Listen to Texas this morning

I was just notified that one of the people working for Texas Citizens for Science (the good guys) will be discussing the Chris Comer incident with someone from the Texas Freedom Network (more good guys). It doesn’t sound like there will be a lot of drama and confrontation, but there will be information and an opportunity to see the decent, intelligent side of Texas represented.

Thresholds’ host George Reiter will be interviewing Steven Schafersman, President of Texas Citizens for Science, and Dan Quinn, communications director for the Texas Freedom network, on the politics in Texas that led up firing of Chris Comer, director of science at the Texas Education Agency for ‘misconduct and insubordination’ and of ‘siding against creationism and the doctrine that life is the product of ‘intelligent design.’ The show is on KPFT, Houston, 90.1 FM, from 11am-12noon this Thursday, Jan 3, 2008. It can be picked up live on the website, http://www.KPFT.org.

You just don’t know how evil Skatje can be

All that noise from a pair of rather ugly pissants criticizing my daughter falls short of describing her perfidy. Today, Skatje spent the whole afternoon making lefse — and she’s really getting it down. The shape isn’t perfect yet, but the texture and the thinness is getting up there around Scandinavian-grandma-quality, which is pretty darn good…I mean, evil.

Dang. It really isn’t very evil at all, is it?

Except that she didn’t make enough.

There is no such thing as a godless family?

John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children’s Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal requirement.

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes’ right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes’ “high moral and ethical standards,” he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that “no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” Despite Eleanor Katherine’s tender years, he continued, “the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being.”

Wow.

This is so revealing. I’ve mentioned that religious indoctrination is a kind of child abuse, as has Richard Dawkins even more notably, yet when you press us we are both are at a loss to what we can do about it; parents have rights, and this is a situation where there there are all kinds of conflicting interests. Neither of us have advocated taking children from parents, or punishing people for mentioning god to kids, or any other penalties, not even mild ones — all we’ve ever said is that this is a real problem, one with no clear solutions, but we shouldn’t hide away from it.

Of course, the typical reaction from Christians and creationists and wingnuts has been pure hysteria — the atheists want to snatch your children away if you take them to Sunday school! Now we can understand it all as a perfect example of projection: if you don’t take your children to Sunday school, the Christians will try to take your children away.

I hope all those good theists who rebuked Dawkins and other atheists for a false perception that they were out to dismantle their families or deny them the privilege of instructing their children in their religion are howling about this attack on the family right now. Perhaps some of them, especially the New Jersey residents, are writing their representatives right now and demanding that this intrusion on the rights of parents be removed from the New Jersey constitution immediately…and perhaps they should be suggesting that Judga Camarata’s high-handed personal bigotry warrants official censure.

And hey, all you conservatives out there, with all your lip service to “family” — what are you doing about this? James Dobson and Tony Perkins must be furious. I’ll be looking forward to their denunciations, and their cooperation with the ACLU to correct this injustice.

Yeesh — now I discover this is old news, from 1970. Why did so many people suddenly send this in to me, anyway?

Anyway, it’s still relevant — I hadn’t known that theists had in the past tried to remove children from atheists. No wonder some freaked out at Dawkins’ description of religious indoctrination as child abuse…again, it’s projection.

Neurulation in zebrafish

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research
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Neurulation is a series of cell movements and shape changes, inductive interactions, and changes in gene expression that partitions tissues into a discrete neural tube. It is one of those early and significant morphogenetic events that define an important tissue, in this case the nervous system, and it’s also an event that can easily go wrong, producing relatively common birth defects like holoprosencephaly and spina bifida. Neurulation has been a somewhat messy phenomenon for comparative embryology, too, because there are not only subtle differences between different vertebrate lineages in precisely how they segregate the neural tissue, but there are also differences along the rostrocaudal axis of an individual organism. A recent review by Lowery and Sive, though, tidies up the confusion and pulls disparate stories together.

[Read more…]

And here’s one for the linguists!

If you’ve ever been curious about the intelligent design of language, here’s a new one for you: Edenics.

Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel — which kickstarted multi-national human history.

Oh, joy. They’re after all of our sciences.

Creationist Physics 101

A weird anti-evolution crank seems to be ramping up his efforts around the blogosphere recently: C. David Parsons has been leaving comments at Florida Citizens for Science, and Wesley Elsberry directly addresses his “conflict driven” views. Parsons has apparently been trying to raise his profile because he has a new book out, and he wants creationists to buy it.

It’s being put out by Tate Publishing, which seems to be a vanity press dedicated specifically to bilking Christian authors. If you have $40 and a complete lack of sense, you too can be the proud owner of The Quest for Right: The Adventure of a Lifetime, although I think you can tell from the title that it’s not going to be well-written. If you need a further clue, the author lists his qualifications on the cover: “Biblical Scholar and Scientist Extraordinaire.” I wonder if that’s anything like a super-scientist?

Anyway, you can browse through the table of contents and a sample excerpt. It’s bizarre. C. David Parsons is a young-earth creationist and biblical literalist; he doesn’t like those Christians who try to shoe-horn dinosaurs into the bible. I suspect he’s alienated a lot of his potential audience right there. He also has some peculiar notions about the origins of the earth.

Unveils the fundamental truth, based on the scientific record of creation, that the earth accreted from a watery nebula; the great surging mass of water and chemicals had no particular shape and covered thousands of square miles of interstellar space.

The “watery nebula” is probably an invention to rationalize the flood myth, but I’m afraid I don’t have any of the details. I also suspect some profound innumeracy: shouldn’t we be concerned about cubic miles in a volume of space, and “thousands of square miles” doesn’t sound like much—the earth formed out of a sheet of water a hundred miles on a side?

The book looks to be full of ranting against a conspiracy out to bury the truth, variously called a “scientific council” and the “league of scientists”. I wish. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a Super-Scientist in the League of Scientists?

I’m afraid, though, that most of his book isn’t for me. He doesn’t seem to say much about biology or evolution, but instead focuses the bulk of his complaints on — and this will thrill some of the readers here — physics. He doesn’t like quantum mechanics. He dedicates a whole chapter to debunking the photoelectric effect — photons aren’t real. Heck, this guy is going right down to the basics: he rejects Rutherford and Bohr, wants nothing to do with electrons, and wants us to know that God is doing it all.

The backbone of obstructionism is electronic interpretation, the tenet that all physical, chemical, and biological processes result from a change in the electronic structure of the atom which, in turn, can be deciphered through the orderly application of mathematics as outlined in quantum mechanics. The philosophy rejects any divine intervention. Scientific obstructionism is judged on these specifics: electronic interpretation and quantum mechanics. Conversely, the view of separatists that God is both responsible for and rules all the phenomena of the universe will stand or fall when the facts are applied. The view, however, is not tested by the definition of science, as determined by the court, but by the weightier principle of verifiable truths.

You’ve got to appreciate an honest kook. He knows that, in order to support biblical creationism, it’s not enough to critique biology — you’ve got to get right down to the roots and revise all of physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy to take down the perfidious lies of the League of Scientists.