jlynch | February 5, 2009Another “academic freedom” bill, this time in Iowa. Those little beavers over at the DI have been busy over the past few months apparently. The "Evolution Academic Freedom Act" (HF 183; “A bill for an act relating to the teaching of chemical and biological evolution in school districts and public postsecondary institutions and providing an effective date”) has been sent to the House Education Committee and is startlingly familiar:
Students at all levels “shall be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials through standard testing procedures. However, students shall not be…
jlynch | February 4, 2009February is going to be a busy month for me. Sunday I leave for Oklahoma where I will be giving the lead-off public lecture for their Darwin 2009 Celebration. I will be speaking on the 12th at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the topic of “Was There A Darwinian Revolution?” Any Sooner readers should feel free to come along and introduce themselves.
While in Norman, I’ll also be teaching a four-day intensive course on Darwin for the Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program, the syllabus for which is here. While there will be some lectures, the meat and potatoes of the…
jlynch | February 3, 2009NCSE is reporting that a “strengths and weaknesses” bill is on the table in New Mexico. It’s your typical “academic freedom” bill that the DI has been shilling for a while now:
The department, school district governing authorities and school administrators shall not prohibit any teacher, when biological evolution or chemical evolution is being taught in accordance with adopted standards and curricula, from informing students about relevant scientific information regarding either the scientific strengths or scientific weaknesses pertaining to biological evolution or chemical evolution.
The…
jlynch | February 2, 2009Andy Schlafly over at the Eagle Forum on Springsteenâs performance at the Super Bowl half-time show:
Springsteen sang nearly all his top hits ... except there was one glaring omission. He did not sing "Born in the U.S.A.," one of his most popular tunes of all.
Wonder why??? The Obama mind controllers would not have been happy if he sang that title! Obama still has not proven that he was born in the U.S.A.
Seriously folks, let it go. Youâre only embarrassing yourselves.
And on a related note, Iâm going to the Springsteen concert here in April.
jlynch | February 2, 2009First there was the Darwin Correspondence Project. Then came the Tyndall Correspondence Project. And now, George Beccaloni has just announced the Wallace Correspondence Project. All very exciting for students of Victorian science.
jlynch | February 1, 2009New data on creationism in Britain. The, ahem, âhighlightsâ
51% agree that "evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages." 40% disagree.
32% agree that "God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years." 60% disagree.
Thus, support for ID runs at 51% and support for YEC runs at 32%.
Update: Below is the cross-tabs for the preliminary results from the poll. These are, apparently, preliminary results.
News report here; preliminary report in this pdf; Apparently the full…
jlynch | January 28, 2009Nick Matzke over at PT has just made me aware that Mike Majerus had passed away after a sudden illness. Those of us who have followed the ID issue will know Majerus from the studies he did of melanism in peppered moths Biston betularia and the empirical work he did to refute the nonsense spouted by the likes on Jonathan Wells and Judith Hooper on Kettlewell’s work on the moths.
His last paper, “Industrial Melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia: An Excellent Teaching Example of Darwinian Evolution in Action” appeared last month in Evolution: Education and Outreach you could do worse…
jlynch | January 28, 2009Iâve been picking on creationists for a number for years now, so it is somewhat strange for me to come out and offer one a gold star but, hey!
Todd Wood, a YEC at Bryan College had had a paper accepted over at Answers Research Journal that gives his take on the whole ridiculous âDarwin was a plagiaristâ riff that the likes of Roy Davies have been shilling. So to recap, John Wilkins, Jim Lennox, and now Todd Wood (a creationist for cripes sake!) think that Davies is wrong.
Short version of Wood:
According to Davies, these alleged evidences of Darwinâs misdeeds have been ignored by Darwin…
jlynch | January 28, 2009I’m quoted in a press release regarding a teacher training workshop (the “Evolution Challenges Workshop”) we’re giving at ASU to help middle and high school teachers teach evolution. Money quotes:
Studies have shown that “16 percent of high school biology teachers are essentially young earth creationists who deny human evolution, with only 28 percent accepting unguided naturalistic evolution of humans,” says John Lynch, a lecturer in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and an Honors Faculty Fellow in Barrett, the Honors College. “While this latter number is higher than the general public’s 13…
jlynch | January 28, 2009Apparently I have to take 12 9 days of unpaid furlough before May 15th. And it can’t be days I teach on, i.e. it has to be Monday or Friday. All because the Republicans in the state senate want to gut K-16 education in Arizona. Seriously, in a state that hasn’t raised state taxes in 20 years, we’re having to do this to keep education afloat. A read somewhere that a 1c sales tax on alcohol would keep the K-16 system afloat, but no that would be raising taxes.
What galls is simply this. Staff on furlough will go home and rest. Sure, they’re not being paid, but they will at least rest. Faculty…
jlynch | January 26, 2009Obama said: âMy administration will not deny facts -- we will be guided by themâ
And then actually began to do something about climate change.
A good start.
jlynch | January 24, 2009Brian Metscher has reviewed the ID “supplementary textbook” Explore Evolution for the journal Evolution & Development. Metscher describes the work as
159 glossy pages of color-illustrated creationist nostalgia All the old favorites are here — fossils saying no, all the Icons, flightless Ubx flies, irreducible flagella, even that irritating homology-is-circular thing. There are no new arguments, no improved understanding of evolution, just a remastered scrapbook of the old ideas patched together in a high-gloss package pre-adapted to survive the post-Dover legal environment.
Metscher…
jlynch | January 22, 2009
Asian golden cat, Catopuma temminckii Vigors & Horsfield 1827
<Click for larger version>
<source>
jlynch | January 21, 2009Iâm still here, just still too busy to blog this week. Tuesday was the opening class for my Socratic seminar, Wednesday was the first session of my lecture course (and a faculty meeting). Today, I have a Socratic discussion of Hesiod. So Iâm guessing it will be Friday before I post again.
To tide you over, here (as a PDF) is the Gould piece discussing the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Enjoy.
jlynch | January 20, 2009A few days ago I highlighted the current state of the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Nigel Monaghan, the Keeper of the museum, contacted me and has kindly allowed me to repost a piece he wrote for Museum Ireland on the past and future of the museum. Enjoy!
The Natural History Museum
Dublin, past and future.
Nigel Monaghan
Keeper, Natural History Division,
National Museum of Ireland
Museum Ireland 17: 48-52
The Natural History Museum
celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2007. The building houses
collections that are even older and faces challenges on a number of
fronts. The Victorian ‘…
jlynch | January 19, 2009
Amen, indeed.
Transcript below the fold
Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.
O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will
Bless us with tears - for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger - at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and…