Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
A large number of blogs have mentioned the case of Richard Colling. Richard Colling is the biology professor at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois who has been prohibited from teaching intro biology classes at Olivet Nazarene University because he taught something similar to theistic evolution rather than straightforward creationism. The best post on the subject, however, comes from Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science
Chris has actually been exchanging emails with Colling and has published one (with Dr. Colling's permission). I would like to highlight one part of the letter, the part where Dr. Colling says:
It has been a rude and very unsettling experience. While promoting a message of peace, and after 26 years of faithful devotion to Christian higher education and investment in the lives of thousands of our college men and women, it is difficult to describe the depths of my disappointment that a few profoundly scientifically ignorant individuals have been allowed to create such discord and damage to to me and the university in the public's eye - by convincing a university president to acquiesce to their demands. (even though the president privately continues to say that he has identified nothing in my teaching or writing that is scientifically or theologically deficient.)
In essence, those "...few profoundly scientifically ignorant individuals..." have decided that Dr. Colling is no longer christian enough to teach biology at the university. This is a good example of why framing won't work. Dr. Colling comes across as an intelligent individual with a sophisticated grasp of christian theology, yet he has run afoul of fundamentalist members of his community. It all gets back to boundary maintenance (a mechanism to prevent ideas from eeping across porous cultural boundaries - in effect boundary maintenance mechanisms serve to separate culture groups and provide a rigid, well defined marker between "us" and "them") and Dr. Colling strayed too far across the boundary. For his local community Dr. Colling has become one of "them". The concept of boundary maintenance comes, largely from the work Peter Berger (probably most widely known for his book The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, cowritten with Thomas Luckmann) and methinks the advocates of framing should probably read some of his works before going too much further.
At any rate, the post by Chris is quite interesting and worth reading...
Politics
Comments
Uh - agreed. Framing arguments to persuade hard-line advocates of silly science will not work.
However, for the rest of us, some of whom believe what they believe only because they haven't been exposed to something better, framing an argument in a way that we can understand it can change minds and destinies.
Simply believing that we, the great unwashed masses cannot be "talked to" in a language which we can understand or by means of a paradigm that we can understand really reflects the limitations of the scientist not the limitations of the public.
Face it. Not everyone can be an evolutionary scientist. SOMEONE has to do your plumbing and pick up your garbage. And show you how to reboot your machine....and so forth.
Posted by: Oldfart | September 17, 2007 12:17 PM
If I didn't believe people were capable of learning I wouldn't write this blog. In my mind explaining something clearly so that anybody can understand it is a completely different issue than framing. I have two problems with framing. First, it seems kind of deceitful. Second, it fails to give folks credit for genuinely believing what they say they believe - and they underestimate how prevalent those beliefs are.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | September 17, 2007 7:42 PM