In the races for the two open seats on the Texas board of education, the merely conservative wackjobs beat the freakishily flaming conservative wackjobs, staving off a creationist working majority. This is progress. I probably shouldn’t call it a victory, though — it just means the fight for rationality will be slightly less difficult.
Huckabee may not stand a chance of winning a presidential nomination, but he can still make his pernicious influence felt.
Next year the Texas State Board of Education will be writing the science curriculum standards for Texas public schoolchildren, and Huckabee may bring enough conservative fundamentalist voters to the polls on March 4 to swing the balance of power on the board to the supporters of creationism. “If Huckabee marshals the religious right in Texas, particularly in North Texas, it has profound implications for the state board,” says Kathy Miller, executive director of the Texas Freedom Network (TFN), an Austin-based advocacy group whose stated goal is to “counter the religious right” in public policy issues, particularly education.
Not mentioned in the article is a potential counterbalance: a lot of moderates and liberals are strongly motivated in this election cycle to boot the bozos out. At least in Minnesota we saw a tremendous surge in DFL participation in the caucuses — there are a few sensible moderates and liberals left in Texas, right? And 100% of you are going to get out and vote, right? You’d better. Complacency is not allowed.
My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds — he’s an appalling fraud who doesn’t understand the science he criticizes. Case in point: he recently smugly asserted that a recent study to characterize the molecular changes involved in the evolution of one kind of antibiotic resistance involved no necessary consideration of evolution at all. Well, yeah…like the modern concept of “door” requires no knowledge of carpentry or locksmithing for Wells to manage to open one, so Wells could blithely suggest we replace all the carpenters with Unification Church theologians and there would be no change in his daily interactions with doors. So sorry, Mr Wells: that you’re too stupid to see how the concept of evolution might guide research into the evolution of antibiotic resistance doesn’t mean the researchers are.
It helps me maintain my equanimity that Ian Musgrave has already ripped Wells a new one over his amazing demonstration of inanity.
Here’s a wonderful addition: the principal investigator of the paper in question has commented.
As principal investigator of the study under discussion, I’d like to strongly support the view advocated this page. In fact, I was completely amazed to see how our work has been misrepresented by M. Wells.
Actually, we did indeed use darwinian evolution within this work (something unusual in structural biology). In order to obtain an enzyme with increased stability (a critical point for structural studies), we used selective pressure to obtain mutants of the enzyme. We selected for bateria with increased aminiglycoside resistance, by plating them on antibiotic containing medium. It turned out that some bacteria evolved such stabler enzymes variants which made this whole study possible !
Finally, I would not consider myself as a chemist, I got my PhD in molecular microbiology. It seems that M. Wells finds it easier to portray us as non-biologists, and hence implicitly as non-evolutionists
Ow. That has to sting, if anything could ever penetrate the oblivious stupor that fogs Wells’ brain.
This is amusing, but isn’t George W. Bush also increasingly irrelevant?
(via Philosophy Monkey)
There are limits to even my capacity to cope with The Stupid, and this video reaches them. It’s interesting in a historical sense, in that it seems to be an old recording — familiar faces look so young, and the whole thing has the clumsy style of a bad 1970s documentary—but it’s a whole half-hour of badly concatenated mish-mashes of creationist arguments. Who knew that Charles Darwin was responsible for the Big Bang theory, or that evolution was the foundation of astronomy? (Don’t tell Phil, his inferiority complex is bad enough.).
It’s rather weird to see old faces that most of you have forgotten or never knew, like Ian Taylor and Luther Sunderland and John Morris, all sitting there mired in the most awful ignorance and propagating lies about Lucy’s knee joint and Neandertal just being an arthritic old man and so forth, and realize that they or their successors are still spouting the same old lies today. Ignorance builds more ignorance, unfortunately.
The incoherence of the whole production is amazing, too. It starts of with this weird set of New Age rationalizations before wallowing in the reactionary pronouncements of fundamentalist kooks like D. James Kennedy … and then at the end it includes a five minute music video with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.
There’s a brief discussion of the video here, brought up by a guy who thought it made good points and made him question his acceptance of evolution. Among the issues he had was that the movie claims that “cro-magnon and other pre-humans were determined to be transitional species from as little as a tooth or a rib,” which is actually an excellent example of an outright lie from the movie. Nope, not true. Cro-magnon refers to a variety of Homo sapiens, so calling them transitional is stretching the word. Transitional forms are far better established than as extrapolations from a single tooth — but the creationists sure milk their mangled story of Nebraska Man for all it is worth, and use it to falsely cast doubt on other explanations.
I’m not even going to try to address the details of that mess. It’s the Gish Gallop on video; if anyone has any specific questions, OK, but the shorter summary is that all the creationists in it are lying out of ignorance and all the scientists are taken out of context.
By the way, if the stupidity in that video doesn’t make your cortex disintegrate into slime, try this one — it’s the intellectual equivalent of huffing a hydrofluoric acid/osmium tetroxide cocktail.
There’s a school board election in District 11 of Texas that has a clear choice: Pat Hardy is the pro-science candidate, despite being a conservative, religious Baptist, while her opponent is a deranged lunatic who is quietly outspending her 12:1 while avoiding the public eye altogether. You do not want to vote for Barney Maddox — he is an “ill-informed nutcase”.
Isn’t this weird? Here in Minnesota, we’re affected by the outcomes of local school board races in Texas — allowing ignorant, raving lunatics to make textbook decisions there is going to shape the choices we get to make here. So if you know any Texans, spread the word: Barney Maddox is bad news.
Answers in Genesis started this so-called peer reviewed journal called Answers, and the latest publication therein is such a confused mess that I’m wondering if it could be a hoax. Here’s the abstract, but I think just the title alone would be sufficient to tell this is codified lunacy: An Apology and Unification Theory for the Reconciliation of Physical Matter and Metaphysical Cognizance.
There was a lecture at UCL recently by Dr Oktar Babuna and Ali Sadun Engin. They spilled the beans, and we’re all in trouble now.
He then showed just how “insightful” the folks at Harun Yahya can be by quoting from one of their books, The Dark Clan, which explains that evolutionary science is inspired by “a dark clan behind all kids of corruption and perversion, that controls drug trafficking, prostitution rings”. Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.
The Dark Clan actually isn’t bad — nice moody music about vampires and such. I was just listening to a couple of their tracks and was enjoying them.
Oh, wait — they’re referring to this Dark Clan, which is just stupid. I’ll have you know I had to get out of the prostitution business when the Discovery Institute moved in and outcompeted us — they were so much better at it than we were. I’ve had to focus on the squid porn niche instead, which is nowhere near as lucrative, but at least the clientele is less creepy than the Dominionists they cater to.
And that quote from the lecture isn’t in error. Here’s what they say on their web site:
The purpose behind choosing the term “dark clan” is to convey the sense of a web-like structure with offshoots in every country, orchestrating the moral degeneration of today’s world. Even though it presents itself as highly modern, its structural design is reminiscent of the historical totemic clans. This dark clan is to be found behind all kinds of despicable deeds, corruption and perversion. It controls drug-trafficking operations, prostitution rings and promotes immorality. The members of this clan manage to portray themselves in a positive light through their collaborators in the media. They enjoy the de facto protection of their collaborators in the security forces and succeed in using the law to their own advantage through their collaborators in departments of justice. They also display a powerful unity against those perceived as enemies. Their greatest enemies are the believers who want to destroy their corrupt business networks, who struggle to make morality, harmony and justice dominant in the world and who strive tirelessly on the ideological battlefield to bring seriousness of the situation to people’s attention.
Oh, yeah, that is so me.
One of the people behind Expelled is holding forth in a thread at Antievolution.org, and it looks like he’s getting kicked around good. This is your chance to have a serious discussion with one of the principals behind the move, ask him questions, and comment on their tactics and content.
In other words, go get him, gang.
The Ecological Society of America has just published an article that surveys the state of science teaching in the US. Some of the results are somewhat reassuring — the majority of our college-bound high school students are at least getting exposed to evolution to some degree — but they’re also getting taught creationism to an unfortunate degree. Here’s the abstract to give you the gist of the story.
How frequently and in what manner are evolution, creationism, and intelligent design taught in public high
schools? Here, I analyze the answer to this question, as given by nearly 600 students from major public universities nationwide in a survey conducted during the spring of 2006. Although almost all recent public high-school graduate respondents reported receiving evolution instruction, only about three-quarters perceived that
evolution was taught as a “credible scientific theory”. Creationism and intelligent design were reportedly presented almost one-third and one-fifth of the time, respectively, though respondents recalled that both concepts
were presented as lacking scientific credibility much more often than not. The survey results are presented in
composite form and also disaggregated with respect to the strength of evolution-related state standards, red
state-blue state divisions, and the regional location of states within the country.
You can also hear the author discussing the methodology and results in a podcast, which I think is a wonderful idea. (Maybe every paper should be accompanied by a 15 minute podcast in which the author explains the work to a general audience…).
Here’s the good news/bad news data.
The good news: look at that, 92% are getting taught about evolution to varying degrees. I also think it’s good news that 26% say they’re getting “in depth” instruction, although, of course, this is self-reported by students who probably don’t know how much depth there is. At least this tells me that a solid majority of teachers are trying, and are not silenced by pressure from the public.
The bad news: 30% are getting taught about creationism, and 20% are learning about intelligent design. That’s a waste of time and resources, and it’s an indicator that the urgings of creationists for a false “fairness” might be having some effect.
Now, of course, maybe they’re learning about creationism in high school because the teacher is slamming it as bogus nonsense, as I do in my university classes. There’s a little good news there, too: over 70% of the time, evolution is taught as credible theory, but as for creationism…
Additionally, when intelligent design is taught, it is
perceived to be presented as a credible scientific theory at
a rate higher (34%) than that for creationism (18%).
This confirms one of the few narrow points of agreement
between intelligent design’s proponents and critics: intelligent design is intended to look more “like science” and
less “like religion” — and to these recent public high-school graduates, it does.
So we can say that the majority of the time creationism is taught, it is disparaged to some degree and is not taught as a credible scientific theory. That’s reassuring. Of course, we could take a glass-half-empty view and note that in those cases where ID is taught, it’s taught as a credible theory an appalling third of the time, and it’s also a successful strategy for boosting the reputation of creationism.
The situation isn’t quite as bad as I feared, although there is a significant minority that are getting taught creationism uncritically in the public schools. What I’m missing is a couple of things. This is information taken from a select population of college bound students, and those students are more likely to have had exposure to science, and are also more likely to be attentive. I’d like to know what impressions other students have of their science instruction.
This is also a collection of exactly that, student impressions. I’d like to see a complement to this study that surveys actual curricula and faculty attitudes. I know how tuned out students can be, so I can’t say that I entirely trust student reports.
Bowman KL (2008) The evolution battles in high-school science classes: who is teaching what? Front Ecol Environ 6(2):69-74.
