Can someone tell me why gods are so obsessed with wee-wees?

How confusing: remember the story about the convert to Judaism who was trying to compel his adolescent son to be circumcised? I was persuaded by others that the story was almost certainly an urban legend, but now it turns out that there really is a pending court case that fits the particulars. The Oregonian reports the details, but leaves out the names of those involved (the accusation that this was faked was in part based on the similarities of the names to those in a work of fiction with a similar premise; could it be that the fictional names were used because they fit the story?) In addition, they have a quote from an Oregon lawyer defending the father’s right to put his kid through unnecessary cosmetic surgery.

But Julie H. McFarlane, a supervising attorney with the Portland-based Juvenile Rights Project, said that the child’s consent for a medical procedure is not required until he turns 15.

“I think the dad has the legal right as the custodial parent to make those kind of religious or medical decisions,” McFarlane said. “It’s not much different from cosmetic surgery.”

15??? Now they tell me, after my daughter turns 16. Maybe threats to carry out random weird cosmetic operations on her would have been a useful tool for getting her to do the dishes. Now she’s just going to roll her eyes and tell me she won’t sign the consent form, darn it.

I do wonder what has happened to the Hippocratic Oath, though. What doctor would carry out such unnecessary surgery if the child or mother were opposing it? Or is Dad just going to find some quack rabbi who will hack it off under the protection of his synagogue? That’s one easy way around ethical considerations — find someone who will use the imagined word of a god to justify violating them.

Maybe Satan just likes a good enchilada?

We’ve finally found something crazy enough to make a Utah Republican to back away. One of their district chairmen, Don Larsen, has proposed an interesting resolution.

“In order for Satan to establish his ‘New World Order’ and destroy the freedom of all people as predicted in the Scriptures, he must first destroy the U.S.,” his resolution states. “The mostly quiet and unspectacular invasion of illegal immigrants does not focus the attention of the nations the way open warfare does, but is all the more insidious for its stealth and innocuousness.”

Whoa … he’s got Satan herding Mexicans across the border, a contention supported by Scripture, apparently (chapter and verse, please?)! To their credit, the Republican party seems to be a bit embarrassed by it all, but it still exposes this terrifying undercurrent of outright wacky theology that is lurking beneath us here.

(One thing I like about the SL Tribune site I linked above is that their comments have a reader scoring system, and the comments that try to endorse Larsen’s crazy rationale are getting lots of thumbs down. That’s somewhat reassuring — the literate sector of the culture is strongly against blaming Satan for social ills.)

What is a diploma worth?

Larry Moran thinks we need more rigorous admission requirements, and Donald Kennedy is not very happy with the state of creationist textbooks.

Kennedy is currently serving as an expert witness for the University of California Regents, who are being sued by a group of Christian schools, students and parents for refusing to allow high school courses taught with creationist textbooks to fulfill the laboratory science requirement for UC admission. After reading several creationist biology texts, Kennedy said he found “few instances in which students are being introduced to science as a process—that is, the way in which scientists work or carry out experiments, or the way in which they analyze and interpret the results of their investigations.”

Kennedy said that the textbooks use “ridicule and inappropriately drawn metaphors” concerning evolution to discourage students from formulating independent opinions. “Even with respect to the hypothesis that dominates them—namely, that biological complexity and organic diversity are the result of special creation—critical thinking is absent,” he added.

[Read more…]

Information must be free

My little trip distracted me with the perfect timing to miss the amazing fair-use flare-up — I’m back just in time to catch the happy resolution. I guess I’ll say something anyway, but I’ll be brief.

The general question is whether blogs should be restrained from using figures and data published in scientific journals. My position is that we should use them — scientific information should be freely and widely disseminated, anything else is antithetical to the advancement of science. The only constraints I think are fair is that all material taken from a journal should be acknowledged and formally cited, and that dumping whole articles to the web should not be done. It wouldn’t be appropriate for our audiences anyway; we should be explaining and synthesizing, not blindly replicating.

I’m glad it has blown over for now, at least. Let’s hope journals continue to be sensible about letting blogs excerpt portions of published work—they have a specialized audience, we have a more general audience, and we hope that blogging about science will lead to more scientists, which will increase the market for the science journals. Everyone will be happy!

Back from Boston

Hey, I’m home again! To Boston and back again in 30 hours is a bit much, I’m afraid—I need a nap, but work awaits me.

We did have a brief gathering of science blog fans at Darwin’s this morning: Mark (whose last name I didn’t get…he can ‘fess up in a comment),
Revere (why isn’t everyone reading his blog?),
Blake Stacey, OM, and
Denis Castaing (Proud Atheist — he even gave me a big bold button that said “Atheist and Proud”) showed up and we chatted for about an hour and a half. Good people: only the smartest read Pharyngula, of course.

That button Denis gave me actually came in very handy. There’s a group, Youcanrunbutyoucannothide.com, that frequents the gas station in Sauk Center where I always fuel up. These guys are the Minnesota equivalent of the squeegee panhandlers—they run up and tell you they have a special full service offer at the gas station, they’ll fill it up for you and check your oil and clean your windshield, and then afterwards they shake a cup at you and ask for money. They’re very annoying, especially since their organization is simply a pseudo-“hip” front for anti-abortion, anti-drug, fanatical Christian baloney. Anyway, the guy in front of the station jumped up to run to my car as I stepped out, then he saw the button (which can be read from 20 feet away), and he stopped cold with his eyes bugging out. It was as good as a poleaxe, so I’m very appreciative.

Oh, another weird story from Boston: the trip was smooth and painless, except for the cab ride from the airport into the city. Did you know they have a weird accent in Boston? This driver had it worse than most, and he may also have been partly deaf. I told him, “Charles Hotel on Bennett Street in Harvard Square”, and he shouted back “HAHVAHD SQUA!” and off we went. We got to Harvard Square just fine, but then he’s driving around … “AH CAN’T FIND STATE STREET!” I was baffled, but he’s the cabbie, he must know the city better than I do, and maybe State Street is part of the route. Then he shouts out, “SHERATON?”, and I reply, loudly and clearly, “No, the Charles Hotel. On Bennett.” “STATE STREET!”

He pulls up along another cab, and asks, “WHEAH’S STATE STREET?”, and the other driver points off in some direction away from Harvard Square. We end up driving back and forth for 20 minutes, with the driver occasionally shouting, “SHERATON? STATE STREET!” and me yelling back, “NO—CHARLES HOTEL! BENNETT!” The next time the guy pulls up alongside another cab to ask directions to “STATE STREET!”, I open my window and am hanging half out of the cab, yelling, “HELP! TELL HIM HOW TO GET TO THE CHARLES HOTEL ON BENNETT!” There was a lot of finger pointing and handwaving, and the crazy cabbie got the car close enough that I could read the signs and get him to the hotel with gestures.

To add to the insult, when we finally got there he yelled, “CHAHLES HOTEL? YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME AT THE AIRPORT THE NAME OF YOUR HOTEL!”

I didn’t tip him.

I take it there isn’t much regulation of cab drivers in Boston?

Music for evilutionists

We have some musical talent among our readers. I was sent lyrics and a link to …

BRAINY PRIMATE BLUES words and music by Bruce Woollatt

Sometimes I wonder why
we ever left Olduvai.
It’s a mystery to me
why we didn’t stay in the trees.
Well a million years ago we should have thought the whole thing through
’cause a million years have gone and we’ve got those Brainy Primate Blues.

Listen to Brainy Primate Blues here.

Another tool for informing the public?

The Wellcome Trust has published a short pamphlet to inform young students about evolution. I haven’t had a chance to look at it carefully yet, but it looks like an interesting combination of a fairly wordy presentation and lots of color and flash. You can download a pdf of Evolution: The Big Picture for yourself; would it be a useful tool to catch student’s eyes and get the basics across to them?

Out of 16 pages, 4 are dedicated to the conflict between science and religion. It doesn’t come right out and say that religion is bad, and it even makes the usual waffley about how some scientists accommodate religion in their lives, but their point-by-point comparisons of how religion and science generates ideas come down hard on religion, and they do pin the blame for the creationist antipathy to evolution on religion. It’s not exactly ferocious on the subject, but at the same time it would cause an uproar if it were distributed in US public schools, I’m afraid.