Some Pennsylvania private schools have a new advertising campaign:

The billboard ads say “Intelligence … by Design” and show a Bible Baptist teacher and students.

The Harrisburg Christian radio ad features the voice of science teacher Stephanie Morris. She describes weaknesses in the theory of evolution and says, “The foundation of my biology course is a personal God and creator.”

Harrisburg Christian has 302 students and costs up to $6,600 per year. Bible Baptist, with 475 students, costs up to $4,400 a year.

That’s 777 students getting a sub-standard education in the sciences, and $4,083,200 getting flushed down a rathole. It’s an odd situation, where the wealthy yank their kids out of the public schools and put them in an expensive pit of ignorance by choice, and at the same time fight to underfund the public education they’ve abandoned and turn the schools the poor and middle class rely on into holding pens. We all lose.

Whoa. This is amazing. A NY Times reporter got a Discovery Institute press release, and he didn’t just accept it on their say-so—he actually went digging to find out how accurate it was. I have to give Kenneth Chang his due for going below the surface and investigating a claim.

The Discovery Institute has been circulating a petition since 2001, trying to get people to sign on to a statement of dissent from Darwin. They’ve now got over 500 signatures on it, but as the article shows, the majority are not biologists, and in interviews with some of the signers, many seem to have signed because of religious sensibilities. When asked, they did dig up two signers who were not religious, and one is David Berlinski, who is not a scientist but is instead a professional pompous ass and semi–supporter of astrology. The list includes Phil Skell, a major crackpot.

That’s why these petitions are meaningless: there will always be fringe characters who will sign on to anything that pokes the establishment in the eye.

As Josh Rosenau shows, there’s another reason the DI petition could get that many signatures: it’s meaningless and gutless. The thing is titled “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,” for Odin’s sake…”Darwinism”? I dissent from “Darwinism”—it’s a theory that’s over a century old, that has been extensively revised, and Darwinism sensu strictu doesn’t exist as a major theory anymore. It’s a straw man that creationists flail at.

Look at the cowardly statement they ask people to sign:

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

That’s it? They can’t even mention their pet guess of Intelligent Design, but instead ask people to sign off on a statement professing the values of skepticism and careful examination? Weak, man, weak. Pathetic.

Hey, I’ve got this idea that Martians are zapping George Bush’s brain with their orbiting lasers, causing it to shrivel and collapse. Do you think the NSA, FBI, CIA, EPA, NCD and RRB will pay attention to me if I get enough people to sign a petition deploring neurodegenerative diseases?

This article by Catherine Tsai on ghastly creationist museum tours is getting syndicated all over the place, so I’m getting lots of mail from people complaining about this dreck appearing in the local paper. Basically, there is a group, Biblically Correct Tours, that is parasitizing museums, leeching money off people and leading them on tours through the museums while coughing up idiotic religious interpretations of their contents. It’s not just lying about the age of the earth, either; it’s accusing scientists of deep evil.

The tours are not all fun and games, with the guides claiming that evolutionist thinking supports racism and abortion. This happened on a recent NCAR tour, when Carter told a dozen children and their parents abortion was an act of natural selection carried out by humans.

Other tours suggest Hitler was playing his version of survival of the fittest by favoring whites, and note that museum dioramas of early humans have black “subhumans.”

“My contention is evolution kills people,” Jack said in an interview. “It’s not that evolutionists don’t have morality, it’s that evolution can offer no morality. Ideas have consequences. If you believe you came from slime there is no reason not to, if you can, get away with anything.”

One interesting comment is from one of the tour guides who is spewing this nonsense.

Carter, who has a degree in biblical studies, admits feeling somewhat intimidated when he first gave tours, knowing scientists were listening. “I used to think, ‘What are they thinking? Are they going to come out and correct me?'” he says.

I don’t think he needs to worry. Most people will simply ignore other people saying stupid things—why, it would be rude to correct misinformation—and even the people behind these museums make excuses for them.

Teri Eastburn, an educational designer at NCAR, said she would never engage in such discussions during a tour. She said the complex welcomes anyone, but notes in-house tours only espouse scientific views of the world.

“We try to explain it using evidence that we find in the natural world, whereas religion is dealing more with spirituality, ethics and morality, which science does not deal with at all,” she said. “It’s different ways of knowing. How people reconcile the ways of knowing is an individual choice.”

I would direct your attention to the quote a couple of paragraphs above, where the clueless twit from Biblically Correct Tours is telling people that the science of evolution is tied to abortion and Hitler and killing people. If religion is involved with “spirituality, ethics and morality”, this is a clearly a case where its influence is pernicious and vile. A museum is a place that is supposed to be dedicated to informing and educating the public (yeah, and making money…), and this is a case where a contemptible group is perverting its purpose to misinform and miseducate (and make money for itself.) I would consider it an obligation of the staff to speak out against it, not to make excuses.

That nice article by Matthew Nisbet I cited earlier has a fourth point: GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE IS GOOD. This is an excellent example of a place where the public and scientists and our institutions ought to be going on the offensive: when one of these tour groups goes through, and some biblical studies major babbles stupidly and misstates a scientific fact, everyone around him should turn around and shout, for the benefit of the group, “THAT’S NOT TRUE!” Make ’em sweat. Make the tour groups realize that all these smart people visiting the museum are looking at them like they’re a mob of dumb hicks and gomers, if they aren’t willing to listen to legitimate scientific explanations. And take the time to tell them what those scientific explanations are—they’re far more interesting and satisfying than the Biblically Correct Nonsense the guide is giving them.

I’m going to back up John Lynch on this one. The Flock of Dodos guy, Randy Olson, has a list of “TEN THINGS EVOLUTIONISTS CAN DO TO IMPROVE COMMUNICATION”, and I have to say I’m not excited about them. While they’re well-intentioned and would be good things to do, it’s too glib and unrealistic. I’ve got a couple of comments over there, but I’ll just repeat one here to summarize my complaint.

I think another twist on this is to point out that maybe one reason you found it so easy to list problems is that you’ve picked the obvious, including some problems that we’re already well aware of. It’s like having a general inspect the army and create lists of shortcomings—they’re too few in number, they don’t have enough ammo, the new recruits are poorly trained—and just declaring “fix those, and we’ll win.” Well, yeah. Finding weaknesses is easy. Declaring that the way to achieve victory is to be flawless in all matters is obvious.

What is more useful and far more difficult is to rattle off a list of strengths (I suspect science might have a few) and explain how those might be exploited in spite of deficiencies elsewhere to achieve that victory.

That’s what we’re looking for now. Telling scientists that they have to be witty and humorous and media-savvy and rich and less intellectual is nice (maybe we should also all have ponies, too, and hey, Very Large Breasts are always a plus), but it doesn’t help. What we need are accurate assessments of what we do have, and what we can capitalize on.

Maybe it’s my own high dork factor talking, but I’m not too receptive to people telling me I need movie star qualities to be able to support science, or that we have to pander to superficial sensibilities to communicate a message. Our strengths are depth, intelligence, evidence, history, the whole damn natural world, and just plain having the best and most powerful explanation for its existence. Don’t tell us to dumb it down and glitz it up—I think people should be smart enough to understand it, and there’s grandeur enough in it that dressing it up in rhinestones is just silly. We need to know how to communicate real science, not Hollywood cartoon science, to people.

I must immediately urge the Social Affairs Unit to consider confining their essays to social matters, or affairs, or units, because dang, when they start chattering about science, it’s like watching monkeys do philosopy—they really aren’t suited to it, and it all boils down to a comic-opera poop-frolic no matter what.

The latest effort is by one Myles Harris…the same Myles Harris who invented bogus criticisms of evolution a while back. Now he’s written a little misbegotten parable about a medieval kingdom where a strange artifact is dug up: a “box made of an unknown, shiny metal” with “an arrangement of what look like keys,” and inside, “a network of tiny green boards covered in gold, copper and silver wires.” He’s trying too hard to be clever; just say a laptop computer and be done with it. After all, he’s willing to plainly call the truth-quashing villains of his story “evolutionists”—this is a primitive kingdom with a ‘priesthood’ of evolutionists, apparently.

The box, evolutionists say, is obviously a product of chance. The common people should not, just because it is so complex, be misled into thinking it is anything else than a sophisticated natural object. If they do they will be falling for the “watch heresy”. Many years ago a noted theologian suggested that if you came across a pocket watch in a forest you would be correct in thinking it was designed by an intelligent hand. This was proved to be quite wrong because many natural objects are far more complicated than a pocket watch, and they arose by chance. Because this object was a million times more complicated did not mean it was designed. Evolution was perfectly capable of creating objects even more complicated than the metal box.

It’s embarrassingly bad, full of obvious logical flaws. If a machine-like artifact, even one whose principles of operation were sophisticated beyond our comprehension, were dug up, “evolutionists” wouldn’t be arguing that the rules of the biological world applied to it unless it exhibited properties resembling those of life. Harris is reduced to inventing characters with views stupid enough that he is capable of coping with them (which means they have to be awfully dim), such as this idea that evolution is about complicated things arising by chance.

Harris himself sent me the link to it. I guess he likes attention, even if it is of the sort we give to circus monkeys. Weird little people over there at SAU…

Michael Behe’s reputation is spiraling down the drain a little more. He denies the ongoing research on his favorite scientific examples, the flagellum and the immune system, and I think Les Lane has the right idea—his favorite icon, Mt Rushmore, needs a little more undermining, too.

That first link above includes an excellent quote from the prescient and thorough Charles Darwin; he had the Behes pegged over a century ago.

[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

You can always trust Francis Beckwith to get it all wrong. He’s arguing against the Dover decision on false premises.

Should religious motivations of a theory’s proponents disqualify that theory from receiving a hearing in the public square? It’s a point that has become a central issue in the Intelligent Design-evolution debate.

Francis J. Beckwith, associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies and associate professor of church-state studies at Baylor University, told a New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary forum that the striking down of a policy based solely on the religious motives of its adherents is “logically fallacious and constitutionally suspect.”

You know me—I’m brutally materialistic and uncompromisingly atheistic—and even so, I don’t think the quality of a science teacher is determined by whether they go to church on Sunday or not. The Dover decision slammed the creationists hard, not because the backers were religious, but because they had no scientific basis for their arguments and their goals were clearly religious. It didn’t help their case at all that their primary advocates so clearly demonstrated the intellectually vacuous nature of Intelligent Design creationism. It wasn’t shot down because its proponents were Christian, but because they were unscientific and had allowed their faith to mislead and misrepresent their dogma as science.

One more thing from that Beckwith article:

“Intelligent design is not stealth creationism,” Beckwith said.

Rather, ID is a name for a cluster of arguments that reasons the universe to be the result of intelligent agency rather than of unguided matter, Beckwith explained. The theory lacks the accompaniment of religious authority or sacred Scripture.

Renaming the “Creator” as an “intelligent agency” fools no one—it’s saying the same thing with different words. As Judge Jones could see, the theory lacks the religious component because the authors had consciously stripped out the overt religious references to skirt the letter of the law…it is stealth creationism. As we all could see, too, with no religious authority and no scientific evidence, there is absolutely nothing holding Intelligent Design creationism up.

The bottom line: show me the evidence. The ID advocates can’t and don’t, therefore their religious beliefs are irrelevant, and Beckwith is merely trying to refocus the complaints about the Dover decision on a trivial red herring.

Carl Zimmer reviews A Flock of Dodos, and also brings up that worrisome issue, the image of scientists in this country. Cosmic Variance is talking about image, too. Scientists get called “inarticulate”, “high-handed”, “stiff” and “arrogant”. “Arrogant” is terribly unfair as a criticism—a bit of arrogance is a virtue, and is exactly what you need in someone who is going to stick his neck out…and the creationists from Gish to Behe have possessed a superabundance of arrogance themselves.

As for inarticulate, that’s not quite right either. Listen to a talk by a scientist, and while there are many who are wooden, there are also many who are enthusiastic and passionate and funny. I’ve heard Gould and Crick and JZ Young and Ted Bullock and Dawkins and Mike Land talk, and they were terrific; a good science talk is a good story with it’s own rhythms and rules. The problem is that if you put those same speakers in front of a lay audience, the listeners don’t know the language, and the speaker is deprived of a large chunk of their vocabulary. They can charge ahead and speak over the audience and get accused of arrogance, or try to gear down and struggle to explain basic words and concepts that they usually invoke simply by naming, and then they get accused of being inarticulate. Teaching undergraduates is helpful practice, but the majority of our hot, well-known scientists are famous for their research, and typically have light teaching loads. Those of us who do invest a lot of time in explaining things to freshman don’t often have the research clout to warrant the popular speaking invitations.

I sure don’t know where the answer lies. I do know that being a good communicator to people other than your peers or students has just about zero influence on promotion and tenure for scientists. Zimmer mentions the blank stare he got from scientists when ID was brought up, and there’s a good reason for that: it just isn’t an important focus for most of us.

There could be some new developments. They are reviewing the Intelligent Design creationism nonsense that was inoculated into their curricula a few years ago, and all signs indicate that they are planning to cut the infection out.

A majority of members on the Board of Education of Ohio, the first state to single out evolution for “critical analysis” in science classes more than three years ago, are expected on Tuesday to challenge a model biology lesson plan they consider an excuse to teach the tenets of the disputed theory of intelligent design.

A reversal in Ohio would be the most significant in a series of developments signaling a sea change across the country against intelligent design — which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone — since a federal judge’s ruling in December that teaching the theory in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

The article mentions the usual polls that say the uninformed public favor teaching creationism, but is also notable for including the scathing opinions of scientists and educators.

Besides the Dover decision, the disclosure in December of documents detailing internal discussions of the lesson plan helped revive debate here. Obtained by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a group considering a suit on the plan, the documents show that department scientists and outside experts condemned the lesson as “a lie,” “crackpot,” “religious,” “creationism” and “an insult to science.”

Asked whether the lesson connects skills to the real world, an external reviewer wrote: “Not the real scientific world. The real religious world, yes, the real world based on faith, yes, the real world of fringe thinking, yes!”

Patricia Princehouse, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science who has led the charge against the lesson plan, said, “Basically critical analysis is intelligent design relabeled, just as intelligent design was creationism relabeled.”

Let’s look forward to seeing this new label tossed in the trash bin.

Michael Behe wasn’t too happy yesterday.

One man who says he isn’t planning to join in the fun on Darwin Day is Michael Behe, the 54-year-old author of “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,” a critique whose 10th anniversary edition will be published in March by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division. Molecular biology is “irreducibly complex,” confounding Darwinism, according to the author.

Of course, the author is wrong. IC is no problem for evolution at all.

“I probably won’t attend” any Darwin Day event anywhere, says Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. “It’s not simply meant to celebrate science or Darwin. It’s an in-your-face exhibition, saying, ‘Look what we have on our side, and you guys who aren’t with us are a bunch of dopes.'”

One more thing he got wrong: it was a celebration of science and Darwin. The one I attended was all about the science.

He was right, though, that the ID crowd is “a bunch of dopes.” I’ve got to give him credit for that.