s an improvement)? The district turns the hyenas loose in the hallways, but denies responsibility if someone gets chewed up.

It’s not just the students. The schools have gay teachers and staff, who are silenced, and the straight teachers lead the way in gagging any protest.

“There has been widespread confusion,” says Anoka-Hennepin teachers’ union president Julie Blaha. “You ask five people how to interpret the policy and you get five different answers.” Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in closeting themselves, they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role models. “I was told by teachers, ‘You have to be careful, it’s really not safe for you to come out,'” says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. “I felt like I couldn’t have a picture of my family on my desk.” When teacher Jefferson Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an “open homosexual,” he didn’t feel he could address the situation with his students even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, “Are you gay?” he panicked. “I was terrified to answer that question,” Fietek says. “I thought, ‘If I violate the policy, what’s going to happen to me?'”

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.

The district is aware that there is a problem — dead kids are very bad PR — and has been waffling ineffectually about doing something or other. Pointless meetings are always the preferred solution for a bureaucracy.

Just to be on the safe side, however, the district held PowerPoint presentations in a handful of schools to train teachers how to defend gay students from harassment while also remaining neutral on homosexuality. One slide instructed teachers that if they hear gay slurs – say, the word “fag” – the best response is a tepid “That language is unacceptable in this school.” (“If a more authoritative response is needed,” the slide added, the teacher could continue with the stilted, almost apologetic explanation, “In this school we are required to welcome all people and to make them feel safe.”) But teachers were, of course, reminded to never show “personal support for GLBT people” in the classroom.

Never show personal support for GLBT kids. That’s the killer right there.

I have some suggestions for the Anoka school district that would be helpful. First, repudiate the Minnesota Family Council and Focus on the Family. These are hate groups that have no business advising the school administration; they should be recognized immediately as symptomatic of the bigotry problem they have. Second, adopt a strictly secular policy on all official school events. No more preachers, no more evangelical assemblies, no more church sponsorship of days or picnics or t-shirts or whatever the hell trick they try to pull. God is the poison here, get it out. That’s not to say that Christians must be oppressed, but that we need to learn that Christianity is a personal, private preference that does not instill a moral message. Third, crack down hard on the students: seeing a few bullying jocks getting kicked off the football team for cracking jokes about faggots would send a strong signal right there.

That’s a school district that definitely needs more atheists. Maybe the SSA needs to seed the place with a little rational thought.

Anything beats church anytime

There’s going to be some kind of football game played this weekend, and American Atheists are sending a message to the pregame parties.

An Atheist civil rights group announced today that it will be flying an airplane banner on Super Bowl Sunday around Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. The banner will read “Football beats church anytime – atheists.org.” The banner is scheduled to be in the air from 9:30-11:30 AM local time.

That’s nice. I’m going to be working on a lecture on signal transduction in cancer. Cancer beats football beats church!

I just committed an American heresy, didn’t I?

Making excuses

The editor of Life, Shu-Kun Lin, has published a rationalization for his shoddy journal.

Life (ISSN 2075-1729, http://www.mdpi.com/journal/life/) is a new journal that deals with new and sometime difficult interdisciplinary matters. Consequently, the journal will occasionally be presented with submitted articles that are controversial and/or outside conventional scientific views. Some papers recently accepted for publication in Life have attracted significant attention. Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. Discussions on previously published articles are welcome and I hope that, by fostering discussion and by keeping an open-minded attitude towards new ideas, the journal will spur progress in this little explored, difficult and very exciting area of knowledge.

In particular, the paper “Andrulis, E.D. Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Life 2012, 2, 1-105” was published recently online and is due to appear in Issue 1, Volume 2, 2012 of Life, at the end of March this year [1]. So that our readership has as much information as I can divulge without violating the confidentiality of the review process, what follows is the background of these events. Professor Bassez had previously guest-edited a successful special issue titled “The Origin of Life” in another MDPI journal [2]. Although Professor Bassez [3] had also planned to be the Guest Editor of the special issue “Origin of Life – Feature Papers” for Life [4], she was, for personal reasons, unable to do so. I therefore volunteered to take this responsibility on her behalf and to guest edit this special issue and supervise the editorial procedure for the papers. I made the decision of acceptance based on the peer review reports we received and their recommendation in support of publication.
As stated earlier, finding reviewers able to cross discipline boundaries as is often needed for multidisciplinary “origin of life” topics [5] is particularly difficult. The publishing process that MDPI manuscripts go through by our in-house editorial staff members is that they choose reviewers from sources like Chemical Abstracts, PubMed, Web of Science or more recently, from Google Scholar. Very often we also ask the Editorial Board members to review papers or ask those of them who have relevant knowledge and expertise to supply possible reviewer names. We also use the reviewer names suggested by the authors, but we do this with great care, checking the background of each potential reviewer and their publication record, as well as ensuring they have no collaborations with the authors that may be construed as a conflict of interest. I should stress that although we try to encourage bold, innovative science, we reject many submissions. In the case of the Dr. Andrulis’s long paper, the two reviewers were both faculty members of reputable universities different than the author’s and both went to considerable trouble presenting lengthy review reports. Dr. Andrulis revised his manuscript as requested, and the paper was subsequently published.

Regardless of opinion on specific papers that have been published to date, I sincerely hope that all of our articles, most of which are outstanding, will continue to be read and discussed. Our editorial procedure is under scrutiny by the Editorial Board, who wishes to be more closely involved in the editorial process, and we are striving to further improve our editorial service. We welcome comments on the Dr. Andrulis’s paper or any other papers that have been published in Life.

The “interdisciplinary” excuse is bogus. I am not a specialist in the fields discussed, but I could see immediately that Andrulis’s paper, and Abel’s paper as well, were “off” — to any critical, skeptical thinker their flaws are obvious. Are there any scientists in any field — general physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, for instance — who would read either of those papers and think maybe there’s something to them? You’d have to be a fellow crackpot or somebody completely unqualified to evaluate any science papers to fail to see the problems in them.

Also, you don’t need someone with great interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to screen out this kind of nonsense. I’m reminded of the comment I read on the Velikovsky affair: someone (it might have been Sagan) noted that the astronomers could see that Velikovsky’s cosmic billiard game was bad physics, but gosh, his biblical scholarship sure was impressive; while the Bible scholars were all saying his mythology was all terrible literary scholarship, but golly, he sure seemed to know a lot of physics. Evaluating interdisciplinary work does not mean you cherry pick the most favorable interpretations from those most ignorant of a specific subfield, nor does it mean you split the difference and average the opinions of the subfields together. If one part of the mix is bullshit, you throw out the whole thing.

The fact that they’re having trouble finding qualified reviewers for the work they’re publishing is also ominous. Shouldn’t the editorial board consist of people who are competent in this interdisciplinary field who can screen out the wackier submissions? And shouldn’t it be setting off alarm bells when they accept suggestions of reviewers from authors, and those are the only people they can get reviews from? It’s a situation ripe for selection by crackpots of crackpot reviewers; you just know that the Abel paper was reviewed by fellow travelers in the Intelligent Design creationism movement, and got no critical evaluation at all.

Given the spectacularly poor quality of the Andrulis and Abel papers, though, I am most amused by the claim that the editors and reviewers of Life “reject many submissions”. I would love to see the papers that they judged worse than Andrulis’s and Abel’s.

(Also on Sb)

OwlMirror found the quote in Sagan’s Broca’s Brain.

Velikovsky has called attention to a wide range of stories and legends, held by diverse peoples, separated by great distances, which stories show remarkable similarities and concordances. I am not expert in the cultures or languages of any of these peoples, but I find the concatenation of legends Velikovsky has accumulated stunning. It is true that some experts in these cultures are less impressed. I can remember vividly discussing Worlds in Collision with a distinguished professor of Semitics at a leading university. He said something like “The Assyriology, Egyptology, Biblical scholarship and all of that Talmudic and Midrashic pilpul is, of course, nonsense; but I was impressed by the astronomy.” I had rather the opposite view.

Why I am an atheist – Stu

I was born to a liberal Jewish family, and grew up with all the cultural trappings of Judaism…Bar Mitzvah, religious school, and holidays.

During the 60s, which is when I grew out of childhood (I was 12 in 1960) the Temple I belonged to began to deal with the social issues of the time (or, more likely, I became aware of that), most notably the Civil Rights movement and later the Vietnam War. The theme running through the discussions focused around the rights of other people to freedom…freedom to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and freedom to say and think what they believed.

This is what I grew up with…this is what my parents and the religious tradition to which I belonged taught me. Yet even this open attitude engendered hypocrisy when combined with theism as I learned later.

This social attitude gave me very good feelings about my family, friends, and religious tradition…so much so that I went on to study “religion” in college. In 1970 I graduated with a B.A. in (secular) Religious Studies. However, by the time I got my degree I had learned that theistic religions were all based on varying degress of superstition.

As with so many others who have written on this topic here, one incident stands out in my mind as the point at which I realized that god is a myth…no more valid than Greek or Norse (or any other) myths.

I was home from college and was attending some sort of service at my Temple. At one point a prayer was read, which I had heard all my life. One passage from the prayer jumped out at me. It was a prayer for peace on earth and understanding between governments and people of different cultures and beliefs. The passage prayed for a time when “superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye.”

At that moment I realized the hypocrisy of it all…here we were, praying to a “supernatural” being to end superstition. I don’t think I laughed out loud, but this insight — which now seems so obvious that I’m embarrassed I didn’t see it years before — set me on the road to non-theism.

Other things have added to my understanding…

• I fell in love and married someone who was raised as a Christian and the response from the Rabbi of the Temple I attended was so hurtful that I realized his words throughout my life about openmindedness were just that…words. Nothing else. When faced with the results of what he, himself taught me, he reverted to bigotry.

• I took two science classes in graduate school — botany (which had a very strong genetics focus) and geology. This provided me with information about common anscestors and the age of the earth and piqued my interest in evolution. From there I did a lot of reading on my own.

• My wife was, and still is, a theist. She is very liberal, doesn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus (though she was raised as a Presbyterian) or in heaven and hell. She wanted to have some sort of religious “base” for our family so we went around trying to find a place where we would both fit. We chose the local Unitarian-Universalist congregation in our city. The members of the congregation were a mix of religious and non-religious liberals…theists and non-theists whose philosophy was “the search is the answer.” I did more reading and learning there. One important thing I remember was that we rarely discussed whether “God” existed or not. This was because we were busy discussing things which mattered — social issues such as war, medical ethics, and political rights.

I don’t identify myself as an “atheist.” I spent my professional career as an elementary school teacher in rural Indiana and if I had admitted that I was an atheist I would have been run out of my small town. I still identify culturally with Judaism, so that was my “cover.”

Spending all those years (I’m retired now) as a closet atheist hasn’t always been easy, but there are others here with me. I have a small group of friends who are in the same position. We “share” the closet.

Maybe someday, I’ll find the courage — like Jessica Ahlquist — to “come out” and face the ignorance of family and friends who are still myth-believers. That, I think, is why I’m here…reading this blog every day (and others…Jerry Coyne, Ed Brayton, for example).

I know I didn’t actually explain WHY I’m an atheist…instead I wrote about how I realized I was an atheist…and how I grew into my atheism. The “why” to my atheism is fairly simple: I don’t believe in supernatural myths.

Stu
United States

More bad science in the literature

That sad article on gyres as an explanation for everything has had more fallout: not only has it been removed from Science Daily’s site, not only has Case Western retracted the press release, but one of the editors at the journal Life has resigned his position over it. The editorial board of the journal was completely surprised by the wretched content of the paper, which is not encouraging; apparently they exercise so little oversight at the journal that they were unaware of the crap their reviewers were passing through. One board member thinks it is a hoax, and laughed it off. Think about that; your shiny new journal has just published total garbage, and instead of being brought up short and questioning the quality control of the review process, you think it is amusing that what you consider an obvious hoax slipped in? There’s something seriously wrong there.

Add this to the list of failures at Life: the paper immediaely after Andrulis’s is this one, “Is Life Unique?”, by David Abel. Guess what? It’s Intelligent Design creationism crap. Here’s the abstract:

Abstract: Is life physicochemically unique? No. Is life unique? Yes. Life manifests innumerable formalisms that cannot be generated or explained by physicodynamics alone. Life pursues thousands of biofunctional goals, not the least of which is staying alive. Neither physicodynamics, nor evolution, pursue goals. Life is largely directed by linear digital programming and by the Prescriptive Information (PI) instantiated particularly into physicodynamically indeterminate nucleotide sequencing. Epigenomic controls only compound the sophistication of these formalisms. Life employs representationalism through the use of symbol systems. Life manifests autonomy, homeostasis far from equilibrium in the harshest of environments, positive and negative feedback mechanisms, prevention and correction of its own errors, and organization of its components into Sustained Functional Systems (SFS). Chance and necessity—heat agitation and the cause-and-effect determinism of nature’s orderliness—cannot spawn formalisms such as mathematics, language, symbol systems, coding, decoding, logic, organization (not to be confused with mere self-ordering), integration of circuits, computational success, and the pursuit of functionality. All of these characteristics of life are formal, not physical.

It’s drivel. The whole thing is one long windy argument from assertion, as in the penultimate sentence above, which is simply the bald claim that higher order functions of human functions like cognition cannot be derived from chemistry and physics. The paper itself contains no data at all — no experiments, measurements, or observations — but it is full of novel acronyms. Apparently, all you need to do to make it as a big time creationist is to make up new words and phrases and string them together. I checked out some of his other papers — he seems to be some kind of computer science guy, and this is all he does, is write impenetrably glib papers full of pretentious acronyms, posing as an expert on biology while saying nothing credible about biology at all.

But he certainly has an impressive address and affiliation!

Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc., 113-120 Hedgewood Drive, Greenbelt, MD 20770

Whoa. Sounds major. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of this foundation, and all I could find out about it is a webpage in which they announce a million dollar prize for “proposing a highly plausible natural-process mechanism for the spontaneous rise of genetic instructions in nature sufficient to give rise to life.” This sounds suspiciously like standard creationist dodging — they’ll never have to award this prize. So I looked at their judging, and at first glance it seems impressive: they have over 200 judges, including Jack Szostak, Peter Atkins, Paul Davies, and Edward O. Wilson. But then, they mention that judging will be in 5 tiers, and only the ones that pass all other reviews will reach the Nobel prize winners and famous scientists…and the first tier is an “in-house review”. I suspect the big names will never be pestered by this prize committee. Actually, I wonder if most of these judges know that their name is on this list. Maybe you should look in case you’ve been drafted.

I started wondering about this “in-house staff” who would be doing the initial judging, and about the Origin of Life Science Foundation itself. It’s awfully hard to track down — its only web presence is the prize page, and its only employee seems to be…David L. Abel. So I looked it up in google maps to see where the foundation’s majestic headquarters might be.

Origins of Life Science Foundation

It’s a house in a residential neighborhood of a Maryland suburb. It made me wonder if maybe the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics was located in the master bathroom, while he Department of ProtoBioSemiotics was in the hall closet, or whether both were consolidated into a sunny corner of the kitchen. At least it seems to be a step above Patriot University, but it’s still some guy’s house that he’s calling a Foundation with multiple implied Departments with fancy titles.

That’s not all! Mr Abel seems to be a linchpin of the Intelligent Design movement, who manages to work his rambling, incoherent publications into all kinds of journals. In fact, the Discovery Institute just bragged about all their peer-reviewed scientific publications, and there, in their list of over 70 works published over the last 25 years or so, which includes papers by such famous scientists as William Lane Craig and John A. Davison, and prestigious journals like Rivisti di Biologia and their own in-house pet journal, BIO-Complexity, and also seems to include books that were not peer-reviewed at all, are twelve papers by Mr Fancy-Titled-Suburban-House. 17% of the Intelligent Design creationism movement’s ‘scientific’ output comes out of that dwelling in Maryland.

I’d love to see the gigantic laboratory he must have in there.

For your edification, I’ve included the official complete list of Intelligent Design creationism’s publications below the fold. It’s an impressively short list of hackery.

And may I suggest that the journal Life has deeper problems than simply accidentally allowing one bad paper to slip into publication? I think it needs a negative impact factor.

(Also on Sb)

[Read more…]

An open letter to the Indiana legislature

The Indiana Senate has approved this bill:

The governing body of a school corporation may offer instruction on various theories of the origin of life. The curriculum for the course must include theories from multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology.

I’ve heard a few complaints from Hoosiers about this, including teachers. One high school science teacher has asked me to post this open letter on the subject; they’ve asked that I not include their name, which is sad in itself. Not only is the legislature passing stupid laws, but the environment is so oppressive that the science teachers who are expected to implement it cannot speak out against it, for fear of losing their jobs. Indiana, you suck.

At least I don’t have to worry about the politicians of Indiana gunning for my job, so I can post this letter for my correspondent.

Honorable Representatives of the state of Indiana,

I am quite dismayed to learn of the passage of SB 89 which will give Indiana school boards the authority to require the teaching of various origin stories in public schools. There are several reasons I feel this is an inappropriate action for our state to take.

First, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard that balanced treatment of creationism and evolution violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Then in 2005 the U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania ruled against the inclusion of Intelligent Design in the science curriculum. As Judge Jones wrote, “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy.” Now it appears that the citizens of Indiana are being poorly served. If this becomes law, our citizens will have to foot the bill for the lawsuits that will certainly ensue.

Second, I appreciate Indiana’s need to educate our citizens about the beliefs and cultures of our planet’s people. Our students would greatly benefit from learning about the multitude of worldviews that exist, in a philosophy or comparative religion class. Such understanding would make our citizens better prepared for international commerce and political discourse. I do not believe that SB 89 was introduced for this reason, however. The implication is that the introduction of various religious beliefs would take place in the science class room. As a biologist and science teacher, I understand the evidence for evolution is as strong as the evidence for any other theory we teach. I also understand that religious belief is based on faith, which by definition requires no evidence. I do not comprehend how exposing my students to ideas based, not on evidence, but faith could constitute good science education. When I read that this bill will allow school boards to require the teaching of “theories from multiple religions”, I interpret this to indicate that a school board may specify which religions may be taught. Two constitutes “multiple”, so if a school board so chose, they could require teachers to teach Christian and Jewish creation ideas only, which are essentially the same. This would not serve to enlighten students on the diversity of ideas, but to reinforce ideas that either they already hold or that they will find in conflict with their beliefs. In either case, it could set students at odds with each other, while not teaching any science at all.

If I am misinterpreting the spirit of this bill, please change the language to indicate that this is not to be applied to science classes, and/or specify which religions’ views must be taught if the local school board chooses to require this. In my opinion, if this is to be done in any way consistent with spirit of the Establishment Clause, all religious views must be taught. In this case, teachers will not be able to cover the state science standards in 180 days and also teach religion.

Third, the misunderstanding of the word theory in the bill is a sad indication of the ignorance of the authors. In science, the word “theory” does not mean an “idea”. A theory is an explanation for how something happens, based on a great deal of research which has been reviewed, published, tested, re-tested, accepted by most scientists in the field, and not yet disproven. No religion has a “theory” of the origins of life that meets the criteria we require to give an idea the full weight of the title “theory” in science. I would be happy to speak with any representative who would like to learn more about what the theory of evolution actually says and what evidence supports it.

Sincerely,

Indiana High School Science Teacher

(Also on Sb)

Your state’s report card

The Fordham Institute has released their annual evaluation of state science standards. They are very tough graders — Minnesota got a “C”. Ack! Mom & Dad are going to be pissed, how will we ever get into a good college at this rate?

The Institute does a fairly thorough breakdown, so there are some bright spots: Minnesota is doing a good job in the life sciences, but where we got dinged hard was on the physical sciences, which are “illogically organized” and contain factual errors. Here’s the introduction to their evaluation of our life sciences standards:

Important life science content is presented quite minimally, but the flow and logic are such as to convey an understanding of the concepts rather than coming across as a list of topics to check off. The inclusion of examples from Kindergarten through eighth grade helps to further explain what students should know and be able to do.

Minimal is OK, as far as I’m concerned; it think it’s more important to get across a solid conceptual understanding. Of course, given that some teachers do a very poor job of getting those concepts across, more specific guidelines might be useful.

What’s really awful about our C, though, is that that’s the same grade Texas got. Oh, the ignominy!

I think we got robbed, though. The detailed breakdown says that a major problem is inconsistency: some bits of the Texas standards are stellar, others are terrible; different grade levels get variable quality of coverage. Texas gets slammed for life science standards that are “woefully imbalanced, with poorly developed material in the early grades and strong, sometimes excellent, content in the upper levels.” The major flaws are entirely predictable.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the middle school standards, however, is their coverage of evolution. For instance, the seventh-grade standards mention the Galapagos finches, giving the impression that the Darwinian paradigm is being presented. Unfortunately, it is not. Instead, the example of the finch Geospiza fortis apparently refers to studies by Peter and Rosemary Grant on beak size in this species, made widely known by Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Beak of the Finch. Creationists often distort these important findings to argue that Darwinian macroevolution does not occur—instead, microevolution does. In addition, the word “evolution” is never used in any of the middle school standards, and the term “natural selection” is never explained.

What’s really telling, though, is the reactions. I just told you I’m disappointed with Minnesota’s “C”; we can do better, and I hope the next round of standards will improve ours to an “A”. In Texas, creationist kook Don McLeroy was happy with his “C”.

McLeroy told the Texas Independent he is “very pleased” with the study and believes it only serves to validate the role he and the conservative bloc played in crafting the standards.

“The work of religious conservatives has been vindicated,” he said, pointing to the report’s positive review of high school evolution standards. When asked about the poor evaluation of middle school standards, McLeroy said blame could fall on the writing teams and review committees and/or the whole board who could have stepped up to improve them. “In the end, what we wrote was legitimate, sound science and the study proves it.”

That is so completely backwards. The weaknesses in the standards are the direct result of the meddling corruption of science pushed by the religious conservatives on the board; everything the Fordham Institute said was bad about their standards were the points the creationists pushed. The strengths are the product of the motivated, hard-working scientists and educators who fought against the religious conservatives. McLeroy can take credit for that “C” in the sense that it could have been an “A” if he and his fellow travellers in superstition had been kicked out of the process…and that’s nothing to be proud of.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – SP

I’m an atheist for all the standard reasons of logic and evidence that others have already articulated, but I’m also an atheist because of a feeling that religious belief can blunt one’s sense of wonder. As a child, the things that struck me as most beautiful and awe inspiring appeared to be off religion’s radar screen. Where were the giant sequoias in the bible? The Grand Canyon and the other National Parks? Bears? I would have been a sucker for religion had my parents been Mormons or animists. My grandmother showed me a 3-D postcard of Christ wearing a bloody crown of thorns. My mom didn’t like this, so grandma revealed the postcard as if it was pornography, something hidden and very special. I didn’t get it. Jesus would blink his eyes open and shut as you tilted the postcard. This freaked me out a little; normal kids prefer live people to dying ones. Even as a five year old, I can remember being revolted at the cruelty of a doctrine that had no place in heaven for cats and even considered the question ridiculous. Richard Dawkins called religion a crime against childhood. That resonates with me, although I grew up without much distortion from religious education.

I married a lapsed but still religious Catholic. (We all have criteria, and I drew the line at Republicans or smokers.) Charles Darwin is a bit of a role model for me in terms of reconciling my total lack of faith with my dear wife’s residual attachment to her religion. He lost his faith, but loved his wife enough to support and accept that she retained hers. Anyway, like Darwin, one of the crosses I bear is occasional attendance at church. Last Easter, the priest was talking about the miracle of the resurrection. My usual Church-service meditation on the history and sociology of the Hellenistic world wasn’t doing it for me. I actually listened to the priest, and I was getting pissed off. Torture is not some abstraction. It is a grotesque crime with nothing redeeming about it, and real people suffer their entire lives from having been tortured. The Father tortured the Son to death and then resurrected Him to free us from sin? That’s obscene. What kind of manipulative organization would glorify it? And why would anyone pick an event like this as the foundation to build some elaborate theological structure and claim that it reflects something fundamental about the universe?

Just when I thought I could stand no more, a warbler appeared outside the window, gleaning insects off of the forsythia bush. Call it a miracle: A bird weighing less than the change in my pocket flew from Colombia en route to Canada. It makes this journey twice each year, and it can do this for a decade. Here was something of tremendous beauty, real and tangible and available to anyone with curiosity. The priest would probably offer some Hallmark sentiment about God’s love for all of His creations, at least until they fly into windows, or toss off a phrase about the beauty of God’s creation that has the effect of stifling inquiry more than encouraging it. To be fair, the Catholic Church accepts evolution and there are Jesuits who have a pretty solid understanding of biology. But even they would insist on Easter Sunday that the defining event in all time was the brutalization of a man during the expansion phase of the Roman Empire.

I don’t get it. I’ve never heard a believable rationale for separating religion and science, and the whole progression of science pretty much proves we’re not the center of the universe. This warbler seemed like a small but welcome messenger from the vast and impersonal universe outside the church. The mysteries of the resurrection and the volumes of theological speculation built upon it seem like weak tea, pale and downright unimaginative compared to the remarkable fact that this warbler and I share the same basic architecture and chemistry, that the warbler has even more in common with the tyrannosaurus down at the Field Museum, that a creature so small uses the stars to navigate, or any of the millions of other things that can be known or asked about both human and bird. The church has nothing emotionally or intellectually satisfying to say about the terrifying vastness of time and chance that created me, the world’s most easily-entertained mammal, or the warbler I was observing. I am an atheist because the universe is unexpected and beautiful in ways that bear little relationship to the myths or beliefs humans create to interpret it.

SP
United States

…and South Dakota follows suit

There was no opposition to a bill that encourages South Dakota public schools to study the bible. This one is as sectarian as they come.

Scripture study and science projects? That’s the prospect some students in South Dakota may face after a substantial majority in the state’s House of Representatives helped pass a resolution to encourage public school districts to incorporate Bible education into curricula. The House passed the resolution last week by a vote of 55-13 after a short floor debate during which no member from either party voiced opposition.

The sponsor of the bill, Steve Hickey, is a pastor, of course. This is clearly a law intended to promote Christianity and Christianity alone in the schools.

Hey, let’s not forget Pennsylvania in the roster of bad, lazy state legislatures. They passed a resolution declaring this the “year of the bible”. That one is just plain dumb: citing vague “great challenges” that the US is facing, it wants Pennsylvanians to turn to an ancient magic book to find strength. They won’t. Real problems need to be confronted with real solutions and hard work, not superstition and a retreat into fairy tales.