Here’s the latest simple summary video from NCSE:

Here’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen all week (and I’m grading genetics exams): it’s the result of a national survey of high school biology teachers.

At least 16% of our high school teachers are young earth creationists. Furthermore, 12% our our teachers are using biology classes in public schools to teach creationism in a positive light. The majority are still pro-science, but even in the good cases, relatively little time is spent on teaching evolution.

The news isn’t all bad. One constructive discovery is that it is neither legal battles nor demanding state standards that determine how much effort is put into teaching evolution — it’s how much education the teachers have in the subject. The obvious lesson is that we ought to be encouraging more coursework for teachers; help educate the teachers, give them more material they can use in the classroom, and the students benefit.

Here’s the conclusion of the paper, which lays it all out very clearly.

Our survey of biology teachers is the first nationally representative, scientific sample survey to examine evolution and creationism in the classroom. Three different survey questions all suggest that between 12% and 16% of the nation’s biology teachers are creationist in orientation. Roughly one sixth of all teachers professed a “young earth” personal belief, and about one in eight reported that they teach creationism or intelligent design in a positive light. The number of hours devoted to these alternative theories is typically low–but this nevertheless must surely convey to students that these theories should be accorded respect as scientific perspectives.

The majority of teachers, however, see evolution as central and essential to high school biology courses. Yet the amount of time devoted to evolutionary biology varies substantially from teacher to teacher, and a majority either avoid human evolution altogether or devote only one or two class periods to the topic. We showed that some of these differences were due to personal beliefs about human origins. However, an equally important factor is the science education the teacher received while in college. Additional variance is likely to be rooted in pressures–subtle or otherwise–emerging from parents and community leaders in each school’s community, in combination with teachers’ confidence in their ability to deal with such pressures given their knowledge of evolution, as well as their personal beliefs.

These findings strongly suggest that victory in the courts is not enough for the scientific community to ensure that evolution is included in high school science courses. Nor is success in persuading states to adopt rigorous content standards consistent with recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and other scientific organizations. Scientists concerned about the quality of evolution instruction might have a bigger impact in the classroom by focusing on the certification standards for high school biology teachers. Our study suggests that requiring all teachers to complete a course in evolutionary biology would have a substantial impact on the emphasis on evolution and its centrality in high school biology courses. In the long run, the impact of such a change could have a more far reaching effect than the victories in courts and in state governments.

I knew this would happen: creationists are pleased with the media coverage of the platypus genome, since it reinforces their misconceptions. The Seattle Times published a couple of letters from local creationists. Need I say that they are ridiculous?

[Read more…]

You’ve got another of those wretched “academic (non)-freedom” bills in your state. They’re like lice, crawling out everywhere.

Senate Bill 1386, introduced in the South Carolina Senate on May 15, 2008, and referred to the Senate Committee on Education, is the newest so-called “academic freedom” bill aimed at undermining the teaching of evolution, joining similar bills currently under consideration in Louisiana, Michigan, and Missouri. Similar bills in Florida and Alabama died when the legislative session in those states ended. The South Carolina bill contends that “[t]he teaching of biological and chemical evolution can cause controversy, and some teachers may be uncertain of administrative expectations concerning the presentation of material on these scientific topics” and that “public school educators must be supported in finding effective ways to present controversial science curriculum and must be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review the scientific strengths and weaknesses of theories of biological and chemical evolution in an objective manner.”

Remember Sally Kern, the Oklahoma legislator who loves God and hates homosexuals? She had earlier sponsored something called the Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act, a ghastly piece of legislation that would require teachers to pass any old crap a student turned in, as long as the student said it was his religious belief — it prioritized belief over evidence. That bill died in a senate committee, fortunately.

But now it has been resurrected! The language from the earlier bill has been inserted into Oklahoma House Bill 2633.

A controversial provision in House Bill 2633 states that “students may express their beliefs about religion in homework, artwork, and other written and oral assignments free from discrimination based on the religious content of their submissions.”

That is simply insane. It’s a declaration that religion trumps everything, and gives students an escape hatch from learning — biology class would become an exercise in futility, in which lazy, stupid, or religiously indoctrinated students would simply parrot the book of genesis at their instructors, and expect to be given a good grade.

Sally Kern knows this.

“We are a very conservative state — a very religious state,” Kern said.

And working hard to become a very stupid state, too.

Oklahomans, be afraid.

So what are they doing having their own creationist troubles? It just goes to show that this isn’t just a problem for southern yokels in Florida and Texas — it’s an epidemic all over the country.

The specific problem in this case is a ignorant kook who has been made director of School Administrative District 59 and has decided to flout the state standards and expectations for science classes. Look at this fellow’s arguments:

Matthew Linkletter of Athens says that both are merely theories that represent “personal beliefs and world views,” rather than proven science. Linkletter suggested during last week’s SAD 59 board meeting that the board discuss evolution, the “Big Bang Theory” and other studies he believes should be deleted from the curriculum.

The school board tabled action on the science curriculum at the April 28 meeting, and will reconsider the issue when it meets at 7 p.m. May 19.

Linkletter, a Christian, said there is no way to prove either evolution or creationism.

“You can’t show, observe or prove it,” Linkletter said of the belief systems. “It’s something you have to believe by faith. It doesn’t meet the criteria of science.

“If it’s not scientifically verifiable, then maybe we should leave it out of the science classes. When you make a statement that’s not backed by facts and just represents a world view, then it has no place.”

It’s just a “theory”; it’s a “worldview”; you can’t “prove” it. This is a guy who doesn’t know one thing about science but has clawed his way up the political ladder so he poison it. As is usual in these situations, the qualified science teachers are stuck there, trying to do their jobs, and gazing incredulously at the posturing buffoon in the administrative position.

“The empirical proof of evolution is in the study of genetics and how genes relate between organisms,” said Ward, who teaches advanced-placement senior biology, senior anatomy/physiology and 10th-grade biology. She said evolution is proven, as an empirical matter of science, through studies of the human genome.

“My personal, as well as the National Science Teachers position, is that you can’t teach genetics or ecology without evolution.

I rather like this summary:

Madison Town Manager Norman Dean, who taught science in Madison from 1962 through 1996 and once taught Linkletter, characterized his former student’s proposal as “absolutely stupid.”

Hyphoid Logic has a round-up of some of the news stories (although they are all saying about the same thing right now), and one godless Maine blogger is urging the locals to join him at at the next school board meeting on 19 May, and also provides contact information for reaching the board. Strangely, while SAD #59 does have a web page, it’s mostly blank and doesn’t even list the board of directors — if anyone has email contact information, let me know and I’ll post it so we can get a fast letter writing campaign going.

This is the Friends of Brooker Creek Preserve website — it looks exactly like the kind of organization I would support, a community effort to protect a local wildlife area. They lobby, they educate, they offer opportunities to hike and experience nature.

One problem: it’s in Florida. That seems to mean the organization is infected with stupidity and cowardice.

As part of their educational mission, they were going to have a speaker come in next last Febrary, Dr Lorena Madrigal of the University of South Florida. She studies genetics and human evolution, and was going to speak on 12 February, Darwin Day. To the Pinellas County bureaucrats, this is a problem.

“Biology without evolution is not biology,” she suggested, which obviously explains, at least in the mind of William Davis, the Pinellas County director of environmental services, why the professor’s speech would be problematic.

“Her topic was about evolution,” Davis said. Well, yeaaaaaah! “I flinched on that.”

“I canceled her out after discussing it with my supervisors,” he said. “We are not the platform for debate on creationism versus evolution.”

Right. Talking about evolution might annoy the creationists, so the county’s response is to shut down and silence efforts to educate and inform by an environmental institution which relies on evolutionary biology to perform its mission. This is a perfect example of how creationists work to keep people ignorant, and create an environment free of legitimate information about a subject that contradicts their absurd literalist beliefs.

Guess what? He didn’t like it, nosir.

“Expelled” is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word “expelled” may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

That’s timely, since it’s also a theme of Miller’s new book, which argues strongly that creationism has destructive consequences for America’s scientific enterprise.