A Valentine’s day opportunity

Aww, how sweet: Eric Hovind is offering a free Creation ‘Science’ Evangelism dvd for you to send to your sweetie. They’ll love it. I’m hoping someone will care enough to send me one, because nothing says love like a dense collection of lies and misleading delusions.

Oops, did my inner cynic slip out there?

Anyway…free, totally free. Not even any shipping charges. They do get your name and address for their database of suckers customers, which may be more than you want to pay, but otherwise it’s a good deal.

Well, it might also be a bit of a libido killer, which may not be a good idea for Valentine’s Day. On second thought, maybe you should think carefully about whether you want to suffer with this thing.

Would you call this pedagogy?

The governor of Kentucky sees nothing wrong with promoting this charlatan’s act, but watch this video of Ken Ham ‘teaching’ an auditorium full of children. It’s appalling.

“What do you say when someone says ‘millions of years’?” “WERE YOU THERE?”

Hey, kids, what do you say when someone says Jesus is Lord, the Grand Canyon was carved by a global flood, and Adam and Eve hung out with dinosaurs?

Tom Ritter’s claim

I chuckled at Ritter, the creationist suing a Pennsylvania school district, but now I’ve actually seen formal legal complaint, and I’m not giggling anymore. It’s more like the kind of roaring guffaw that would make Brian Blessed sound like a feeble titterer.

I don’t think he had any legal counsel in drafting that. At least he took the time to retype it from the original draft, which was probably done in purple crayon on a Big Chief tablet. Does he even have standing in this case?

That’s not a lawsuit anyone needs to worry about, except perhaps for Tom Ritter, who will at best be publicly embarrassed and at worst might have to pay some court costs.

Bad science education in the US

I am completely unsurprised by the recent report on the state of evolution in the American science classroom. It confirms entirely my impressions from years of freshman college students and from previous studies of the subject, and puts specific numbers and issues to the problem.

The short summary: public schools suck at teaching basic biology. You already knew this, too, though, didn’t you? The question has always been, “How bad?”

We can now say how many high school biology teachers do a good job, teaching the recommendations of the National Research Council and also, by the way, obeying the requirements of most state science standards: 28%. About a quarter of our biology teachers are actually discussing the evidence that evolution occurred and using evolution as a theme to integrate the components of a good year of biology instruction. And since most school curricula only include one year of life science, that effectively means that only about a quarter of our high school graduates are even exposed to evolutionary biology.

There’s also another problem. 13% of our biology teachers are openly and unashamedly creationists who teach creationism in the classroom. That number varies, by the way, with the political leanings of the citizens of the school district: 40% of the teachers in conservative school districts reject evolution entirely, while “only” 11% in liberal areas do. This is a disaster. This is active, ongoing miseducation and misrepresentation of science by the teachers we entrust with our children.

What about the rest? 60% of our teachers do nothing: they teach the bare minimum of evolution that they can get away with, focusing on details of genetics and molecular biology that allow them to avoid the more obvious implications (which shouldn’t happen, either; the molecular evidence for evolution is powerful stuff), or they allow it to slip off the schedule of lesson plans. They’re afraid, and rightly so, of aggressive, nasty, privileged religious parents who will make their life hellish if they do their job properly.

The paper did surprise me in one way. It made a very strong statement about those timid teachers in the 60%:

The cautious 60% may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists. The strategies of emphasizing microevolution, justifying the curriculum on the basis of state-wide tests, or “teaching the controversy” all undermine the legitimacy of findings that are well established by the combination of peer review and replication. These teachers fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments, even if unintentionally.

Are you a teacher who avoids the subject of evolution because of the crapstorm of chaos that follows from the public if you do? Consider yourselves rebuked. You really aren’t helping.

What are we going to do about this? The authors have two major suggestions, and here’s where I get to feel rebuked. One problem is that many of the timid teachers also do not feel adequately trained to address evolution well, and that’s a significant factor in their reluctance to press the topic (creationist teachers, on the other hand, are full of unwarranted certainty and lie to their students with confidence). So they recommend that there be more thorough training in evolution for pre-service teachers, with at least a requirement for one course in evolution. I think I can say that my university does a good job at that, at least: our secondary education majors get a rigorous exposure to evolutionary biology in our program. If you’re looking to hire new science teachers, look to UMM graduates!

Another suggestion, though, is that scientists and science organizations ought to be doing more outreach and assistance. That’s tough, since our time is tight, but we know that would be a good goal. When a group of us put together the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education, for instance, one of the goals was to provide speakers and yearly seminar courses to help teachers learn more about evolution, and we did a good job the first year. But that effort was made at a time when there was active pressure from creationist groups to influence the state science standards, and as that pressure eased off, so did we, and we’ve been slacking ever since. The framework is there so we could fire it up again quickly, but maybe we ought also to be maintaining good science education in these lulls between storms, too.

There’s an interesting interview with the authors on Ars Technica — check it out.


Berkman MB, Plutzer E (2011) Defeating creationism in the courtroom, but not in the classroom. Science 331:404-405.

Tom Ritter has figured out the path to scientific credibility

Tom Ritter has a dream. It’s a grand dream.

Tom Ritter dreams of a day when people recognize that he’s more than just a cranky high school teacher, and they realize that all the scientists in the world have been completely wrong, while Truth lives in the sweaty cranium of a harumphing gomer in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

He dreams of a day when everyone sees that he fills an important niche.

He dreams of a day when people realize that evolution is an unscientific theory, while Jesus is our Principal Investigator.

Ritter dreams of a day when the kids get off of his lawn.

He dreams of a day when modern medicine finally figures out how to remove that stick from his butt. You know, the one with the pointy end pressing against his brain.

He’s had these dreams for a long time now, but at last he’s got a shot at glory, one chance to maybe have one of his dreams come true.

Tom Ritter is suing Pennsylvania public schools for teaching evolution. Surely this won’t make him look like a deranged looney from the sticks, unprofessionally bellowing his rage at a world he never made and never understood? This is his opportunity! Fate can’t be so cruel as to continue to foster his reputation as the crazy, creepy chemistry teacher, the Milton Wadams of the Blue Mountain School District who sees evolution as his red Swingline stapler, his object of desire? No, of course not. Because his logic is sound, as strong as anything any creationist has ever come up with.

Here is his professional, scientific argument. I’ve taken the liberty of footnoting it so that you can see how deep it is.

Evolution is Unscientific1

“The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.” — Richard Dawkins, famous Atheist2

Biology studies organisms. It can also explain how organisms got that way, but studying organisms does not require explaining how they got that way3, and the theory of evolution is bad science.4

Evolutionists cannot demonstrate that three critical points are even possible, let alone that they actually happened:

(1) No one has demonstrated that life can be created from non-life.5 (Reports of artificial DNA do not alter this fact. Life is still required.)6

(2) No one has demonstrated that a new “sexual species” can be created.7 (Since the definition of species is contested, for these purposes it is defined as an organism that can breed with its own kind and produce fertile offspring, but cannot breed with its ancestors.8)

(3) Evolutionists theorize the human brain evolved from lower forms.9 Over 50 years into the age of computers, machines can crunch numbers far better and faster than humans, recognize and use language and tools, and beat us in chess. Yet science has yet to build even a rudimentary computer that can contemplate its own existence, the hallmark of the human brain.10 (Contemplating your existence is best understood as imagining what will remain after your death.) And no animal, no matter how “intelligent,” can do this either.11

Ask anyone who espouses evolution if these three points are not true.12

If evolution is unscientific, why teach it?13 Because no Creator means no God.14 In other words, evolution taught without a possible alternative is Atheism.15

Now Atheism rests on an article of faith (A strong belief that cannot be proven but is nonetheless believed).16

Therefore Atheism is a religion.17

And it is illegal to teach religion in the public schools.18

(I am not defending creationism or intelligent design. But evolution has not proven its case, and until it does, saying it is the only explanation for present life is Atheism.)19

1Because Tom Ritter says so, and only about a million scientists know he’s wrong.

2And famous evolutionary biologist, but for purposes of Tom’s argument, that’s hardly relevant, where “relevant” is defined as “conflicts with my claim”.

3True Science™requires closing your eyes to questions that might produce answers contradicting True Faith™.

4See title.

5Except that we are pretty sure the world lacked life before it had life, therefore life had to come from non-life at some point. Or perhaps Mr Ritter is also arguing with the Old Testament?

6Similarly, any technology that allows life to be created doesn’t count. Therefore this statement is irrefutable! Huzzah!

7See previous unbreakable escape clause.

8Because that would be really icky. If they aren’t dead, they’re really old.

9For instance, I theorize that a small garden slug crawled into Tom Ritter’s ear one day, worked its way into his cranium, and is now rasping away at his motor nerves to evoke strange twitchy responses.

1050 years of computing certainly ought to be able to outperform 4 billion years of evolution.

11Well, obsessing over the imagined fate of a magic wisp of personhood that survives blunt force trauma (or cranial slug invasion) might be the hallmark of the Christian brain, but the rest of us…not so much.

12OK. They aren’t true.

13Aside from its explanatory power, the volumes of evidence in its support, its ability to guide further research, its practice by the overwhelming majority of biologists on the planet, and the necessity to understand the principles of evolutionary biology to understand taxonomy, physiology, development, cell biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, etc., etc., etc.? Well, no, aside from those, there really is no reason to teach it.

14Unless you’re one of those wacky theistic evolutionists who think evolution is the mechanism god used to create life…but they’re all like Mormons or Scientologists, non-Christians, and therefore atheists.

15This is a sweeping principle that will be expanded to cover other disciplines as well. Teaching auto repair without mentioning a magic car factory in the sky is atheism; teaching agriculture without discussing the angels who tug the shoots out of the ground is atheism.

16Which is also true for every single science, which makes them, by this definition, religions.

17Just like chemistry, physics, agriculture, and auto repair.

18More simply, it is therefore illegal to teach, period, in the public schools. QED. Brains explode. Society melts down. Zombies stalk the streets while rains of frogs and blood predict the End Times. Mission accomplished.

19Wait a minute there…Christianity hasn’t proven its case, either. Therefore Christianity is atheism?

Yes, indeed, we’re all going to take Tom Ritter seriously from now on! Because filing a federal lawsuit is something only a True Genius™ could possibly do. Next step: Nobel Prize.

Television alert!

According to Ken Ham, he will be appearing on Anderson Cooper tonight (10pm (9 Central time) on CNN), along with Barry Lynn of Americans United. It sounds a little odd — the day after the state of the union address, they bring on a creationist kook? — and they don’t say exactly what the topic is, although we can probably guess.

Ham is asking for prayers. They won’t help him much against Lynn, who is simply an awesome speaker. It could be fine entertainment.

Actually, prayers wouldn’t help him much if his opponent was Big Bird, either.


Barry Lynn was excellent, but then he always is. The best moment for me was after Lynn stated that what Ham was doing was getting subsidies for a ministry, Cooper turned to Ham and simply asked, “Are you trying to convert people?” Of course he is, but Ham can’t be honest about his intent, so he gulped and went into his spiel about how the Ark Encounter is run by a shell company as a for-profit endeavor. He didn’t answer the question at all.

And isn’t this game of separating the profit-making part of the park into a separate company rather devious? The profits will just go to Answers in Genesis, anyway.


Now you can watch it yourself if you missed it:

I get email

At the end of February, I’ve mentioned that a flack from Answers in Genesis will be appearing in Morris. I guess the local hosts of that event are a little worried that I might breathe fire over their little church, so they just sent me a note.

Professor Myers,

I am the local coordinator for the Answers in Genesis conference which will be held in Morris on Feb. 27 and 28 featuring Dr. Terry Mortenson. I realize that there is a lot of real estate between our opinions on this subject. My hope is that we create a respectful discussion about this issue which will be challenging.

I would like to meet with you, at your convenience, to discuss the conference, the schedule, and how we can make it a positive experience for all members of our community.

How odd and annoying. I’ve attended creationist events in town before, and they should know by now that I don’t cause grief, at least not during the talks. So I wrote this back to him. I always believe in being honest and straightforward with people, even creationists.

Hmmm. Well. I can guarantee you that I and the people I will be bringing along to the event will be quiet, polite, and entirely non-disruptive; we’ll do nothing but observe, take note, and possibly ask a few simple questions, and we’ll follow any restrictions you want to place on us. You can ask your friends at Answers in Genesis; I led a group of 300 students through the Creation Museum, and we did not run riot or create any real problems for the staff or other attendees. We’ll do the same here, although we definitely won’t have such a large contingent this time around.

But I have to be honest with you: there will be no respect for this nonsense, and I do not consider bringing in dishonest incompetents to miseducate and misrepresent science to be a positive experience for our community. We will respect your right to have discussions of this sort and will in no way impede your ability to present creationist dogma to your audience, but I will not agree in any way with any of it, and once I step away from your church grounds you can expect that my criticisms will be thorough and fiery and will not include any pretense of respect for Answers in Genesis or the Morris Evangelical Free Church.

I don’t quite see the point of meeting. You know my position, and I know yours and Terry Mortenson’s. It is your event and I do not expect any accommodation for actual, honest science in it, nor do I demand it. Since I have promised that I will create no obstacles to your agenda, there really isn’t any good reason to discuss anything about it.

I hope they weren’t misled by my prior instances of polite behavior into somehow thinking I’m nice, or something.

Dawkins on Gaskell

Richard Dawkins takes a slightly harder line than I do on the case of Gaskell, the astronomer who didn’t get a job because his potential employers objected to his faith-based mangling of evolutionary biology. Dawkins regards that as entirely justifiable, and makes a good case.

A commentator on a website discussing the Gaskell affair went so far as to write, “If Gaskell has produced sound, peer-reviewed literature of high quality then I see no reason for denying him the position, even if he believes Mars is the egg of a giant purple Mongoose”. That commentator probably felt rather pleased with his imagery, but I don’t believe he could seriously defend the point he makes with it and I hope most of my readers would not follow him. There are at least some imaginable circumstances in which most sensible people would practise negative discrimination.

If you disagree, I offer the following argument. Even if a doctor’s belief in the stork theory of reproduction is technically irrelevant to his competence as an eye surgeon, it tells you something about him. It is revealing. It is relevant in a general way to whether we would wish him to treat us or teach us. A patient could reasonably shrink from entrusting her eyes to a doctor whose beliefs (admittedly in the apparently unrelated field of obstetrics) are so cataclysmically disconnected from reality. And a student could reasonably object to being taught geography by a professor who is prepared to take a salary to teach, however brilliantly, what he believes is a lie. I think those are good grounds to impugn his moral character if not his sanity, and a student would be wise to avoid his classes.

That’s all true. We’ve got a new wave of creationists like Wells and Ross who are going through the motions of graduate programs to earn degrees in subjects they intend only to repudiate, who basically lie their way through a program of advanced study, and I wouldn’t want to hire them or even trust them. Marcus Ross, for instance, wrote a whole thesis on Cretaceous paleontology while publicly professing at creationist meetings that the earth is less than 10,000 years old — who in their right mind would hire such a confused and deceptive fellow for a job which involves regularly dealing with geologic ages?

These aren’t minor, scientific disagreements, like hiring a paleontologist who emphasizes punctuated equilibrium or neutral theory in his analysis; those are legitimate scientific issues that will be resolved with evidence. These are people who throw out the evidence in favor of their religious dogma, and they are about as anti-scientific as you can get.

We’re about to re-open a search for a tenure-track position at my university. If Jonathan Wells applied, how far do you think he’d get in the review? We’d examine his application with the same impartial eye we do all the others, but the fact that he has demonstrated his incompetence in biology in his books and public speaking events, and has a known malicious intent to ‘destroy Darwinism’ means it would be round-filed very early in the process—and if you were privy to committee comments during the review, they’d probably involve lots of incredulous expletives. Would that be discrimination? I don’t think so. He’s patently unsuitable for the job.

On the other hand, many of the applicants to our position would likely be Christian with varying degrees of devotion — but if their work, the basis for hiring that person, showed no attempt to shoehorn personal and private ideas that I, for instance, find ridiculous, into their science, then it wouldn’t be an issue. Christians believe in something as absurd as the purple mongoose egg theory, this whole bizarre notion of incarnated gods dying to magically redeem us from a distant ancestor’s dietary error, but good scientists are capable of switching that nonsense off entirely in the lab, and are also aware of the impact on their credibility of espousing folly…if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be good scientists (or they’re Nobel prize winners who know they can get away with it now).

We have to be careful about letting personal disagreements on matters of taste intrude on our decisions; if the person has been circumspect about keeping them from poisoning a body of good work, I’m willing to accommodate them. The alternative is that we start rejecting applicants because we discover that they listen to 70s hair metal bands while they work, are fans of the New York Yankees, or put milk in their teacup before they add the hot water, all irrational and unforgiveable heresies. It’s all fine unless they join a Poison tribute band and start slopping dairy products about with manic abandon.

Tin-eared Martin Cothran

Cothran, an analyst for one of those right-wing religious think tanks, the Family Patriarchy Foundation, has written an op-ed rebuking the University of Kentucky for discrimination against Christians. It is breathtakingly ridiculous. He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I’m sure, just as there are believers on every committee I’ve ever worked with at my universities, and the atheists are usually the minority. So to claim that this committee thought that the idea of a candidate going to church was grounds for exclusion is absurd.

Gaskell’s employment was questioned, not because he is a Christian, but because he is an evangelical Christian who used his authority as an astronomer to mislead the public about biology. That was a question of responsibility and competence, well within the domain of inquiry by a hiring committee. It was not about his private, personal religious practices, but how he would engage the public.

Cothran, though, has to carry his argument into the realm of offensive stupidity.

One of its arguments used to defend UK’s actions was that Gaskell would have public outreach responsibilities and that his religious views would embarrass the university.

Let’s apply this to a similar discrimination case against, say, an African-American, a group protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Let’s say the University of Kentucky was looking for an agriculture extension officer for a part of the state with a racist history. The job obviously involved public outreach.

And let’s say an African-American applied for the job and was clearly the most qualified applicant.

But there were faculty and staff who indicated in e-mails they didn’t think highly of blacks and who engaged in a concerted effort to torpedo his candidacy for the job, and one of the reasons was that they felt his race would impair his ability to do outreach in this part of the state.

I think we all know what would happen, and it would have little to do with a potential hire embarrassing the University of Kentucky. It would have a whole lot to do with the university embarrassing itself.

This isn’t diversity. It isn’t equal treatment. It isn’t tolerance. UK got off the hook by paying a relatively small settlement in the case.

Right. Christians. Just like the oppressed African-American minority, with their long history of suffering and repression, and their current underprivileged state in which they are excluded from positions of leadership by bigotry. That whole argument reveals much about Martin Cothran and his coddled Christian privilege, and not much about the University of Kentucky.

In his hypothetical example, imagine that this well-qualified applicant was great at helping farmers with the job of raising crops (he’s well qualified!), but would also go off and lecture them about how Kentucky was first settled by Egyptians who developed the system of agriculture, Kentucky bluegrass, and thoroughbred racehorses, which are all descended from purely African stock. I think the agriculture department would be justified in questioning his suitability for employment, not because of his race, but because he is promoting false ideas justified by a very narrow and ignorant myth about African contributions to history.

That’s Gaskell. He wasn’t turned away because he was a Christian, but because he actively uses Christianity as an excuse to peddle falsehoods and doubts. And the objection wasn’t to the “Christian” part, but to the “false doubts” part.