They have a real talent there

Has anyone else noticed that you often only need to read the first sentence of anything written at Uncommon Descent to see them screw up royally? Especially, lately, if the author is Denyse O’Leary. Take this, for example.

Textbooks often don’t discuss extinction — the death of all members of a species — in any detail.

That’s news to me. I opened up my intro biology text, which is more a philosophy and history of biology book, and found 23 pages dedicated to discussing extinctions. It’s been my experience that most textbooks will mention at least the Permian and K/T extinctions; they’ll include quite a bit of material on modern extinctions; and they’ll always discuss mechanisms of extinctions. It’s as if these people have never even cracked a biology book, yet feel perfectly comfortable in declaring precisely what’s inside.

Even weirder, O’Leary goes on to quote a section from David Raup’s excellent book, Extinction (damn those evilutionists: they’re always trying to hide the facts by writing books with titles that say exactly what they’re about. Douglas Erwin also has a book titled Extinction — we’re trying so hard to avoid discussing in any detail these subjects, you see.) Raup wrote a book in which he documented the importance of chance events in evolutionary history, arguing that some major events, such as extinction in the face of overwhelming environmental trauma, are not something that any lineage can adapt itself to — some events really are just unpreventable accidents. He also carefully explained that because many major processes are driven entirely by chance, that does not mean that selection is false or doesn’t occur. Evolution has a plurality of mechanisms. O’Leary quoted a paragraph of that, and here’s her take.

In his day, Raup was taking a big risk by even suggesting that Darwinism might not be true, so he wisely merely provides facts that dispute it — and then covers his tracks with a resounding promotion of Darwinism in areas of study that he does not actually address in his book in any detail.

Wha…? That’s simply insane. David Raup was most definitely not suggesting that evolution by natural selection (which is what I presume she means by “Darwinism”) was not true, nor did any of the facts he describe in the book in any way dispute the role of selection. Raup is not in any way on O’Leary’s side. He is not a cunning stealth creationist writing a book to rebut evolution, and hiding his motives in a few false testimonials — he’s an evolutionary biologist, his book supports evolution, and the reason he’s explaining that extinctions don’t refute natural selection is because they don’t, as anyone with a sliver of reading comprehension would be able to tell you after reading his book.

Here’s the other amazing thing about the creationists’ output. The first sentence is stupid and patently wrong, but they always manage to get even stupider as you read deeper.

Congratulations, Canada!

Canadians always make such a fuss about being distinct from their southern neighbor, but you know it’s all a pretense. They want to be just like the US, they admire and respect us so much. And here’s the evidence: they’re getting rid of the position of science advisor to their government. Just like the United States of America … who needs reality-based advising on some of the most important issues of the age? Oh, sure, the Canadian scientists are unhappy about it, but the wailing and lamentations of American scientists are everywhere, too, and who cares? And it seems Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is an evangelical Christian himself … just like all of our national leaders.

Look on the bright side: it means unity. We are forming one great northern continent, unified in our ignorance, led by uninformed dumbasses. Brothers and sisters to the north, welcome!

Books that make you dumber?

I don’t think so. Virgil Griffith pulled out the top ten books read by students at various universities (it turns out Facebook collects that data for you), and then tried to correlate that with the average SAT/ACT score of each university. The result is a mess. You might be able to say that schools with low admission standards are more likely to have students who read the Bible and Fahrenheight 451, while the universities with the higher academic reputation are more likely to have students reading Lolita and Ayn Rand, but the overall distribution is more suggestive of chance — there is large, diverse pool of books read by university students, and facebook is plucking out a nearly random subset.

The display leaves a lot to be desired, too. What does the size of the lozenges mean? Standard deviation? I’d need to see something about the actual numbers for each book, too — how many universities have The Grapes of Wrath in their top ten, and how many students is the sample based on? A small college with only a few students on Facebook is a situation that is readily skewed.

I’m only mentioning this to torment you all, so you can stare at this chart trying to make sense of it as long as I did.

Talk radio for the godless

Remember: listen to the Minnesota Atheists radio program on Air America, tomorrow morning at 9am central time.

Topics tomorrow include Huckabee, an interview with Robert M. Price, and yours truly (with Kristine Harley) in a Moment of Science. We’re going to be discussing useful references for evolution; the segment has been lengthened, so there may actually be time for you to call in.

Please, though, call in with sincere questions — time is limited, and comments, no matter how complimentary, eat up minutes, and whiny creationists who think it’s clever to eat up time with tedious, self-important fussing will be cut off.

Carnivalia and an open thread

Hey! Carnivals!

  • Accretionary Wedge #5. Rocks? How can they possibly find enough to write about rocks?

  • Carnival of Space #38. Space? Even worse. It’s mostly nothing!

  • I and the Bird #67. Birds? They’ve been at this for 67 weeks and there’s still more to be said about beaks, wings, and feathers?

  • Friday Ark #175. It’s almost all cats, so obviously this is the B-Ark, and they’re being loaded up along with all the hairdressers, insurance salesemen, and telephone sanitizers.

An exemplary Christian science fair project

It’s getting to be about that time: science fair season. I’ll remind you all that we have an infamous local event, the Twin Cities Creation Science Fair, in which real live homeschooled creationist kids will present their experiments at the Har Mar Mall, on 16-17 February. I’m hoping to make it this year, but I’ve got a lot of other traveling to do that week, so I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it…if I do, though, I’ll let you know.

Because I have to deal with this all the time, I’ll also remind everyone that the Objective: Ministries Creation Sciende Fair page is a satire, OK?

This, however, is real: Possummomma finds a lovely example of Christian “science”. A sixth-grader in her area decided to test the hypothesis that “unchristians” are less moral than Christians with a questionnaire — a badly done questionnaire. Some amusing bits: the student had his subjects report on their amoral behaviors, and didn’t keep their answers anonymous. Cool. That could add some fun to a community event.

The other amusing thing is the conclusion: everyone failed the morality test. The answer, then is that we are all sinners, so we’d better become Christians.

The kid ought to come on up to Minnesota — he’d fit right in.