Culture Wars
tfk | March 25, 2009White wants S&W. He insists that there are credible alternatives to evolution. Thinks that random mutation can't add mutations. Do these people not read the Index of Creationist Claims? Claims evolution is a sacrosanct icon.
Leo: What do you say to people who think these things belong only in college? He thinks its bad! Shocker!
Martha Griffin: "Keeping our science standards strong." Went to college with Cargill, teacher and museum educator. Mentors science teachers. Backs ESS and Biology TEKS without amendments and without S&W. People who respect actual knowledge and…
tfk | March 25, 2009ESS writing committee member Sharon Mosher calls for them to reverse the bogus changes. Calling for students to "assess the arguments for and against universal common descent in light of the fossil evidence" is nonsense, she says, because it requires teachers to "manufacture arguments that don't exist."
BTW, Ray Bohlin's biological research apparently includes work on questions about whether pole-dancing is OK for believers. I imagine there was a lot of field work for that. I wonder if the Biologic Institute will take up that important work.
Deborah Koeck, member of the Chemistry TEKS…
tfk | March 25, 2009Ray Bohlin, Disco. fellow and head of Probe Ministries (Motto: "Touched by a being from above!") is about to speak. On the group's front page, there is a story asking: "Is Masturbation A Sin?" Guess what he decides!
Doesn't have written testimony. "I'll be reading from a recent evolution text."
He insists there are limits to change. Which is true in some sense, but it isn't really meaningful. Those limits are vastly more expansive than what is required to explain the diversity of life.
Quotes Jerry Coyne on the difference between artificial and natural selection.
Runs out of time,…
tfk | March 25, 2009Texas oilman Kyle Lewallen is building toward something, I guess. He hasn't actually made an argument yet. Ah, he was on the writing committee, and is offering their suggested revisions for the Earth and Space Science TEKS. They don't like amendments offered last time around by the Board, who didn't consult their expert writing committee before mucking with the text.
NCSE has been pushing simply to reverse those amendments, but the committee is offering revisions which might be easier for the Board to stomach.
Dunbar and Lewallen are going back and forth over the amendments to ESS TEKS 4…
tfk | March 25, 2009According to Terri Leo, Genie favored the strengths and weaknesses language in November. This is false. Not only does she oppose that language now, as she did in November, she wasn't here in November.
Why must people bear false witness?
tfk | March 24, 2009It's the Discovery Institute's Rob Crowther, of course!
I'm in Texas right now, gearing up for the second round of science standards hearings. I'll be testifying 2nd tomorrow, right after what looks to be a very impressive news conference.
Anyway, Crowther, Disco. DJ, is upset that people oppose amendments made in the January meeting. Unfortunately, his complaints simply reveal that Crowther doesn't have any place in debates about education.
First, he claims that the Wall Street Journal is wrong to claim that "The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all…
tfk | March 18, 2009
It was a tremendous honor to be the first speaker at a session on evolution education last February. The session included such luminaries as Ken Miller, Olivia Judson, Neil Shubin, and David Deamer, who each presented a marvelous overview of how evolution illuminates our understanding of biology, from the origins of life to the behavior of beetles, from the workings of the cell to peculiarities of the human body.
While I could not hope to speak with authority matching those great scientists on those particular fields, my opening talk set the stage by showing that, 150 years after the Origin…
tfk | March 15, 2009Over at IDolator Bill Dembski's blog, Denyse "Buy My Book" O'Leary has been on a tear lately, blogging about the supposed racism inherent in evolution. Fellow blog contributor DaveScot responded with a long post observing that the leadership of racist groups today and in the past are often vehement antievolutionists. DaveScot fails to observe that the Klan was prominent at the Scopes trial, firmly opposing the teaching of evolution.
In any event, one might have expected this contrary voice to suddenly disappear from the blog, since Dembski and his sycophants have a long history of censoring…
tfk | March 8, 2009There are a lot of reasons not to hold Arthur Conan Doyle up as a guide to solid scientific practice. The creator of the famously rational Sherlock Holmes was also an advocate of spiritualism and the existence of fairies, after all. Setting that aside, it would be a bad mistake to cite the work of fictional characters to justify claims about successful scientific practice, at least without copious clarification of the relationship between fictional scientists like The Lost World's Professor Challenger and scientists in the real world.
I might have had to deploy any and all of these…
razib | March 6, 2009Some have argued that the Culture Wars are in abatement. Out of curiosity I checked the attitudes toward abortion on demand and homosexuality in the GSS broken down by age & political orientation. The ABANY and HOMOSEX variables. Below are the percentages who agree with abortion on demand as well as the contention that there is nothing wrong with homosexual relations.
Yes To Abortion On Demand
Extremely Liberal
Liberal
Slightly Liberal
Moderate
Slightly Conservative
Conservative
Extremely Conservative
65 or older
57
50
34
32
32…
tfk | February 23, 2009At the AAAS meetings in Chicago two weeks ago, I was privileged to be on a panel with such luminaries as Olivia Judson, David Deamer, Neil Shubin, and this year's winner of the AAAS Award for the Public Understanding of Science, Ken Miller. It was a great occasion, and afterward I got to shake hands with the original Tiktaalik fossil at Neil Shubin's lab, conveniently located catty-corner to my old dorm at the University of Chicago.
I plan to make slidecasts of several of those talks to post on Youtube or Slideshare when I get the time.
Until then, we can anticipate a multi-part series…
tfk | February 20, 2009Disco. Inst. honcho Bruce Chapman is upset at The Weakness at the Center of the Conservative Coalition. Shorter Bruce Chapman:
No one wants to have anything to do with social conservatives. Waaaaah! We'll take our ball and go home.
Yesterday, Chapman was going ape about … well, it's hard to be sure. Shorter Bruce Chapman:
Apes aren't people because apes sometimes injure people. After all, no one would keep a tiger as a pet, claim it was like a child, and be shocked when it attacked him. Oh, um, even though he did, it is surely be the fault of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins.…
tfk | January 21, 2009In November, the Texas Board of Education met to consider their new science standards. As I've mentioned a major point of contention is a reference in the current standards to "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific explanations, a concept only ever applied to evolution, and without any clear explanation of what it means.
In the course of 6 hours of testimony, witnesses constantly asked what these "weaknesses" were, and got no clarity. Finally, at an ungodly hour, Cynthia Dunbar (the one who thinks public schools are evil and that President Obama is a s3kr1t Mussulman) gave her explanation…
tfk | December 30, 2008Several of the blogs have pointed to the Disco. Inst.'s shameful abuse of the suicide of Jesse Kilgore in an end-of-year fundraising pitch. Kilgore, a college student who had recently returned from military service in Iraq, had been challenging aspects of his upbringing, and his father (a fundamentalist pastor) concluded that reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion inspired Jesse to kill himself. The Disco. Inst. decided that the best thing to do was to glom onto that father's grief in order to drum up end-of-year donation.
Given that the suicide rate for Iraq veterans keeps rising, I'd…
tfk | December 29, 2008Yet another study confirms what we've known for a long time, abstinence education doesn't work:
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health…
tfk | December 8, 2008The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles EPA head Stephen Johnson:
Johnson majored in biology. At Taylor [University, one of the oldest evangelical universities in the country], that includes discussion of creationism.
Taylor biology professor Timothy Burkholder, who was Johnson's adviser, said, "We would adhere to the view that God is the creator of all things and in charge of our lives, and I think Steve recognizes that and did from the beginning."
Asked about this, Johnson declined to express his views on the evolution-creation question.
"It's not a clean-cut division," the career EPA…
tfk | November 19, 2008Listening to the Texas TEKS hearings, I note that a speaker is decrying the "eliticism" of his biologist critics. Isn't it a little counterproductive to decry elitism even as demonstrating that one is ignorant of basic vocabulary?
Or am I being eliticist?
tfk | October 23, 2008I imagine Casey Luskin and Anika Smith sitting in a dark room together. The mirror ball spins as these Disco. titans take the floor for a podcast about the Texas science standards (aka TEKS: Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). You'll recall that I tripped up some of Disco.'s fancy footwork last Friday, but these two sashay right past the evidence.
At issue is a Disco.-inspired standard in the older TEKS which requires teachers to have students "analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific…
tfk | September 2, 2008Time magazine digs into Mayor Palin's early days:
At some point in those the fractious first days, Palin told the department heads they needed her permission to talk to reporters. "She put a gag order on those people, something that you'd expect to find in the big city, not here," says [local paper editor] Naegele. "She flew in there like a big city gal, which she's not. It was a strange time, and [the Frontiersman] came out very harshly against her."
[Former mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she…
tfk | July 8, 2008Disco. Inst. flack Rob Crowther is crowing about a grant they gave to Guillermo Gonzalez. Gonzalez was the Iowa State University astronomer who got tied in with the ID creationists at Disco. and with the old-earth creationists at Reasons To Believe, then was denied tenure when his publication rate dropped precipitously. Disco. responded to the tenure denial by insisting simultaneously that Gonzalez's ID research was powerful evidence of the scientific validity of their theological views, and that it was improper for ISU to consider this supposedly scientific work ("viewpoint discrimination…