The latest Tangled Bank is available at Archaeoporn. The theme is … Ben Stein. Yeesh. That makes me feel a little queasy.
(By the way, there’s a glitch in the numbering. This one actually is the 100th edition.)
The Vatican wants to erect a statue to Galileo, which is ironic enough. But to put the cherry on top, they plan to place it near the cell where he was held during his heresy trial. Do you think they’re doing this as a sign of papal humility, a sort of grand, ornate slap to the forehead and admission that “boy, did we make a boner”? Somehow, I suspect arrogance plays a bigger role.
Will Smith’s last movie, I Am Legend, was apocalyptically bad — in particular, the ending was awful. Now Phil has the alternate ending that was filmed but not used — I agree with him that it’s not perfect, but it is immensely better, and is also a little closer to the spirit of the book.
All right, so she’s not a child any more, but she’ll always be my baby girl … and she doesn’t seem to think highly of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Does anyone?
(Yeah, she’s probably going to beat me up tonight for calling her a child. “So silly a mature 17 year old can see through it” just isn’t as punchy.)
This one is just too cute for words: a little girl summarizes Star Wars. The younger your eyes, the better that movie looks.
Uh, well, maybe this one isn’t appropriate for lunch. There’s nothing immediately off-putting about it, but it will sneak up on you. It made me laugh, anyway.
I despise him.
He’s an ignorant buffoon and a professional liar. I hate what he does in his attempts to corrupt public education, but as a human being, I find him simply contemptible.
I just had to set the record straight. He seems to be taking pride in who hates him, but there really is nothing there that elevates him to the level of hate-worthy; he’s just a sloppy ideologue who faked his way through a degree program.
A couple of small towns in Vermont passed an unenforceable law to declare Bush and Cheney criminals. I like it. Personally, I favor something more like Megan’s Law, in which Bush and Cheney would forever after be required to register with local law authorities where ever they go, with their names, photographs, addresses, and a list of their offenses made public. (I’m actually not a big fan of Megan’s Laws, but if we’re going to publicly track one kind of monster, I think far more wicked monsters should be subject to the same penalties.)
A Catholic bishop (of a weird breakaway sect, admittedly) has endorsed the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion and declared that Jews are conspiring to rule the world
.
Obviously, the man must be an evolutionist. Only through Darwin can one become a hateful racist.*
*Necessary disclaimer: obviously, I’m saying this with a sarcastic sneer.
I and a diverse group of people got a question in email, one that we are supposed to answer in a single sentence. The question is,
What is evolution?
You know, Ernst Mayr wrote a whole book to answer that question on a simple level, and I’m supposed to have the hubris to answer that in one sentence? OK, knowing full well that it is grossly inadequate, here’s my short answer:
Evolution is a well-confirmed process of biological change that produces diversity and coherent functionality by a variety of natural mechanisms.
Go ahead, you people try to answer it in one sentence in the comments. It’s harder than it looks, especially since I feel the itch to expand each word into a lecture.
By the way, when I say this question was sent to a diverse group of people, I mean a diverse group of people. One of them was the author of this book, and another was from this site, and you can imagine what their answers were. (Sorry, they were sent out with some expectation of confidentiality, so I can’t tell you them. Maybe they’ll notice all the traffic to their websites and share it with us.)
In the creation wars, we never really win one — we just shuffle the battlegrounds around. That’s the case in Florida, where the committee to write the state science standards recently approved the inclusion of evolution in their standards. We cheered. This is what’s supposed to happen when you get a team of competent people to put together the standards — you get results that reflect, to some approximation, the current understanding of science in our public schools.
But of course that could not stand. A group of conservative politicians are poised to meddle — they asked experts to give them the best answer, they didn’t like the answer, so now they’re going to pull some political strings to work out a way to ignore the answer.
After the vote, John Stemberger, the head of the Florida Family Policy Council, said social conservatives would push for an “academic freedom” measure when the Legislature convenes this month. Such a proposal would protect teachers who teach alternatives to evolution. House Speaker Marco Rubio — who wanted evolution taught as a theory — told the Florida Baptist Witness such a plan might gain traction in the house.
And Friday, State Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Brandon, filed just such a bill that would create an “Academic Freedom Act” and protect the right of teachers to “objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding chemical and biological evolution.”
The bill is much like the sample one posted on the website of the Discovery Institute, which advocates for Intelligent Design. And it is controversial because many scientists (and their backers) say there are no other “scientific views” about evolution, only religion-in-disguise beliefs.
Those labels. You just know that the “Florida Family Policy Council” is a far right wing group with a mission to promote ignorance — the word “Family” gives them away every time (and it is such a nice word, ruined by people who translate it to mean “social shackles”). “Academic freedom” is also being misused here. The teachers have a job to do, to present a certain minimal body of scientific information to their students; they have freedom to think and act and speak, but they also have obligations, and those obligations include not misleading their charges. Academic freedom does not equate to irresponsibility. One would think conservatives would be pushing bills to enforce academic competence and academic responsibility, not this dishonest nonsense of calling attempts to ramrod intellectual gobbledygook into our schools “freedom”.
And the wording of the bill doesn’t even make sense. The standards were commissioned to outline the range of scientific views and scientific information, so that’s already there — this bill wouldn’t be an escape clause, it would further reinforce the requirement that the material on the standards be taught. Creationism and it’s inbred cousin with airs, Intelligent Design, are not scientific views.
Oh, and do note the similarity between this act and the Discovery Institute’s recommendation, and further, look here:
On the day the state board voted, Stemberger called adding the phrase “scientific theory” a “meaningless and impotent change.”
A post on the Discovery Institute’s “evolution news and views” blog that same day used the same phrase to criticize the vote, saying it did nothing “to actually inform students about the scientific problems with evolution.”
The Discovery Institute’s grubby little paw prints are all over this one. That’s the mission of the DI: undermining scientific expertise with propaganda and political machinations.
