Don’t miss this one: tomorrow on Science Friday, Flatow interviews the expelled director of the Texas science curriculum.

Education and Evolution in Texas
(broadcast Friday, December 7th, 2007)
The education official responsible for the science curriculum in the state of Texas resigned last month saying she was forced to step down after being reprimanded for informing colleagues of a talk on the conflict over the teaching of evolution. Christine Castillo Comer, former Director of Science in the curriculum division of the Texas Education Agency, forwarded several colleagues an email notice of a upcoming talk by Barbara Forrest, co-author of the book “Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design.” Castillo Comer’s supervisor said the email was grounds for termination as the ‘FYI’ email “implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.”

In this segment, Ira talks with Christine Castillo Comer about the case and about evolution, ‘intelligent design,’ and creationism in Texas.

Josh Rosenau summarizes the Gonzalez affair:

This whole song and dance is too absurd for words. Gonzalez had a poor record of grant-writing, a poor record of graduating students, limited telescope time, and his record of publication tailed off since he started working on his ID creationist book. He even submitted that book as part of his tenure file, yet he and the DI are shocked (shocked!) that his department would consider his ID work. At the very least they are shocked (shocked?) that his colleagues were unenthusiastic about that work.

They talk the talk of wanting “fairness”, but it’s all one-sided: they only want positive recognition of any old nonsense they might spout, but when anyone criticizes their rationalizations, oh, no…you are being ‘biased’.

One of the few papers any of the Discovery Institute frauds have managed to get published was a bit of fluff by Jonathan Wells, who made a strange argument that centrioles generate a “polar ejection force” — his rationale was that they looked like turbines. Then he made a sloppy connection to ID by claiming that since turbines are designed, and he made his inference about their function because of that resemblance, the design hypothesis is therefore useful.

Ian Musgrave dissected Wells a while back, but now we have another worthy deconstruction: Stephen Matheson reviews the paper. He seems … unimpressed.

The recent unpleasant affair at the Texas Education Agency, in which the director of the science curriculum, Chris Comer, was pressured to resign, was triggered by Comer forwarding an email announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest. Forrest is a philosopher of science, and one of our leading advocates in the ongoing fight for better science education in the face of the nonsense the creationists are promoting. She’s also one of their critics the creationists most fear, so it’s not surprising that her name would elicit knee-jerk panic.

Forrest has now issued a formal statement on the termination of Chris Comer. You can download the pdf from NCSE, or read it below the fold. She doesn’t pull any punches. Here’s a taste, but you really should read the whole thing.

The incident now involving Ms. Comer exemplifies perfectly the reason my co-author Paul R. Gross and I felt that our book, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, had to be written. (http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com) By forcing Ms. Comer to resign, the TEA seems to have confirmed our contention that the ID creationist movement — a religious movement with absolutely no standing in the scientific world — is being advanced by means of power politics.

[Read more…]

Texas has McLeroy driving pro-science people out of the Texas Education Agency, so Florida must be feeling left behind: a member of their state board of education has recently declared her opposition to evolution in the schools.

State Board of Education member Donna Callaway says she’ll be voting against the proposed new state science standards because evolution “should not be taught to the exclusion of other theories of origin of life” and says she hopes “there will be times of prayer throughout Christian homes and churches directed toward this issue.”

“As a SBOE member, I want those prayers,” Callaway said, according to a Nov. 30 column in the Florida Baptist Witness, a weekly newspaper based in Jacksonville that is an official organ of the Florida Baptist Convention. “I want God to be part of this. Isn’t that ironic?”

Florida Citizens for Science has been on top of this for some time. It’s completely incomprehensible to me: the court precedent is very clear that you don’t get to insert your sectarian religious beliefs into the public schools, yet these bizarre creationist uprisings always begin with some clueless, bleating official on a school board babbling about bringing back prayer and god and appealing for Christian support. I thought for a while we might have to seriously worry about a new DI strategy of more effectively divorcing themselves from religion, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards: they are whining about religious persecution in the Gonzalez tiff, and we can reliably trust their followers to bring out the sacred, holy knife of their blessed lord Jesus and publicly slit their own throats with it, guaranteeing that the case will never be seen as a secular issue.

So now I’m wondering which state is going to have the dubious privilege of hosting the next spectacular time-waster of court case. Texas is looking good, and that would be a nice place to drive a stake into the creationist movement, but Florida is coming on strong. There are also tales of a few smoldering possibilities in Louisiana. Or perhaps some dark horse crazy will come galloping out of one of the northern states and surprise us. We should start a pool.

Who best to talk about the Gonzalez tenure case? Since he’s an astronomer, how about another astronomer? Phil is unimpressed:

So when ISU denied Gonzalez tenure, I applauded them. Faculty members are de facto representatives of the University, and having one advocate for a provably wrong antiscientific load of crap… well, it seems counterproductive. Denying someone tenure on that basis alone is, in my opinion, perfectly valid, and in fact should be demanded.

It will feed their martyr complex a little more, but it’s true — when you’re trying to peddle weird pseudoscience and you don’t have the evidence to back it up, you don’t get to join the ranks of professional scientists.

And how about the opinion of someone who was there? Evil Monkey reports direct from Iowa, and he makes the point that Gonzalez’s grant record did not come close to that of his colleagues, and that’s counting an chunk of change straight from the Discovery Institute.

So Gonzalez brought in about 1/10th of the funds of his other colleagues, on average, at best. A good chunk of that went back to the University of Washington to pay a grad student, not ISU. The Templeton grant to write Privileged Planet would pay a portion of his salary, not fund research and advance the mission of his department. And the DI grant (having probably the most fortuitous timing I’ve ever seen) of $50k over 5 years won’t even pay a technician for two full years. The DI claims not much money is needed to do astronomy research, simply on a computer to crunch numbers (which is laughable as typically universities provide some computers to their professors). But somebody, be it a technician, a grad student, or a postdoc, has to be paid to collect data, which that requires salary, benefits, and ‘scope time. Obviously it does require serious cash, as his peers are pulling in over ten times the money Gonzalez is. By way of comparison, I coauthored a grant that netted $198,000 over the course of one year when I was a postdoc.

Poor Guillermo. What he should be doing is either writing grant proposals, or writing applications for jobs that have lesser requirements for bringing in external funds. Instead, he’s looking on as the DI digs a deep grave in which to bury his career.

Now the NY Times has an editorial deploring the politicization of the Texas Education Agency. This one is going to burn the creationists, I think; it’s an opportunity to turn their slogans about fairness right around and skewer them.