Policy and Politics
tfk | November 28, 2009Not to delve into the accommodationism wars again, but this claim is just silly. Ophelia Benson comments on Michael Shermer commenting on Jerry Coyne commenting on Michael Shermer, and objects to Shermer's claim that "the right way to respond to theists and/or theism⦠is simple: there is no one 'right way'. There are multiple ways, all of which work, depending on the context":
He expands on the point, but without bothering to say what he means by 'works.' It's a rather silly way to put it, frankly, because one doesn't always expect one's responses to 'work' - one sometimes simply wants to…
tfk | November 23, 2009Just back from Egypt, and still not ready for craziness. So please no one steal a lot of emails from climate scientists and try to dishonestly present a few snippets from them as evidence of a global conspiracy, OK?
Also, could everyone stop blogging for a day or two, just until I catch up? Thanks.
tfk | November 15, 2009Alexandria, actually, but still.
I'm here at the British Council's conference on Darwin's Living Legacy. It's really a remarkable event, bringing together brilliant biologists from around the world to talk about how the research program begun by Darwin continues today, as well as historians and philosophers giving us a nuanced view of Darwin himself and the reception of his ideas around the world, not to mention sociologists and education experts exploring contemporary reactions to Darwin's ideas (including my own talk comparing Islamic creationist rhetoric with that of American creationists…
tfk | November 11, 2009We truly are ruled by the worst in society. Proposition 13, the supermajority requirement for tax increases, and the state's inane proposition system more generally, are destroying California. But what can you do about it?:
Backers of an overhaul of California's government, who hope to leverage disgust with Sacramento into support for changing how the state raises taxes and spends money, have a difficult path ahead, according to a new poll of California voters.
Major segments of the electorate see the state's problems as the product of unrestrained lawmakers driven by special interests to…
tfk | November 11, 2009Sorry for minimal blogging lately, which will continue for the next week or so, most likely.
Last Friday I headed off to Kansas, where I helped celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of Kansas Citizens for Science. It was a great time, and a great thing to celebrate. Marvelous to see the gang again and to think about the next decades of KCFS's future.
From there, I was off to Minneapolis, where I participated â along with NCSE's Peter Hess â in a symposium at the University of St. Thomas Law School on "ID and the Constitution." Other panelists included Disco. spinner Casey Luskin,…
tfk | November 3, 2009Todd Wood is a creationist. He is a professor at Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Scopes in 1925. He is, in particular, a professor of baraminology, the creationist notion that his particular Christian God created the "kinds" in the first week, and that by careful measurement, he can identify those "kinds." He thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old. He thinks evolution is wrong, but he also freely acknowledges that it is the very best scientific knowledge available, and has been on a minor crusade to move other creationists away from the…
tfk | November 3, 2009Martin Cothran â fellow traveler with the Disco. 'Tute, shill for James Dobson's crew, and generally unpleasant person â thinks the dissent of 162 members of American Physical Society disproves a scientific consensus. Alas for Cothran, the APS has 47,189 members, so the dissent of 162 hardly undermines a claim of consensus.
Bonus shorter Martin Cothran â A sad story:
Guilt by association is wrong. It might lead you to criticize someone for endorsing the racist, eugenic arguments of racist eugenicists, or to criticize an event promoting sexual health and safety for being sponsored by a group…
tfk | October 31, 2009For some reason, people are only now realizing Christopher Hitchens' distaste for Mother Teresa. It's like they started paying attention to the world a week ago.
tfk | October 29, 2009There's been much ink spilled lately about the latest work from the authors of Freakonomics. I should say before getting into this that I haven't read their last book, and don't plan to read the sequel. I also haven't read any of Malcolm Gladwell's books, for largely the same reasons (note that the Freakonomists apparently acknowledge that they cut one section of their latest book because Gladwell scooped them). Basically, I see these sorts of books as attempts by minimally-informed dilettantes to insert themselves into complex topics by applying a canned methodology and pretending that…
tfk | October 28, 2009Norman Levitt was a great man, a leonine defender of science against the trendy pablum advanced under the guise of post-modern critique. This defense was most famously advanced in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, co-authored with the indomitable Paul Gross. He also assisted in an amicus brief in Kitzmiller v. Dover and reviewed a book about Dover by sociologist Steve Fuller, who testified in defense of ID (arguing, for instance, that ID deserved "affirmative action"). Levitt passed away over the weekend, and his widow has asked that, in lieu of flowers,…
tfk | October 27, 2009Jason Rosenhouse, criticizing Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's reply to Jerry Coyne's review of their book in Science, ends with this thought:
You can not consistently argue that one side hurts the cause every time they open their mouths, but then object that you are not telling them to keep quiet. Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this, as has been explained to M and K many times. No one thinks they want the government to come in and do anything. To be honest, I'm baffled that M and K persist in getting so irate on this point. Of course they want people like Dawkins to keep…
tfk | October 27, 2009You may recall Martin Cothran from our fight over whether Pat Buchanan is a racist and a Holocaust denier, and from his guest-blogging gigs at the Discovery Institute, and through his other attempts to abuse logic for partisan purposes. Not content to push creationism with the Disco. 'Tute and other forms of evangelical Christianity through Kentucky's affiliate of Focus on the Family, he now is promoting Charles Murray's eugenic pap.
Murray, for those who don't recall, was a co-author of The Bell Curve, a book widely criticized as racist and eugenic in its implications. Murray and co-author…
tfk | October 22, 2009Slacktivist is talking sense. He notes a common problem in dealing with creationists:
I find I'm unable to communicate with them -- not just because I'm less fluent in the language of science, but because when they start talking about science then words no longer seem to mean what they mean for the rest of us. They use familiar-sounding words, but you quickly realize that they're using these familiar words in unfamiliar ways, using them to communicate vastly, irreconcilably different things.
In particular, they use the word "theory" in ways that don't reflect the term's actual meaning in…
tfk | October 20, 2009In a radio interview today, George Herbert Walker Bush complains about the "lack of civility in politics":
The Republican elder statesman said, "It's not just the right." He complained, "there are plenty of people on the left."
While he said he does not believe in personal name-calling, he singled out MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow calling them "sick puppies."
"The way they treat my son and anyone who's opposed to their point of view is just horrible," Mr. Bush said.
"When our son was president they just hammered him mercilessly and I think obscenely a lot of the time…
tfk | October 20, 2009Don McLeroy, erstwhile head of the Texas Board of Education, doesn't like the National Academy of Sciences. At least not on even-numbered days. During the science standards fight, he praised the NAS definition of science. Then again, he endorsed a crazy, self-published pamphlet declaring that the NAS is "sowing atheism." And of course, he dismissed the good advice of the NAS and other science groups when they asked him not to undermine evolution education, telling the Board "Someone has to stand up to these experts."
And now McLeroy has decided to attack the NAS in social studies standards.…
tfk | October 15, 2009At least in the movies. Michael Moore's Capitalism has passed Expelled as the fifth-top-grossing political documentary EVAR! It's showing on fewer screens and has earned over 2 million dollars more, to date, than Ben Stein's crapfest.
This makes total sense. Michael Moore's movie is quite good, is based on real and well-documented events, and has genuinely thought-provoking arguments to make. What's the relationship between capitalism and democracy? When capitalism fails a society, can democracy save both the society and the economic system?
These are hardly new questions. When Franklin…
tfk | October 13, 2009I'm not a cognitive scientist, so I'll be curious to see what the blog commentary on this paper might say, but apparently people get smarter when they think about things that don't make sense. Whether or not irrational beliefs are epistemically compatible with science, this would suggest that they are cognitively helpful for the practice of science.
Basically, the researchers had some students read a convoluted story by Kafka and another group read a more linear story. The each group was tasked with making sense of seemingly random strings of letters that actually did have structure. Those…
tfk | October 13, 2009A co-worker of mine recently visited Canada for a wedding. The day she arrived in her preferred unpopulated stretch of tundra, President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was announced.
Now, my first reaction upon hearing about the award was that it was too soon, at least. Then again, it wasn't until 8 hours later that it occurred to me that our President's race might factor into the analysis.
But in Canada, the consensus was that this was a well-deserved honor. That evicting an anti-world, anti-peace, anti-liberties junta from our seats of power and restoring the United States to a path to peace and…
tfk | October 12, 2009Massachusetts has a Sacred Cod. What are the establishment clause implications?
tfk | October 9, 2009It seems like a better hypothesis than that religion is epistemically incompatible with science. (Trying to replace political science with CNN? Really?)
Consider. Roughly half of scientists are religious, but fewer than 10% are conservatives. John McCain, the leader of the Republican party, denigrated astronomy education by calling a star-projector for a planetarium "foolishness" and "an overhead projector." His hand-picked successor suggested that fruit fly research should be defunded, and suggested that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together. By contrast, the Catholic church's…