Just go and gape in awe at the obliviousness of our national media. This is a poll on US News & World Report, and it asks, “If you had a choice of four daycare centers run separately by Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, which would you choose for your kids?” Incredible.
I believe that next week they’ll have a question about Barack Obama’s, Colin Powell’s, Al Sharpton’s, and Jesse Jackson’s hypothetical fried chicken stands.
If you open your latest issue of New Scientist (unless, of course, you threw away your subscription), you’ll find a nice little letter from three luminaries — Dennett, Coyne, and Dawkins — and one other guy explaining that Darwin was actually mostly right, contrary to a certain recent cover. Here’s a taste:
What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that “Darwin was wrong” (24 January)?
First, it’s false, and second, it’s inflammatory. And, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure, but about evolution.
Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from “a few forms or… one”, as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.
The flagellation continues.
Carl Zimmer is a little bit peeved at the ever flexible standards of the media. If you’re a science writer like he is, your articles get fact-checked until they bleed. If you’re George Will, conservative pedant and pundit, not so much. The Washington Post seems to basically accept whatever he says as gospel truth, even when he gets the scientific facts completely wrong.
Oh, for the day when our media wake up to the fact that they are supposed to be reality-based, not faith-based.
You may have heard that there is a new movie about Darwin in the works, Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. We have a synopsis now, and it isn’t good news.
The Darwin we meet in CREATION is a young, vibrant father, husband and friend whose mental and physical health gradually buckles under the weight of guilt and grief for a lost child. Ultimately it is the ghost of Annie, his adored 10 year-old daughter who leads him out of darkness and helps him reconnect with his wife and family. Only then is he able to create the book that changed the world.
They’ve got to be kidding. I’m assuming it is only a metaphorical ghost, not a real one, but given the dreadful melodramatic botch of a story there, I can’t even be sure of that.
I was more than a little disappointed when Forbes magazine published the screeds of those ignorant doofii, Ham, Wells, Flannery, West, and Egnor. Now, though, they’ve also published a broadside from Jerry Coyne that demolishes the five creationists. His primary focus is on Egnor (but just as much could be said against any of them), and he doesn’t hold back.
Why does he so readily dismiss a theory that has been universally accepted by scientists for over a century?
Apparently because a rather old book, Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, first published in 1985, convinced him that evolutionary theory was underlain by very weak evidence. If Egnor had bothered to look just a little into Denton’s book and its current standing, he would have learned that the arguments in it have long since been firmly refuted by scientists. Indeed, they were recanted by Denton himself in a later book more than 10 years ago.
Since Egnor is decades out of date and shows no sign of knowing anything at all about evolutionary biology in the 21st century, one wonders what could have inspired his declaration at this time.
There’s more, much more. Read it all if you enjoy watching an intellectual mauling.
Also, Coyne did not hold back in criticizing the magazine, either — and Forbes published it all without edits. That’s to their credit, but I can’t help but feel that there’s a callous calculation here, that even arguments against the quality of their publication are seen as a way to boost circulation.
The only “controversy” is social and political: Will Americans, in violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution, be allowed to impose a false, religiously based view of biology in the public schools? This “teach the controversy” approach, so popular among fundamentalists, ill suits a publication with the gravitas of Forbes.
Can we expect that it will balance stories on medicine with the competing views of shamans, Christian Scientists and spiritual healers? Will articles on the Holocaust be rebutted by the many Holocaust deniers? When the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing rolls around this July, will Forbes give a say to paranoids who think the landing was a fraud, staged on a movie lot?
This, in effect, is what Forbes has done by giving equal time to evolution-deniers. Journalists have an obligation to be fair, but this doesn’t mean that they must give charlatans a prestigious platform from which to broadcast their lies. By doing so, Forbes has debased both journalism and science.
Exactly. Why would anyone go to that gang of charlatans at the Discovery Institute for articles on evolution? Because idiocy sells?
Coyne and I seem to have achieved consensus in our opinion of the Safina column, without talking to each other about it. It’s true, once you reach a certain level of Darwin Consciousness, you gain the ability to read minds. And also levitate.
The other problem with media coverage is that certifiable idiots get to open their mouths and their noise goes unquestioned in print. Here’s a regrettable example of an ignorant opinion piece, one so egregiously stupid that even Ian Musgrave is reduced to indignant spluttering.
The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won’t take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them.
You would think that, since Darwin himself did not consider any of those actions to be either commendable or a consequence of his theory, maybe someone would realize that perhaps those aren’t logical conclusions of “Darwinism”. You would think that somebody would consider that, while Newton described the acceleration of falling bodies accurately, it does not imply in any way that he he advocated pushing people off of tall buildings. Rational people might be able to see that.
The author of the piece is a professor of theology, though, so we ought to have lower expectations. I’m pretty sure he is probably capable of eating with a fork without putting his eye out.
I must recommend an excellent editorial in the Guardian. Somebody there gets it; all the “he said she said” journalism that we get is a failure of the media to get to the basic truth of a story.
There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin’s theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other’s beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin’s reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin’s contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.
That’s the lesson to be taught in this week, at the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. There is a hard core of fact to science, and all the waffling about to negate the ideas of common descent and natural selection is driven by ideology, not evidence.
How strange: The Economist is running this graph, of people’s acceptance of evolutionary theory by country.
Look familiar? It should. It seems to be some of the same data used in this well known figure (not from New Scientist, by the way, but Science):
Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.
So, The Economist has taken a chart, stripped out half the data, put it into new colors that make my eyes hurt, and put it on a background with chimpanzees having a snack — said chimpanzees occupying almost half the space allotted.
Shock horror! I am offended! The monkey is unhappy! My sensibilities, in particular, recoil. Someone send the illustrators at The Economist some copies of Tufte’s books. I think I’ll stick with Miller et al.’s version.
Italy is experiencing its own version of the Terry Schiavo case. A woman, Eluana Englaro, was in a car crash 17 years ago that caused catastrophic brain damage — she’s been in a vegetative state ever since, and the family has been engaged in a legal fight for many years to pull the plug and allow her to die with a little dignity. They finally won that battle recently, and are easing her off life support and a feeding tube.
Cue the right wing. Silvio Berlusconi, Bush-like Prime Minister of Italy, has rushed to impose an emergency decree blocking the suspension of life support, a decision made after consulting with the Vatican. Here’s a good rule: never consult the priesthood of a death cult before making a life-and-death decision. They always give stupid and evil advice.
Berlusconi’s rationalization is appalling and repugnant. He claims to be “rescuing” Englaro — not true, since she was effectively dead 17 years ago — and in what has to be the most tasteless and disgusting excuse made yet for the actions of these villains of the right, has further justified it by saying that physically she is “in the condition to have babies”. So, what is Berlusconi going to do next in his bizarro Prince Charming act? Fertilize her eggs?
It’s nice to know that the Catholic Church’s criteria for the value of a woman’s life focus on the functionality of her ovaries rather than the existence of her mind.
