I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I’d make it illegal. Too often it’s an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn’t help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part of the social contract that we ought to provide a good education to everyone.

Before you start protesting (aw, who am I kidding? Some will be howling in protest anyway) I know that there are good homeschool programs, and I have students who were homeschooled and were better prepared than kids coming out of the public school system. You may be one of them. But I don’t think sending everyone to be taught by your mom and dad is a good solution, and I think we’re better off investing in good public education.

OK, but now on to the email. Here’s a sincere and worthy request from a homeschooling mom in Arizona.

Next summer, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis is coming to Phoenix to speak at the local homeschool convention. As a secular homeschooler in Phoenix, I am appalled. I feel like I must respond in some way, stand up and say, “This guy does not represent me or others like me!”

I am interested in creating some kind of large, public response, but not sure where to begin. I thought that one of you might have some ideas.

See what I mean? This is one of the big problems of homeschooling: for every good, science-oriented parent, there are dozens or hundreds who buy into the awful, horrible, no-good nonsense peddled by Ken Ham and other creationists.

So I recuse myself as an opponent of homeschooling, but I appreciate that as long as we are going to have homeschoolers, something needs to be done about this ridiculous association between homeschooling and bad education. I turn it over to the readers here: what should be done? What can be done in the short term to protest damning choices like bringing Ham in to speak to a convention, and what can be done in the long run to get better quality science into homeschool programs? That last one will be a real challenge, given that my impression of the majority of homeschoolers is that they’re doing it specifically to indoctrinate their kids in a specific conservative Christian ideology.

Virginia Heffernan did us all a favor: it’s easy now to tell who the ignoramuses are by looking for favorable reactions to her ill-informed screed. And of course, if you want to find a real ignoramus, we wouldn’t even need that much: we could just look to Rod Dreher, apologist and apparatchik of the Templeton Foundation. He thinks Heffernan is onto something, by which I think he means she reiterates his same clueless biases.

Heffernan is onto something here, and not just with ScienceBlogs. A few years ago, I was in an editorial board meeting with some pro-science academics and others, who had come in to speak to us about some issue, I forget precisely what, having to do with science education in Texas. We entered that meeting entirely on their side, but by the time it was over, we were, as I recall, still on their side on the merits of the argument, but we had a distinctly nasty taste in our mouth. The advocates were simply dripping with contempt for their opponents, and carried themselves with an aristocratic hauteur, as if they considered it beneath them to be questioned by others about this stuff. I never quite got a handle on why they acted that way, but reading Heffernan, it’s more clear: I thought these people had come to argue about science and science education, but whether they realized it or not, they were class warriors. They acted the same way you would expect 19th century colonial English vicars to behave if asked to give a serious thought to the protestations of the dark and inscrutable Hindoos of the Raj.

What is it with science-oriented advocates who consider contempt a virtue? Who, exactly, do they think they are going to persuade? (You could say the same thing about sneering political bloggers, sneering religious bloggers, and, well, sneerers in all forms of public discourse, inasmuch as sneering seems to be a popular pose these days.) Most of us are tempted to sneer every now and then (I certainly am guilty of this), but some of these people adopt sneering as a basic intellectual stance to the world. It works for drag queens and comedians, who have it down to an art, but for the rest of us, it’s just ugly and, ultimately, boring. In the case I mention, the self-righteousness the pro-science folks could barely contain actually undermined their authority and effectiveness before a sympathetic audience. Nobody likes jerks, except other jerks.

He forgets precisely what, but it had something to do with science education in Texas. Hmm. What could have pro-science educators and academics “dripping with contempt” on that subject? Has he considered the possibility that just maybe the agents provocateur of the creationist side in the culture war in Texas deserve some contempt? It’s hard not to look at someone like Don McLeroy, professional science-denier and flaming creationist asshole, and not feel considerable disgust that that man was in charge of destroying the public school curriculum in the state.

But I forget: Dreher is part of an organization whose goal is to make those poisoners of the minds of children comfortable.

Does Mr Dreher think he’s going to persuade a Don McLeroy, for example, to somehow stop trying to inject lies about the age of the earth or the inadequacy of evolutionary theory into textbooks? I’d like to know how. I’d especially like to see it done. I might just have to back off on my ‘sneering’ at the liars for Jesus if one of these namby-pamby wimps for theistic evolution managed to convince a few of these stark raving mad creationist opponents of science to change their tunes; if they were actually successful in persuading leading creationists, I’d have to admit they have a good strategy.

But of course they don’t. They only work to hush the critics of creationists. I, for one, admit that I have no hope in hell of ever persuading the likes of McLeroy or Ham or Hovind or Comfort of ever recognizing good science, and I don’t think anyone else can, either. So I content myself with being intellectually honest and not pretending that they’re part of a community of reason, and will continue to point and laugh and encourage everyone else to treat these clowns appropriately.

Queensland is allowing fundamentalist Christians to teach religious instruction classes in the public schools — and, as we might have predicted, they are teaching nonsense.

Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.

Set Free Christian Church’s Tim McKenzie said when students questioned him why dinosaur fossils carbon dated as earlier than man, he replied that the great flood must have skewed the data.

A parent of a Year 5 student on the Sunshine Coast said his daughter was ostracised to the library after arguing with her scripture teacher about DNA.

“The scripture teacher told the class that all people were descended from Adam and Eve,” he said.

“My daughter rightly pointed out, as I had been teaching her about DNA and science, that ‘wouldn’t they all be inbred’?

“But the teacher replied that DNA wasn’t invented then.”

Creationists are crackpots and liars — they simply don’t belong at all in positions of responsibility in the public schools, because they are going to intentionally miseducate. What do the education administrators in Queensland say? Why, that students can “opt out” of these classes. That isn’t the issue, of course — why are the schools investing scarce resources to give religious extremists and lunatics a platform in the public schools at all?

There is a zoo near Bristol called — you’ll see there are already problems right from the name — Noah’s Ark Zoo. It is unambguously proud of its status as a blatantly creationist institution.

After looking at the current explanations for origins and evolution; it is our view that the evidence available points to widespread evolution after an initial Creation by God. This is viewed as controversial by some and welcomed by others; but whether currently popular or not we believe the evidence supports a world-view somewhere between Darwinism and 6000BC Creationism and we encourage interested readers to look into the claims being made.

They are disavowing the strictly young earth creationist approach, so they reassure us that the world really is older than 6,000 years old. Ha ha, how silly — 6,000 years is far too short. Aren’t those dogmatic creationists absurd?

So, you might wonder, how old do they think the earth is? And they cagily hem and haw and refuse to answer, although they do suggest that 4.5 billion years is just way too old, ha ha, goofy evolutionists. They do reference a creationist site that invents a new geology, and which argues, for instance, that the Cretaceous was a period that was actually 4,000 years long.

Real geologists, the ones who actually understand the science, say the Cretaceous was 80 million years long. So they’re only off by about 4 orders of magnitude. I guess that means they think the earth is tens of millions of years old instead of a few billion, which makes them what? Adolescent Earth Creationists, instead of Young Earth Creationists? Maybe we can call them Tweenie Creationists. They’re still wrong, though.

Anyway, this joke of a zoo that miseducates children (but apparently cheerfully and with colorful and interactive exhibits and stories!) has won an award from the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom. It’s a peculiar gift — they’re basically rewarding them for good, effective teaching of lies.

You can read about the award here. Apparently, one of the qualifications is supposed to be about providing “accurate information”; shouldn’t this zoo have been instantly disqualified on that basis alone?

Jason Rosenhouse has a short, clear post in which which he briefly exams the polling data to see if New Atheists have harmed the cause of science education, an accusation frequently made. He shows that no, there is absolutely no evidence of such a thing; there may be a trend in the other way, in an increase in the number of science educators willing to say that there is no sign of intelligent guidance in evolution, but he’s also rightly cautious to say that there are a lot of variables at play here, so it would be premature to say there is a positive effect.

It does seem interesting, though, that while many people are wringing their hands over the supposedly pernicious effect of the New Atheists on evolution acceptance and education, the numbers show not the slightest evidence of a backlash. To the extent that the numbers are moving at all, they seem to be going in the right direction.

So Josh Rosenau, one of those people who accuses New Atheists of doing harm, makes a long and confused post in which he disputes Rosenhouse by looking at the same data and concluding…there is no evidence that the New Atheists have harmed the cause of science education. But he does manage to bury the conclusion in a flustered chaos of noise about…a lot of variables at play here. It was a struggle to even extract the point of that post; even Rosenau is reduced to vague splutterings at the end.

As I said before, it may be that careful work with the GSS would give enough demographic controls that you could pick some of this apart. Were there different trajectories in people’s views of evolution in areas with active creationist efforts? How do the many variables tracking religiosity interact with people’s views on evolution? How does that match against demographic trends in polls by Pew, Gallup, and Harris, all of whom have asked the same questions for several years.

I’d like to see someone do this work, and I’d welcome citations of papers which might serve as a basis for such an analysis. But the evidence at hand simply isn’t adequate for what Jason would like do with it. Noting those complications is not shifting goalposts, nor is it making excuses. It’s the way I would think about any challenge in hypothesis testing. If we want to promote science as a way of knowing, I think it behooves us to model good scientific practices, and that’s my agenda with this post and the post it follows from.

Jebus, but Josh can make writing look agonizing.

It’s an enlightening comparison of styles of discussion. One goes right to the point with clarity, the other wallows in obfuscatory noise. One points right to the key data that so far shows no deleterious effect, the other wishes there were damage to the cause of science education, and so goes on and on in the blogging equivalent of stammering “but…but…but…”.

I know which side I’m glad to be on.

Remember that horrible, stupid, no-good article about chickens and eggs, the one that used the identification of a protein important in egg shell formation to claim chickens had to have come before eggs, with no comparative data, no appreciation of the logic of evolutionary theory, and absolutely no respect for the evidence? Yeah, that one. The article that ought to have embarrassed both the journalist and the scientist involved.

Well, somebody liked it. They liked it a lot. Guess who?

Ken Ham.

He likes it because he thinks it means that chickens couldn’t have evolved, that their putative non-chicken ancestors wouldn’t have been able to lay eggs, so his god had to have abracadabraed them into existence. Then he makes this prediction:

I wouldn’t be surprised if atheist scientists will loudly complain that this study actually supports the creation account in Genesis and then try to attack the research.

No, we’re complaining about this study because its interpretation was mangled beyond belief by the reporter and scientist. It says nothing about the ancestors of chickens or their closest relatives, and so can’t really come to the conclusion that the protein examined appeared de novo in Gallus gallus. It can’t support Genesis. It can’t support anything, because it is bad science.