Culture Wars
tfk | September 8, 2007
Many years ago, I heard a story about a mohel (the man who performs ritual Jewish circumcisions), and this comment by the Disco. Institute's Bruce Chapman reminded me of it. Bruce told Tom Bethell (author of the Incorrect Guide to Science):
if I were to carry around Discovery fellows' peer-reviewed science journal articles on Darwinian theory and intelligent design I would need a suitcase, not a coat pocket.
Boy howdy! A whole suitcase in a decade or so of "research." It's a shame that, even when Chapman stretches, he can't come up with anything more impressive.
Speaking of which, the…
tfk | September 4, 2007Ben Stein cannot grasp what the GOP's problem is with Larry Craig:
What I don't understand is why the GOP is tossing Senator Craig overboard as if he were a terrorist.
Even if it turns Senator Craig is gay, so what? Barney Frank is gay and he's one of the best members of the Congress. There are lots of fine gay public servants.
But Ben, Barney Frank is not a Republican. The list of prominent members of the Log Cabin Republicans is very brief, and entirely devoid of members of Congress.
If the GOP treats a gay member as a terrorist, it should hardly be surprising. Many Republicans seem to…
tfk | August 30, 2007At Billy Dembski's blog, Granville Sewell wonders What if we DID find irreducibly complex biological features?:
In any debate on Intelligent Design, there is a question I have long wished to see posed to ID opponents: “If we DID discover some biological feature that was irreducibly complex, to your satisfication [sic] and to the satisfaction of all reasonable observers, would that justify the design inference?”
No, at least not necessarily. It isn't clear why we should make that immediate leap.
There are two related problems with that jump. First, the fact that something meets the…
tfk | August 14, 2007The Dallas Morning News observes:
North Texas didn't have a single charter school with the state's top academic rating two years ago. Now there are four.
But those campuses remain outnumbered by low-performing charters: 11 this year across the region, up from eight a couple years ago. The same trend holds for the rest of the state: 51 of Texas' 317 charters were rated "academically unacceptable" based on 2007 test scores, while only 15 received the top rating "exemplary," according to data released this month by the Texas Education Agency.
…
The 16 percent of charters labeled unacceptable…
tfk | August 9, 2007Not content to mangle science, the DI's Logan Gage declares war on the English language. After Time states that ID is "a stealth creationist theory," Gage quotes a definition of "stealth" stating that it involves proceeding "furtively, secretly, or imperceptibly," and then furtively observes that some people do not perceive the link between creationism and ID (or keep it secret):
First of all, ID is not creationism—and no one is more vociferously insistent about this than the major creationist organizations like Answers In Genesis. We’ve heard this charge before. But stealth?
Stealth...like…
omnibrain | August 4, 2007...just kidding! It's nearly every month that a new study comes out showing that abstinence only programs don't do shit. This time a study from Oxford shows, through a meta-analysis of 13 different U.S. trials, that
none of the abstinence-only programmes had an impact on the age at which individuals lost their virginity, whether they had unprotected sex, the number of sexual partners, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases or the number of pregnancies.
One trial did show a short-term benefit with participants reporting that they were less likely to have had sex in the month following…
tfk | August 1, 2007Reposted from the old TfK, for your enjoyment while I drive out to the NCSE.
I don't mind creationism. I know this comes as a bit of a shock, but I don't. For our purposes, creationism is the belief that a supernatural force or being created, designed or otherwise shaped the universe and life in it.
I don't have any broad beef with that idea. I don't necessarily buy it, but I'm not necessarily against it.
I say this because Billy Dembski has expanded on his Vise strategy (previously discussed in "Beware the simple machines").
He creates a taxonomy of "Darwinists": those who advocate…
omnibrain | July 30, 2007So freaking cool (and freaky)...Via Neatorama and Curious Expeditions.
It is a remarkable bit of irony, that finger. Venerated, kept in reliquary, subjected to the same treatment as a Saint. But this finger belonged to no Saint. It is the long bony finger of an enemy of the church, a heretic. A man so dangerous to the religious institution he was made a prisoner in his own home. It sits in a small glass egg atop an inscribed marble base in the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, or the History of Science Museum in Florence, Italy. On the shelf next to the middle finger of his right hand…
omnibrain | July 27, 2007Since we're talking about panicking about drugs today, complements of Robot Chicken:
tfk | July 25, 2007The Kansas Tourism Bureau should send a copy of this book to PZ Myers. Giant squidlike aliens and enmity of the gods would make great attractions.
Neatorama explains the cover of Joseph Millard's 1964 exposé of the wonders of Kansas:
THE GODS HATE KANSAS by Joseph Millard
INVASION FROM THE STARS
It began with the landing of nine meteors in Kansas. Then, suddenly, it exploded into a massive catastrophe.
First, the meteorite investigating team were turned into automatons, ruled by an unknown, alien intelligence. They barricaded themselves from the world and began building a rocket project,…
tfk | July 24, 2007The Discovery Institute promotes a podcast in a post titled:
William Dembski Addresses Forthcoming Intelligent Design Research that Advances ID and Answers Critics
How lovely to know before it happens not only that this "research" will yield answers for his critics, but that those answers will advance his own particular beliefs. Watch him move in one paragraph from "It’s too early to tell what the impact of my ideas is on science" to "I think ID is finally in a position to challenge certain fundamental assumptions in the natural sciences about the nature and origin of information. This, I…
tfk | July 23, 2007As French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde tells the National Assembly and the French people "Enough thinking, already," and calling on them to work harder, not smarter, we find the American anti-intellectual party warming up. Mitt Romney told a crowd:
Senator Obama is wrong if he thinks science-based sex education has any place in kindergarten.
Rick Perlstein comments:
He's referring to a quote from Obama: "'But it's the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in schools.'" But note how Romney is careful to repeat the phrase "science-based…
tfk | July 21, 2007Denyse O'Leary uses Bill Dembski's blog (and a dozen other ID blogs) to report a comment from a friend about the mission statement for Nature. The mission statement reads:
First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life.
Her friend replies:
To report…
tfk | July 11, 2007At the Johnson County District Attorney's Office Home Page, Phill Kline (the extra "l" is for loser) pimps a WingNutDaily column by local conspiracy theorist Jack Cashill (HT: KSDP Buffalo Blog). Kline's heading for the article is "WorldNetDaily coverage of Morrison / Tiller controversy," an accurate enough description which fails to establish why it belongs on a county-funded webpage. Tiller is an OB/GYN in Wichita who runs a family planning clinic, Morrison (then the Johnson County DA) beat Kline in last year's state Attorney General election.
Neither Morrison nor Tiller currently has…
tfk | July 10, 2007The National Center for Science Education is looking for a new logo. The nation's premier force standing up for accurate science education has decided that their old logo lacks pizzazz. They want to enlist the vast online evolutionist cabal and naturally select the very finest ideas. Send your intelligently designed logo to them by August 10, and do read the guidelines in the link. The successful designer gets pretty fancy swag.
tfk | July 9, 2007Via Jesus' General, I learn that any possible hypothesis that I could possibly be innocent, or that I could conceivably get into heaven, is in fact incorrect. You can find out whether you are innocent by visiting needgod.com. Alas, that title is an assertion, not a question, and the quiz will not help you determine whether you actually "Need God," just that the God they need is prepared to toss everyone into Hell.
I don't like these people. The God they worship is a prick, and they tend to emulate him. While I usually question the wisdom of attributing gender to an incorporeal…
tfk | July 7, 2007At Bill Dembski's blog, crandaddy applies intelligent design to driving:
you don’t go about searching for design by looking for designers; you infer its presence from the explanatory inadequecy of epistemic nondesign processes (chance and necessity). This is the heuristic procedure for design inferences at all levels–animal, human, ET, God, or whatever. If naturalistic nondesign explanations are the only type allowed at the biological and cosmological levels, then why not impose the same restriction on scientific explanations at the human level? Are the drivers of the automobiles I pass on…
tfk | July 6, 2007Billy Dembski, self-proclaimed "Isaac Newton of Information Theory," has decided that calling himself "pro-science" is just as good as actually, you know, being pro-science, while Paul Nelson seems to think that open puzzles are a bad thing in science.
Meanwhile, Denyse O'Leary is excited about the new Christian magazine pimping IDC to its readers, while Larry Caldwell doesn't understand why everyone keeps talking about ID as if it were religious.
tfk | July 5, 2007When God (Morgan Freeman) approaches Evan Baxter (Steve Carrell) about becoming Noah, it requires some lifestyle changes. Baxter, a news anchor from Bruce Almighty who has become a congressman, is compelled to grows a bushy white beard, discovers an appreciation for the brown robes favored by Charlton Heston's Moses, and suddenly has a hankering for another of Moses' favorites – unleavened bread. His wife obliges by offering pita, and since neither the Baxters, the director nor the audience realize that pita is leavened, everyone is happy.
Anyone looking for a retelling of Noah's flood that…
tfk | July 4, 2007At Borders yesterday, a woman picked up The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould, and got very excited. Being a fan of the author, I eavesdropped on her cell phone explanation.
She began by getting very excited at learning "Professor Gould's" first and middle names, which suggested that she might be encountering the joy of the late Harvard paleontologist for the first time. She began reading the book jacket, which contained some text about his explanations of the ways life on earth developed (not, alas "evolved"). She paused, told her friend that he "must be some treehugger…