creationism
pharyngula | December 22, 2007The threat of an eruption of creationism in Polk County, Florida, is dying down. The school board hasn't changed, it still has a number of confident creationists on it, but they're all going to keep their religious beliefs at home and in church, and in fact, they have a "great eagerness simply to return to the day-to-day work of running a school district with 90,000 students." It's great news all around.
What got them to confine their interest to doing their job? As the article explains, a lot of factors contributed. The county wants tech sector jobs and expansion of a University of South…
pharyngula | December 21, 2007Godless heathen that I am, even I can read the subtext in Don McLeroy's recent letter to the Dallas Morning News. First he reassures us that he is very, very, very Christian, and then he promises to purge the dogma from Texas education. We know what that means in the up-means-down world of Christianist fanaticism: the dogma is the science and his empirical evidence is the revealed word of his Lord, Jesus Christ.
I've heard a few words about the situation looking up in Florida, but Texas is a dismal scary place for evolution education — I'm going to have to put a few more quatloos on Texas in…
pharyngula | December 21, 2007Steve Fuller, the smug sociologist who testified for the creationists in the Dover trial, has a new book out. Who cares about the book, though? You want to read Norman Levitt's review, "The Painful Elaboration of the Fatuous". Wow. Fuller gets deconstructed.
Here's a small taste.
A similar farce plays out when Fuller tries to address the larger question of the supposedly contentious nature of evolutionary theory within the scientific community itself. In the World According to Fuller, evolutionary theory never really got past the stage of being a "well evidenced ideology" rather than a "…
gregladen | December 20, 2007The AH Trust intends to spend seven million dollars to build a theme park and studio to "promote the account of the creation recorded in the biblical book of Genesis and to combat what it sees as the malign influence on society of Darwin's theory of evolution" and to produce Christians films and TV shows.
"Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society," the report said. "We need the studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood which presently is destroying the church foundation."
In a short statement released on Tuesday, the charity said it had…
pharyngula | December 20, 2007You've hurt little Billy Dembski's feelings! You keep promoting negative reviews of his book!
The Design of Life has 13 five-star reviews and 4 one-star reviews. None of the one-star reviews give evidence of the reviewer having read the book. Yet the three reviews placed front and center by Amazon are the one-star reviews and none of the five-star reviews appear there. That's because the Darwinists keep voting up the negative reviews and voting down the positive reviews. Please go to the link right now, look at the reviews, and vote on them (toward the bottom of a review are "yes" and "no"…
pharyngula | December 20, 2007Amadan wrote this amusing Gilbert and Sullivan parody, I Am the Very Model of a C-Design-Proponentsist. Now you can actually hear it sung by Karl Mogel! (by the way, Karl, you know you're a science nerd when you think the best way to tell people what the tune is is to mention that it's the same as Tom Lehrer's Elements song.)
I think this is one of those carols that is best sung drunk, I'm afraid; I'm picturing hordes of godless atheists and happy secularists stumbling into midnight mass on Christmas Eve and disrupting the services by trying to pronounce c-designproponents-ists very fast.
pharyngula | December 19, 2007It's a strange thing to read another review of Behe's Edge of Evolution. This one is by David Levin, and it strongly highlights the compromises and the irrelevancy of the book.
In the end, the most irritating aspect of this book is Behe's selective use of the ever-expanding base of scientific knowledge as a soapbox from which to shout his embrace of perpetual ignorance. The better our understanding of the intricate details of complex biological systems, the stronger is his belief that they must have been designed and that science will never unravel how they came to be. This is a trend for him…
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
As I mentioned earlier, I love a good book review if it excoriates a stupid book. Norman Levitt, of Rutgers University, has an absolutely lovely piece of critical invective for Steve Fuller's defense of Intelligent Design here. Fuller is a sociologist philosopher* of science who seems to dislike science intensely, unless he does it. At the Dover Trial, he got a lot of money to write a fairly incoherent defense of ID, which seemed only to exacerbate the judge's final decision, and it seems he is cashing in again by putting out a book based on his "expert witness". Read Levitt's deflation of…
pharyngula | December 19, 2007The man who wrote the email that got Chris Comer fired spills his guts on the issue.
He seems curiously proud of the fact that he's pro-science and that he thinks the Texas Education Agency's position of "neutrality" on evolution is ignorant humbuggery.
pharyngula | December 19, 2007Textbook selection by the South Carolina State Board of Education has been held up because of baseless objections by creationist reviewers. Does this sound familiar? It's what triggered the Dover trial — clueless school board members rejecting standard biology textbooks because they wanted something more…biblical.
During October and November, the texts approved by the state Evaluation Committee were sent out for public review to 28 sites - mostly colleges and universities with teacher education programs. It was during this period of time, that Ms. Kristin Maguire (or one of her colleagues)…
mikethemadbiologist | December 19, 2007
...the Chikungunya virus might have something to say about that (if it could speak). From PLoS Pathogens:
Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is an emerging arbovirus associated with several recent large-scale epidemics of arthritic disease, including one on Reunion island, where there were approximately 266,000 cases (34% of the total island population). CHIKV is transmitted by Aedes species mosquitoes, primarily Ae. aegypti. However, the 2005-2006 CHIKV epidemic on Reunion island was unusual because the vector responsible for transmission between humans was apparently the Asian tiger mosquito, Ae.…
gregladen | December 18, 2007I wanted to point out two interesting posts both having to to with the nature of knowledge, or as we call it here in Minnesota (where the "k" in "Knute" is proudly pronounced).
The first is The Problem with Google's Knol Initiative (aha, you see, there's that "k" again...). This is about Google's idea of starting up it's own version of Wikipedia. Pierre Far of BlogSci questions the wisdom of Google's approach. The Google version of a wiki that is an encyclopedia promises to be better because it will recruit, and rely on, expertise. However, Far suggests that this could backfire, and asks…
pharyngula | December 18, 2007Those are the four incompetents the residents of Pinellas County, Florida need to vote against in the next school board election: they favor corrupting science education with creationist nonsense. They all claim that students should be taught multiple "theories" in science classes, where they mangle the word "theory" to mean any ol' crap someone wants to babble about, without regard for the evidence.
pharyngula | December 17, 2007Hey! Dan Whipple got to see a preliminary screening of Ben Stein's silly movie, Expelled!
Read the review — it makes the point that the movie doesn't even bother to explain what ID and evolution are before taking sides, and it defends its position incompetently. The movie is "so intellectually garbled it's hard to summarize," which is about what we all expected.
There's no mention of my role, but I expect it would be a tiny part anyway; no mention of Eugenie Scott, either. Dan Whipple, if you see this — there are a lot of us who'd like to know more details about how our interviews were…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007Texas Citizens for Science has come up with the site visit report for the ICR. It's funky stuff: it seems they had creationist-sympathizers review the program, and they issued a pile of fluff and let them slide on their content.
The PDF file contains (1) the Report of Evaluation of the ICR by the THECB Site Visit Team and (2) the ICR Initial Response to the Report of Evaluation. The latter Response contains ICR's Strategic Plan and Budgeting Process Timeline for their new Dallas institution.
The on-site evaluation committee of the THECB visited ICR on November 8, 2007. The on-site visiting…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007So that's what the ICR is up to
If you've been wondering what's up with that attempt by the Institute for Creation Research to get accredited by the state of Texas, Texas Citizens for Science has dug up some suggestive information: the ICS is trying to trade up from their past worthless accreditation by an evangelical accreditation board, and they're hoping to tap into some secular legitimacy.
The story is below the fold.
ICR is listed as accredited by TRACS on the U.S. Department of Education Database of Accredited Programs and Institutions. Information about this database is at
http://www.…