Policy and Politics
tfk | May 27, 2011
In the video above, you can see my creation/evolution hero of the last school year. Zack Kopplin is a Louisiana high school senior (heading to Rice University next fall) who decided to fight the misnamed Louisiana Science Education Act. That bill, passed in 2008, opens the door to creationist materials in science classrooms. It is the only one of these so-called academic freedom laws that has passed a state legislature, though dozens have been proposed.
It passed the Louisiana Senate unanimously a couple years ago, but Zack found a Senator to sponsor his repeal bill, he got 43 Nobel…
tfk | May 25, 2011Razib Khan has a good response to my post yesterday about biopunks, including this:
I obviously support this movement and its intents (I've met a few of the people who are prominent in it). But we need to keep perspective here. This will probably be analogous to the free or open source software movement; the base of tinkers will be much larger than corporations and academic institutions, but it isn't going to expand to cover the majority of the public. But so what? Most us can probably agree that the ad hoc decentralized elements of the software engineering community have done good just by…
tfk | May 24, 2011On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They'd do their standard scan of your genome for free, as long as you paid for a year's worth of their online subscription service.
A much smaller version of that same genome survey would have cost you a thousand dollars or more only a couple of years ago. For your money, you get data on single nucleotide polymorphisms at about a million spots in your chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA: mutations that can tell you about your ancestors' migrations across the globe, about your propensity for certain diseases, and about…
tfk | May 23, 2011Reviewing Elaine Howard Ecklund's Science vs. Religion for the Washington Post last May, I noted:
Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund offers a fresh perspective on this debate in "Science vs. Religion." Rather than offering another polemic, she builds on a detailed survey of almost 1,700 scientists at elite American research universities -- the most comprehensive such study to date. These surveys and 275 lengthy follow-up interviews reveal that scientists often practice a closeted faith....
Fully half of these top scientists are religious. Only five of the 275 interviewees actively…
tfk | May 23, 2011I mentioned before that last weekend I was going to a post-Rapture party/conference thrown by local atheists, and I did, and it had its definite moments. I wasn't there on Rapture day itself (I was at Maker Faire then), but the crowd the following Sunday was undiminished, and the talks were generally good (a low point for me was Greta Christina's New Atheist rant about the wonders of getting angry, a talk that ran too long, thus preventing anyone from asking questions afterwards or being able to challenge any of the ways she characterized critics of this angry style).
David Eller opened the…
tfk | May 21, 2011
I took the picture above at Maker Faire today, at a display by a group called Kinetic Steam Works, which uses coal-powered steam engines to power various devices. This shot captures the steam, certainly, but also the kinetics (the moving wheel, blurred with speed), and also work, a belt conveying energy to machines.
And more broadly, it's a nice bit of synecdoche for Maker Faire in general. Maker Faire calls itself the largest DIY festival in the world, and I believe it, but it's about more than just learning to do it yourself. Maker Faire is a celebration of an old ideal - the idea…
tfk | May 18, 2011Caroline Crocker taught creationism in some DC-area colleges, and the colleges didn't renew her contract, so she was put on wingnut welfare with a gig at the ID creationist IDEA center. There, she tells us, she helped create "safe houses" and fake identities so students could secretly come "out of the closet."
tfk | May 17, 2011Remember when Ben Stein, promoting his schlockumentary in Canada, dismissed the ADL's concerns about his mistreatment of the Holocaust by saying "it's none of their fucking business"? Classy, right?
Anyway, having been booted from the pages of the New York Times for violating the paper's ethics policy, Stein is now shilling in decidedly down-market conservative rags. Today, he takes to The American Spectator to defend accused rapist and IMF Managing Director. It is a paragon of the art of bad-faith arguments. The highlights of his 8-point defense:
1.) If he is such a womanizer and violent…
tfk | May 16, 2011Scientists Take Darwin on the Road | Miller-McCune:
"I want to send our scientists to rural schools and communities around the U.S. to talk about evolution for Darwin Day 2011." Jory Weintraub's words hung undigested in the silent air of the management meeting at our North Carolina center last July.
"You want to send our scientists where?" I jested. "On purpose?"
So begins Craig McClain's account of the Darwin Road Show, a project he and his colleagues at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center undertook last February. McClain, who also blogs at Deep Sea News, describes the enthusiasm the…
tfk | May 12, 2011In Ophelia Benson's writeup of the Ron Lindsay/Chris Mooney discussion, there's a passage about the Templeton Foundation that jumps out as deeply problematic:
Then they talked about the Templeton Foundation, and Mooney's "fellowship," and the fact that it was controversial. Would you accept a fellowship from the Discovery Institute? Lindsay asked. No. Liberty University? Probably not. But they interfere with science, and Templeton doesn't. Templeton, he said, "are generating a dialogue about the relationship between science and religion." He thinks that's a good thing.
I don't.
On its own,…
tfk | May 12, 2011PZ Myers responds to a podcast debate between Chris Mooney and Ron Lindsay about accommodationism and New Atheism. I haven't listened to the podcast, so I don't know who won or who lost, or what brilliant points were or weren't made. I do know that the title of PZ's post reflects the general New Atheist triumphalism about the podcast, and yet his post doesn't match the title.
The title is: "We aren't angry, we're effective, which is even scarier."
From that title, I'd expect some sort of clear statement of what effect PZ wishes to have, and then clear evidence showing that the strategy is…
tfk | May 11, 2011I can't say I've ever understood the adulation Noam Chomsky gets in some lefty circles. His arguments are generally fairly banal, drifting into a caricature of liberalism.. I don't doubt that at some point in his life he may have been an incisive political commentator, but I've never seen it.
This applies in spades to Chomsky's reaction to Osama bin Ladenâs death. Terming the operation which killed the mass murderer and seized a trove of information about al Qaeda's operational plans "a planned assassinationâ¦violating elementary norms of international law," and decrying that there was "no…
tfk | May 11, 2011
In cleaning out my open webpages, I came across the video above in an important post at Wired blogs, and it hardly matters that the post is from last October (yes, I keep too many tabs open in Firefox). Rhett Allain argues that there's an inverse relationship between how much standardized testing students experience, and how much learning they experience, and Ken Robinson, in the video, argues that standardized testing assumes that there is a single standard way of learning, or that such standardization is desirable. The video touches on a wide range of points beyond that, and is well…
tfk | May 5, 2011Christopher Lane has a fascinating history of agnosticism in the New Humanist, an ode to doubt. :
Then [in the Victorian era] as now, doubt requires strength - it is not an easy or straightforward position to maintain.
The impact of such doubt grew on both sides of the Atlantic, with subscription rates for freethinking journals rising substantially and a growing number of articles appearing on the topic. ... The idea that doubt was a sin and a moral failing, still widely held in the 1850s, gave way to a new and different emphasis: doubt was instead an intellectual obligation, even an ethical…
tfk | May 5, 2011Greg Laden suggests A multiplicity of strategies is better than infighting when addressing creationism and related problems. That seems reasonable, and I'm intrigued by his diagnosis for the conflict over accommodationism and New Atheism:
I have always thought, naively and probably incorrectly, that what defined Accommodationist is what they think, not how they argue. At the same time, I have always thought that what defined a "New Atheist" is how we argued, and not what we think.
This strikes me as potentially right, and that the distinction between what one thinks and what one argues is a…
tfk | May 3, 2011Cosma Shalizi, 11/4/2007: "The object of torture is torture":
The point of this torture is not to extract information; there are better ways to do that, which we have long used. The point of this torture is not to extract confessions; there are no show trials of terrorists or auto-de-fes in the offing. The point of this torture is to exercise unlimited, unaccountable power over other human beings; to negate the very point of our country, to our profound and lasting national shame.
This, it must be emphasized, is all that torture has ever been good for. Torture did not lead us to Osama bin…
tfk | May 2, 2011It's a running joke that any time some horrible person is in the news, Discovery Institute fellow David Klinghoffer is sure to pen a piece trying to link that person to the nefarious ways of evolution-defenders. He's written such pieces about Hitler, the Columbine killers, the Holocaust museum shooter, and many other modern monsters.
Today's headlines are dominated by talk of Osama bin Laden, so we get, on the DI twitter feed:
David Klinghoffer explains the connection between Osama bin Laden and "junk" DNA
And indeed, the post over at the Disco. 'Tute complaints department is titled "The…
tfk | May 2, 2011
Via the White House Flickr site, a tense moment in the Situation Room yesterday, as the national security team was updated on the raid on a Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden had been in hiding. The weight of the moment plays out a little differently on each face. The political, diplomatic, and military cost of failure would have been enormous. The mission was, as we all know by now, successful, and led to spontaneous parties in streets around the world, with firefighters in New York making an impromptu pilgrimage to the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.…
tfk | April 26, 2011The hijab and niqab worn by some Muslim women have hit the news lately, especially after France's ban on the veil worn by some Muslim women (niqab) went into effect, and after death threats against a British imam who held that wearing hijab (a scarf covering the hair) was a woman's choice (he also held that evolution and Islam need not be at odds). Some sort of headcovering for women is a common feature of Middle Eastern cultures (orthodox Jewish women cover their hair, too, and the men wear a hat or yarmulke at all times), which doesn't make it automatically good or bad, but it does make it…
tfk | April 25, 2011Chad Orzel says Support the National Center for Science Education:
I try not to do any shilling for political groups on the blog, but I'll make an exception for the National Center for Science Education. Why? Three reasons:
1) They do good and important, if not always glamorous work, supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools, both in the classroom and in the courts.
2) Josh Rosenau has a really good blog, one of the best on science-and-politics issues, and his day job is with NCSE.
3) Jerry Coyne is a jackass, whose latest bit of jackassery involves sending an open letter to NCSE…