Earlier this week, I had a chance to talk with Randy Olson about this business of communication good science to the public. I’ve had some disagreements with his strategies before; I think we resolved them a bit. What I had interpreted as a call to dumb down science to get it to the people is really a request that we develop clear narratives, good stories, and sharp, comprehensible slogans backing evolution and science teaching. I agree completely. We are experts at efficient discourse within the community of science, but when it comes to talking to middle America, we suck. There is a good reason for that — we get all of our training in how to talk to other people who have all of our training, but not in how to educate people who don’t have the same background — but that’s no excuse. It’s something we have to change.

Randy was generous and let me have a copy of his movie, Flock of Dodos, and I finally found time to sit down and watch it this evening. It’s excellent and the overall message was one with which I agree, and I hope more scientists get a chance to see it—it accomplishes its mission of shaking us up and pointing out our flaws, and we need that. However, it doesn’t quite satisfy the criticisms I had in mind before I saw it, and there was something that bugged me throughout.

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A reader sent along a few notes on Paul Nelson’s grand tour of Norway—I’ve got to say that his strategy and his talk sounds awfully familiar, right down to the vacuous thought-experiments and god-praising screen-saver that conveniently kicked in during the Q&A. Most significantly, the Norwegian audience of scientists had little patience for his nonsensical arguments, just like our audience of students.

I really wonder how Nelson gets these travel invitations. Did the Scandinavian creationist groups pay his expenses, or is the Discovery Institute funding his missionary work? I think I need some atheist organization sugar daddy to front my junkets to Trondheim and other exotic locales in my ancestral homeland—I’d willingly go into a Norwegian church to lecture on godless evilution and get hammered on by the fundies if it meant I got to visit some interesting people and places.

The summary of his talk (in English, you’ll be relieved to know) is below the fold.

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The Pagan Prattle has an article about the infection of the UK with a rather American sounding version of creationism/ID. It sounds as if the response has ranged from dismissal to dithering avoidance, so it doesn’t seem to be a big threat (yet—these nasty little strains can expand into chronic virulence fairly easily), so the most interesting thing, I thought, was some terminology.

There is an air of superficial plausibility about this, which is apparent in four lesson plans on Irreducible Complexity (Intelligent Design’s catchphrase), the Fossil Record, Homology and Natural Selection. As a geologist I will only comment on the Fossil Record Lesson Plan, where Pupils are introduced to the three theories currently used to interpret the fossil record: Phyletic Gradualism, Punctuated Equilibrium and Phyletic Discontinuity. These three are, of course, Darwinian gradualism, PE and essentially Six Day Creation. Both scientists and theologians contend, with massive evidence that it is disingenuous to present the last as a scientific theory.

Ooooh. “Phyletic Discontinuity Theory”. It sounds so…sciencey.

In case you haven’t been following the vivisections of Wells’ horrid book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, I thought I’d mention that there’s more online at the Panda’s Thumb. Wells’ book is a collection of anti-science propaganda, brought to us by those friendly frauds at the Discovery Institute and Regnery Publishing, and the crew at The Panda’s Thumb are slowly working their way through it, documenting the falsehoods, the distortions, the poor scholarship, and the generally atrocious crapitude of the book. It’s great fun!

The critiques of Chapter 3 (developmental biology), Chapter 9 (the genetic code and information), and Chapter 16 (American Lysenkoism, and this chapter was such a mess of lies that it spawned two additional posts: the distortions of the Ohio situation and Wells’ legal dishonesty are treated separately) went up early, but now various contributors have stuck the knife in Chapter 7 (who needs evolution?), Chapter 10 (irreducible complexity), and Chapter 15 (the war on Christianity). There are only about ten more stalls to muck out in this Augean stable. They’ll be done eventually, but one thing is certain: the fellows of the Discovery Institute will have spewed out more crap by the time it’s done.

The Christian group that spread the initial rumor that Steve Irwin had been “born again” shortly before his death has retracted the claim.

But as encouraging as it might be for Christians to know they
may share heaven with Irwin, the group now concedes there is reason
to doubt the conversion. The unverified story was sent out by an
exuberant staff member, said the group’s managing director, Carl
Wieland. “Though we are able to substantiate our suggestion that
Steve’s wife, Terri, was a church-going Christian, the stories of
Steve coming forward can, at this stage, not be substantiated,” he
said in a statement on the group’s website.

Note the name: Carl Wieland. The Australian co-founder of Answers In Genesis, the creationist group. I am not surprised.

ID advocates are prone to brag about their self-professed expertise, which all too often relies on some respectable knowledge of engineering or other fields irrelevant to biology. DaveScot, the raving mad anti-scientist at Uncommon Descent, is a perfect example…but even in their own domains of knowledge they too often prove to be incompetent. Case in point: their blog has somehow become delisted from Google, and now DaveScot is flailing about, trying to find someone to blame. His answer? Wesley Elsberry did it. It’s all because other sites mirror their content, which he thinks Google finds offensive.

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It is so predictable that Michigan candidate for governor Dick DeVos is a Republican and a Christian.

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