In my talk on Tuesday, I suggested that if we really want to teach the controversy, we ought to put the Norse creation myth in our classes. I had no idea the plan would be so popular.
In my talk on Tuesday, I suggested that if we really want to teach the controversy, we ought to put the Norse creation myth in our classes. I had no idea the plan would be so popular.
Some things are just too stupid for words, but lots of people are emailing me about this fool’s plan.
He wants to enshrine his ignorance in the Nevada constitution.
And he’s a democrat. Gaaaaa. Can we all just point, laugh, and turn our backs on this guy from now on?
Here are a couple of accounts of encounters with creationists that are amusing to read.
If you live near Austin, on 9 March there will be A Debate on the History of Life on Earth with Sahotra Sarkar and Paul Nelson. I scowl disapprovingly on the debate format: it means half the time is going to be wasted with some creationist babbling on stage. The topic, “Can the history of life on Earth be explained by purely natural processes?”, doesn’t sound particularly promising, and simply invites the creationist to say “no”, although he won’t have any evidence to support that conclusion. Go to hear Sarkar, though, which should be interesting.
New Yorkers can attend the Bridges symposium at NYU on 4 March. This is what I like: more young scientists presenting their work, with none of the creationist wibbly-wobbly nonsense in sight. Douglas J. Futuyma is the keynote speaker.
We laugh at the yahoos on the Kansas Board of Education who are dragging their state down the drain with bad science education, but don’t confuse that with laughing at Kansans. There are some very smart people down there. I am very impressed with this op-ed by Cassie Gentry—she very effectively takes down an Intelligent Design advocate…and she’s a college freshman in English.
I’d suggest that she ought to think about coming up to Minnesota and majoring in a science, but I think they need more like her right where she is.
Afghanistan doesn’t look pretty, and this cuts awful close to home for a teacher.
Teachers are the main targets. Some have been beheaded, others shot in front of their classes.
The years of fighting the Russians, the subsequent civil war and Taleban rule has produced a “lost generation” in education. International agencies and aid organisations speak of their difficulties in finding qualified people to run projects.
Now another lost generation is being created. The education system of modern Afghanistan is anathema to the Taleban and Islamist extremists because it is inclusive of girls, and offers secular subjects for study. They have declared that only madrassas (Muslim religious schools) meeting their approval will be allowed to operate.
Shooting kids on playgrounds? Butchering teachers for daring to instruct girls? When we fail to protect a whole generation like this, face it: you’ve lost the war.
We have a new Tangled Bank at Aetiology: Tangled Bank #48. It’s kind of grungy this time, somehow…does Tara wear a lot of flannel and come from Seattle?
Powerline. Round about these parts, that name is pretty much a synonym for stupid, and I see they’re doing a good job of maintaining their reputation. You’d think they’d learn that whenever they step into the domain of science, their level of ignorance is even more palpably apparent than usual.
Their latest embarrassment was prompted by an egregiously idiotic article from Michael Fumento, which catalogs an error-filled collection of so-called biases in science. The assrocket’s conclusion?
The moral of the story is that the leading scientific journals have been taken over by liberals who value politics over truth. So any time you see a news report on a “scientific” journal article that ostensibly has political implications, you should greet it with skepticism.
Wow. So any science article that discusses, say, evolution, climate, energy, reproduction, conservation, petroleum geology, glaciers, pesticides, extinction, wetlands, materials science, transportation, agriculture, neurobiology, HIV/AIDS (shall I go on?), demographics, deforestation, habitat loss, human genetics (I could keep this up all day), influenza, psychiatry, ethanol production, sexually transmitted disease, medicine in general, stem cells, weather, sex (OK, enough), all issues that have political implications, and which are therefore automatically suspect and tainted by <hiss>liberals? Jeez, John and Michael, why not just say, “Science is EVIL” and be done with it?When all the scientists are disagreeing with you, though, maybe instead you should wonder if you, people with no scientific competence at all, might just be wrong.
I’m pleased to say that we here at scienceblogs.com seem to be presenting a united front on this one, unsurprisingly. Chris Mooney also points out the absurdity of rejecting in its entirety the so-called “liberal” academy, and Tim Lambert rips into the bogus interpretations of the Fumento article. I’ll have to gnaw on a few scraps that are left over.
Here, for example, is an instance of Fumento illogic.
Consider a report
by three environmentalist authors back in 1988 in Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA), analyzing male-female birth ratios between
1970 and 1990. The authors found male births declining, and predictably
blamed man-made chemicals. Yet public data going
back to 1940 showed gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious
reason. Years that disproved their thesis were simply sliced out.
Look at that bit where he cites public data, with a link to a report by the CDC. He claims that the interpretation of the report is that “gender ratios are always changing, for no obvious reason”—I can only assume that he figures absolutely no one who reads his column will actually, like, look at his links. The report says nothing of the kind. Right at the top of the report is a graph that shows year-by-year variation, with trend lines on it to show that there is an overall decline in the number of males born. The report specifically discusses the reasons for it, explaining that it only looks at a few relationships and listing others. Here’s the CDC’s conclusion, plainly stated in the final paragraph.
Changes in the sex ratio at birth in the United States have been
attributed to many different factors. The factors examined in this report
include age of mother, birth order, and race and Hispanic origin of
mother. Other factors not examined here but cited by others in determining the sex of a child and, thus, the sex ratio at birth are weight
of mother, stress, age of father, family size, geographic and climatic
conditions, environmental toxins, and a preference for male offspring.
As such, the effect of these factors should be considered in under
standing the annual variation and overall decline in the sex ratio at birth.
How does he get away with this? He cites a report and claims that its conclusions are the exact opposite of what it actually says!
Assrocket just gullibly swallows it all whole. There is a whole parade of similarly mangled science results in Fumento’s article, and another is the recent Hwang Woo Suk scandal.
Fumento’s second example is embryonic stem cell research, where the most important “science” underlying public enthusiasm for cloning turned out to be fraudulent:
Even Science’s awful stem-cell embarrassment wasn’t purely a matter of fraud. I have written repeatedly on how both Science and Nature have turned themselves into cheerleaders for any supposed advance in ES cell science, while opening their pages to laughable attacks on what many see as both medically and ethically superior — namely adult stem cells.
Neither Powerline nor Fumento understand this result. It was an important and expected step in stem cell research, but it was only one result, and certainly wasn’t the foundation of public or scientific enthusiasm for this line of research. Nor does it in anyway invalidate the promise or past results of stem cell researchers, and the claim that everyone is sitting around wondering “How could I have been fooled?” is ridiculous.
This happens every time Powerline mentions anything about science. I think we ought to encourage a new reflex: every time Powerline mentions the word “science”, come check out scienceblogs.com, and you’ll find several of us howling with laughter.
People are so cruel. I was busy all evening with this talk (which went well, I think), and lots of people flood my mailbox with news of the giant squid at the NHM.
You know I can look out my window and see everything covered in over a foot of snow. You know I’m about as far from any sea as you can get. And you know you can get me pining for abyssal pelagia with this kind of thing—you all must love to torment me. Could you at least send tickets to London with this kind of news?
Oh, well. It is a thing of beauty at any rate, and I will just have to worship it from afar.