Culture Wars
tfk | July 19, 2012As Steve Benen notes at Rachel Maddow's blog, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker draws his governing lessons from interesting sources:
Just imagine. Then imagine that Noah had to build his ark in a capitalist market economy, and had to be able to turn a profit on the deal simply in order to start construction. He might have to charge admission, treat it like a zoo or a theme park or something.
Now imagine that Noah's business plan didn't appeal to bankers, and even the people who supported his past ventures (like, perhaps, a museum about how the planet and all life on it was created a mere…
tfk | July 18, 2012Slacktivist observes that Bryan Fischer is an AIDS denier:
Tweet from Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association:
“New pill stops HIV virus. But won’t stop AIDS since caused by extensive inhalant drug use, not HIV.”
So there it is. Bryan Fischer is an AIDS denier. The chief spokesman of the American Family Association is an AIDS denier.
Do you need to know anything, anything at all, else about Bryan Fischer?
No.
Is there anything, anything at all, else that you could possibly learn about Bryan Fischer that would balance this out and make him a credible and/or decent human being?
No.
So…
tfk | July 17, 2012Sometimes someone tricks me into reading Jerry Coyne's blog. He tends to trot out the same bad arguments, sometimes it's worth pushing back. For instance, he recently set out to demonstrate that science and religion are incompatible, in part because of:
the well known data on the greater prevalence of nonbelief among scientists than among the general public. In the elite U.S. National Academy of Sciences, for example, only 7% of members accept a personal God, with 93% being agnostics and atheists. In the U.S. general population, these figures are almost exactly reversed. And, of course, in…
tfk | July 10, 2012Shorter Disco. 'tute's David Klinghoffer: Paul McBride, Darwinist Hero of the Hour:
Why don't real scientists take our book seeking to throw out all of paleoanthropology – self-published by a lawyer, an insect geneticist, and a bacterium geneticist – seriously? That paleoanthropologist who tore it to shreds doesn't count: he hasn't got good enough credentials.
Honestly, here's David Klinghoffer's actual opening:
The debate about evolution is conducted in large part on blogs… Defending Darwinism from critics and advocates of alternative scientific theories like intelligent design should be a…
tfk | July 10, 2012Disco. 'tute blogger Ann Gauger wants to make something clear:
There seems to be an idea on the part of some critics that my analysis in Science and Human Origins means that humans arose four million years ago. That is not the case.
The very idea that anyone would think Gauger agrees with the scientific evidence on any matter is clearly offensive, and her umbrage is duly noted.
Gauger doesn't ever specify who these critics are that maligned her so, or what they actually said. She certainly doesn't link to the critics' work so that her readers can evaluate those criticisms themselves. Links…
tfk | July 2, 2012At his blog Still Monkeys, Paul McBride has done yeoman work examining the shoddy claims of the latest book from the Disco. 'tute Press. This book, barely more than a pamphlet, really, purports to show that the last century of research on the roots of the human race are wrong, that evolution can't explain where humans came from, that there was no common ancestry between humans and other primates, and to "debunk claims that the human race could not have started from an original couple."
Typically for the book's authors – Disco. 'tute staffers Casey Luskin, Douglas Axe, and Ann Gauger – the…
tfk | June 28, 2012At the time of YHWH, God's making of earth and heaven, no bush of the field was yet on earth,no plant of the field had yet sprung up,for YHWH, God, had not made it rain upon the earth,and there was no human/adam to till the soil/adama–but a surge would well up from the ground and water all the face of the soul;and YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soilhe blew into his nostrils the breath of lifeand the human became a living being.
YHWH, God, planted a garden in Eden/Land-of-Pleasure, in the east,and there he placed the human whom he had formed.
…
Now YHWH, God, said:It is not good…
tfk | April 25, 2012A couple weeks ago, the second creationist bill of the "academic freedom" generation became law. You'd think Casey Luskin, who seems to be the ringleader of the clowns pushing these bills, would be thrilled. But all he can seem to do is find reasons to be upset.
First he was angry that Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam let the bill become law, but did so without signing it. Haslam's statement refusing to sign the bill observed that, by the defenders' own argument, the bill was essentially powerless, while there are ways in which it could make things worse. Noting that laws ought to "bring…
tfk | April 22, 2012[Attention Conservation Notice: About 3,500 words on the factual, scientific, and philosophical problems of a paper which was surely not intended to be taken seriously as science or philosophy. Nick Matzke comes at it from a different angle at The Panda's Thumb, and more briefly.]
Evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne has an article coming out in the journal Evolution, in which he demonstrates yet again why excellence in one field does not guarantee competence in any other field. The paper aims to do several things: to advance an argument about why evolution is so controversial in US political…
tfk | April 12, 2012Todd Wood is a professor at Bryan College, in Dayton, TN. Dayton, you'll recall, was the home of the Scopes trial, and Bryan College was named after Scopes's prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, and was founded in part to carry on Bryan's anti-evolution crusade. Wood himself is a prominent young earth creationist, a leader in the creationist answer to phylogenetics (baraminology), and director of Bryan's Center for Origins Research. Which is to say, he's a creationist's creationist.
And he's against the Tennessee monkey bill.
Last month, he wrote to Governor Haslam, asking him to oppose the…
tfk | April 12, 2012On Tuesday, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee allowed HB 368 to become law; it is the second of this new generation of creationist laws, along with a similar bill in Louisiana. Haslam refused to sign the bill, stating that it brought confusion, not clarity. He also noted that the bill had overwhelming legislative support (passing by roughly 3-1 margins in both houses), so a veto was unlikely to have any effect.
That morning, as Haslam weighed his options, balancing the concerns expressed by thousands of parents across Tennessee, and the concerns expressed by the state's leading scientists and…
tfk | March 21, 2012The Florida Atlantic University newspaper reports:
Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura was reviewing with his evolution class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU student Jonatha Carr interrupted him: âHow does evolution kill black people?â she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution doesnât kill anyone.
And then, Carr became violent.
Another member of the class taped the outburst, though it's hard to follow much of what's going on.
A student told the paper that Kajiura "was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question⦠She asked it four…
tfk | March 21, 2012If you wonder why I haven't been blogging lately, it's because I've been trying to keep science safe in the Volunteer State; for instance, here's a great piece Huffington Post science editor Cara Santa Maria put together, including an interview with yours truly.
If you watch the NCSE front page (and you should), you'll see that it's almost all-Tennessee, all the time. Tennessee is getting ready to repeat an unfortunate part of its state's history, the Butler Act and Scopes trial of the 1920s.
Of course, creationism evolves, so the 21st century version won't take the same tack. In 1925,…
tfk | March 1, 2012From The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, Book Three of The Baroque Cycle. The Duchess of Oyonnax, in the court of Louis XIV, explains why good people do bad things:
In this world there are few who would kill for money. To believe that the Court of France is crowded with such rare specimens is folly. There used to be, at court, many practitioners of the Black Mass. Do you really think that all these people woke up one morning and said, "Today I shall worship and offer sacrifices to the Prince of Evil?" Of course not. Rather, it was that some girl, desperate to find a husband, so that she would…
tfk | February 29, 2012David Klinghoffer is surprised that his Disco. 'tute colleagues managed to get an article published at the Huffington Post. Klinghoffer's colleague must've known this was coming, and HuffPo isn't notorious for refusing essays, so I can't fathom why it was any sort of surprise. Nor is "pleasant" the word that came to mind on reading the essay, or anything coming from Disco. Anyway, Klinghoffer asks us to "Try to Imagine Our Country's Founding if the Founders Had Not Been Advocates of Intelligent Design:
The Huffington Post pleasantly surprised us today with an excellent piece on the…
tfk | February 21, 2012Shorter David Klinghoffer: National Center for Science Education, Darwin/Climate Enforcers, Humiliated by Forged Document Scandal:
Ethical questions about someone with no formal ties to NCSE clearly demonstrates the scientific, pedagogical, and moral failings of NCSE.
So Peter Gleick outed himself as the source of the Heartland board documents released last week, and now lots of people are chasing the shiny toy of how and why Gleick did it, rather than the important story of what the documents say.
But how and why Gleick did it, and even that Gleick did it, is irrelevant to most people, while…
tfk | February 19, 2012A secret fundraising document from a shadowy anti-science institute was accidentally made public. The document candidly lays out the anti-science agenda of group, including efforts to undermine science education in public schools, but also plans to broadly redefine society.
The year was 1998, and the document was from the Discovery Institute. Nicknamed "The Wedge Document" by opponents of the Disco. 'tute's brand of creationism, it details plans to use attacks on evolution like the thin edge of a wedge, opening a crack which in time would break society free of "scientific materialism."…
tfk | February 14, 2012Disco. 'tute ex-president Bruce Chapman doesn't know his history. He asserts:
The Spanish Inquisition was about testing the sincerity of people's Christianity.
This is true in the sense that the Crusades were about the joys of travel and cultural exchange.
I mean, how did torturing Jews until they accepted Jesus or fled their homeland test the sincerity of their Christianity? Was the seizure of property of those Jews who fled or died a test of anyone's Christianity?
In what sense did the iron maiden test the sincerity of anyone's Christianity?
It isn't clear whether Chapman regards the 5,000…
tfk | February 1, 2012Shorter David Klinghoffer, Minister of Propaganda for the Disco. 'tute: "Then They Came for Me -- and There Was No One Left to Speak for Me.":
I'm Jewish so it's OK for me to claim NCSE's decision to oppose pseudoscience in earth science classrooms as well as biology classes is just like Nazis dragging people off to be murdered in the middle of the night.
âShorterâ concept created by Daniel Davies, perfected by Elton Beard, and popularized by Sadly, No!. We are aware of all Internet traditions.â¢
tfk | January 16, 2012The National Center for Science Education, where I work, has focused on fighting political attacks on evolution education for all of its 30 year history. When the group was founded in the early '80s, they didn't choose a name narrowly focused on evolution, hoping that they'd make quick work of creationism and then move on to other problems in science education. Today's announcement that NCSE's taking on climate change is a partial fulfillment of that dream.
Creationism is far from dead, of course. This year, legislators in Indiana have filed two bills attacking evolution. One bill revives…