How could she do this to me? I’ve got lots of work to get done today, but the
this busy image is mesmerizing. I think I need to sit here for an hour watching the little blue balls wander around.
Here’s a really good question from Katrina Refugee:
Due to the unforeseen events of Katrina, my family and I ended up staying with relatives in South Carolina, and my children (for the year) are going to a small Christian school with their cousins (the public schools in this area are quite horrendous and we were trying to ease the transition as best as possible). They will be back in public school next year, but in the meantime have been exposed to some really silly creationist crap in the science classroom.
Can you recommend some reading material for the summer to “wash away” all the stuff they have been exposed to this year? We have diligently discussed all the fallacies of what they are being taught, but I am not a scientist and I would feel much better if they had some appropriate books to read over the summer.
They are aged 15 and 14.
This is a serious request, and I would greatly appreciate any advice you may have.
I’ve put a few ideas below the fold.
Let us continue our Ben Domenech bashing. He’s got this somewhat high profile gig at the Washington Post, and one has to wonder what his qualifications are. I think we can rule out “intelligence.”
GWW made an interesting discovery: he’s a creationist. I don’t understand why the Right is constantly elevating these ignoramuses; there must still be a few conservatives who read this site (I can’t possibly have driven you all away)…aren’t you embarrassed by this kind of thing?
For instance, here’s some dumb-as-a-post reasoning:
Why, oh why, did you have to disillusion me, Ebonmuse? And to slap me upside the face with a study from my own university, no less.
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
Oh. Well. That explains the tears and yelling from the in-laws-to-be 26 years ago last week.
Knowing how most Americans regard Muslims and homosexuals, though, it’s rather scary to see us ranked below them.
Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past–they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy–and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.
And we’re even worse than Communists! Jebus. What have we done to America?
Criminal behavior? They’ve confused us with Republicans. Rampant materialism? I thought that was the American way! And again, they’ve confused us with Republicans. Cultural elitism? Umm, well. Hmm. That one fits, I suppose, but why would anyone think that was a bad thing?
Apparently, it’s going to cost me my credibility as bona fide liberal left-wing moonbat, but yes, I have seen Red Dawn. You know, the movie that that wacky new Washington Post blog touted as a talisman of righteous manliness.
Red Dawn? You must know it—the greatest pro-gun movie ever? I mean, they actually show the jackbooted communist thugs prying the guns from cold dead hands.
Saying it’s the greatest pro-gun movie ever is like saying mucous and sawdust make the best sandwich ever—it either says your taste is something execrable, or you’ve just insulted every other sandwich on earth. It makes me itch to ban guns, even though I don’t really have strong feelings on the topic, because if that’s the best defense they can muster, there must be something deeply wrong with guns.
It really isn’t a very good movie. It caters to the deluded wingnut belief that some American high school kids with hunting rifles could have defeated the Soviet army (which, if you think about it, is another backhanded sneer at the American military that worried about fighting the Soviets throughout the Cold War…if only we’d known then that the answer was the local football team, a couple of .22s and .30-06s, and a rusted pickup truck!) and that macho fantasy was the sole virtue of the story.
I’m hoping that Washington Post guy keeps it up. Maybe tomorrow he can tell us that Budweiser is the best beer ever, and Windows 95 was the best OS ever, mud and tree bark make the best coffee ever, and George W. Bush is the best Republican ever. I think that’s his schtick, anyway.
(via Brad DeLong)
You have a couple of bills working their way through the state house that offer aid and comfort to the Intelligent Design wackos. You don’t want that, do you? If you live in Maryland, are a scientist, teacher, or dependent on science research, sign the online petition to oppose these nasty little bills. Work fast, too, you don’t have much time.
Lots of people have been emailing me the story that the Archbishop of Canterbury backs evolution. I have to confess to mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it’s good to have a religious authority figure coming down on the side of sense. I applaud the sentiment of his statements, and hope they have some positive influence.
On the other hand, I don’t give a flying firkin what the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks, and would question his authority to even make such a pronouncement. If people are going to accept things because someone who wears a funny hat on Sunday says so, where are they going to learn the critical thinking to question when said funny-hat wearer announces that crackers magically turn into meat or that an omnipotent invisible super-being is very fussy about where you put your penis? I simply do not recognize the foundation for his authority.
To be honest, I much prefer stories where religious people in ornate garments say crazy stupid things, because I want to see their authority diminished. I will be very worried when the Mormon elders, Desmond Tutu, the president of American Atheists, the Pope, a voudoun priestess, the Dalai Lama, JZ Knight, the Archbishop of Canterbury, some dessicated ascetic hermit from North Africa, the Raelians, Pat Robertson, the Unitarians, etc., all get together and announce that they are going to simply acknowledge and accept the scientific and natural explanations for the origin and evolution of life and stop meddling in the materialist issues to focus exclusively on the purely ‘spiritual’ life of their flocks. If that day comes, I won’t have any looney religious ideas to complain about, and there goes half the outrage that drives me to write. And I will also fear that the kooks and frauds are simply consolidating their power in claims beyond anyone’s power to test.
I have those suspicions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, too—I think he’s just trying to make sure his authority is based on ideas not subject to empirical testing.
As an exercise in futility, The Daily Transcript tries to categorize disciplines of the life sciences. Although there is a general air of truth to what he’s saying, the problem is that, unlike the members of the Tree of Life, academic disciplines are free to hybridize and accumulate and change, so instead of blurry but recognizable terminal branches, you end up with an anastomosing rete, and no one can sort out precisely who is what.
For instance, I’ve got training as a neurophysiologist (electrodes everywhere!), a cell biologist (painting organelles different colors and watching the glowing cells move), and a developmental biologist (which, contrary to Palazzo’s description, is actually the Most Important Discipline in Biology; he’s also wrong about killing fetuses, sometimes we just like to muck ’em up so they’re horribly deformed.) Oh, and I’ve had a smattering of genetics, but it was all developmental—real geneticists are kind of the mathematicians of biology, all very abstract and peculiar and mostly incomprehensible.
I also notice the bench biologist’s bias in his classification scheme. No ecologists? An article on taxonomy with no taxonomists?
The EO Wilson interview on Salon is worth watching a commercial for; he’s an interesting and smart fellow, even where I disagree with him. I’ve put a few excerpts below the fold just in case you really detest jumping through those capitalist hoops.
