Culture Wars
tfk | September 29, 2010My post yesterday about Pew's religion poll has generated a certain amount of discussion, though mostly about a point that I phrased poorly and ought to rework to clarify. I'm getting general pushback on my suggestion that atheists did better on this survey because they are book smart about religion, but lack experiential or emotional knowledge about religion. I haven't been dissuaded by the arguments, but look forward to seeing what else emerges.
The thing that shakes me most is the fact that paleocon Daniel Larison made the same point at American Conservative magazine. I assume that…
tfk | September 28, 2010Martin Cothran (cf.) demonstrates that he's a religious illiterate, writing:
It's Banned Books Week again: You know, the week where we talk about all of the books religious parents have objected to in schools, but where we ignore the fact that religious books were prevented from making it into schools in the first place?
In fact, I did a search in the "Books Banned and Challenged 2008-2009," for the word "Bible," but it didn't turn up anything.
Funny how that works.
Funny indeed, as he wrote this the same day that Pew released a major survey on religious literacy (Pew's site is hammered, so I…
tfk | September 27, 2010Disco. club owner Bruce Chapman is upset. He saw a report from Saturday which claimed that the UN had someone in charge of meeting aliens if they landed. Two days later, he therefore launched a breathless critique of the obviously Darwinian influence on this decision, a blog post he titled Evidence of Mindless Evolution at the U.N.:
the U.N. now wants to establish a liaison with these unknown creatures, even if there is no evidence for their existence at all--just speculation. A Malaysian astrophysicist is to be the first ambassador of the world to little green men on Mars, or wherever they…
tfk | September 27, 2010The more I watch Christine O'Donnell's riff on evolution, the more sure I am that Christine McDonnell would, had she not been interrupted, have told Bill Maher, "even Darwin himself renounced evolution on his deathbed." Alas, she only got through "even Darwin himself…," but I think we'd all have been treated to the Lady Hope Story had Maher just waited a second. Then she got distracted and issued a different canard.
tfk | September 24, 2010Ed Yong has a great blog post up asking Should science journalists take sides? He rightly answers: yes, "a commitment to the view from nowhere has many problems." Among those problems, this opinions-on-shape-of-earth-differ style is "a disservice to journalism," reflective of "laziness" and "a poor understanding of one's audience," and a sign of "naiveté" among journalists who adopt the pose. It can force writers to make "ethical breaches." Lastly, he notes that it derives from â and more importantly contributes to â a "failure to understand the nature of science."
Other bloggers have…
tfk | September 23, 2010Not to reopen raw wounds, but reposting my talk from Netroots Nation reminded me of two other sessions I attended, both on the theme of snark and satire. Unfortunately, video from the one I want to talk about today is not yet online.
As you'll recall, sciencebloggers and skeptics were really bored over the summer, and to pass the time they got into a fight over whether it was good or bad to be dickish. Those who said "no," generally argued that there's no particular evidence that such behavior is effective at convincing people to join your cause and the peer reviewed literature found dickish…
cevans | August 6, 2010
Let's talk about the God Particle.
It strikes me that people refer to the Higgs boson as the "God particle" in the same way some call the iPhone the "Jesus phone": with an almost pointed disregard for what such a prefix actually means. Considering the intensity of the culture wars, the popularity of the moniker is baffling. Is this about contextualizing the abstraction (and grandeur) of particle physics in a way "regular" people can understand? Does this represent a humanist concession to the religious? If so, can religious culture really be swayed by such a transparent ploy -- y'know, it…
tfk | July 27, 2010Disco. president Bruce Chapman wonders:
It is not clear why the number of academic freedom cases seem to be increasing. Is it because the iron hand of ideological conformity is squeezing professors more tightly? Or is it because more subjects of attack are fighting back in court?
Or is it because he's making numbers up from thin air? Might it be not clear that the number of academic freedom cases is increasing? Could Chapman's staff be ginning up meritless claims of academic freedom violations so he has things to blog about?
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…
tfk | July 20, 2010Calitics has the story about that whooping cough epidemic:
With whooping cough now at epidemic levels, it's becoming clear that one of the primary culprits is the idiotic trend over the last 10 years of parents, mostly affluent whites, opting out of vaccination out of a baseless fear that the vaccines are unsafe.
tfk | July 19, 2010In February, at the AAAS meetings in San Diego, Stephen Schneider gave a gangbuster talk about climate change denial. Schneider was energetic, feisty, and absolutely right about the challenges faced by scientists trying to talk to the media. NCSE's Genie Scott, a fellow panelist, came away deeply impressed, and she knows more than most about giving a good presentation on how scientists should react to science denial. Little wonder, since Schneider has been at the heart of research on global warming since the early 1970s, and has recognized for just as long that the science is not enough…
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…
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…
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…
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…
tfk | July 14, 2010Over the weekend, the skeptics gathered at James Randi's annual The Amazing Meeting, or TAM. By all accounts, it was a great show. Probably the most buzz came from a talk by Phil Plait, which became known as the "don't be a dick" speech, because, well, he argued that skeptics will be most effective when they aren't dicks.
As I wasn't there, I couldn't comment on the speech, but twitter exploded over it. A surprising number of PZ Myers' fans seemed to think Plait was talking about PZ, though PZ wasn't mentioned. Interesting, that PZ's supporters either think he's a dick, or think other…
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…
tfk | July 12, 2010A draft of the Standards Framework for national science standards, funded by the Carnegie Foundation and sponsored by the National Governors Association and the US Chamber of Commerce (among others), has been published. The National Research Council drafted the framework, and is seeking comment until August 2, and I'll have more to say as I work through the draft. Forty-eight states (excluding Texas and Alaska) have agreed to use English Language Arts and Mathematics standards produced through a similar process, and many people see these standards as natural additions to that national…