creationism
gregladen | December 8, 2007The School Board for Rio Rancho, New Mexico has rescinded "Policy 401" which is said to have supported the teaching of creationism. Let's have a look.
I managed to grab a copy of the policy from the Rio Rancho Public Schools web site ... presumably it will disappear shortly:
The Rio Rancho Board of Education recognizes that scientific theories, such as theories regarding biological and cosmological origins, may be used to support or to challenge individual religious and philosophical beliefs. Consequently, the teaching of science in public school science classrooms may be of great interest…
gregladen | December 7, 2007He was saved by creation science. But a little too late, like, it happened after he became a vicious cannibal.
pharyngula | December 7, 2007It was short, mainly taken up with Chris Comers trying to tell her side of the story, and not getting it all in within the time allotted. The main points I got out of it were:
It sure sounds like this was a planned expulsion, with pressure being applied for weeks ahead of the incident that prompted it.
It's not entirely clear, but this does not sound like a voluntary resignation. She was sandbagged with a letter from the Bush appointee, Lizzette Reynolds, that opened with a statement that she had committed a firing offense; she was later summoned without warning to a long meeting that…
gregladen | December 7, 2007There was a time, not so long ago, when you could "Google" the terms "Greg Laden" and "Idiot" and get, well, besides the several thousand hits about me being an idiot and stuff, an Amazon.com page for "The Idiot's Guide to Human Prehistory by Greg Laden"
This is a book I never wrote. But the publishers wanted me to. However, there were complications. The first complication was that I found out (from an excellent source) that the owner of the company had "a problem" with evolution, and I came to believe it was likely that certain things would be changed prior to publication. In…
clock | December 7, 2007Archy reports that the papal official astronomer said so:
Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.
He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because it harked back to the days of "…
laelaps | December 7, 2007Note: As Larry Moran rightly points out in the comments everything isn't all about putting out papers and us science bloggers should put out graphs of our own publication rates, as well. For my own part, I've contributed nothing so I couldn't even make a graph, but I know there has been some discussion about some of the leading spokesmen for evolution and their publication rates (Dawkins and Gould, for example, have put out plenty of popular works, but how did that affect the amount of technical work they accomplished?). The point that jumping on the ID bandwagon adversely affects…
pharyngula | December 7, 2007I am so amused. A creationist lost his job at Woods Hole, and he was a zebrafish developmental biologist. Hey, I know a little bit about that!
The creationist, Nathaniel Abraham, briefly held a post-doctoral position under Mark Hahn at Woods Hole. Here's the creationist's side:
Nathaniel Abraham filed a lawsuit earlier this week in US District Court in Boston saying that the Cape Cod research center dismissed him in 2004 because of his Christian belief that the Bible presents a true account of human creation.
Abraham, who is seeking $500,000 in compensation for a violation of his civil rights…
pharyngula | December 6, 2007Don't miss this one: tomorrow on Science Friday, Flatow interviews the expelled director of the Texas science curriculum.
Education and Evolution in Texas(broadcast Friday, December 7th, 2007)
The education official responsible for the science curriculum in the state of Texas resigned last month saying she was forced to step down after being reprimanded for informing colleagues of a talk on the conflict over the teaching of evolution. Christine Castillo Comer, former Director of Science in the curriculum division of the Texas Education Agency, forwarded several colleagues an email notice of a…
pharyngula | December 6, 2007What is wrong with the teachers in New Hampshire? They just endorsed Clinton for the Democratic candidate, and Huckabee for the Republicans. Huckabee is a deranged young earth creationist! Did the NEA just spit in the face of its science teachers? How could they possibly support a creationist?
Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, was the only Republican candidate to speak at the national NEA meeting in Philadelphia in July. His campaign also courted the New Hampshire chapter, and he was the only GOP candidate to meet with chapter officials, a source with the New Hampshire union said.
Oh.…
pharyngula | December 6, 2007There is a certain creationist book that contains this infamous quote:
No matter what ideology they may espouse, those who perpetrate terror over the world are, in reality, Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy that places a value on-and thus encourages-conflict.
Kind of a common sentiment on the far right, I know. But you'd think a member of the far right would be reluctant to use it, because it's from an Islamic crackpot, Adnan Oktar AKA Haryun Yahya, in his massive plagiarized tome, The Atlas of Creation.
Yet this book is prominently displayed in the waiting room of Secretary of…
gregladen | December 6, 2007From Science Notes, from the continuing series "Why do people laugh at creationists" ... This is installment number six.
pharyngula | December 6, 2007Josh Rosenau summarizes the Gonzalez affair:
This whole song and dance is too absurd for words. Gonzalez had a poor record of grant-writing, a poor record of graduating students, limited telescope time, and his record of publication tailed off since he started working on his ID creationist book. He even submitted that book as part of his tenure file, yet he and the DI are shocked (shocked!) that his department would consider his ID work. At the very least they are shocked (shocked?) that his colleagues were unenthusiastic about that work.
They talk the talk of wanting "fairness", but it's…
pharyngula | December 5, 2007One of the few papers any of the Discovery Institute frauds have managed to get published was a bit of fluff by Jonathan Wells, who made a strange argument that centrioles generate a "polar ejection force" — his rationale was that they looked like turbines. Then he made a sloppy connection to ID by claiming that since turbines are designed, and he made his inference about their function because of that resemblance, the design hypothesis is therefore useful.
Ian Musgrave dissected Wells a while back, but now we have another worthy deconstruction: Stephen Matheson reviews the paper. He seems ……
gregladen | December 5, 2007Eugenics in History and the Bible
I'm getting sick of the constant shrill coming out of the Discovery Institute trying to link "Darwinism" with eugenics. The creationists love to claim that such an idea could never have existed before Darwin came up with the idea of natural selection, but that is patently false.
All animals in the wild abandon unfit babies the moment they're born, even those species without advanced degrees in biology....
Read the rest here at Primordial Blog.
pharyngula | December 5, 2007The recent unpleasant affair at the Texas Education Agency, in which the director of the science curriculum, Chris Comer, was pressured to resign, was triggered by Comer forwarding an email announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest. Forrest is a philosopher of science, and one of our leading advocates in the ongoing fight for better science education in the face of the nonsense the creationists are promoting. She's also one of their critics the creationists most fear, so it's not surprising that her name would elicit knee-jerk panic.
Forrest has now issued a formal statement on the termination of…
pharyngula | December 5, 2007Texas has McLeroy driving pro-science people out of the Texas Education Agency, so Florida must be feeling left behind: a member of their state board of education has recently declared her opposition to evolution in the schools.
State Board of Education member Donna Callaway says she'll be voting against the proposed new state science standards because evolution "should not be taught to the exclusion of other theories of origin of life" and says she hopes "there will be times of prayer throughout Christian homes and churches directed toward this issue."
"As a SBOE member, I want those prayers…
mikethemadbiologist | December 5, 2007Between my original post about how to punish creationist politicians and ScienceBlogling Greg's discussion, several readers commented that I was making this a political issue. Quite simply, I am not the only doing that: the Republican theopolitical conservative base is. The issue is, do we fight back, or lose due to their political power?
The creationists might not be able to defeat the reality of the existence of evolution, but they can defeat every effort to teach and study that reality. So, like it or not, evolution has become a political issue, and it must not only be taught in…
pharyngula | December 4, 2007Who best to talk about the Gonzalez tenure case? Since he's an astronomer, how about another astronomer? Phil is unimpressed:
So when ISU denied Gonzalez tenure, I applauded them. Faculty members are de facto representatives of the University, and having one advocate for a provably wrong antiscientific load of crap... well, it seems counterproductive. Denying someone tenure on that basis alone is, in my opinion, perfectly valid, and in fact should be demanded.
It will feed their martyr complex a little more, but it's true — when you're trying to peddle weird pseudoscience and you don't have…