BAD radio reminder

Our local evangelical radio station is about to dump a load of tripe on the Twin Cities. I’m going to be tied up in domestic duties for a while, but if anyone else wants to tune in to KKMS (short for Khristian Krap for Mendacious Scoundrels) in about a half hour, here’s the drivel you’ll get to hear:

5:00 Hour – “Understanding the Science of Creation”

Dick Fischer, Founder and President of the Genesis Proclaimed Association joins us to explain some of the scientific facts that support the creation story found in the book of Genesis.

I’m going to try to catch some of it, but 5-6 is family time today. It’s gotta be ripe, though.

Heh. I caught the first bit — this is turning out to be amusing. The guest started out by completely surrendering science to the scientists, saying that he had no problem with an old earth, and that he wasn’t going to argue with evolution. He’s still a loon, though: he claims that the book of Genesis is historically accurate in a literal sense. The DJs sound nonplussed, since he’s one of them, a biblical literalist, but he’s arguing for a different literal interpretation of the Bible.

You can practically hear the sizzle as their brains melt.

Do we care about Expelled anymore?

Apparently, a New York judge has upheld the injunction against the movie, so there will be no new showings, and DVD rights are in limbo.

The movie is dead anyway, so it doesn’t seem to be a significant decision. It’s not as if theater distributors are lined up clamoring for more copies of this stinker. Although, to be honest, I would like the rights cleared up, because the only way I’m ever going to see it is if I can rent the DVD from my local store.

Another reason to wear underwear at all times

Uh-oh. The creationist expectation of an abrupt transformation from one species to another has been demonstrated: the picture below is of a chicken egg that was cracked open to make a meal, and inside … a dead gecko. A bird giving birth to a reptile?

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Actually, no, sorry. A chicken giving birth to a lizard is the kind of thing creationists imagine that evolution predicts, but which would actually surprise and disturb scientists if it happened — we’d have to rethink a lot of genetics if a solid instance were documented.

In this case, there’s an alternative, if rather disgusting, explanation. The poor mother hen had a gecko crawl up her cloaca (probably in a pushy attempt to sell her insurance), die somewhere in the oviducts, and then got incorporated into the egg before the shell was laid down. The deposition of a calcium-containing shell is one of the last steps in egg production, so it’s possible…it would just take a very persistent suicidal gecko, or one that was profoundly lost.

Don’t tell Geoffrey Simmons — he’s been on a credulity junket lately, crowing about every functional adaptation, including the egg, as proof of purposeful design. I don’t know about you, but a system that muddles excretion with reproduction and that allows random lizards to crawl up your butt and squat in your oviduct doesn’t sound like great engineering to me.

Birth pangs of a police state

Minneapolis is hosting the Republican National Convention this summer, and that means we’re seeing an uptick in sleaze (you might want to avoid public restrooms when these guys are in town). The most bizarre part of it all is that the FBI is looking for villains in all the wrong places.

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant–someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort’s primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division’s website, is to “investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines.”

Vegan potlucks now fall within the definition of a terrorist cell, as defined by the US Attorney General? What are they going to do, threaten a mass assault by kumbaya-singing hordes in birkenstocks armed with lumps of tofu?

This is not about protecting citizens. It’s about silencing the expression of dissent, no matter how mild.

Happy Birthday, Laura King!

A few months ago, Laura King was riding a bus in Argentina with some nerd named Jeff Buckley, and they started talking about some weirdly amusing little blog called “Pharyngula”, which led to a long discussion of evolution, which led to a relationship*, which led to her now-boyfriend asking me to send her birthday greetings over the internet while she’s spending her special day working at a field station.

So…Happy Birthday, Laura King! May your every year make you smarter and wiser, and may you continue to contribute to human knowledge.

This brings back memories. Growing up in the Puget Sound area, every morning before school we would watch the local television clown, JP Patches, who would do jokes and skits and introduce cartoons. Every show would end with JP reading off the list of boys and girls who were having birthdays that day. I have become that noble clown now — it’s a good day for me.

*I hope. If I’m enabling some creepy internet stalker, I’ll feel awkward, for sure.

Britain has some wacky beliefs, too

Perhaps my fellow Americans feel a little dismayed at the news of all those young creationist school teachers…well, a recent poll in Britain showed that people have some awfully materialist opinions about god.

Only 1% of people think of God as female, with 62% considering God to be male, the online survey conducted earlier this month of 1,050 adults in Britain found.

Weird. So god has a penis, and a Y chromosome?

Some day, they’ve got to ask people some other details of god’s physical attributes. What shade is his skin color? What color eyes does he have? At his age, does he get regular prostate exams?

When you get bored of speculating on imponderable nonsensicals, you can take a second and crash their poll: do you believe in the supernatural? Yes is winning 60:40 right now.

Creationists in the American classroom

Here’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen all week (and I’m grading genetics exams): it’s the result of a national survey of high school biology teachers.

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At least 16% of our high school teachers are young earth creationists. Furthermore, 12% our our teachers are using biology classes in public schools to teach creationism in a positive light. The majority are still pro-science, but even in the good cases, relatively little time is spent on teaching evolution.

The news isn’t all bad. One constructive discovery is that it is neither legal battles nor demanding state standards that determine how much effort is put into teaching evolution — it’s how much education the teachers have in the subject. The obvious lesson is that we ought to be encouraging more coursework for teachers; help educate the teachers, give them more material they can use in the classroom, and the students benefit.

Here’s the conclusion of the paper, which lays it all out very clearly.

Our survey of biology teachers is the first nationally representative, scientific sample survey to examine evolution and creationism in the classroom. Three different survey questions all suggest that between 12% and 16% of the nation’s biology teachers are creationist in orientation. Roughly one sixth of all teachers professed a “young earth” personal belief, and about one in eight reported that they teach creationism or intelligent design in a positive light. The number of hours devoted to these alternative theories is typically low–but this nevertheless must surely convey to students that these theories should be accorded respect as scientific perspectives.

The majority of teachers, however, see evolution as central and essential to high school biology courses. Yet the amount of time devoted to evolutionary biology varies substantially from teacher to teacher, and a majority either avoid human evolution altogether or devote only one or two class periods to the topic. We showed that some of these differences were due to personal beliefs about human origins. However, an equally important factor is the science education the teacher received while in college. Additional variance is likely to be rooted in pressures–subtle or otherwise–emerging from parents and community leaders in each school’s community, in combination with teachers’ confidence in their ability to deal with such pressures given their knowledge of evolution, as well as their personal beliefs.

These findings strongly suggest that victory in the courts is not enough for the scientific community to ensure that evolution is included in high school science courses. Nor is success in persuading states to adopt rigorous content standards consistent with recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and other scientific organizations. Scientists concerned about the quality of evolution instruction might have a bigger impact in the classroom by focusing on the certification standards for high school biology teachers. Our study suggests that requiring all teachers to complete a course in evolutionary biology would have a substantial impact on the emphasis on evolution and its centrality in high school biology courses. In the long run, the impact of such a change could have a more far reaching effect than the victories in courts and in state governments.

For the Australian readership

I got a request to try and drum up some Australian research subjects for a student’s honors thesis work — don’t worry, no knives, exotic drugs, or electrodes are involved, just filling out a short questionnaire. She’s looking for Australians who read blogs but don’t have blogs of their own, which sounds like a rather limited pool, but let’s see how many such beings there are.

Do you have a favourite blogger that you want to talk about?

I am an Honours student from the University of Queensland, Australia and I am conducting an email-based survey that looks at the experiences that blog readers have with their favourite bloggers.

To take part in this research you cannot be a blogger yourself and you cannot know the blogger offline.

AND

Please note that for ethical and legal issues you MUST be 18+ years of age and an Australian Citizen to partake in this research

If this sounds like you and you would like to participate in this original and exciting research project then please email Bo at:

s4029966@student.uq.edu.au

Participation is until August 2008
All inquiries are very much appreciated!

Scars

Hank Fox is starting one of those memes: this one asks us to tell the story of a scar.

Tell the story of a (non-surgical) scar you have somewhere on your body. Answer and tag three other bloggers.

Alas, I am a pampered child of the middle class, and I don’t have much of a history of trauma and injury. I’ve got a couple of small slashes on my forehead from when I was a toddler, when I had a series of unfortunate accidents falling headfirst onto coffee tables. My knees were shredded in typical childhood accidents. I’ve got a massive appendectomy scar that gets admiring comments from doctors when I go in for checkups — most appendectomies nowadays involve teeny-tiny incisions and don’t demand a hemisection of the abdomen. That’s about it. Boring, I know.

There is one other hairline scar on my left hand, but I already described that. Does a self-inflicted incision with a scalpel count as non-surgical?

Now I’m supposed to tag three other people…wait, I’m supposed to ask some strangers to tell me about their scars? If you did that at a party it would be considered hopelessly rude. To reduce personal culpability, I just punched my magic blogroll randomizer and it spat up three urls: Neurodudes, Amygdala, and Unfogged. Surely somebody in that mob has a notable scar, but if you’d rather not talk about it, that’s fine. And please don’t feel obligated to show us any.