Abortion ship sails to Spain

Here’s an interesting idea: since some countries have restrictive laws on abortion (rather like the ones McCain apparently would like to institute, where even the health of the mother becomes a non-excuse), a Dutch non-profit is sending a ship to provide reproductive health services to such countries, anchoring in international waters to get around local policies. It’s a brilliant idea — a way to directly help women deprived of rational family planning opportunities by the wackaloons of their government.

Just one problem: how are they going to help South Dakota?

Bidlack for Congress

That guy Phil is complaining that none of the big sites like Daily Kos or Crooks & Liars are covering the political campaign of Hal Bidlack for the 5th Congressional District of Colorado. Hey, Phil! Is that an admission that your site is tiny and insignificant? Cover it yourself!

At least I’ll offer my support. I met Hal at The Amazing Meeting, and he’s a good guy — a skeptic and rationalist who ought to be in congress. I hope you eligible Coloradans give him your vote!

Post-debate

McCain really annoyed me last night, and there are a few things I have to mention now.

First of all, his gripe about the $3 million “overhead projector” simply marks him as an idiot — and not just an ignorant idiot, but the kind of idiot who ignores readily available evidence. What he is dismissing is a tool for science education. Take a look at what the sky projector looks like — your teacher didn’t have one of those babies to flash her transparencies up in the classroom. And while you’re there, you can always donate to the Adler Planetarium. The other thing McCain leaves out of his complaint is that the projector was not funded, and they’re still hurting for a replacement.

The other trumped-up lie and pseudo-scandal that irritates me is the ACORN mess. ACORN is an organization that works to help the poor, which of course makes it about as anti-Republican as you can get. They have had some incidents of attempted fraud, but the fraud was against ACORN itself, with workers attempting to cheat to get paid for submitting falsified registrations. Furthermore, it was ACORN itself that caught these fake registrations and notified government agencies.

What the ACORN nonsense is all about is a preemptive attempt by the Republican party to cast doubt on the election. I predict we’ll hear much more about this if Obama wins…while the Diebold bias will be ignored, and the unfair policy of using the most unreliable voting machines in the poorest districts will continue.

Oh, no! Another debate!

It’s been a long day for me, and now I get to cap it off with another presidential debate. This could be awful. I’m just hoping that McCain is feeling desperate and will do something that’s bug-eyed crazy to change the status of the election. Go ahead, say what you think in the comments.

McCain brought up the “overhead projector” again! He really is an anti-science loon.

After claiming that Obama was running a negative campaign, McCain than tried to defend the ugly attempt to tar Obama by association with Ayers. Hypocrite alert!

My final opinion: McCain didn’t blow up as I hoped, making it a somewhat boring debate. Instead, McCain spent the whole hour and a half being creepy — I don’t want another president who makes me want to gag every time his face appears on TV.

McCain also seemed to lie incessantly. The claim that Obama has been negatively campaigning coming out of 100%-negative-McCain was a low point for him. I don’t trust him a bit.

Prepare for an ugly battle in Texas

The Texas Board of Education has named the six people who will be on a committee to review science curriculum standards. Texas, you’ve got trouble. The people are:

  • David Hillis, professor of integrative biology and director of the Center of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Texas at Austin;

  • Ronald K. Wetherington, professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence;

  • Gerald Skoog, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Education at Texas Tech and co-director of the Center for Integration of Science Education and Research;

  • Stephen Meyer, vice-frakkin’-president of the odious Discovery Institute in Washington state;

  • Ralph Seelke, a pro-ID creationist and biologist from Wisconsin;

  • Charles Garner, a chemist from Baylor who is also a pro-ID creationist.

Note that Meyer and Seelke are co-authors of that ghastly new ID textbook, Explore Evolution, and would no doubt love to tweak the curriculum to make their book marketable in Texas. Conflict of interest? Nah.

So, three good guys and three ignorant ideologues, with the overall head of the board of education being Don McLeroy, the creationist dentist. It’s going to get ugly.

Congratulations to Randy Moore

My colleague at the Twin Cities branch campus of the University of Minnesota, Randy Moore, has won an award from the Discovery Institute: The Award for Most Dogmatic Indoctrinator in an Evolutionary Biology Course. Congratulations to Randy! He won it for this paragraph:

The evidence supporting evolution is overwhelming and comes from diverse disciplines, such as molecular biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, ethology, and biochemistry. There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution occurs, nor are there science-based alternative theories. Evolution is a unifying theme in biology; teaching it as such is the best way to show students what biology is about and how they can use evolution as a tool to understand our world. [Evolution] is as important an idea as there is in science – it is a great gift to give to students.

The Discovery Institute claims there are at least four mistakes in that paragraph. Their summary of the “errors” is hilarious, and shows how delusional those guys are.

  • The evidence isn’t overwhelming, because their books, Icons of Evolution and Explore Evolution, say so. Those two books are propaganda pieces put out by the Discovery Institute itself, and they are awful: poor scholarship, sloppy reasoning, and and an abysmal ignorance of the science characterize both. If you want some good popular books on the subject, try The Making of the Fittest(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), Your Inner Fish(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), Why Evolution is True(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and The Ancestor’s Tale(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), all much better and more informative, and actually representing the evidence accurately.

  • There is too controversy because they have a list of crackpots dissenters from evolution. Any field will have kooks and crackpots on the fringe; compiling a short list of loons is a relatively trivial and entirely meaningless exercise. Even at that, the DI’s list is very short on people who are actually biologists…and the whole petition is misleadingly worded.

  • Evolution is a theory in trouble because some scientists discussed alternative modes of evolution at the Altenberg conference this summer. Science is not fixed, but adapts to the evidence, so it is perfectly normal to have conferences that discuss new ideas. The Altenberg meeting did not challenge the fact of evolution or try to displace known evolutionary mechanisms; it discussed some new findings that might add to the theory. It’s absurd that people are still going on and on about how a small meeting of scientists working on extending some parts evolutionary theory is a strike against evolution. To the contrary, it’s what we expect of good science.

  • There are too science-based alternative theories: Intelligent Design, endosymbiosis, and self-organization. Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory was a natural explanation for eukaryote evolution — it is not an alternative, but a part of evolutionary theory. Similarly, self-organization (as, for example, described by Kauffman) does not oppose evolution at all, but suggests that physical and chemical properties of the universe could facilitate evolution. Like I said above, these are part of the normal process of science, that people propose new explanations and try to back them up with evidence, and they become incorporated into our body of knowledge. Intelligent Design creationism does not qualify. IDists don’t do science, don’t propose testable theories, and don’t have any evidence to back up their claims.

So I hope Randy Moore doesn’t get too cocky here — the award was given by a gang of incompetent judges who don’t know what they are talking about.