Some teachers were at a workshop in Atlanta to talk about their experiences teaching evolution, and how to overcome some of the problems. They’ve had it worse than I have.

Some students burst into tears when a high school biology told them they’d be studying evolution. Another teacher said some students repeatedly screamed “no” when he began talking about it.

Other teachers said students demanded to know whether they pray and questioned why the had to learn about evolution if it was just a theory.

I get remarks on my student evaluations (last year, a group of students must have collaborated, because there were a half dozen evaluations that said exactly the same thing: “This class taught me to love Jesus even more!”, which they may have thought would hurt my feelings, but I just laughed.) I’ve had some students who talked to my colleagues about this evolution stuff — they were apparently afraid to confront me. I do get some forthright creationists, but they don’t respond with tears…they try to argue with me, which is just fine. But otherwise, the only screams I get are when I return exams.

The solutions are a little vaguely stated, but OK — they are actively responding to the problem.

A few years ago, Pratt started holding meetings – open to parents, students, church members and others – to address their questions about evolution. She holds the annual session a few weeks before she begins the unit and gets about 200 people.

“It used to be that the whole unit was a struggle, and we were butting heads,” Pratt said. “This meeting helps everyone understand that science teachers are not the enemy. Now, the kids are showing up ready to learn about evolution.”

Other teachers said they try to fix students’ misconceptions. They explain how humans and apes share a common ancestor that no longer exists, not that humans and apes evolved from one another. They say that while “theory” may describe a hunch in everyday language, in science it is defined as an explanation supported by factual evidence to describe events that occur in our world.

Graham Balch, a biology teacher at Grady High in Atlanta, addressed the controversy head-on. He had his students read about Cox’s actions and the response she got. They learned about efforts across the country to water down lessons about evolution and how other public and private schools teach the material. They debated the cause of the conflict and whether evolution should be taught in public schools.

As for myself, the way I handle it is not to push atheism in the classroom (you’re shocked, I know), since that would lead into arguments that aren’t part of the subject matter of the course. What I do instead is teach a historical approach to the issue of evolution, showing that there really wasn’t an Evil Atheist Conspiracy at work, but simply scientists who were making honest evaluations of the evidence: 19th century geology was driven by profits to be made from coal and railroads and canals, not ideology, and Darwin arrived at his conclusions in spite of his upbringing in a faith. And once you’ve gone through the evidence, it becomes really easy to spend a lecture or two ripping up creationists, because the students can easily see how creationists are not operating in good faith and are in denial of the facts of geology and biology.

Some still argue with me now and then, but usually my problem is keeping the other students in the class from brutalizing the poor credulous sap’s arguments too cruelly.

“YOU cannot overestimate,” thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, “how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about… how Darwin’s explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it… I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.”

Sound familiar? That’s exactly the same rhetoric the Discovery Institute has used towards evolution, and it’s just as false. It’s to be expected, since this is the ranting of a DI fellow.

What Schwartz is arguing for is dualism: the idea that the mind is not the product of the activity of the brain, but is somehow generated supernaturally, with the brain being nothing but the host or receiver for the emanations of an immaterial ‘soul’. Contrary to his claims, however, this is definitely not a popular view in the neuroscientific community — if anything, the trend is going far, far away from what he claims, with the evidence growing that the reductionist, materialist approach to the brain is the best way to understand how it works. It’s not breaking down. Just as evolutionary theory has been strengthened by advances in molecular biology, so too has the materialist view of the mind been strengthened by multidisciplinary approaches in neuroscience.

The article is reporting on a meeting of these DI-sponsored loons, and it really does sound like a delightful coterie of idiots. Denyse O’Leary was there, along with Mario Beauregard, who together authored what I consider the worst book of 2007, The Spiritual Brain, and so far I’ve read nothing as bad in 2008, so they may deserve a lifetime award. It’s a book that was practically unreadable in its incoherent style, and which was full of illogical claims built from fallacious premises and bad experiments. Schwartz provides more excellent examples of the nonsense these guys are propagating.

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.

That makes no sense. The perception of mental activity is associated with detectable changes in the activity of the brain; that is not evidence for dualism. Would it be evidence for the idea that the mind is the product of the brain if our most sensitive instruments revealed that while people composed sonnets or solved calculus problems or daydreamed about Tina Fey nude, their brains were as inert as large lumps of cold silly putty? I think not. These data are exactly what we’d expect if thought were the product of brain activity, that we’d see brain activity while people were thinking. We even have experimental evidence of correlated brain activity preceding individual awareness of conscious thought…again, as we materialists would expect.

The article points out that this is a looming concern, and it’s one I’ve been talking about for a long time. Just as evolution challenged religious literalists preconceptions about human exceptionalism and our origins, and made itself a focus of concerted hatred by the dogmatists, neuroscience is the next big science that is going to antagonize them, since it challenges other fundamental concepts of primitive religious thought, such as the idea that we have immortal souls separate from our flesh, that we are imbued by our creator with this magical element at some instant, such as conception. Remember that this is the papal escape clause: Catholics can accept physical evolution, but that the significant spiritual event was the endowment of a soul on the human lineage at some indefinite time in the past. It’s also going to be a flashpoint for the anti-choice crowd, who want to claim personhood and identity on clumps of cells that don’t even have any neural tissue — it yanks the basis for their claims right out from under their feet.

The only thing sparing us right now is that most public school science classrooms never introduce anything about neuroscience, so it avoids the problem so far of actually directly antagonizing ignorant yahoos who don’t like their children liberated from the biases of their parents’ ignorance. Give it a few more years, though, and let it become a bit more high profile, and it will trigger furious outrage in many more. After all, it is so degrading to be told that your finest thoughts are made from well-ordered meat.

Greg Lloyd attended the Northern Kentucky University mock trial of evolution/creation, and sent back a report. The scenario was that a teacher tried to advocate creationist theories in a public high school classroom, was fired for it, and is trying to sue for reinstatement. Here’s Greg’s account of the event.

Several Pharyngulites and I (ggab and his friend) attended last evenings mock trial at NKU. You can see pictures of the event here:

http://gallery.me.com/gllopc#100069

The pictures include the question the audience/jury was asked, and the results.

36% Believe she should remain fired
2% Believe she should remain fired, but for other reasons
31% Should be given her job back unconditionally (that is, she should be permitted to continue presenting research by young earth scientists that challenges evolution)
4% Believed should she keep her job, providing she stop including young earth science research as part of her teaching
28% Believed she should keep her job, if she agrees to make it clear when teaching young earth research that most scientists reject that research and accept evolution as the explanation for the origins of the Earth and its plant and animal life

Some rounding up was obviously done, as this equals 101%.

The mock trial itself was a bit confusing, as it was unclear what was being argued: the wrongful termination of the teacher, or creation science versus evolution. Ggab believed that there may have been some confusion between the mock attorneys and witnesses in that the school board’s attorney argued that the teacher was given a warning to cease the teaching of “creation science”, where the teacher’s attorney argued that no warning was ever given. Ggab believed that it was settled ahead of time that warning was given, and perhaps the teacher’s attorney conveniently forgot, or veered off script. They then introduced witnesses that argued for or against creation science, which seemed non-sequitur.

The teacher’s expert, Dr. Scripture, played a video, as seen in the pics, which showed the inner workings of a cell. His argument was for irreducible complexity. Dr. Scripture made sure to get in a plug for his website, as well as the Expelled DVD.

The school boards expert, Ed Kagin, was both entertaining and informative. He was twice accused of filibustering by the fired teachers attorney. The audience enjoyed him. He called the teacher a “liar” for teaching creation science in class, and yet calling herself science teacher.

The evening ended with a Q&A. Dr. Scripture appeared to have a plant in the audience (he was reading from a sheet of paper) who brought up microevolution versus macroevolution. Dr. Scripture gave his explanation, saying that there is no proof of macroevolution since it can’t be observed, only inferred via the fossil record. Immediately after a biology professor at NKU stood and gave examples of macroevolution, citing the evolution of batwings, as well as Cortez’ army’s immunity to small pocks during the invasion of the Aztecs – noting that over 90% of the Aztecs perished to the disease. She was the only person to be applauded the entire evening.

When exiting the auditorium a table was setup with creation science materials, including a DVD on creation science. No pro-evolution material was on the table (that I noticed).

It was an interesting evening to say the least.

Bill Dembski gave a talk at Baylor recently, and we have a rather thorough account of his lecture. Basically, it’s the usual creationist rope-a-dope: ask for the impossible (give me every single step in the evolution of a process) and garbled distortion of useful concepts (in this case, of information), then declare that evolution has failed.

The horrible Expelled is now available on DVD. I have no plans to view it. However, you can get it from a site called redbox, which has a bizarre synopsis.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Who better to interview fanatics than the hilariously deadpan Ben Stein? Here, the former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” (and, it should mentioned, trusted Nixon advisor) hosts a documentary in which he sets out to ask the hard questions about the Intelligent Design theory to its most fervent believers.

I don’t know what they were thinking when they wrote that.

Northern Kentucky University is going to have a mock trial on teh creation/evolution debate. They say the intent is to legitimately explore the issue.

“It is part of the mission of the Scripps Howard Center to conduct public forums,” said Mark Neikirk, the Center’s executive director. “I’ve heard President Votruba state many times that a college campus should be a safe place for difficult conversations.” Neikirk said that while the evolution/creation science debate is a difficult and polarizing topic, the mock trial format is designed to provide structure for a civil, informative exploration of the public policy questions raised by the debate.

I have to call bullshit on that. What this really is is an attempt to contrive a debate between science and superstition in which the superstition side gets to pretend they have equal status. And, of course, science issues are not settled in a courtroom, ever.

Worst of all, though, is the way they’re planning to resolve the issues.

The first 200 people in attendance will have an opportunity to serve as jurors, using small remote control clickers to register their opinions both before and after the trial. At the conclusion of the proceeding, they will decide the case.

Yeah, right…in Kentucky. The local churches will bus in a mob, retired godbots with nothing else to do will get in line early, and they’ll all have predetermined (and blessedly ignorant) views of the outcome before they get started. The theological lackwit they have babbling the case for the supernatural can come in half-drunk and still count on ‘victory’. This fight has been thrown before it even gets started.

Here’s something you can do. Write to the president of NKU, James Votruba, and let him know that this is a joke of an event that only brings embarrassment to his university.

That’s the only possible explanation for their curious anachronisms. The Institute for Creation Research has just claimed that Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 to refute Darwin’s theory of pangenesis (which, by the way, was published in 1868). Furthermore, Mendel’s paper was initially rejected for publication by editors who were in thrall to the dogma of pangenesis, which, as was mentioned, wouldn’t be published for two years.

Wait…that means just about everyone in the 19th century must have had time machines!