Wrong in principle, right on detail

I was all prepared to criticize a young atheist who refused to read the bible as literature in an English class.

Newton South High School officials dropped a requirement to read excerpts from the Bible for one student last month, after he refused to read the Biblical passages as a literature assignment because he is an atheist.

Jack Summers, a 15-year-old sophomore, said he objected to reading the religious text as part of an honors English class that also includes writings by William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, among others.

“This is the word of God. People take this literally … I don’t want to read about what they believe to be true,” said Summers, who described himself as an atheist.

That is so wrong. We are immersed in a culture that believes this nonsense is true, so we should read about it, the better to oppose it. It’s also a simple fact that, wrong as it is, that bible has been a major literary and cultural influence on the West…and it should be read critically for that reason alone. I think it’s a good idea for our schools to discuss these kinds of important influences, and I’m also in favor of teaching comparative religion in the public schools.

But then I read further and changed my mind.

South’s freshman curriculum lists the Book of Genesis from the Bible as a required academic subject in ninth-grade English courses, alongside “Lord of the Flies,” “Catcher in the Rye” and “House on Mango Street,” plus passages from “Romeo and Juliet.”

Whoa, hang on there: they want to teach the bible as literature, but their choice of an excerpt is the Book of Genesis? They pick one of the parts that purports to be a scientific and historical account of the world, that is cheesy, badly written, and wrong? Why not pick Revelation and really mess with their heads?

There are excellent parts to the bible, chapters that are not only beautifully written, but also would make students think: try Ecclesiastes, or even the book of Job, for dog’s sake, where everyone could chew over the ideas without inviting an intelligent teacher to have to help them understand all the elements of the story that are flat-out wrong. You cannot responsibly teach Genesis to 21st century students without explaining that it is not science, and that if you try to squeeze it into a literal, accurate description of our origins, you are both defying the evidence and buggering up the literature; and that all the accounts therein of the Chosen People’s tribulations and triumphs are utterly bogus tribal propaganda.

I am not sufficiently delusional that I would believe a public high school could actually teach Genesis critically, not without bringing down fierce parental wrath. That leads me to suspect that what the students would get is faith-affirming pablum, a survey of the book that would gloss over minor little problems, like that it is a frickin’ myth that contradicts reality.

So, while I think Jack Summers is wrong in principle in rejecting an education that makes him uncomfortable (I’ve said it over and over again, that that is what a good education should do), I’m suspicious of the school and the teacher, and don’t trust their motives at all. Why that book? How would they approach the material? Are they going to encourage criticism of its content?

I’m also even more suspicious because of this line.

JC Considine, a spokesman for the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, said the state has a suggested book list that includes religious texts such as the Bible, the Koran and Buddhist scriptures, but local districts decide which books to use in classrooms.

Hmmm. So the local school board decided to include only religious material out of several choices that happened to coincide with the majority beliefs in the area? Apparently, the only people who get to be made uncomfortable in the classrooms are the ones who aren’t Jewish or Christian. If they genuinely wanted a compromise that would still show a little integrity, they should have included a chapter of the Koran to be discussed — and make everyone think.

The story has a poll associated with it, too.

Should the Bible be part of the 10th grade English literature curriculum?

Of course. It’s among the world’s most famous books 42%
No. It’s not fair to those who don’t believe in the Bible’s teachings. 20%
Are you kidding? This is a phony controversy started by a kid who was too lazy to do his homework. 38%
Undecided 0%

I hate all three choices. Yes, it’s one of the world’s most famous books; it’s also 90% crap, and the school district picked one of the crappy parts. The second choice is the only one that criticizes the choice, and does so for the wrong reason: it’s because they can’t include a religious book without encouraging students to criticize it, not because non-believers will be annoyed. And that third question is just slimy and loaded. I ended up voting “no” just because I think the poll sucks and the school district is dishonest.

I have been assured by quite a few people who have more direct knowledge of the Newton school district that they actually do teach Genesis critically, which removes most of my objections to their handling of the issue. I’m left with my first impression, which is that the student was out of line — he shouldn’t be avoiding instruction in material which makes him uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, I am not a resident of liberal Massachusetts. Out here in the rural midwest, a class in Genesis would mostly be a whitewash used to make excuses for fundamentalist beliefs. May the spirit of Newton spread a bit further westward!

Say it ain’t so, Randi!

This is so disappointing: James Randi joins the ranks of the climate change denialists, and he does so on the basis of an extremely poor argument. I know, he’s a professional skeptic about everything, but skeptics must have some standard for evidence … a standard which the climatologists have reached, while the denialists have not. Here’s the core of Randi’s dissent from the scientific consensus.

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid. I base this on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the facts about planet Earth. This ball of hot rock and salt water spins on its axis and rotates about the Sun with the expected regularity, though we’re aware that lunar tides, solar wind, galactic space dust and geomagnetic storms have cooled the planet by about one centigrade degree in the past 150 years. The myriad of influences that act upon Earth are so many and so variable — though not capricious — that I believe we simply cannot formulate an equation into which we enter variables and come up with an answer. A living planet will continually belch, vibrate, fracture, and crumble a bit, and thus defeat an accurate equation. Please note that this my amateur opinion, based on probably insufficient data.

At least he’s self-aware enoughto realize that he has come to this conclusion on the basis of his personal ignorance. He has two main reasons otherwise to disagree with the idea of anthropogenic global warming.

One is the idea that climate is such a complex product of multiple phenomena that we should expect significant variation, and that no one could possibly have a single equation that describes it all. This is entirely true, but irrelevant. Climate scientists have collected a huge amount of data, and the confounding fact that none of them would ever deny is that it’s variable, messy, noisy stuff, with loads of daily/monthly/yearly variation, and it has to be analyzed to find long term trends. The consensus was not reached because somebody had a magic formula that predicts a result. It was reached because a body of observation has shown long term change is going on. They are aware of possible causes, and they know that phenomena like volcanic eruptions and cyclic changes in solar activity effect climate…and our situation is not sufficiently explained by those kinds of natural events. One consistent change is a rise in CO2 levels, and we know that we are digging up huge reservoirs of sequestered carbon and dumping it into the atmosphere.

The other source of his skepticism is one that Randi should have been more skeptical about: the Petition Project. This is a project by the denialists to gather enough signatures to show a strong pattern of dissent in the scientific community (Sound familiar? The Discovery Institute has done exactly the same thing with their “Dissent from Darwin” list). They’ve got over 30,000 signatures so far! However, as with the Discovery Institute’s list, only a tiny proportion of the signatories are actually qualified, and their procedure for gathering signatures is incredibly sloppy and prone to accumulate fake names. This is what you’d expect: they don’t want quality control, for the propaganda purposes of this list, all you need is quantity.

The source for this list is also rather dubious. It comes from a tiny team of crank scientists operating out of a ‘think tank’ in a small town in Oregon.

I would expect Randi to have given his denialist sources the same degree of critical analysis that he gave to the conclusions of the IPCC. Maybe he did, since he has shown no understanding of the IPCC determinations at all, but I think it was a gross mistake on his part to therefore charge in and decide on the basis of his rudimentary knowledge that maybe the fringe cranks were right.

I’d better mention this again

Yes! I’ve seen the octopuses using coconut shells, and it’s very, very cool. Here’s the video:

(This is one of the dilemmas of having a popular blog. I just checked my inbox, and I’ve been getting notifications about this observation at the rate of about 20 per hour since yesterday. Thanks everyone, I really appreciate it, and you should feel free to send me links to appropriate material — but I may have to repost stuff two or three times to make sure everyone notices that I caught on to the really hot topics of the day.)

Gotta keep you on your toes

The comment registration system here is still a PITA. I know; I get so many complaints from so many people, yet at the same time, I need the dog-damned thing in order to manage the horrendous pile of spam and troll-trash spilling over into the comments.

So I’m going to compromise a bit. I will occasionally switch off the comment registration requirement for random periods of time, just so people who are locked out by its clumsiness can get a word in; but I will also sporadically switch it back on whenever the noise gets to me. Which might be every day. Or every couple of days. Or every weekend. I don’t know, it depends on how much annoyance I can handle.

There’s a hierarchy of increasing pain at work here.

  1. The best solution would be for SixApart to get in here and fix the registration system so it worked reliably for everyone, which I suspect would mean moving away from their beloved TypeKey/Moveable Type in-house schemes. Which suck.

  2. Everyone who can use the registration system continues to do so, while I sometimes allow anonymous/unregistered comments for people who can’t register. This sucks for the unregistered, because you never know when the registration lockout will come down, but at least they can comment sometimes.

  3. I just switch on comment registration full time. People who can register feel little pain, people who can’t will simply be silenced.

  4. I shut off comment registration permanently. Everyone rejoices, except for me, who suffers horribly behind the scenes. In this non-egalitarian universe of Pharyngula, I’m sorry, but my pain counts far more than the pain of a million readers.

We’ve been operating under solution 3 this past week, and I’m switching now to solution 2 for the indefinite future. We will not be going back to solution 4 ever again, because it makes me cry like a little baby every morning when I wake up to the nightmare of cleaning up the comments here. Solution 1 is what we all dream of, but we are at the mercy of SixApart, and they are evil and capricious gods with their own agenda, which does not seem to involve enhancing the interactive part of blogging.

The bottom line is that if you can’t get registered (it’s not your fault, the blame lies on the weed-smoking brain-damaged monkeys they apparently hired to code that stuff), you still suffer, but I will intermittently switch off the hell-code so you can type in a few words. Then I’ll slam it down again, and you won’t know when.

I get email

I am often chided by morons.

Consistent

Dear Mr. Myers,

To be wrong is always acceptable, because we are human. But, to be consistently wrong, especially when you call yourself a Professor, is going way beyond the bounds of good sense. Anyone who even gives ear to people such as Dawkins and Kitchens is no less than a fool. There is nothing wrong with being a fool, but teaching others to be one is unacceptable and irresponsible, at the very least. Furthermore, to have a degree or degrees in biology and to still believe in Darwinian theory, shows ignorance in the worst degree. Macro evolution is founded on absolutely nothing but blind faith. No evidence has ever been provided for it. Several hokes and false attempts, but no real evidence. A large group of sciences, including biologists, have concluded that the theory is false. Why, other than you can make a living no way else, that a professional biologist would continue on with such a shenanigan, is beyond comprehension. It is a poison to society and you are one who doses it out. As common as a drug dealer. I hope you will come to your senses, as a thinking rational man, before too long. If it is the result of bitterness about something in your past…get over it.

Sincerely,
Michael Aprile

I’ve split half-billion year old stones to expose the shells of trilobites, I’ve seen the bones of Tiktaalik, I’ve held in my hands the skull of Neanderthal. I’ve compared the genes of mice and flies, I’ve studied the embryos of grasshoppers and fish, I’ve read thousands of papers produced by a scientific community that values curiosity over money. I’ve also read dozens of books by creationists, and I can say with complete confidence that they, and you, Mr Michael Aprile, are full of shit.

You write chastising email built out of condescending ignorance, and can’t even be troubled to check the spelling and grammar. You claim there is no evidence for evolution, when you haven’t even looked. All those people with degrees in biology know genetics, molecular biology, anatomy, physiology, and ecology — what do you know, Mr Aprile? The science points ineluctably to evolution as a fact, as the mechanism for biological change over time. The only people who argue otherwise, and that includes those ‘sciences’ [sic] you claim have concluded that the theory is false, are ideologues who have had their brains addled by non-scientific presuppositions, and who have decided that their fallacious traditional myths must supersede observation and evidence.

The professional biologists whose work you do not comprehend are not spreading poison or drugs: they are sharing knowledge. I know you find that anathema, since it directly displaces the ignorance you and your religion thrive on, but I do not concede an iota of respect to your stupidity, and will be spending the rest of my life opposing it.

Nice debunking of biocentrism

Robert Lanza and Deepak Chopra (just the fact that he is associated with it should discredit it right there) have been peddling this bizarre notion of Biocentrism, the idea that the universe is the product of human awareness — it’s a kind of upscale version of The Secret, gussied up with more science vocabulary. The gang at Nirmukta have put together a long dissection of Lanza’s bad physics, well worth a read.

The privilege of authority

Peter Watts is a biologist and a science fiction author who combines the two beautifully — watch his fictional presentation on vampires to a pharmacology group to see what I mean. He’s also a Canadian who was driving from the US to his home in Toronto when he was assaulted by American border guards, apparently provoked by his temerity in asking why they were rummaging through his luggage. You can read Watts’ account of the episode, or the story on BoingBoing, and Making Light, but the bottom line is this: a writer was beaten, pepper-sprayed, arrested, and threatened with two years in jail for the crime of asking questions of police…of demanding accountability and an explanation from officials of the law. He was not interfering or hindering their work, but he was requesting what we ought to minimally expect from the police: a legal justification for their actions.

I know that some people are going to rush to defend the border guards, and Patrick Hayden has already addressed this: don’t bother. There is no defense of their actions. Watts is a big nerd, not a violent thug, and any provocation he might have offered would have been physically non-threatening, and the border guards should be constrained by the law and by an expectation of civility. They don’t have any such restraint. My general experience with US border guards is that they are privileged, sneering goons who feel entitled to treat citizens of both countries with contempt. When we cross the border, we should be expected to comply with the law…but we should not be required to cower and cringe, nor should we accept any demand of the guys with guns without question. The commenters at Watts’ blog who are insisting that it’s Watts’ fault because he was obviously insufficiently subservient have got it all wrong — they’ve already given up their freedom for fear.

I’m going to be giving a talk in Winnipeg in January, and the only thing I don’t look forward to is dealing with the paranoid jerks at the border again.