Some days, you just want to give up the arguing and go rest your head on the desk for a while. No matter how dumb you think the opposition is, they’ll always manage to say something dumber than you can imagine.
Forgive me, but I find it hard to take Casey Luskin seriously. He’s a mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute who always reminds me of a voluble squirrel: he chatters away frenetically, but the brain behind his words is tiny and ill-prepared to cope with any substance. I always feel this urge to throw some peanuts at his feet to distract him. Anyway, his latest frenetic missive is a collection of angry chitterings, protesting that ID isn’t about the supernatural at all (it’s just about undermining naturalism…hasn’t he read Philip Johnson yet?), and no, they aren’t trying to sow doubt and confusion by mangling the science standards in Kansas. Meanwhile, John Rennie is more like a sleek, swift Doberman who gives the squirrel a quick shake, a chomp, and the nuisance vanishes with a squeak. For now. Anticipate Luskin’s further shrill whining to continue from within the belly of the beast.
Hey, and if you want to hear more about the distortions of science in the Kansas standards revisions, Jack Krebs has been barnstorming the state, and there’s lots of material to expose the Discovery Institute fraudulent campaign there.
This is an excellent short article by Janet Browne (the Janet Browne who wrote the best biography of Darwin I’ve read, Voyaging(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Power of Place(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), both well worth reading) that discusses the reception of the theory of evolution by his contemporaries, and acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Huxley, Hooker, Gray, and Lyell. One important point is that opposition to his ideas was not driven by the crude Biblical literalism that we encounter so much today, but a more general conflict with a more enlightened religion that found no place for a personal god in a world where life was the product of rather callous and impersonal forces, and of course, with a religion that was a force for controlling people’s minds.
Scholars nowadays agree that The Descent of Man offered a far-reaching naturalistic account of human evolution but did not change many minds. The people who already accepted evolution continued to believe. Those who did not continued to disbelieve. Few readers wished to shrink the gap between mankind and animals quite so dramatically, however. If these ideas were accepted, wrote the Edinburgh Review, the constitution of society would be destroyed.
A lot of people seem to want to argue that it’s just fundamentalism that’s a problem—but that’s only one narrow aspect of the problem that’s common in the US. It was not a major issue in 19th century Britain.
(via Thoughts in a Haystack)
Don’t be surprised—it’s just another couple of clueless creationists bumbling into science they don’t understand, extracting single sentences out of context, and coming to faulty conclusions that contradict the actual results of the paper. Orac gets to have a little fun ripping up an easy creationist mark.
Mark Chu-Carroll has a post up that does two admirable things: it deflates yet another creationist and his grandly fallacious claims, and it gives me a new toy to play with.
My physicist friends will be embarrassed at this tale of a creationist
physics professor campaigning against science education. Maybe it’s not the physics—it’s the dairy products overdose.
The Strib has an article on Camp Quest of Minnesota, the secular summer camp that is starting up this week. It’s a fairly good story, although it’s unfortunate to see it overwhelmed by the gigantic rah-rah story on crazy Pentacostalism spread over the next two pages of the paper, by the same reporter.
By the way, I’ll be volunteering at Camp Quest on Friday, to show the kids how to deal with creationists.
Richard Gallagher is one of those guys I’m not ever going to like much. He’s the editor of The Scientist, yet he wrote an editorial encouraging us to embrace Intelligent Design in the classroom, in the perverse hope that by giving ID that much attention, students will naturally disregard it. That was crazy stupid enough, but where he lost my respect completely was in a published rebuttal to my criticisms where he maliciously distorted my point from one advocating the teaching of science as a process based on evidence (which is why ID fails in the classroom) to a false claim that I want to shield kids from critical thinking. Lies and misrepresentation to get ID into the classroom? The Discovery Institute loved it and republished his article.
Now he has published another editorial, one in which he finally realizes the danger of letting pseudoscience into the classroom, and finally he gets it right…but I’m going to be much less charitable than Tara. What finally motivates him to speak out for good science teaching based on reason and evidence is a perceived threat from “New Agers” and the “spiritual Left” with their wacky “mother earth sensibility.”
John McCain recently spoke out on evolution and ID. He just managed to demonstrate that he’s a dissembling fool.
Responding to a question about a report that he thinks “intelligent design” should be taught in schools, the senator mocked the idea that American young people were so delicate and impressionable that they needed to be sheltered from the concept, which says God had a hand in creation and which has been challenged by Darwinists as unscientific.
“Shhh, you shouldn’t tell them,” he said, mimicking those who would shield children from the fact that some people believe in intelligent design. The former prisoner of war said he also disagreed with Cold War-era efforts to prevent Marxist-Leninism from being taught in schools, saying it was better for Americans to understand their enemy. He noted that he didn’t say that intelligent design needed to be taught in “science class,” leaving unclear exactly what class he thought it should be taught in. He said he believed local school boards, not the federal government, should determine curricula.
“From a personal standpoint, I believe in evolution,” Mr. McCain said. At the same time, he said, “When I stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and I see the sun going down, I believe the hand of God was there.”
First of all, no one is afraid of Intelligent Design, or thinks kids need to be sheltered from the concept. American kids as it stands now get more exposure to creationism than to science—in the home and church. The fight isn’t about hiding silly ideas from schoolkids. It’s about not allowing crackpots to waste our children’s time, and about promoting good, substantive science teaching. Do you want school to be a place where kids learn, Mr McCain? Or do you see it as a propaganda arm of the ideological apparatus of the state?
The comment about local school boards is what they all say. Local control has always been a disaster: school boards consist of elected officials who rarely have any competence in education, and who get into office on promises of keeping costs under control, for instance. They should not be in the business of regulating and defining educational content, but they all too often are. Who in their right mind would think the local hardware store owner, the retired bank clerk, and the part-time realtor are automatically competent to tell the high school biology teacher what she ought to teach in her classes?
As for that last paragraph…he’s a typical politician, trying to have it both ways and avoid antagonizing anyone. It didn’t work: I see a credulous twit who also lacks the courage of any convictions.
