Almost two weeks ago, I wrote about that creationist teacher who was fired in Sisters, Oregon — Kris Helphinstine had been showing his freshman biology class some PowerPoint presentations designed to cast doubt on biology, rather than to inform the students about the facts and evidence. Now a Bend newspaper has given a few more details of the grounds for firing, and most entertaining of all, has put up copies of the PowerPoint presentations! Aficionados of both bad creationism and bad PowerPoint will savor these.
Both are afflicted with ugly and inconsistent layout, and it’s always reassuring that you are about to see a quality presentation when one of the big, bold words in the title of the opening slide is grossly misspelled. You’ll also discover that the html renderings of the files will only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer, although that crime against all that is right and good may be the fault of the newspaper.
The human evolution presentation, in addition to being a clumsy monstrosity, doesn’t explain anything. It first shows a collection of trees, and seems to be making the point that there have been different ways of displaying and organizing the evidence. There’s some of the standard creationist quote-mining going on, with citations from various authorities that question absolute interpretations of the fossil evidence (which is fair enough, if only the students had first learned something about the evidence). A lot of the slides at the end are just illustrations of modern human diversity, as if to say that all the variations in those fossil skulls were merely snapshots of extant morphology. For instance, he has a picture of a Malaysian juxtaposed with a photo of a Homo erectus skull, as if to say they’re similar in their divergence from the human norm.
The eugenics presentation is even more egregiously empty of evidence and rich in emotion-laden, false associations. Most of it is page after page of horrible photos of Nazi death camps — which I think kids should see in their history class, and learn so that that horror is never repeated — and he makes a weak attemp to couple heaps of dead bodies to Francis Galton, Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, and evolution. It’s all very Clockwork Orange, an attempt to instill a conditioned reflex to gag in disgust at the mention of the words biology and contraception. I also think there is good reason to discuss eugenics in the classroom, even in the biology classroom, but the point should be that good biology counters the claims of the eugenicists.
I can see why he was fired more clearly now. He was exhibiting fact-free collections of selectively biased images to mislead his students, and didn’t teach them a scrap of valid biology. These are students who would have to be deprogrammed of that nonsense if they went on to study biology at a university … and since most of them wouldn’t do that, it would produce misinformed citizens of that community. Exactly what the creationists desire — more ignorance!
Another Bend newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, has put Helphinstine’s slides up in a convenient, easy to use, PDF format. So Internet Exploder and Powerpoint aren’t required to view them, just Acrobat or some other PDF reader.
Here is the Eugenics presenation
Here is the Human Evolution presentation
And there is an accompanying story, Veering from Evolution: Fired teacher explains his presentation
Shocking in more than one way; obviously pure slander as far as the mixing in of Darwin is concerned. It strikes me that hardly any attempt is made to explain the link. Just the typical advertisement technique of showing a picture of Darwin and a concentration camp to ‘induce’ a thought association (compare the guy in the commercial who smoked a Camel, surrounded by pretty women, and sitting next to his Land rover). The ugliness of the PowerPoint presentation is very consistent with the ugliness of the message; it looked the same in IE7 and FF on me.
Not such a bad idea to make the point that eugenics existed also in the USA. BTW, the practice of forced sterilization (of course not quite the same as killing people but certainly a form of eugenics) ended not until 1976 in a progressive country like Sweden.
It seems to me that it is also unfairly denigrating Galton. I know that he suggested that births to people he considered to have better genetics should be encouraged but did he actually suggest that others should be sterilized? He was interested in the possibility of racial differences in intelligence but did he come to any conclusions? From a superficial look, I can’t see any evidence that he did. Did he advocate killing or sterilizing large segments of the population?
I first came across Galton as the person responsible for developing the statistical procedures of regression and correlation. He was honoured for his work in getting fingerprinting accepted by courts and his explorations in southern Africa – he was not just ‘that eugenics guy’.
Once I saw Rowan Atkinson’s picture in the display of “Varieties of Human,” I suddenly realized that evolution is highly questionable!
(How enlightening it must have been for students to sit through this repetitive and stultifying presentation.)
Aficionados of both bad creationism and bad PowerPoint will savor these.
Is there any other kind of creationism? I’ll leave the PowerPoint bashing to others.
“Nazi Eugenics: Was it just the Nazis?”
Well, yes, by definition Nazi eugenics must have been performed by the Nazis, otherwise it would be Martian eugenics, or penguin eugenics. Even their sentence structure is loaded with illogic.
And is that a screenshot from Spartan: Total War?
Why do the believers feel it is important to lie to get their message of lies across? OH? Forget it I answered my own question.
And this guy has a degree? From where? And shouldn’t we be allowed to challenge the institution that handed this retard that document?
That article contains a worrisome quote from a school board member who did have a problem with what K.H. was doing in his classroom: “It doesn’t matter that he never said the word ‘God’ in the classroom. If you eliminate one of two theories, you uphold the other one.”
Argh! But I suppose he’s right that high-school students will probably take it that way.
Kris Helphinstine’s PowerPoints are sloppily researched and fact-checked. To give just one example, page 39 of the Eugenics presentation, which given the context is surely intended to depict Nazi atrocities, is actually a photograph of the execution of SS officers by American soldiers during the liberation of Dachau. (This action is today widely regarded as a war crime, but I believe that it was a heroic act.)
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/SoldiersKilled.html
It is ludicrous and intellectually irresponsible to place Darwin’s image next to photographs of concentration camp victims. However, there is a connection between pre-synthesis evolutionary biology and the eugenics movement. Darwin’s cousin Galton, his son Leonard Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Alexis Carrel and scores of other advocates of eugenics cited evolutionary biology in support of their policy views. However, their notions about evolution were often quite different than post-synthesis views. And of course Darwin and Galton – or even Haeckel – are not responsible for the Holocaust.
IDists gravely distort history. For example, someone whose only knowledge of eugenics is from ID propaganda would hardly be aware that far from being a homogeneous movement, a wide range of views and policy prescriptions fell under the umbrella of eugenics – from birth control to “positive” eugenics to negative eugenics to genocide. But while the Nazis were extreme relative to most eugenicists, specific beliefs about eugenics and race commonly associated with Nazism were not, in fact, unique to the Nazis.
Christians and anti-evolutionists of the 19th and early 20th centuries were as racist as evolutionists, and many also embraced eugenics (although some actively opposed it). It was a racist and imperialist era (the Herero and Congo genocides preceded the Holocaust), and would have been even without evolution and eugenics. In parallel to Christian imperialist racism, the Koran was interpreted to justify the trans-Saharan slave trade. Not many intellectuals of that period, including biologists and physical anthropologists, come across as very enlightened by today’s standards. (Exceptions include Franz Boas, an under-appreciated intellectual figure, and A.R. Wallace.)
However, it’s not enough to suggest that eugenics and racial hierarchies were really just based on pre-evolutionary Chain of Being concepts. We ought not wave away the legacy of the misuse of evolutionary biology in the service of eugenics and scientific racism in the period from the late 19th to mid 20th century. SJ Gould certainly did not. Rather, we should discuss how our understanding of human variation and evolution is far more sophisticated and enlightened than that held by people – evolutionists and anti-evolutionists alike – in that era.
Actually, amph, forced sterilization continued here in the good ol’ US of A until 1981.
Carlie: Sweden 1976 amazes me more than USA 1981. Sorry.
1. “Science is based on evidence. Religion is based on faith.”
No. Science is based on faith in evidence. Religion is based on faith in wishful thinking.
2. “bad creationism and bad PowerPoint”
No. This implies there is good creationism and good PowerPoint. Tufte put the lie to the latter.
The worst PowerPoint presentation I’ve ever seen (which is really saying something) was actually given by Paul Nelson. Methinks I see a trend….
Science is based on faith in evidence. Religion is based on faith in wishful thinking.
Actually I think the most accurate way of putting it would be “science is faith in induction”. Basically in science, you have to use past experience to predict future events, and the only logical assumption (“faith step”) you have to make is induction. It underlies our concepts of social trust, and of the constancy of the behaviour of the universe through time, and is probably an evolved concept as it’s pretty deeply built into our thought processes. Jacob Bronowski called it the “common sense of science”.
You’ve got to wonder what the universe would be like if logical induction didn’t hold. Very confusing, I imagine.
The problem that I think is being overlooked her is that, even if both presentations had been academically rigorous, these are not appropriate subjects for the grade level. You need a little basic biology and genetics before you can have a meaningful discussion of human evolution or eugenics. Lecturing to unprepared students on these subjects, regardless of the point of view being presented, is an exercise in brain washing. The real irony here is that he claims to be teaching critical thinking when he’s really just teaching them what to think.
Actually, I can see how this power point can be used as a powerful teaching tool (hang on, I’m going to explain). For example, it could be used within a course on logic to allow students the opportunity to basically deconstruct the argument and show why it is so poor. Or, it could be used in science courses to show and debunk a common creationist argument. It would also be an interesting study on the power of propaganda, and the ultimate irony would be to use this in a parallel presentation of what Nazi propoganda taught. Humans are very subject to “group think” as we have learned throughout history, and helping students to recognize the fallacies within such propoganda has a great deal of merit. If only that was the teacher’s original intent.
Squeaky,
Maybe it could, but in a class of 9th and 10th graders?
It would be interesting to know how prevalent this rogue teaching is in US public high schools. Is this a rare event that was addressed, or does it happen more frequently without being reported?
“Maybe it could, but in a class of 9th and 10th graders?”
Granted, I was thinking more of college level. However, if it is done well, I think it could be done for that age. My 10th grade English teacher had a habit of making outlandish statements to stimulate thought and conversation (he played devil’s advocate). Those ages aren’t too early to stimulate critical thinking, especially, as I said, if it is done well. This particular issue may be too complex for that age group, but certainly seniors and even juniors should be able to tackle it.
To me, that says nothing about human divergence, but is rather a veiled claim that brown people are sub-human.
Although I suppose it could go both ways. Intellectual laziness and seething bigotry often go hand in hand.
Feh. I skimmed the Human Evolution chart deck — he manages to hit quite a few of the standard talking points, mined quotes, etc. He doesn’t need to say “creation” or “God” in order to reveal his agenda. KH claims not to have been teaching creationism — but since the bulk of “creation science” consists of pointing out (alleged) flaws in evolution, the distinction is pretty much non-existent.
Excuse me, it doesn’t hold in this universe.
Accordingly, induction is unscientific. Science is hypothetico-deductive: you make up a hypothesis (by any means — revelation, induction, dreaming, whatever), deduce a prediction from it, and test that prediction by observation. Instead of basing conclusions about the general on the special (induction), you base conclusions about the special on the general (deduction).
Why are we confident that the sun will rise tomorrow? Because we haven’t managed to disprove the law of gravity, which predicts that the Earth will not suddenly change its course around the sun.
Excuse me, it doesn’t hold in this universe.
Accordingly, induction is unscientific. Science is hypothetico-deductive: you make up a hypothesis (by any means — revelation, induction, dreaming, whatever), deduce a prediction from it, and test that prediction by observation. Instead of basing conclusions about the general on the special (induction), you base conclusions about the special on the general (deduction).
Why are we confident that the sun will rise tomorrow? Because we haven’t managed to disprove the law of gravity, which predicts that the Earth will not suddenly change its course around the sun.
Erm… and the law of the conservation of angular momentum, which predicts the Earth will keep spinning as it currently does, and a couple more. You get my drift. :-)
Erm… and the law of the conservation of angular momentum, which predicts the Earth will keep spinning as it currently does, and a couple more. You get my drift. :-)
I’m always glad when people move from the unwarranted picture of Sweden being a good example in most everything. There have been and still remains atrocities. For a continuing example, the indigenous Sami people that Sweden shares with some other Scandinavian countries are still forced to obey laws and regulations (and then disuse their different languages) that doesn’t quite fit their old life style if they wish to follow it. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The US Wikipedia notes that Sweden had the largest proportion of coerced compulsory sterilizations. I suspect two causes. First, and perhaps foremost, Sweden was still very much a consensus culture. It was probably solidified latest in village cooperation before the land reformations. (Villagers inherited patchworks of land, so no one could really use their parts without having an agreement.) And the consensus got along with this program, to the extent it knew (probably not much) and cared (also probably not much in the beginning).
Second, I think the ruling social democrats easily took to actions that was supposed to ‘level’ population characteristics.
For once, the swedish Wikipedia gives a more concise background. It notes that US, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland were early adopters in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Several other European countries followed, as did Canada and Australia. But in the 1970’s these programs were generally noted, and critique forced them to shut down. (With exceptions such as India.)
I’m constantly intrigued by the use of naive inductionism and the folk psychology of common sense in discussions about science. There are many and some stronger reasons that we trust (not just believe) in the continuance of our laws. (Null hypothesis, conservation laws, parsimony, causality.)
Induction is fine for suggesting some models, common sense is usually not, and neither cover how we test theories. As an analogy, we have faith, even justified faith, that the sun will raise tomorrow, but if it doesn’t we will look for natural causes (consumed by black hole, for example) because we still trust our descriptions of nature.
But when it comes to his comedy, it goes beyond regressive behavior. I think. ;-)
(Btw, I usually don’t care much for too intellectualized humor myself. It often falls flat, as I think Atkinson does after Black Adder. But there are also plenty of exceptions IMHO such as the late Victor Borge, Eddie Izzard, parts of Monty Python’s FC, et cetera.)
So perhaps the vacuous theology of ID is really Ignorant Deism?
I’m always glad when people move from the unwarranted picture of Sweden being a good example in most everything. There have been and still remains atrocities. For a continuing example, the indigenous Sami people that Sweden shares with some other Scandinavian countries are still forced to obey laws and regulations (and then disuse their different languages) that doesn’t quite fit their old life style if they wish to follow it. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The US Wikipedia notes that Sweden had the largest proportion of coerced compulsory sterilizations. I suspect two causes. First, and perhaps foremost, Sweden was still very much a consensus culture. It was probably solidified latest in village cooperation before the land reformations. (Villagers inherited patchworks of land, so no one could really use their parts without having an agreement.) And the consensus got along with this program, to the extent it knew (probably not much) and cared (also probably not much in the beginning).
Second, I think the ruling social democrats easily took to actions that was supposed to ‘level’ population characteristics.
For once, the swedish Wikipedia gives a more concise background. It notes that US, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland were early adopters in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Several other European countries followed, as did Canada and Australia. But in the 1970’s these programs were generally noted, and critique forced them to shut down. (With exceptions such as India.)
I’m constantly intrigued by the use of naive inductionism and the folk psychology of common sense in discussions about science. There are many and some stronger reasons that we trust (not just believe) in the continuance of our laws. (Null hypothesis, conservation laws, parsimony, causality.)
Induction is fine for suggesting some models, common sense is usually not, and neither cover how we test theories. As an analogy, we have faith, even justified faith, that the sun will raise tomorrow, but if it doesn’t we will look for natural causes (consumed by black hole, for example) because we still trust our descriptions of nature.
But when it comes to his comedy, it goes beyond regressive behavior. I think. ;-)
(Btw, I usually don’t care much for too intellectualized humor myself. It often falls flat, as I think Atkinson does after Black Adder. But there are also plenty of exceptions IMHO such as the late Victor Borge, Eddie Izzard, parts of Monty Python’s FC, et cetera.)
So perhaps the vacuous theology of ID is really Ignorant Deism?
Um, also because some minds think alike? :-)
Um, also because some minds think alike? :-)
Funny that the illustration for “Origin of Nazi Eugenics” is on the relationships of major phyla. Was chordate supremacism a big issue for the Nazis?
Hmm. I should have read your comment more carefully instead of just reacting to the similar arguments. I suspect you are referring to the problem of observing infinities?
That is an excellent basic argument argument showing the problem behind naive inductionism. And coincidentally also excellent to use when describing how testing works. I may have to adopt it.
Hmm. I should have read your comment more carefully instead of just reacting to the similar arguments. I suspect you are referring to the problem of observing infinities?
That is an excellent basic argument argument showing the problem behind naive inductionism. And coincidentally also excellent to use when describing how testing works. I may have to adopt it.
Really Paul, THERE IS WORSE…here’s how to NOT teach about evolution.
http://alternet.org/blogs/video/50013/
I remember my technical writing class in college. “How to use PowerPoint: Don’t.” We got a good lecture about how to use PowerPoint when necessary without turning to the Dark Side. In fact, our final paper had to be presented using PowerPoint so the professor could make sure that he didn’t allow any monsters to escape his classroom. “If I see a slide at the end with the word ‘Questions?’ and no information beyond a ridiculous graphic, I’ll kill you.”
My coworkers and I often joke that Microsoft has to compile Office with the optimizations turned down. If they didn’t, a truly smart optimizing compiler would see the PowerPoint as the useless code it truly was and simply remove it from the suite.
I’m always glad when people move from the unwarranted picture of Sweden being a good example in most everything.
Case in point: I think I just lost my whole unemployment insurance by unwittingly accepting a part time job that might bring in 3 hours per week. Arrrgh! Thanks a bunch, nonsensical Swedish rules! Can I be sterilised instead? :)
http://linked.mroach.com/conan-sweden_sucks2.jpg
Torbjörn Larsson: “I’m always glad when people move from the unwarranted picture of Sweden being a good example in most everything.”
There is a lot of grass-is-greener wishful thinking about Western Europe, especially Scandinavia, here in the US.
Contrary to the delusions of 2 commenters here, “science” isn’t “based on” any assumptions. The is no set of axioms or assumptions or faiths (e.g. induction or materialism or metaphysical naturalism) one must adopt before one can do science. I really wonder how you got that idea? Oh, I know! You used “induction”, the method you yourself claim to be a “faith”…Circular logic, anyone?
When I’m typing this message, I know with great likelihood (or certain sense of expectancy) that I can look up this comment later after I’ve posted it. Science is doing everything it can to achieve the same kind of “high likelihoods” (i.e. knowledge) about the world we live in. However, it usually follows well-tested and thus reliable methods of collecting evidence, making up hypotheses, doing experiments, analysing data etc. etc.
Squeaky,
I’m sorry, but I just don’t see how 9th and 10th graders could be prepared for a course like that unless they had been given an intensive course in introductory biology and genetics and a generous helping of sociology. Have you talked to your average high school graduate lately? Most of them aren’t prepared to take college-level introductory biology. Even the ones who get into college often need gobs of remedial work. And that’s just to prepare them for a course that would be a prerequisite for the kind of course we’re talking about here.
The kind of course he’s talking about teaching to these kids would be appropriate for a junior or senior seminar course in college.
There’s more fun in store than just bad PowerPoint.
Look at the computer-generated reconstructions of the Homo sapiens and the alleged A. afarensis on slide 19 of the Human Evolution PowerPoint. It looks a little off, since a dominant feature of the supposed A. afarensis is a truly massive saggital crest. That’s actually a computer-generated reconstruction of Paranthropus aethiopicus, without a doubt.
A creationist would never fake his figures to make an ideological point, after all the trouble give to poor old Ernst Haeckel, would they? *big grin*
And I was also struck by the use of the footnote number 188 on the slide immediately following. Certainly there had not been 188 references in the entirety of the PowerPoint, so curious as to where that number came from, I googled it inclusive of the footnote number. And you can imagine my surprise when, in addition to the AiG sources we already know about, his source turned out to be cult leader and convicted blackmailer, Adnan Okhtar (better known as Harun Yahya). The precise quote mine can be found on this page of Darwinism Refuted.com.
That would be to say “…after all the trouble they give to poor old Ernst Haeckel…?”
The Preview Button is truly a harsh mistress, for she punishes me for neglecting her.
Just to clear things up, I don’t for a second believe that you have to make assumptions in order to build a model based on past observations and figure out what future observations are a good test for that model. However I’ve got the impression that the very idea that a model will continue to hold for any time after this proving process requires some inductive step.
I mean, for example, there’s no airtight reason to suppose that gravity will be attractive ten picoseconds from now. Past experience and vigorous testing has shown this model to be accurate, but everything could (in insanely pedantic philosophical principle) turn into a Lovecraft-meets-Escher nightmare at any instant. You could say “well, we’ve never seen such physical discontinuities in the past so that’s a very dubious model”, but that’s an aesthetic concern, not an inherently true principle.
This is coming out of an interesting internet argument I got into with a philosophy student, by the way, so I may have misunderstood it. We were debating whether the primacy of the scientific method as a test of knowledge had any real logical basis. I kept coming back to the point that, based on past experience, science has provided far better results than simple faith. However I couldn’t really come up with a satisfactory ab initio reason (in his eyes) for this to be so. I mean to say, the iterative process of testing and correcting models needn’t – in principle – provide the global minimum for “truthiness”.
I don’t mean for any of this to be taken too seriously, but between Bronowski’s eyebrow-raising on positivism (he considered it too rigid to accurately describe the scientific method) and the evolutionary origins of common sense, I thought I’d bring it up.
As an aside, would you lot mind not getting your rant on when someone says something that makes you drop your monacle in your cognac, it’s irritating. You know who you are.
Alex Whiteside:
That depends on what you mean by “logical basis,” a term that usually goes undefined.
That’s the problem with talking to philosophers. They argue for the sake of arguing, not for the sake of reaching a conclusion.
Testing and correcting models isn’t done in a vacuum, though. The ab initio logical basis of science is the physical evidence, as it is in any other hard field. Without physical evidence, logic is just an idle mind game.
This is why philosophers are ill-suited to hard-scientific discussions. In philosophy, there is no such thing as physical evidence, there are only sets of assertions. The lack of rigorous mathematical training leaves them out of the theoretical discussions, too.
One can continue from naive induction and strengthen it with continuity and limits, to get around the basic problem inductive assumptions. That still doesn’t model testing.
One can further look at iterations as here, and “saving the model”. But since we assuredly junk models and debunk concepts, as well as use null hypotheses, it *still* isn’t a natural nor complete description of testing.
It is more fruitful to describe testing directly instead, IMHO.
And what Dan said.
One can continue from naive induction and strengthen it with continuity and limits, to get around the basic problem inductive assumptions. That still doesn’t model testing.
One can further look at iterations as here, and “saving the model”. But since we assuredly junk models and debunk concepts, as well as use null hypotheses, it *still* isn’t a natural nor complete description of testing.
It is more fruitful to describe testing directly instead, IMHO.
And what Dan said.
Quoting myself:
I just experienced this problem again last night. I was talking to someone who brought up the so-called “simulation theory,” i.e., cosmology-cum-The-Matrix. It states that if Moore’s Law holds true, then computing power will become sufficiently powerful to accurately simulate a complex reality such as ours.
And then he had the audacity to invoke Occam’s Razor to justify it, as if “our entire existence is a computer simulation” were somehow the most parsimonious explanation of the physical evidence. First of all, Moore’s Law cannot, by definition, hold true indefinitely, because there are necessary physical limits (defined by fundamental physical constants) to how many transistors we can cram onto a processor chip. Both the laws of physics and the laws of economics dictate that processor technology must eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, both physically and financially.
Second of all, and even more annoying, is that the “simulation theory” states that we’d never be able to determine that we were living in a simulation. Any theory that, as a necessary component of the theory itself, declares that we’ll never be able to test the theory is a priori non-falsifiable, and therefore non-scientific. Most formulations of string theory have the same problem.
Once we divorce ourselves from the primacy of physical evidence, there’s no barrier to simply making shit up as we go along. That’s what Occam’s Razor forbids.
Not all philosophers ignore scientific discovery. Charles Sanders Peirce found both induction and deduction to be inadequate descriptions of discovery, and so he tried to formalize abductive reasoning as an alternative – not yet overwhelmingly successfully.