An epidemic of quackery, that is. Shame on CNN for allowing this babbling to go on. The producer of their medical news wrote an absurd anecdote, a story that reveals his credulity.
I’ve just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin’s pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel’s genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn’t yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it’s a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks right up there with bumblebees can’t fly, rockets won’t work in a vacuum, and no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM…he specifically predicts that ‘Darwinism’ will be dead and abandoned within ten years, by 1910.
Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past. A few decades hence when people will look back upon the history of the doctrine of Descent, they will confess that the years between 1860 and 1880 were in many respects a time of carnival; and the enthusiasm which at that time took possession of the devotees of natural science will appear to them as the excitement attending some mad revel.
The Strange Maps blog (a very interesting browse, if you like peculiar maps) has a map illustrating the state of US evolution education in 2002. It’s not surprising; the Fordham Foundation regularly publishes detailed summaries of state science standards, and you can take a look at the data for 2005 and 2006, if you don’t mind getting a bit depressed. Now what we need to do, though, is reassess state standards and get everyone up to A+ performance. Florida is about to go through that wringer, under the thumb of the odious Cheri Yecke, who tainted our standards process here in Minnesota last time around. Minnesota is going to be going through a standards re-evaluation soon, too, without Yecke … maybe we can bring our standards up a bit more, too.
One other interesting feature of that link: most of the Strange Maps articles seem to get on the order of 10 comments. The evolution education map has over 400, with a painful number of loonies babbling against evolution. That’s another measure of our science education problem.
On a completely different note, another map at that blog caught my eye: a cartogram of the world’s population. It puts those Canadians and Australians in their place with respect to the U.S., but what’s that strange, huge mass bulging up in Europe and Asia? How dare they dwarf us!
(This post was causing some browsers to crash. Let’s see if browsers are happier if I hide it below the fold.)
A reader sent me a mild ethical problem, and asked that I put it up to get reader input. This isn’t a life-or-death sort of situation, but the kind of low-level, day-to-day aggravation with which we’re all familiar.
Those rascals at antievolution.org are like the Baker Street Irregulars of the evolutionary forces—they’re always doing the legwork to come up with interesting bits of data. Like, for instance, this wonderful example of hypocrisy/inconsistency at Uncommon Descent.
This is what Dembski spat out today, complaining about us manipulative elites (he really deserves a Pastor Ray Mummert Award for it, too):
“Framing,” as a colleague of mine pointed out, is the term that UC Berkeley Professor of Linguistics George Lakoff uses to urge Democrats that the public will agree with liberal policies if only the policies are described in different terms — “framed” in other words. Politics aside, framing is part and parcel with the condescension of our secular elite that the masses cannot be reasoned with and must therefore be manipulated.
And here’s what Grima DaveScot said last year:
I will remind everyone again — please frame your arguments around science. If the ID movement doesn’t get the issue framed around science it’s going down and I do not like losing. The plain conclusion of scientific evidence supports descent with modification from a common ancestor…
I am amused, and I shall deign to give you peons leave to chortle quietly, if you promise to be decorous about it and not go on too long. … … … that was long enough. Stop now, and go back to being mindlessly subservient.
He should be so proud — he has taken first place in the 2007 Jefferson Muzzle Awards. These are awards given for “egregious or ridiculous affronts to free expression in the previous year”, and little Georgie won it for:
For its unprecedented efforts of discouraging, changing, and sometimes censoring the reports and studies of government scientists in order to make them more supportive of political policies, a 2007 Jefferson Muzzle goes to… the Bush Administration.
It’s a well deserved honor. The description goes on to list several specific instances of Bush administration manipulation of scientific assessment, particularly in areas of climate and environment where scientific conclusions conflict with Republican bidness ties.
The title of this article is terribly misleading: “The Octopus that can open drink bottles”. I was thinking it would be so cool to have an octopus on your shoulder, and you hold up your beer bottle, and he reaches out an arm and twists the top off for you. And then you read a little further and discover that the little smart-aleck will only do it if you open it first and put some octopus food inside for it. I wouldn’t mind a bit of shrimp or crab bobbing about in my beer, but having to open the bottle first to put it in there defeats the whole purpose of carrying a bottle-opening octopus around with you.
I thought maybe I’d just have to train the octopus to like beer … but then I’d have to share, and just my luck I’d probably get an eight-armed lush. Having a clever beast around who’d probably figure out how to open the refrigerator and then crawls in and drinks all your beer seems like a bad idea.
I hesitate to mention this, but I seem to be the target of creationist humor. It’s not being targeted that I mind, but that the ‘humor’ is so lame and the photoshopping is so bad. I would have thought that I’d be an excellent subject for lampooning, being easily caricatured and having views outside the mainstream, so why are they so pathetic at it?
Never mind, I looked around the site a little more — it’s all that bad, a kind of ham-fisted exaggeration of creationist misconceptions that really only makes the creationists look foolish, on a par with Dembski’s clumsy attempts at a joke. Don’t they know that good satire has to build on some grain of truth about the subject?
I’m not really fond of the idea of categorizing atheists (you either are or aren’t, and the game of labeling is often a short step away from ranking, and then you’re on the slippery slope to the No True Atheist fallacy), but Hank Fox has an interesting comment that categorizes reasons for being an atheist. It’s relevant to that video of a mother reacting to her son’s ‘coming out’, though — one category is the “Rebel Atheist” who adopts the idea to piss off his mother.
Now let’s all aspire to be Awakened Atheists.
