Shelley started it.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
And Federal Way is feeling its sting right now.
The kooks who promote foolish ideas are one target for ridicule, and this Frosty Hardison character is a prime example. He’s got a reply to the Seattle PI article that exposed him; it’s a MS Word file that doesn’t help his case. It starts off with a collection of bogus complaints about climate science, and just gets weirder and weirder. Here are a few choice bits.
Grrlscientist asked me for a blue cephalopod the other day, and what do we all think of when blue cephalopods come up? Blue ringed octopuses, of course. So lovely, and so deadly.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
This will blow you away. Watch the video and spot the octopus—it’s like magic.
(via Skeptic News)
Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views.
It looks to me like being a fundamentalist means you’re about half as likely to believe in evolution as a non-fundamentalist of the same level of education and place on the political spectrum. The majority of fundamentalists of any kind (except the liberal ones with a grad school education; I wonder how many of those there are) reject evolution. To get a majority of conservatives to accept evolution, you have to drag them through grad school and make sure they aren’t fundamentalists.
It’s not surprising that fundamentalism puts such a strong damper on evolution, but it is surprising that political conservatism would do likewise. That, I suspect, is a consequence of the strong association between the religious right and Republicans in this country, and I have to wonder whether conservatives who reject religion completely are as screwed up as this sample indicates, and if conservatives from other countries would do as poorly.
One problem I have with these data, though, is there is no indication of the sample size in each category. It’s taken from a total of 3673 respondents, but I rather suspect that the liberal-fundamentalist category was significantly smaller than the conservative-fundamentalist group in raw numbers, so that, for instance, there are actually many more fundamentalist grad students who disbelieve evolution than believe it.
The chart also shows that a college education has a negligible effect on fundamentalist’s belief in evolution, but what we don’t have here is any data on what kind of college education we’re talking about. The fundamentalists may have mostly attended a bible college that reinforces their ignorance for all we know, and they may have had a very different experience than the non-fundamentalists, who would have been more likely to attend a secular school.
The association of anti-evolutionism with conservatism is not a particularly reassuring trend to me. Despite being liberal myself, I think the acceptance of good science ought to be independent of political affiliation; the data says it isn’t. The chart is about belief in evolution, and that’s a good word for it—if you are saying you agree that humans evolved from earlier species of animals because your political views say you should, you may not be evaluating the evidence rationally…or perhaps liberals are simply more receptive to education.
Mazur A (2007) Disbelievers in evolution. Science 315(5809):187.
This is a concrete image of biology’s future under the Intelligent Design creationists: it would be dissolved by fiat.
If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn’t get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new “Department of Biological Engineering”; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new “Department of Nature Appreciation” (didn’t Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?).
Dembski’s ignorance of biology departments apparently rivals his ignorance of biology. I don’t know what he means by “engineering”, but I know a fair number of physiologists who will go on and on about Reynold’s numbers and force-structure relationships and other such esoterica…and every single one of them is an evolutionist.
I think they already understand the problem, but such a vivid example of creationist lunacy will be very useful in discussions with my colleagues.
I reported on this survey of people’s attitudes towards evolution, in which the US was second to the worst. We beat Turkey. The point was to emphasize the poor shape of US education, but it unfairly made fun of Turkey … imagine, though, how awful it would be to be in their shoes. This week’s issue of Nature has a letter from several Turkish scientists describing their plight and what they are doing to fight it; I’ve put it below the fold.
Gary Farber of Amygdala is in a crisis, both financially and in his health. This is such a waste: Gary is one of the all time great online raconteurs with a long history of bloggy productivity and the respect of swarms of other internet personalities. If someone were setting up a weblog franchise similar to scienceblogs, they ought to snap him up to anchor their site—he’s that good. And at this point, the tiny amount he’s asking for means he’ll work for cheap.
Help him out however you can. And if you’re looking for an interesting and provocative commentator, hire him!
I remember Federal Way! It was just up the hill from where I grew up, and although it was never a destination of interest, we would pass through its majestic strip malls on the way to Dash Point or Saltwater State Park. Now Federal Way is in the news as a haven for a few wingnuts. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised, but this one does express a point of view I find both novel and incoherent.
They’re protesting the showing of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth in the schools up there. I could understand the complaints if they were objecting to the presentation of a partisan campaign film for a presidential candidate (there is a bit too much of that in the movie), but they don’t—they never seem to find that angle troubling. Instead, the vomit all over the science, the part that’s pretty darn good and unobjectionable.
One of the lesser diaries on Daily Kos is calling for a boycott of Scienceblogs and is asking readers to email the gang at Seedmedia and tell them to spank one of our colleagues here. All this because Dr Charles thinks John Edwards is a piss-poor presidential candidate. Now I happen to disagree on Edwards worth as a candidate, but I do agree with some of the criticisms: Edwards sure is awfully rich, and good lawyerly arguments are often very, very bad scientific arguments. But anyone who had actually read much of Charles’ site would know that he’s a liberal humanist who actually wants Barack Obama for president, a candidate I detest about as much as he does Edwards. Will I be censured by dKos for that? I guess I can kiss my chances of being invited to speak at YearlyKos ever again goodbye.
One of the paradoxes of this medium, too, is that now that dKos has linked to Dr Charles, and I and the Mungers are chiming in, he’s probably going to get a little surge of traffic today. It would be a good idea for him to open that article to commenting, because he’d probably get a lot of vociferous arguments that might win more repeat traffic. I have the impression, though, that Dr Charles really isn’t into long, loud wrangles, which is probably why he didn’t open comments on it in the first place.
By the way, pestering the nice people at Seed about us is ineffectual and counterproductive. None of us were selected for our political views, and any liberal bias here is entirely a side-effect of the representation of conservative thought in America by a rather nasty know-nothing party of anti-science ignoramuses, which does tend to alienate people who favor science. If we were a country of Rockefeller Republicans and Shirley MacLaine Democrats, we’d have more blogs railing at the Democratic party (and if in continued political evolution, the two parties transformed themselves in that direction, I’d be among those railers.)
Also, think about it: if the management were malleable by the flow of complaints from people who were offended by some of the things we bloggers write, who do you think would be #1 on the chopping block? Not Dr Charles, that’s for sure; I think it would be a blog with a name that starts with a “ph” and ends with an “ula”, and “phlyctenula” is an icky subject name, and the “phylum Sipuncula” is poorly represented here.
