Cruel, cruel tease

If you’re like me, you are eagerly awaiting the release of Dawkins’ next book,
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and you’ve probably already put in your preorder at Amazon. It’s kind of like the anticipatory excitement for the Harry Potter books, only for hardcore geeks.

To whet your appetite, there is a short extract from chapter one available online. And alas, you have to wait until 22 September for the whole thing. We’ll have it read by the 23rd, right?

Want more? Here’s an excerpt from chapter two.

The educated/ignorant divide

This is a very interesting analysis of Unscientific America: the authors weren’t only shallow in identifying solutions to the problems they identified, they completely missed the big one. This is an informative chart.


American variation in science literacy is enormous. Data from Salzmann & Lowell (2008)

We’ve got a large number of science-literate students in the top-performing category (which is good), but the average is relatively low (not good). I know this is really obvious, but I have to say it anyway, since I’m afraid many Americans will read this: the only way that can happen is if there is a huge number of students who are also really, really bad at science. Our country has an educated/ignorant divide to match our ugly rich/poor divide.

Here’s a personal story to make the abstract real. It’s back-to-school time in Florida, and the budget isn’t there.

Science teachers are feeling the pinch at Journeys Academy, Seminole’s new alternative school.

“My science teachers handed me three pages of things they’d like to have, but because of the hard budget times, we weren’t given an opening budget for science,” Principal Michael Icardi said.

That means a big need for “microscopes and balances and those types of things.” His team, Icardi said, will have to be “creative.”

If you don’t have the basics, if science teachers are told by their administrators that they have to replace essential tools with their imagination, it’s only going to get worse. If you want to fix science literacy in America, the answer isn’t going to come from the top with the training of a thousand Carl Sagans — we need to give a few tens of millions of students a decent lab experience, a little knowledge of critical thinking, and the intellectual tools to aspire to something better.

Jason Lisle and the everlasting fallacy argument

I must have really stung those poor fellows at the Creation “Museum”. They’ve added a new article in the Jason Lisle ouevre which takes a few silly slaps at me, and also perpetuates the image of Lisle as the most boring pedant ever. As usual, his schtick is always the same: he accuses everyone else of committing horrible logical fallacies, therefore, God. This one made me laugh, though. The fallacy du jour is the question-begging epithet, in which someone uses leading or insulting language in addressing a claim to discredit it.

As an example, he uses a quote from me…and I freely admit to having a thoroughly dismissive attitude towards their awful little sideshow (there, again, is the epithet; I won’t shy away from it). Here’s the sentence Lisle uses.

“The Creation ‘Museum’ isn’t about science at all, but is entirely about a peculiar, quirky, very specific interpretation of the Bible.”

The author provided no support for this opinion; it is simply an emotional reaction. He also attempts to deride the Creation Museum by putting the word museum in quotes. His claim is nothing but a fallacious epithet. When people use sarcastic/sardonic statements in place of logic, they commit the fallacy of the question-begging epithet.

That’s not an emotional reaction! That’s a calm statement of fact, and Lisle could have disputed it, but he never will. He can’t. Instead, everything said about his belief system will be instantly slotted into one of his categories of fallacies, so he can ignore it — and ignoring it means he doesn’t have to defend anything by, for instance, saying anything about any credible science behind flood geology, or showing that the fundamentalist Christianity that Answers in Genesis promotes is mainstream, or is independent of a narrow interpretation of biblical literalism. What I wrote is actually entirely factual.

Another common trick of these con-men is to avoid letting anyone see anything in context. He quotes a sentence from me, but doesn’t link to the article. Why would he do that? Because that article quotes directly from the web and publications by Answers in Genesis that shows everything in their view is built around…interpretation of the bible! I even titled the article, Answers in Genesis is proudly Bible-based. Do they dispute that?

Of course they, and especially Jason Lisle, will not ever deal with the substance of an argument. They will instead whine that they’ve been called mean names and run away. That’s what they do.

OK, so far you’re saying this isn’t very funny. Lisle is a drab, boring writer with one rhetorical trick in his book that he plays over and over. Here’s the funny part, though.

They’re claiming that their critics are just noisy brutes who portray the noble creationists, servants of god, in rude and obnoxious terms. They, of course, are entirely above that. They would never, ever stoop to emotional, nasty comments about their opponents. Why, that would be a logical fallacy.

So they chose to illustrate their article with a cartoon. Of me, apparently.

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Hypocrisy is a bitch, isn’t it?

I am so stealing that cartoon, though.

Small inspirations

A couple sent their child to Vacation Bible School (not recommended, not even for the most open-minded atheists — VBS is always an awful waste of time). I like this kid’s reaction.

One couple who said they were atheists decided to give their son a chance to attend one year. On the first day of VBS, when the teacher was explaining the concept of creation, the boy stood and up announced to the other kids, “That’s just a fairy tale.”

Unfortunately, the teacher then shut him up by saying god did it, but it’s a start.

A groundskeeper at a golf course recognized that a strange 10 pound lump of rock was something more: it was a mammoth tooth.

The recent high school graduate told The Grand Rapids Press he knew the tooth exposed by recent rains was from an extinct elephant because he paid attention in his science classes.

There is a science teacher in Michigan who should be proud right now.

Morality doesn’t equal God

Shorter Robert Wright: All we have to do to end the conflict between science and religion is convert the Christians to deists and get the scientists to pretend that evolution is teleological!

Who knew it would be so easy?

Unfortunately, from my perspective, knowledge is not one of those things on which one can compromise — you’ve either got evidence for something, or you don’t. We do not have evidence for purpose in evolution, and if anything, all the evidence is against the idea that evolution has a direction or that natural selection can be anything but an unguided response to local conditions.

Furthermore, his example doesn’t work. He’s all hung up on the “moral law”, and even cites C.S. Lewis. He wants to argue that the existence of morality, even if it isn’t derived from a god, is still an indication of the existence of a general directedness or overarching nudge from the laws of the universe, and therefore we should all just get along and accept this awesome pan-galactic force.

Nope, says I. First, there is no moral law: the universe is a nasty, heartless place where most things wouldn’t mind killing you if you let them. No one is compelled to be nice; you or anyone could go on a murder spree, and all that is stopping you is your self-interest (it is very destructive to your personal bliss to knock down your social support system) and the self-interest of others, who would try to stop you. There is nothing ‘out there’ that imposes morality on you, other than local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you’ve inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions.

Jerry Coyne has addressed the same silly op-ed at much greater length. It really is wrong all the way through, but as Coyne suggests, maybe Wright is just taking a practical approach to winning that lucrative Templeton prize. It’s not because the universe drives his argument, but because he too is responding in a self-interested way to local conditions.

Steve Anderson, hatemonger

Brace yourselves: Glenn Moon is plainly mentally ill, but what are we to make of Pastor Steve Anderson? He has a job, he has a congregation, people actually respect him…but if you go to that link, you will hear the most astonishingly deranged, hateful, creepy nonsense in his sermons.

It’s all bible-based, too. You can use that vile old book to support any evil you can imagine, I think.

Good ol’ American politics

Livonia, Michigan (Orac’s home town!) is having an election for city council. This is not newsworthy. What is amusing, however, is the candidacy of Glenn Moon, who is running on the issues of abortion, littering, and paying city employees a salary of $1 per year plus the love of Jesus Christ. He is remarkably passionate about killing babies, litter, and firing heathens.

I’ll be really curious to see how he does in the election. He’ll get some votes, guaranteed, but probably won’t get elected. Probably. Don’t rule him out, though. Who knows, he may be running for vice president of the US on a slate with Glenn Beck in 2012.