Don’t delay, donate!

We have received most excellent news from Seed: notice that challenge bar to the left, where I (and many other science bloggers) are asking you to donate to public education? We’re doing great—my challenge has gathered over a thousand dollars so far, all to help out teachers and schoolkids—but now Seed has announced that they will match the total donations, up to $10,000. Double your money!

I’ve set a goal of raising $2000 for teachers, but I’ve got a dozen projects listed, and they’re going to need more than that if all are to be fully funded. If I hit the goal, don’t stop—you can keep contributing. Janet has a list of the other participants, too, so if you want to spread the joy around some more, check out the others.

Oh, and everyone should shout out, “Yay, Seed!” right now. It’s the right thing to do, even if it startles other people in the office or coffee shop.

It must be a universal property of creationists

Maybe I was too hard on Harun Yahya. As Wesley writes, plagiarism and theft are common practices among creationists—it’s even encouraged.

Authors such as George Macready Price and Henry M. Morris assembled many of the arguments together in various books. And, as I said, nobody cares if you steal it. In fact, others will be confused if you provide complete references and trace back claims to sources. That just isn’t done as a matter of course in this field, and, of course, it pays to pick up the social gestalt of your new career.

When among knaves and fools, do as they do.

Help teachers!

The scienceblogs crew is pushing a new charity for the next few weeks: an outfit called DonorsChoose, which collects funding requests from teachers and tries to match them up with people willing to pass along a few dollars. They have a long, long list of teachers looking for help in their classrooms; what we sciencebloggers have done is picked a subset of the requests that each of us like and grouped them into a challenge. My challenge contains a dozen science-related requests, and now my job is to beg you, the readers of Pharyngula, to take a look at them and if you can, kick in a few dollars to help them out.

If you look to the sidebar on the left, you’ll see a status bar showing how close we are to funding those requests. It’s at a pathetic 0% right now, but it would be nice to see it fill up.

I said that a lot of us here at scienceblogs are doing this; Janet has a complete list, so if you’d rather help out one of the other blogs meet their goal, please do. All that matters is that teachers get help, not which of us helps out.

Also, there will be a random drawing at the end of our efforts, and donors have a chance of winning various small tchotchkes. Again, Janet has the details, including the list of fabulous prizes.

Science swirling down the drain

Lots of stuff about the intersection of science and politics in the US today—here are three things to read over breakfast.

  • Bruce Sterling suggests that American science is experiencing creeping Lysenkoism, and reports that “the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues.” He predicts a rather grim end for our science and science policy.

    Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs. This process has already begun in bioethics, meteorology, agriculture, nuclear science, and medicine, but doubts will spread to “American science” generally.

    It’s not a happy piece. Read it anyway.

  • Chris Mooney is surprised at the longevity of the critiques of Republican “science”: he says that “a similar pattern–ignore experts, favor ideologues–has been followed by the administration on any number of other science issues, ranging from global warming to the morning after pill,” and seems most impressed by the fact that these problems are being pointed out, over and over again. Where Sterling sees looming disaster, though, Mooney sees some hope: not everyone is blind to what the Bushites are doing, and science policy is becoming an important issue.

    But now I realize something more: These questions are proof positive that those who are worried about the politics of science nurture their concern within a much broader context. These Americans are thinking: As science goes, so goes the nation. On some level, the science community has always known that. What’s new is that now, we have a heck of a lot of company.

    Now we just have to get all that company motivated to campaign and vote.

  • Darksyde discusses an bill to protect scientific whistleblowers, people who come forward to politicized, ideological tampering with the science coming out of our premier federal research institutions, like NOAA. As he says, “Once again, the GOP preferred to ignore reality and opt for wishful thinking”: it was killed by the Republicans. The author of the bill, Rep. Brad Miller, (D-North Carolina), was online responding to comments, if you’d like to hear straight from the source.

    I think Mooney is right, that the public can see the damage being done to our reputation and the erosion of America’s science and engineering skill set, but there’s the obstacle—as long as the Republicans are in power, we’re not going to be able to slow the destruction.

Coulter’s Godless: as bad as you knew it would be

A reader (who will be nameless, unless he wants to confess in the comments) sent me a chunk of Coulter’s book, Godless. It’s worse than I feared. It contains the usual stock creationist crap presented at a rapid pace, full of the usual bald assertions of outright lies, intentional misinterpretations, and lots and lots of quote mining. Seriously, it looks like every paragraph contains multiple falsehoods or screwy manglings of science.

She claims Darwin’s theory is “one step above Scientology in scientific rigor“, that it is a “tautology“, that there is “no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record“, and the only reason it’s still around is that “liberals think evolution disproves God.”

That’s all in the first paragraph of chapter 8, which focuses on evolution. Go ahead and follow the links up there; each one is to a short, simple refutation of Coulter’s claim.

Now picture a whole 27 page chapter packed with the same nonsense. I could do a sentence by sentence dissection of this abomination, but I’d have to write nothing but Coulter exposés for the next month. Forgive me if I pass on that.

Not only is it wrong through and through, but Coulter is a plagiarist. This is the book that William Dembski thinks “will propel [their] issues in the public consciousness like nothing to date“—well, yeah. Let’s propel the idea that creationists are dishonest and stupid right into everyone’s consciousness.

I just saw Coulter and Carlin on the Tonight show. Carlin was bland and harmless; there was no confrontation. Coulter was contemptibly smug, and Leno was a wimp who tossed off a few lazy questions and let her slide by. Of course he didn’t bother to mention the gross factual inaccuracies in her book.

She also clearly had an audience of fans there. They ate up every sneer and lie. No one is going to call her on them.