Africa: our past, perhaps our future

The story about the ranking of evolution support in Western nations did not include any data on Africa. America’s standing might have looked a little better if it did; the news from Kenya is not good. Evangelical churches want to suppress the Kenya national museum’s fossil collection. This includes some of the most impressive examples of humankind’s ancient history, such as multiple australopithecine specimens and Turkana Boy; it’s arguably one of the world’s foremost collections of hominid fossils. This is where many of Richard Leakey’s finds are stored.

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Read the freakin’ paper!

Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House is moved to complain about the declining understanding of science in our country, which is a good start. Waking up the wingnuts to the fact that science is doing poorly in the US is a good thing, far better than the usual science denial we get from that side of the political divide. However, he takes exception to the idea that a good part of the blame belongs to the religious and to the far right. Instead, he blames the failure on schools run by Democrats.

It goes without saying that those school systems — mostly located in large cities and the rural south — don’t need a belief in God to keep them from understanding evolution. All they need is local government (run by Democrats for the most part) to run the schools so incompetently that students can graduate while lacking the scientific fundamentals.

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Good. Bad. They’re the ones doing the hosting.

The Tangled Bank

Tangled Bank is coming up, to be hosted at the FrinkTank. This could be interesting; we usually don’t have any guidelines beyond that the topic of the submitted articles relate to science, but the frinksters will be giving special preference to “submissions that contain curse words, gratuitous nudity, or general bad taste“. I was thinking of sending in that one with the breast shot that met the standards of gratuity and bad taste, but I think we all want to forget that one.

Anyway, send your links in to the FrinkTank, to me, or to host@tangledbank.net by Tuesday.

Signs of the coming Cephalopocalypse

This could be a new feature here, rather like RaptureReady’s Rapture Index. I’m collecting omens and portents of the coming of our imminent doom at the hands suckers of the Tentacled Great Old Ones. It’s a race: will the cephalopods beat Jesus? A distinct edge goes to the squiddies—at least they’re real.

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As mentioned earlier, cephalopods are turning up in our nation’s rivers and highways.

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Martin Rundkvist reports that the Swedish Research Council’s new outreach magazine is called…Tentakel.

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Majikthise reveals that the cephalopods have conquered the Moon. (Oh, and here’s a much prettier carving).

Our current Cephalopocalypse Alert Level: 6.7, Glass. Marine molluscs are taking advantage of modern science, beware of strange people in lab coats that have too many arms.

Is incompetence an act of God?

An Alabama church collapses on a Thursday night; fortunately no one was hurt. As we’ve come to expect, a god gets credit, never mind that maybe a truly beneficent god would have prevented the collapse in the first place.

“Thank God nobody was hurt,” Pastor Jeff Carroll said. “He chose to let it come down on a Thursday evening when nobody was there.”

This story has an additional twist, though. Why did the church collapse?

The congregation and volunteers designed and built the new church apparently without filing plans or gaining approval from local or state entities. Carroll, himself a homebuilder, said he was not aware of any requirements and remains unconvinced a government body should have a say in how a church is built. “If the state and the church are separate, I don’t understand why they think they’ve got jurisdiction,” he said.

It seems to me that houses built on faith lack any substantial means of support, as this little story illustrates. I’m a little bit sympathetic with Pastor Carroll’s position, though: let’s remove churches from all secular oversight and impose no demands or restrictions on their construction, except that in the spirit of fair warning we should require large signs be posted all around them, announcing the hazard but reassuring congregants that god himself is holding the building up. That’ll drive everyone with a lick of sense away from them, and those consenting adults (we’ll have a new reason to forbid the attendance of children!) who believe in ghosts propping up the bricks…well, they’ll be removed from the population one way or another.

I wonder if any insurance companies in Alabama have been alerted to the construction standards of Jeff Carroll homes?

Put the blame where it belongs: God and the Republican Party

We are so screwed.

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That’s the result of a new survey of people’s attitudes toward evolution. Notice where the United States lies: nearly dead last. We beat Turkey.

There was more to this study than just asking whether a person agreed with the statement that “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” They also collected other data on age, gender, education, genetic literacy, religious belief, attitude toward life, attitude toward science and technology, belief in science and technology, reservations about science and technology, and political ideology, and carried out a statistical analysis to determine the relative contribution of these variables to ignorance about evolution.

I’m sure you can all guess what the number one biggest obstacle to accepting evolution was.

The total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitude toward evolution (using a standardized metric) was nearly twice as much in the United States as in the nine European countries (path coefficients of -0.42 and -0.24, respectively), which indicates that individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God and who pray frequently were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true than adults with less conservative religious views.

The number two problem?

Second, the evolution issue has been politicized and incorporated into the current partisan division in the United States in a manner never seen in Europe or Japan. In the second half of the 20th century, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as a part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in southern and Midwestern states—the “red” states. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in seven states included explicit demands for the teaching of “creation science”. There is no major political party in Europe or Japan that uses opposition to evolution as a part of its political platform.

On the positive side, one factor that improves the acceptance of evolution is genetic literacy, and the authors advocate improved science education in our public schools. We need it, desperately.

It appears that many of these adults have adopted a human exceptionalism perspective. Elements of this perspective can be seen in the way that many adults try to integrate modern genetics into their understanding of life. For example, only a third of American adults agree that more than half of human genes are identical to those of mice and only 38% of adults recognize that humans have more than half of their genes in common with chimpanzees. In
other studies, fewer than half of American adults can provide a minimal definition of DNA. Thus, it is not surprising that nearly half of the respondents in 2005 were not sure about the proportion of human genes that overlap with mice or chimpanzees.

Nick Matzke has more to say on this part of the work)

Despite the good suggestion about improving education, the paper ends on a grim and pessimistic note. Like I said, we are so screwed.

The politicization of science in the name of religion and political partisanship is not new to the United States, but transformation of traditional geographically and economically based political parties into religiously oriented ideological coalitions marks the beginning of a new era for science policy. The broad public acceptance of the benefits of science and technology in the second half of the 20th century allowed science to develop a nonpartisan identification that largely protected it from overt partisanship. That era appears to have closed.

Hmmm. I wonder what the Discovery Institute thinks of all this. Let’s ask Bruce Chapman!

“A better explanation for the high percentage of doubters of Darwinism in America may be that this country’s citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field,” Chapman said. “In particular, the growing doubts about Darwinism undoubtedly reflect growing doubts among scientists about Darwinian theory. Over 640 have now signed a public dissent and the number keeps growing.”

I think the study shows precisely the opposite effect. Americans are being rolled in large numbers by an ideological ‘elite’ nested in our churches and in the Republican party—the reason we are falling so far behind in our understanding of the biological sciences is that political and religious authority figures are lying to the people and fostering ignorance, and Americans are dumbly falling for it…and the more ignorant they are, the more they depend on those false authorities.

Americans aren’t second to last because they are “famously independent.” They’re failing biology because they’re god-soaked sheep, and the Republican party has exploited that failing.

By the way, I am quoted on Fox News on this one. That feels…strange.

Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.