Florida and Texas going at it

There are some rational people in Florida, as Robyn Blumner’s column makes clear. Not only does she mock Texas for their foolish harrassment of Christine Comer, but she goes on to point out the disastrous consequences of Republican religious meddling, and that Huckabee is going to be more of the same.

Here is something scary-ignorant. Last week, the Web site ChristiaNet.com, which bills itself as “the world’s largest Christian portal,” cheered the results of a survey it took finding that half of its 1,400 Christian respondents said that dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth at the same time.

Putting aside that the schoolteachers of these people should be slapped silly, these are Huckabee’s peeps. We can’t afford to put this kind of backward thinking and scientific illiteracy in the driver’s seat again.

That also highlights one of the sources of the problem: that these Christwits are proud of their ignorance.

And speaking of Chris Comer, the TEA education commissioner, Robert Scott, has spoken up. It’s nothing new, but is what you’d expect: denial. He claims there are no litmus tests for political ideology at the TEA, and that religion is irrelevant, and that Comer had a history of personnel problems that lead to her dismissal.

Here are the concluding questions of the interview, where it all gets very confusing.

Was her advocacy of evolution over creationism an element in her dismissal?

She wasn’t advocating anything. My understanding is that the e-mail she forwarded – let me rephrase that. She wasn’t advocating for evolution. But she may have given the impression that … we were taking a position as an agency – not as an individual but as an agency – on a matter.

She wasn’t advocating for evolution, OK. So why was she called into meetings to discuss the problem of forwarding this email, and why was she pressured by human resources to quit? And what “matter” caused the problem, then? I get the impression that Mr Scott is lying clumsily to obscure the actual issues involved.

And this, of course, is a good question:

Why shouldn’t the agency advocate the science of evolution? Texas students are required to study it.

I don’t think the impression was that we were taking a position in favor of evolution. We teach evolution in public schools. It’s part of our curriculum. But you can be in favor of a science without bashing people’s faith, too. I don’t know all the facts, but I think that may be the real issue here. I can’t speak to motivation but … we have standards of conduct and expect those standards of conduct to be followed.

I don’t get the impression that the TEA is favoring evolution, either, more shame to them. The rest — accusation of faith-bashing and violated standards of conduct — is simply more desperate floundering to cover what is turning into a major gaffe by the creationists.

Dubious parentage

It would seem like sweet poetic justice if James Watson were found to be 1/8th African, but I’m afraid I don’t quite believe it. This is news coming from a company called deCODE genetics, an Icelandic outfit that analyzes an individual’s racial background on the basis of various genetic markers. While I can buy the claim that they can assess the distribution of various alleles in populations, I really dislike the game of trying to work in reverse and assign the fraction of a race to an individual.

I don’t think Larry is much impressed with them, either. Here’s another article that brings up the flaws.

The problem is compounded by the increasing improbability of the company’s claims. Watson is also 9% Asian. He’s got a 31% lesser chance than average of getting asthma, and a 2% greater chance of prostate cancer. These kinds of numbers are meaningless when applied to individuals. We don’t even know all the genetic factors that contribute to the various diseases listed, so it’s ludicrous to pretend they can quantify the total risk for a single person that way. While I’ve got no problem thinking there are shared alleles percolating through African and European populations, there are much more reliable ways of determining that a person has an African great grandparent.

(via Accidental Blogger)

The Church of Hate

Would you care to attend Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church for a morning? Philip Bloom has a short documentary in which he used a hidden camera in the Phelps compound. It’s as you might expect: raging howls of a sermon, condemnations and hatred, people hoping that millions of others die and go to hell. Phelps has 13 children (11 of whom are lawyers!) and 54 grandchildren, and looking around the pews there can’t be many more attendees than that.

The end is particularly disturbing when two of Phelps’ teenaged granddaughters come up to regurgitate the very same hate speech at the reporter. It’s also kind of creepy because they look so alike, and like Shirley Phelps Roper, and Fred Phelps … just how inbred are these people?

I’m afraid, though, that there’s a little interlude in the middle with a liberal minister in Topeka, and she’s saying with such certainty the usual platitudes about how god is love and he wouldn’t countenance Phelps’ activities, etc., and I found that just as offensive as Phelps’ screeching about god’s nature and desires. They’re both ignorant, and they’re both saying what they think their congregation wants to hear.

Assessing email

Here’s a useful formula devised by Jessa to evaluate creationist hate mail, called the Creationist Rant Absurdity Phenomenon Index:

CRAP Index = M + 10(µ + Ω + I) + 10(F + σ + ρ) + (H)(1.0 x 106)

Where:
M = number of words in all capitals
µ = number of misspelled words
Ω = number of superfluous quotes around words or phrases
I = number of exclamation points
F = number of factually incorrect statements
σ = number of times the words “Darwinist,” “evolutionist,” etc. are used (double points for “evilutionist”)
ρ = number of insults
H = number of statements that the recipient is going to/will burn in/will rot in Hell

Somebody needs to code up a mail plug-in that will automatically score incoming mail for me…although I fear that F, σ, and ρ are probably difficult for software to recognize at this point. I also think there ought to be extra points for sequential exclamation points. Maybe we need a simplified index that is machine-calcuable.