[When I started this weblog, one of the hot topics in the Creationist Wars was Jonathan Wells, a Moonie who had trained as a developmental biologist and written a screed against evolutionary biology titled Icons of Evolution. This book purported to document serious flaws in some of the major examples of evolutionary biology, although what it actually did was parrot old creationist arguments and get much of the science wrong. One of the subjects he focused on was the pharyngula—the embryonic stage that exhibits a common morphology across all vertebrates. This fascinating developmental period has an unfortunate history, in that Ernst Haeckel published some fraudulent drawings of it, and also made exaggerated claims about it. One of Wells’ strategies was to condemn every biology textbook that illustrated homologies in pharyngula stage embryos, tarring them with the broad brush of Haeckelism. This got to the point where he was absurdly damning books that even included photos of embryos, and one of the things I’ve tried to do is document the way he misrepresents science teaching.]

I got a request to document some of Wells’ claims from his execrable book, Icons of Evolution. Specifically, Wells chastises several textbook authors for using modified versions of Haeckel’s drawings:

Starr & Taggart, 10th ed and this was mentioned in
Well’s testimony, p. 315, “slightly simplified version of
Haekel’s original fraudulent drawings”

Raven & Johnson, Biology, 6th ed

“modified version … exaggerates actual similarities” p. 450

I don’t have all of the textbooks he describes, but I do have the 5^th and 9^th editions of the above books, and I suspect the figures haven’t changed. Below, I’ve scanned in several of the figures that Wells finds objectionable, and for the most part, they aren’t bad at all, and actually make useful pedagogical points. I suspect that the real reason Wells and other creationists dislike them is that they reveal deep homologies that support evolutionary explanations of the origins of animal diversity.

[Read more…]

Conservative religious groups are once again making grade school textbooks the battleground. In California, supremacists and revisionists are trying to make radical changes to kids’ textbooks, inserting propaganda and absurd assertions that are not supported in any way by legitimate scholars. The primary effort is to mangle history, but they’re also trying to make ridiculous claims about scientific issues.

Such as that civilization started 111.5 trillion years ago, and that people flew to the moon and set off atomic bombs thousands of years ago.

(OK, everyone, let’s all do our best imitation Jon Stewart double-take: “Whaaa…??”)

Yeah, these aren’t fundamentalist Christians, but Hindu nationalists with very strange ideas—still, it’s the same old religious nonsense. Two groups, the Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation, have a whole slate of peculiar historical ideas driven by their religious ideology, and are pressuring the California State Board of Education to modify textbooks. They want to recast Hinduism as a monotheistic religion, whitewash the caste system and the oppression of women, and peddle racist notions about Aryan origins.

This is what happens when religious dogma is allowed to dictate educational content—reality and evidence and objective analysis all become irrelevant. The earth is neither 111.5 trillion years old, nor only 6,000 years old, and the errors and misperceptions of old priests are not a sound foundation for science. It doesn’t matter whether those priests spoke Sanskrit or Hebrew, since their ideas are the product of revealed ‘knowledge’ rather than critical, evidence-based research, they don’t belong in a public school classroom.

Heck, what am I saying? It’s just another idea, right? Let’s teach the controversy and allow orthodox Hindu supremacists to battle it out with fundamentalist Christian dominionists in front of sixth graders. It should be exciting and enlightening.

(via Butterflies and Wheels)

Minnesotans are pretty smart, too. Read the letter to the Minnesota Daily by Alex Galaitsis; he gets it. It’s written in response to a budding young he-said-she-said journalist who wrote a truly insipid article a few days ago.

Some good news first: Dembski gave a talk in Kansas. Kansas! You’d think they’d love him there, but his audience was better informed than you might expect, from the example of their elected Board of Education officials.

Dembski, who may have been led to expect a warmer reception for his ideas—he was in Kansas, after all—seemed to grow testy as questioner after questioner expressed doubt about his assertion that evolution is a failed theory and that patterns in nature are best explained as a result of intelligence.

I know there is a solid body of intelligent, well-informed people in Kansas, and the escapades of the klutzes trying to railroad the state back into the Middle Ages are probably rousing quite a bit of antagonism. I also suspect the Discovery Institute schtick is getting old, and since Intelligent Design is a proven loser in the courtroom, its fans are looking for a new angle. The DI Fellows might want to think about revamping their CVs.

The New York Times once again screws up by asking a religion writer to comment on evolution, and of course she casts it all in religious terms, opting in to Ruse’s terrible characterization of it as “evolutionism”. Fortunately, John Rennie has ripped into that claim satisfyingly.

Shulevitz and Ruse can go on about “evolutionism” if they like, but the kinds of claims they find troubling have nothing to do with what would be taught in public school science classes. Thus their arguments might be relevant as social context, but they have no bearing on any of the specific disputes involving whether or how evolution should be taught. Whether Shulevitz and Ruse would want this to be the case, their arguments help the creationists distract the public from the real issues.

Chris Mooney also has some good criticisms of the piece, although he and I do disagree on strategy (I think promoting secularism, of which atheism is a part, is a necessary component of any long term resolution of the creationism problem, and that is not the same as this mythical “evolutionism”.)

There is this fellow, Krauze, who runs some forgettable Intelligent Design blog, who can be best described as polite, persistent, and utterly clueless. He’s been having a little back-and-forth with Jason Rosenhouse (who has a more patient temperament than I do, clearly), and Jason neatly polishes off Krauze’s claim that ID just needs more time to develop. It’s entertaining and thorough.