Culture Wars
tfk | July 12, 2011
It was a hard job, but someone had to do it. A few days ago, I sat down and watched a 15 minute video of Miss USA pageant contestants as they pondered the question: Should evolution be taught in schools?
Then I watched it again. And again. Until my eardrums bled I had a complete and accurate transcript.
So that you don't have to do endure the same agony, I present the transcript below, as a service to the community, with timecodes relative to the video above. Enjoy. You can find the names and biographies of each state's contestant at the Miss USA site.
"Should evolution be taught in…
tfk | July 11, 2011Speaking, for reasons passing understanding, before the Israeli Knesset, Glenn Beck said:
I donât know a lot of Palestinians but I also donât know a lot of Jewish people either.
So, the list of things Glenn Beck can be fairly said not to "know a lot of": Palestinians, Jews, anything.
tfk | July 9, 2011Jerry Coyne has a concern. Weighing in on the elevatorgate saga (cf.):
Over the past few days Iâve become increasingly distressed at the inability of our community to discuss an issue rationally and without rancor or name-calling. This âcampaignâ, which I agree with Miranda is vile and disgusting, seems more like a popularity contest: who has the greatest influence on the internet? It is about trying to bully people into agreement through name calling (âgender traitorsâ) and humiliation. It is not about rational discourse but about self promotion (âSCOREâ) and censorship of ideas that some…
tfk | July 7, 2011About a year ago, a month before our wedding, I was walking with my wife (wife-to-be, I guess) and some friends through New York City. It was a hot, sunny summer day, so she was in a sun dress.
We walked through parks, we met various friends throughout the city, and generally had a good time.
That evening, talking with her mom, she mentioned that she needed to pin the front of her dress, because it showed too much cleavage, and people had been staring at her cleavage whispering crude things to her all day.
Folks, I was right there, arm around her waist, pretty much all day. But jackasses…
tfk | July 6, 2011Thanks to everyone for their help with the Miss USA survey. There were 713 responses, which should give me what I need. I'll post the results shortly. I closed the survey and have started crunching numbers.
There was a question raised about the question wording, so I changed how the questions were introduced about halfway through. It was a modest change in the wording, clarifying that I wanted respondents to assess the contestants' answers in terms of their objective merits, not just whether they answered the question asked. I didn't think it was a big impact, but I was curious whether…
tfk | June 29, 2011Last night, several folks on twitter expressed similar concerns about the wording of the survey I created and blogged about a couple days ago. Some folks taking the survey were confused about whether I wanted respondents to rate the answers by whether or not they answered the question, or by how well the ideas expressed by the contestants matched the raters' own beliefs (even if they didn't quite answer the question).
I wanted the latter, and have updated the instructions to clarify. If you took the survey before, and if this clarification changes how you would have answered, please…
tfk | June 29, 2011Because Nobel laureate Werner Arber is addressing evolution at the Landau meeting of Nobel laureates, I thought I'd repost this piece from January 21, 2009, which was first posted from the Texas Board of Education meeting room. Enjoy.
In 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…
tfk | June 28, 2011Prompted by some questions on twitter and elsewhere, I'm working on some research based on the much-discussed Miss USA answers to a question about evolution.
I'd like your help with that research. I need to come up with a consistent rating of the contestants' answers, and I created a survey that you can use help.
Please take the survey, and share it with others. I'd prefer to have science-friendly and science literate people take the survey, but don't be shy about sharing the answers more widely.
Thanks!
tfk | June 22, 2011In Slacktivist Fred Clark's regular Left Behind blogging has reached a point in the novels where an Orthodox rabbi has gone on TV to explain that Jesus is the Messiah, and Jews should all be Jews for Jesus. One of the novels' protagonists (who found Jesus after seeing a billion or so people killed raptured) pumps his fists and cheers.
This reaction, and the rabbi's broadcast itself, grate on Clark's ears. Clark is an evangelical Christian, and knows when someone's Doing It Wrong. This scene, he writes, "illustrates another important point in our lesson on How Not to Do Evangelism. Fist-…
tfk | June 21, 2011PZ writes: Not the puppy dog!:
Religion really does make people crazy. Here's a story about a dog who walked into a Jewish court.
"The dog entered the Jerusalem financial court several weeks ago and would not leave, reports Israeli website Ynet."
"It reminded a judge of a curse passed on a now deceased secular lawyer about 20 years ago, when judges bid his spirit to enter the body of a dog."
So, obviously, this stray mutt must contain the displaced, reincarnated soul of a dead lawyer. At least, that's what somebody steeped in magical thinking would assume.
If you have an animal possessed by…
tfk | June 20, 2011Astronomer Phil Plait notes a webcomic addressing testability and the supernatural, and makes an odd endorsement of this position:
there's no such thing as the supernatural. Either something is natural -- that is, part of the Universe -- or else it doesn't exist.
If you posit some thing that has no perceivable or measurable effect, then it may as well not exist. And as soon as you claim it does have an effect -- it can be seen, heard, recorded, felt -- then it must be in some way testable, and therefore subject to science.
Not quite. The issue with the supernatural is not whether it's part…
tfk | June 20, 2011Daniel Loxton does the yeoman work of unearthing much of the history of Skepticism's Oldest Debate: A Prehistory of "DBAD" (1838-2010). It's too good throughout to even try pulling out a summarizing quote, so seriously, read the whole thing, and see how skeptics have been telling one another not to be so dickish since around the time Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle was published.
That year, 1838, David Meredith Reese published his Humbugs of New-York: being a remonstrance against popular delusion, whether in science, philosophy, or religion, and wrote:
Unhappily, however, those who have…
tfk | June 20, 2011
I taped this back in April, and forgot all about it until I just found it online. Enjoy!
Dr. Kiki and I chatted about science education, controversies in science classrooms, and related issues. It was inspired by this presentation.
tfk | June 14, 2011There's a lot of good value in You Are Not So Smart's take on the Backfire Effect:
The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.
The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.
Lots of people are blogging and tweeting about it, so it's worth remembering that the excellent Bob Carroll did a nice piece on it at the Skeptics Dictionary a while back.
tfk | June 13, 2011Hitchens on the Art of the Feud - NYTimes.com:
according to some famous combatants, the death of the literary feud has been greatly exaggerated: the fighting will go on as long as there are writers willing to defend high principles, or at least able to pull off some devastating lines.
Perhaps no one has distinguished himself as a feudist in the past few decades more than Christopher Hitchens, who in an e-mail gave some helpful hints on how to start a feud â and, more important, how to keep it going.
A proper feud, Mr. Hitchens wrote, requires one of at least two things: a clash of strong…
tfk | June 11, 2011Shepherd Book â Serenity:
Why when I talk about belief, why do you always assume I'm talking about God?
Interfaith prayer meetings face opposition; some religious leaders fear pluralism:
Interfaith dialogues and worship services spread across the nation following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, ⦠But now, some Christian leaders are reacting publicly against acceptance of Muslims and even other Christian faith traditions.
Dwayne Mercer, the newly elected president of the Florida Baptist Convention, ⦠would not attend an interfaith meeting. Mercer ⦠feared that his church members might…
tfk | June 9, 2011Just a reminder, Haeckel's embryo drawing were not fraudulent. He did the best he could with the resources available.
tfk | June 9, 2011Politico reports on on Rick Santorum mixing it up with Rush Limbaugh:
"I believe the earth gets warmer and I also believe the earth gets cooler," Santorum said. "And I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man, through the production of CO2 ... is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all the other factors, El Niño, La Niña, sunspots, moisture in the air. There's a variety of factors that contribute to the Earth warming and cooling." ...
"It's just an excuse for more government control of your life," Santorum…
tfk | June 6, 2011Jerry Coyne is trying to do math. A new survey out from Pew finds that, as in 2007, 61% of Americans say they'd be less likely to vote for someone who did not believe in God. Coyne thinks:
The unchanged level of disapprobation is a bit disconcerting, but at least gives the lie to accommodationist claims that vociferous atheism is turning people off. And we know that lack of religious belief is still increasing everywhere in America.
Several problems arise here, exacerbated by the generally handwavy attitude Coyne-as-blogger takes towards data and logical argument. We have to guess what…
tfk | June 6, 2011NCSE's Glenn Branch is known for his nigh-omniscience, and today he got a great scoop: the production company behind schlockumentary Expelled is going bankrupt. You'll recall Expelled: No Intelligence... as a movie so full of crap that even frontman Ben Stein acknowledges it's best watched while high. It's so bad that the New York Times called it "One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time," Roger Ebert said "This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions, segues between…