creationism
gregladen | July 26, 2010Unless they are stopped which, frankly, does not seem very likely.
The Livingston Parish School Board, in Louisiana, is poised to enthusiastically support the introduction of creationism into the school curriculum as a requirement, and possibly even toss out evolution. You people in Louisiana are truly a bunch of morans*. You do know that, right?
Barbara Forrest, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, has written a letter that you may want to read about the school board's intentions, and the NCSE has a detailed press report here.
Here's the thing that is so…
tfk | July 26, 2010An interesting new article today at the Skeptic's Dictionary, explaining the backfire effect. Several recent papers have found that information contradicting people's initial beliefs can actually increase their acceptance of those beliefs. This is true in political contexts and in religious context. In one example, people given false information about a Supreme Court nominee (which played to their biases) wound up retaining their heightened negative views of the nominee after having the negative claims refuted.
Skeptic's Dictionary author Robert Carroll concludes:
The backfire effect…
pharyngula | July 23, 2010There is a zoo near Bristol called — you'll see there are already problems right from the name — Noah's Ark Zoo. It is unambguously proud of its status as a blatantly creationist institution.
After looking at the current explanations for origins and evolution; it is our view that the evidence available points to widespread evolution after an initial Creation by God. This is viewed as controversial by some and welcomed by others; but whether currently popular or not we believe the evidence supports a world-view somewhere between Darwinism and 6000BC Creationism and we encourage interested…
tfk | July 19, 2010Sensuous Curmudgeon and PZ are both having fun poking through the background of Kansas gubernatorial candidate Joan Heffington. Heffington forthrightly calls for creationism to be taught in public schools, and pledged to demand advocates offer a âbiblical and constitutional reason exist for the passage of any new law." Yeesh.
PZ responds to this development:
Quick, somebody reassure me that she's a fringe candidate without a prayer of getting into office. Please. It's Monday, the day is painful enough.
Yes, she's a fringe candidate without a prayer of getting into public office. But that's…
tfk | July 17, 2010Shorter PZ Myers: Backlash? Harming the cause? Where?:
Simplicity is preferable to science.
Let us accept, arguendo that this post is poorly written. So what? Does that mean it's wrong? When did PZ Myers â the scourge of framing â come to defend the notion that science discussions are best evaluated based on their presentation rather than their content?
Jason's post was simpler because he skipped over obvious complications to the story he was trying to tell, along the way ignoring well-known sources of bias, skipping basic steps in polls interpretation, cherrypicking a cutoff for the data…
pharyngula | July 17, 2010Jason Rosenhouse has a short, clear post in which which he briefly exams the polling data to see if New Atheists have harmed the cause of science education, an accusation frequently made. He shows that no, there is absolutely no evidence of such a thing; there may be a trend in the other way, in an increase in the number of science educators willing to say that there is no sign of intelligent guidance in evolution, but he's also rightly cautious to say that there are a lot of variables at play here, so it would be premature to say there is a positive effect.
It does seem interesting, though,…
pharyngula | July 17, 2010Remember that horrible, stupid, no-good article about chickens and eggs, the one that used the identification of a protein important in egg shell formation to claim chickens had to have come before eggs, with no comparative data, no appreciation of the logic of evolutionary theory, and absolutely no respect for the evidence? Yeah, that one. The article that ought to have embarrassed both the journalist and the scientist involved.
Well, somebody liked it. They liked it a lot. Guess who?
Ken Ham.
He likes it because he thinks it means that chickens couldn't have evolved, that their putative non…
pharyngula | July 17, 2010There have been some recent surveys of attitudes towards evolution and the state of science education in the US, and I've mainly used tables in presentations — so it's nice to see some eye-catching graphical representations of the data. Use these!
One thing surprised me — usually, this datum is presented in a positive light, but it's always bugged me. 28% of science teachers accept that evolution occurred, and god had nothing to do with it; 47% of science teachers accept evolution, but believe that god guided it. That 47% is typically presented as no problem, these are the teachers on our…
pharyngula | July 16, 2010Those slippery rascals at Answers in Genesis have been doing research, they say, and Jason Lisle claims to have discovered something radical.
I have been working for some time on solving the "distant starlight problem." This is the issue of how starlight from the most distant galaxies is able to reach earth within the biblical timescale. Although light is incredibly fast, the most distant galaxies are incredibly far away. So, under normal circumstances we would be inclined to think that it should take billions of years for their starlight to reach us. Yet, the Bible teaches that the universe…
tfk | July 16, 2010The back and forth here in comments and at Jason Rosenhouse's blog has been interesting and stimulating in the last few days. The question of how the rise of New Atheism will or has changed public attitudes towards evolution, towards religion, and towards atheism/atheists are all important questions that have extracted gallons of ink from a lot of bloggers and book authors. But to date, I know of no attempts to measure those effects scientifically. This is odd, since all the advocates on all sides are heavily invested in science as a way of knowing about the world.
Part of the problem is…
gregladen | July 16, 2010.... because your proof of your god is falsified by science. But that is not a problem that science has. It is a problem that you have. It is also not a problem that the Secular Public School System in the US has. Unless you make it so.
This explored in a recent iNewp piece:
As many biblical literalists maintain, evolution says there is no plan (or Planner) for life; it's random, just one damned thing after another, everything passing and changing (except maybe things like sharks, horseshoe crabs and cockroaches). Nothing's permanent, nothing is special, including us. They contrast…
pharyngula | July 15, 2010A lot of people have been writing to me about this free webgame, CellCraft. In it, you control a cell and build up all these complex organelles in order to gather resources and fight off viruses; it's cute, it does throw in a lot of useful jargon, but the few minutes I spent trying it were also a bit odd — there was something off about it all.
Where do you get these organelles? A species of intelligent platypus just poofs them into existence for you when you need them. What is the goal? The cells have a lot of room in their genomes, so the platypuses are going to put platypus DNA in there, so…
tfk | July 15, 2010â¦hypothesis testing!
To recap, Jason Rosenhouse, who I love like a brother, put up a post using a poll from VCU and data from Gallup polling to address a hypothesis about "New Atheists," a hypothesis he attributes broadly to the critics of "New Atheism." He's since clarified (in a comment pledging not to reply further here, alas) that he was thinking of a comment by Michael Ruse that New Atheists have been "a bloody disaster," with Jason add: "it is hard to find a critic of the NA's who has not" claimed "the NA's are hurting the cause of good science education."
He proposed to test this…
pharyngula | July 15, 2010Really, they are. A while back, the Institute for Creation Research moved to Texas, where they expected a friendly welcome, and instead they got spanked: their request to be allowed to hand out degrees was turned down by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. This made the ICR angry, and they made a wacky lawsuit. A genuinely deranged brief. Their minds work in very twisty weird ways.
They've gone down in flames — they are not authorized to give out degrees. But those creationist brains that scuttle sideways and inside out are not daunted by this mere legal restriction! Their website…
tfk | July 14, 2010Attention conservation notice: 3000 words about how smart people who ought to know better are reading way too much into a poll.
Last May, NCSE reported on a poll on evolution conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University. The results were, to my eye, in line with most of the other polling out there, so I never wrote about it here, other than a passing mention in a post about my WaPo review of Elaine Howard Ecklund's Science vs. Religion.
Anyway, a month and a half later, Jerry Coyne and Jason Rosenhouse have discovered the poll, and each has found different questions in the poll that they…
gregladen | July 14, 2010And we need your help to move it. Please click here so the global network of DNS servers knows that you want to visit the MnCSE. You should really visit the site anyway, it's very cool, even if you are not a Minnesota. I love the graphic thingie on the top of the right sidebar .... click the picture to learn an interesting thing about evolution or related topics.
So? What are you waiting for? Click here!
And, if yo are a parent, teacher, student, or academic interested in excellent science education in Minnesota, bookmark the site and come back often.
Thank you very much, that is all.
pharyngula | July 14, 2010I know, I know already. We're getting creationist and religious ads appearing on the right sidebar.
Seed has farmed out some of their ad space to a generic ad provider, which doesn't pay us much and which stuffs in ridiculous ads from any old desperate wanker who wants to buy some attention. In this particular case, I know the guy behind the ad: he was one of those obsessed cranks who, for a while, was sending me nagging emails every day demanding that I read his ReVoLuTiOnArY ThEoRy. I guess he got tired of the cold shoulder and decided to buy space on the web, a sure measure of exactly how…
tfk | July 13, 2010In the comments on my previous post, there's an important update from George Soule, a communications director at the Carnegie Foundation, and I updated the post to reflect his clarifications.
In chatting with him, he had a useful explanation of how the science standards process differs from that which applied to the Common Core standards in English language arts and in mathematics. Forty-eight governors have committed to using those standards, which are well on their way to final adoption. He's allowed me to quote part of his reply:
The conceptual science framework effort is proceeding very…
pharyngula | July 13, 2010People are still going to the ghastly Creation "Museum" in Kentucky — it's actually doing a bang-up business. Fortunately, some of the people going are critics who can see its troubling flaws.
When I went, what leapt out at me was the intellectual dishonesty of the place; it mimics a museum, but it isn't, and it pretends to understand evolution when it doesn't. I walked through it with a little alarm bell in my head going "wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong" nonstop.
Ideas Man picks up on another aspect of the "museum": it's a temple to fear. Everywhere you go, it portrays violence and bloody…
gregladen | July 13, 2010Speaking of Accommodationism and New Atheism and stuff, check out this 10 year old discussion: