Help FCS out

Florida Citizens for Science is asking for your contributions to a rebuttal they’re working on. The organization got an op-ed published decrying the recent ID BS at the Sundome, and the local newspapers have published a series of replies that are stupefying in their ignorance. This should be easy.

One writer simply lies:

The scientific evidence for intelligent design would fill several editions of this newspaper. The scientific evidence for macroevolution, the formation of a new species by random mutation and natural selection (Darwinism), would not fill the period at the end of this sentence. The missing links are still missing.

Wow. Simultaneously claiming that there is no evidence for evolution while Intelligent Design creationism has lots is absurd: ID is not science, and the body of ID literature is negligible. There isn’t any published research on ID; these people tend to publish extended tracts, lacking any evidence.

That was the high mark of this series of letters. Here’s one that drools out one of the oldest canards in the book:

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is exactly what the name implies – a theory that has yet to be proven and will never be proven.

The writer doesn’t know what the word theory means, and has no glimmering of the volume of
evidence for evolution.

Finally, the newspaper published a whole column on the subject from someone named Guy Fisher, who doesn’t have a clue and merely parrots a list of scientists endorsing the existence of a controversy about evolution. It’s rank quote mining. For instance, he quotes fragments from SJ Gould, Colin Patterson, and Eugenie Scott to give the impression that they have or had serious disagreements with evolution, tosses in some crackpottery from Fred Hoyle, and then scrapes the bottom of the barrel with some guy named Louis Boundoure, the wingnut economist Paul Craig Roberts, and the Discovery Institute. It’s all common dishonesty.

Leave a comment at Florida Citizens for Science if you want to give them more ideas. It looks to me, though, that Florida creationists are a particularly stupid breed.

Carnivalia, and an open thread

Here are a few carnival announcements, but mainly what I’ve got is announcements of impending carnivals—there’s going to be a bunch coming out next week, I guess.

Discuss the imminent dissolution of the blogosphere into collections of links linking to other collections of links, which will lead either to irrelevance and destruction, or reach a critical level of self-reference that will generate consciousness as an emergent property. Or whatever else you feel like.

Bachmann profile

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I’ve been reading Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas?(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and then today I read the excellent profile of Michele Bachmann in the City Pages. Yikes. The similarities are terrifying. Bachmann is a clueless ideologue who has harnessed the power of the Religious Right to ride to political power on issues like discriminating against gays and promoting creationism; she’s the kind of candidate who preaches piety while legislating for the abolition of the minimum wage, exactly the sort Franks describes as wrecking Kansas while claiming to save its soul.

She’s in a tight race with Patty Wetterling in Minnesota’s Sixth district—this is the one I’ll be watching in November, and I sure hope this state doesn’t elect such an odious, sanctimonious fraud.

Friday Cephalopod: I’ve been there

The paternal view of childbirth is that you watch the mother struggle for hours, the child finally emerges, the midwife cleans him* up, hands him to you, and that’s when he unloads a bladder full of pee on you. This photo of a newly hatched bobtail squid’s first reflex reminds me of that…

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Euprymna tasmanica juvenile releasing ink on hatching.

Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

*Boys are the most obvious culprits, since when they cut loose they hose down your shirt; girls discreetly dampen their blankies.

Will this work?

The US has done wonderfully well in collecting Nobel prizes this year, but there’s no reason to be complacent. There’s a lot of momentum in our science establishment, the result of solid support for many years, but there are troubling signs that the engines of our advance, the young minds of the next generation, aren’t going to be propelling us as well. Take this report by science educators, for instance:

“We are the best in the world at what we do at the top end, and we are mediocre — or worse — at the bottom end,” said Jon Miller, of Michigan State University, who studies the role of science in American society.

[Read more…]

Mixed feelings

A revised curriculum at Harvard may include a required course in religion, as Jim Downey has brought to my attention. There isn’t enough information in the article to decide how to regard this decision, though; I don’t object automatically to requiring college kids to learn to think critically about religion, and I would hope that a course at Harvard wouldn’t be anything like a tutorial in Jebus-praising at Pensacola Christian College, but who knows? The summary is impossibly vague.

“I think 30 years ago,” when the school’s curriculum was last overhauled, “people would have said that religion is not something that everyone needs to know,” said Louis Menand, a Harvard professor and co-chairman of the committee that drafted the report. “But today, few would disagree that religion is supremely important to modern life.”

In the same way that knowledge of cholera and dysentery would be supremely important to a 19th century city dweller? It sounds like any of a number of courses would fit the requirement of discussing “the interplay between reason and faith“, so it doesn’t sound like much of a change to me…except, of course, that it would be treated as a PR coup by the religious.