Take a stand, or watch it all slide away

First the ideologues came for evolution, making it uncomfortable for teachers to teach it, even when it is not only legal, but mandated by state education standards. What will they suppress with indirect social pressure next?

How about those bits of history the fascists and the religious find objectionable?

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

As I said in the previous post, this struggle in which we’re engaged is more than a fight against a few specific clowns — it’s for a broader ideal of striving towards a truth, against those who want to twist perception of reality to support short-sighted, selfish, and silly beliefs. It’s not just science, it’s history, politics, culture. If you side with the primacy of faith over reason in science, there is a long list of other virtues you will also be sacrificing on your altar.

Mike’s Weekly Skeptic Rant has a good rant on the subject.

The Pope is not our friend: he is the friend of irrationalism, dogma, and superstition, so treat him appropriately

Here is a criticism of evolutionary biology:

…it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory … We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.

If a Bill Dembski or a Michael Egnor or a Ken Ham had said this — and it is exactly the kind of thing they would say — we’d be throwing rotten fruit at them and mocking their ignorance of how science works. Nothing is proven, it’s all provisional, but we do have an incredible amount of evidence in support of biology. This fellow is also deeply wrong about what we can do in the lab, and is overlooking the fact that not all science is something you do on a bench. Those statements are the kind of destructive nonsense the Discovery Institute uses, propaganda sown explicitly to spread excessive doubt where we should have very little, so that their vapid and useless ‘alternative’ theory looks a little more attractive. That quote is a stupid statement that ought to be ripped apart on the evolution blogs.

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Dennert and the deathbed of Darwinism

I’ve just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin’s pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel’s genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn’t yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it’s a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks right up there with bumblebees can’t fly, rockets won’t work in a vacuum, and no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM…he specifically predicts that ‘Darwinism’ will be dead and abandoned within ten years, by 1910.

Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past. A few decades hence when people will look back upon the history of the doctrine of Descent, they will confess that the years between 1860 and 1880 were in many respects a time of carnival; and the enthusiasm which at that time took possession of the devotees of natural science will appear to them as the excitement attending some mad revel.

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Mapping our failures

The Strange Maps blog (a very interesting browse, if you like peculiar maps) has a map illustrating the state of US evolution education in 2002. It’s not surprising; the Fordham Foundation regularly publishes detailed summaries of state science standards, and you can take a look at the data for 2005 and 2006, if you don’t mind getting a bit depressed. Now what we need to do, though, is reassess state standards and get everyone up to A+ performance. Florida is about to go through that wringer, under the thumb of the odious Cheri Yecke, who tainted our standards process here in Minnesota last time around. Minnesota is going to be going through a standards re-evaluation soon, too, without Yecke … maybe we can bring our standards up a bit more, too.

One other interesting feature of that link: most of the Strange Maps articles seem to get on the order of 10 comments. The evolution education map has over 400, with a painful number of loonies babbling against evolution. That’s another measure of our science education problem.

On a completely different note, another map at that blog caught my eye: a cartogram of the world’s population. It puts those Canadians and Australians in their place with respect to the U.S., but what’s that strange, huge mass bulging up in Europe and Asia? How dare they dwarf us!

The Pastor Ray Mummert Award goes to…

Those rascals at antievolution.org are like the Baker Street Irregulars of the evolutionary forces—they’re always doing the legwork to come up with interesting bits of data. Like, for instance, this wonderful example of hypocrisy/inconsistency at Uncommon Descent.

This is what Dembski spat out today, complaining about us manipulative elites (he really deserves a Pastor Ray Mummert Award for it, too):

“Framing,” as a colleague of mine pointed out, is the term that UC Berkeley Professor of Linguistics George Lakoff uses to urge Democrats that the public will agree with liberal policies if only the policies are described in different terms — “framed” in other words. Politics aside, framing is part and parcel with the condescension of our secular elite that the masses cannot be reasoned with and must therefore be manipulated.

And here’s what Grima DaveScot said last year:

I will remind everyone again — please frame your arguments around science. If the ID movement doesn’t get the issue framed around science it’s going down and I do not like losing. The plain conclusion of scientific evidence supports descent with modification from a common ancestor…

I am amused, and I shall deign to give you peons leave to chortle quietly, if you promise to be decorous about it and not go on too long. … … … that was long enough. Stop now, and go back to being mindlessly subservient.

The joke’s on them

I hesitate to mention this, but I seem to be the target of creationist humor. It’s not being targeted that I mind, but that the ‘humor’ is so lame and the photoshopping is so bad. I would have thought that I’d be an excellent subject for lampooning, being easily caricatured and having views outside the mainstream, so why are they so pathetic at it?

Never mind, I looked around the site a little more — it’s all that bad, a kind of ham-fisted exaggeration of creationist misconceptions that really only makes the creationists look foolish, on a par with Dembski’s clumsy attempts at a joke. Don’t they know that good satire has to build on some grain of truth about the subject?

SMU ‘Darwin vs. Design’ conference is coming soon, and the creationists are flustered

The ID creationists are having one of those ludicrous “Darwin vs. Design” conferences, in which they rehash assertions and nonexistent evidence and practice propaganda and rhetoric, at Southern Methodist University this week. They seem a little nonplussed at the opposition they’ve encountered. Hey, it’s Southern Methodist University — it’s got a religion in its name! — and it’s Texas, aren’t they all ignorant bible-thumping yahoos down there who ought to chow down happily on any Design story they spin? No, they aren’t, and good, legitimate scientists are on the staff at SMU, and suddenly, the creationists are getting criticized.

Advocates of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute have been rattled by the strong showing of scientists at Southern Methodist University who called their bluff, and questioned SMU for hosting an ID conference this week. SMU’s officials pointed out they were just renting out facilities, and not hosting the conference at all.

The ID conference, with special religious group activities preceding it, is scheduled for April 13 and 14 at SMU. It is a rerun of a similar revival held in Knoxville, Tennessee, last month. The conference features no new scientific research, no serious science sessions with scientists looking at new research, or new findings from old data.

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What’s the creationist position on ‘framing’?

The proper answer to that question is “Who cares?”, but just in case you’re morbidly curious, Bill Dembski weighs in:

The authors of “Framing Science” (see below), which appeared in Science, are world-renowned scientists and therefore know whereof they speak. Well, not exactly. Matthew Nisbet is a professor of communication and Chris Mooney is a correspondent for the atheist magazine Seed. (Nisbet’s blog is also hosted by Seed.) Nisbet and Mooney are both outspoken defenders of Darwinism and critics of ID — which is no doubt why the American Association for the Advancement of Science (publisher of Science) regards them as qualified to “frame” science.

The man is a bitter, seething mass of envy, isn’t he? It takes some chutzpah for a fellow of the Discovery Institute, that nest of lawyers, bad philosophers, and theologians, to complain about the scientific qualifications of others. If Dembski is world-renowned as anything, it’s as an incompetent hack and promoter of anti-scientific nonsense, so I don’t think he should be whining about credentials.

As for that “atheist magazine Seed” … I’ve read every issue, and the magazine as a whole does not take any noticeable position on atheism or religion; some of the interviews have been a little too conciliatory for my taste (but then my taste does not dictate content in any way, or he would have grounds fro calling it an atheist magazine!) Neither is scienceblogs in any way a host that favors atheism, and that is not a criterion used in selecting blogs to join the mob. My little corner here may be a vicious hotbed of brutal, humorless, militant atheism, but Pharyngula is not scienceblogs (it isn’t even particularly well liked by a great many of the sciencebloggers here) and it is especially not Seed.

But then, accuracy and honesty are not what we expect of Dembski…

300

The movie 300 has finally arrived in Morris, and I saw it last evening. I’d heard a lot about this film, in particular that it was loaded with relationships to current events—the war in Iraq, in particular, with arguments for it being pro-war, anti-war, a jingoistic propaganda film, etc. The arguments are all wrong. I could tell exactly what this movie’s hidden meaning was: it’s a retelling of the creation-evolution struggle! “But of course!” you’re all saying to yourselves, “It’s so obvious, now that you mention it!”

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