Eugenie Scott honored again

Now she has been awarded the first ever Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution.

The Stephen Jay Gould Prize is awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize individuals whose sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life in the spirit of Stephen Jay Gould.

The winner of the 2009 Stephen Jay Gould Prize is Eugenie C. Scott. Dr. Scott has devoted her life to advancing public understanding of evolution. As the executive director of the National Center for Science Education she has been in the forefront of battles to ensure that public education clearly distinguishes science from non-science and that the principles of evolution are taught in all biology courses. She has served on the boards of many organizations, such as the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, and as a consultant to organizations from the National Academy of Sciences to WGBH/NOVA to the Mississippi Department of Education. In these efforts, she has been an important leader in the public sphere, molding and focusing the efforts of scientists, educators, lay people, religious groups, skeptics, agnostics, believers, scholars, and ordinary citizens through firm but gentle guidance.

Dr. Scott is a gifted communicator and public intellectual. She is a frequent guest on radio and television shows, and an eloquent spokeswoman for science. Her writings have illuminated the process of science to thousands, and her books have exposed the efforts of many groups in our society to hobble and undermine the teaching of science to our younger generation. The organization she helped create far transcends the considerable reach of her own voice, vastly amplifying her impact on public understanding. For these many reasons, it is extremely appropriate that Dr. Scott be the first recipient of the Gould Prize.

Congratulations!

We’ve been attacked by the stupid, ignorant segment of the culture!

That horrible little Christian parody site, Christwire, is attacking me! It’s terrible! They have publicly made this wicked accusation: “Professor Meyers and the Pharyngula peddle off tentacle anime pornography.” I am aghast. I would sue their slandering, sanctimonious little butts off, except, of course, that their claim is actually true, and I’m actually rather proud of my small role in promoting a universal interest in animal sex.

I’m therefore going to have to fire back directly by linking to them and hammering down their bandwidth. Go ahead, visit their site until you reduce it to a stammering series of 404 errors.

And right after you’ve choked them off, you can read these articles just to spite them.

How to make a vulva

Lobster sex

Worm porn!

Squid nuptial dances

Tentacle sex

Tentacle sex, part deux

Spider Kama Sutra

Sex in the MRI

How to evolve a vulva

Penis evolution

The burden of bearing a massive penis

Fish courtship and sex

Evolution of the mammalian vagina

For shame, California Supreme Court

The California court ruled today on the constitutionality of proposition 8, the measure that prohibited same sex marriage. Unfortunately, the court upheld the ban.

California should be embarrassed. Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Vermont allow or will allow same-sex marriages, and New York and New Hampshire are working on it. The trend is going one way, towards recognizing the civil rights of all individuals. Californians better get to work, you don’t want Mississippi to beat you to the 21st century. (Although I will be quite pleased when Mississippi legalizes gay marriage, whenever that may happen and no matter what order the states accomplish it.)

Gimme my iPod Touch!

While I’m off at meetings, you could be voting to help me win Eric Hovind’s iPod Touch. All you have to do is CLICK ON THIS LINK. Note that it has to be that link — it’s got an imbedded code in it to let the tabulators know that the incoming click comes from me, PZ Myers, so that the Hovind crew will know that they owe me a new toy.

This is the fourth creation minute video, and I think it’s the last one you should have to watch. Sometime after this they’ll tally up all the page views, and somebody will win.

This one, by the way, has Hovind defining science — “knowledge derived from observation and study” — and then giving six uses of the word evolution: cosmic, chemical, stellar, organic, macroevolution, and microevolution. Then he says that only microevolution is scientific. Wow. The cosmologists are going to be surprised that all that physics they’ve been doing is not science; the nuclear chemists are going to learn to their disappointment that all that work on fusion is unobserved and unstudied; the astronomers are going to have to remove the Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams from their textbooks; the biochemists have merely been imagining their work on metabolism and molecular biology; and the paleontologists, biogeographers, systematists, molecular geneticists, and bioinformaticians haven’t been observing and studying anything.

Only the population geneticists get to be called scientists. They’re going to be a bit surprised, too, because as a discipline you’ll be hard-pressed to find a group more unanimous in their support of evolution.

I know, it hurts so bad to be exposed to so much stupid, but it will be worth it when I get to show off my fancy gadget from Creation Science Evangelism. I’m going to especially enjoy all the creationist videos on it, and I hope they even have it engraved or slap a CSE sticker on the back of it.

I hope this isn’t like that Father Ted episode where they were going to lottery off a car, and had arranged ahead of time that Father Dougal would have the winning ticket number of 11. (They almost lost that one because Dougal confused himself by holding his ticket upside down…).

Scientology on trial

The French demonstrate their bravery by putting Scientology on trial:

The case centres on a complaint made in 1998 by a woman who said she was enrolled into Scientology after members approached her in the street and persuaded her to do a personality test.

In the following months, she paid more than €21,000 for books, “purification packs” of vitamins, sauna sessions and an “e-meter” to measure her spiritual progress, she said.

Other complaints then surfaced. The five original plaintiffs – three of whom withdrew after reaching a financial settlement with the Church of Scientology – said they spent up to hundreds of thousands of euros on similar tests and cures.

It’s a promising start, and I wish the lawyers trying to shut down the frauds of scientology good luck.

It’s only a start, though. Scientology is small fry; I think the next target ought to be Lourdes, which also racks up big money for the Catholic church and the various remoras of bunco artists pushing religion with false promises of cures and spiritual purification. I don’t see any difference at all between the papacy and L. Ron Hubbard’s empire of lies…why not hit them all?

Open thread

I am mired in meetings today (yes, it’s summer, I’m on a 9 month appointment, and I’m also on sabbatical…but necessity has roped me in yet again). I’m going to be wrestling with academic obligations almost all day, so you’re going to have to entertain yourselves for a bit. Here’s an open thread, say what you think!

For a little ferocious inflammatory commentary to prime the pump, here’s Pat Condell.

The Link

I got home late, and have just tuned in to The Link, the grossly overyhyped History Channel documentary on Darwinius masillae. I haven’t seen much of it so far, but there is good and bad. The good: lots of long closeups of the fossil itself. The bad: it’s kind of slow and talky. Fortunately, I haven’t seen any grand pronouncements that it’s going to change the universe, although the title is a bit annoying.

Those of you who have seen more of it can leave your comments and opinions here.