Intelligent Design
gregladen | March 19, 2008The fight continues in Texas; Homophobia is a punishable offense, yet legislators march on in opposition to the already underway 21st century; Some guy named Stephen on homeschooling.
Mary Helen Berlanga is the senior member of the Texas Board of Education. She is warning Texas citizens of impending fights on the board regarding a number of issues, including evolution.
She asked her constituents to travel to Austin next week to speak out against proposed amendments outside consultants are pushing for that she says exclude Hispanics and other minorities from classroom instruction.…
gregladen | March 17, 2008First, Larry said:
...the right people hate Idiots...Wells makes a virtue out of lying for Jesus...He should be an embarrassment to the intelligent design creationist cult except that the members of that cult are all incapable of separating fact from fiction when it comes to science...When I first saw the Wells article I seriously wondered whether Jonathan Wells was mentally stable...
Then, Michael Egnor said:
Dr. Moran has a low view of people who question his evolutionary views from the perspective of design.
Larry had previously said:
Flunk the IDiots...40% of the freshman class [at UCSD…
gregladen | March 11, 2008Yet another demonstration of creationist's inability to get what they want without resorting to ethically questionable behavior .....
Shortly before he was to attend a screening in January of the documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," ... Roger Moore, a film critic for The Orlando Sentinel, learned that his invitation had been revoked by the film's marketers.
"Well, you already invited me," he recalled thinking at the time. "I'm going to go."
So Mr. Moore traveled to a local megachurch and planted himself among a large group of pastors to watch the movie....
There were nondisclosure…
gregladen | March 10, 2008You may have noticed that I've been entirely silent about the movie Expelled. This is because of something that I do: Utterly ignore certain aspects of reality because my level of interest does not exceed my level of annoyance. I also ignore entire chunks of reality because I find them too interesting yet don't have the available time or energy to invest at the moment. Like the Maya. I've totally ignored the Maya for this reasn.
But, here's the thing: If you go to my old blog, which is a dormant archive, I've got a few Google ads set up, and they tend to display ads for Ben Stein,…
gregladen | March 9, 2008There are two books called "Icons of Evolution." One is by Jonathan Wells. The best way to learn about Well's Icons of Evolution is to watch Randy Olson's Flock of Dodos. It is an anti science piece of dreck.
The other is a more recently published is Icons of Evolution [Two Volumes]: An Encyclopedia of People, Evidence, and Controversies (Greenwood Icons), and it is an entirely different book. I have heard about this book, but not read it. Since it came up in a comment I thought I'd give you a direct link and a little bit of information. Info from the publisher:
Students and the…
gregladen | March 8, 2008Today is PZ Myers birthday. I live roughly in PZ's neighborhood, so I broke into his house last night and scanned a couple of images from the Myers family photo album. I thought you might enjoy them...
There is a LINKFEST growing of other LOL PZ posts (and perhaps other items) at A Blog Around the Clock.
gregladen | March 8, 2008Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design is a must read for those interested in the Evolution - Creationism controversy. In particular, this volume is an essential part of the personal library of every science educator, for reasons that I will describe below. If you know a Life Science Teacher, this is a perfect birthday present. If you have a child in the public K-12 education system in the US, or the analog somewhere else, donate a copy of this book to the appropriate life science teacher!
In this important book published by Oxford University Press in 2004, Forrest…
gregladen | March 7, 2008Scott Rowed published an Op Ed piece in the Calgary Herald last October that has just come to my attention. It is about evolution in schools in Canada, and provides an interesting perspective.
Should we reward them with taxpayers' money to pass on these wonderful insights to the next generation? Should our future leaders learn to smother their critical thinking and make decisions based on faith rather than evidence and reason? From Canada, we don't have to look too far south to see how tragic these faith-based decisions can be.
Read the whole thing here.
Scott has another Op Ed piece…
gregladen | March 7, 2008.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module" (more on the "evolution module" another time ... or come to the Bell on Friday to hear me rant about that in person).
Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Jonathan Wells has launched a nasty attack on PZ Myers and Ian Musgrave on the discredited Discovery Institute web site.
Darwinist bloggers P. Z. Myers and Ian Musgrave hate me. In fact, Myers writes, "My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds."...
The most recent outbursts by Myers and Musgrave were provoked by my February 29 blog on Evolution News & Views, in which I predicted that Darwinists would try to take credit for a recent French discovery regarding antibiotic resistance. And indeed they did.
In the course of claiming credit for Darwinism, Musgrave claims that I completely…
gregladen | March 4, 2008It is very common, across the U.S., for science teachers to dread the "evolution" unit that they teach during life science class. As they approach the day, and start to prepare the students for what is coming, they begin to hear the sarcastic remarks from the creationist students. When the day to engage the evolution unit arrives, students may show up in the classroom with handouts from anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis, to give to their friends. They may carry a bible to the lab station and read it instead of doing the work. If there is a parent conference night around that time…
gregladen | March 3, 2008On one hand, we have the Huckabee factor ... Huckabee's draw on hard right voters in tomorrows primary may lead anti-evolutionists to victory. On the other hand, we have the Obama factor ... Obama's draw on moderate republicans may lead to a cleansing of pernicious liberal elements from the Republican party.
Hilary Hylton has an interesting and informative piece in, of all places, Time, about tomorrow's events in Texas. You need to know this.
Texas has a state-wide school board. This means that when it comes to textbook adoption, Texas is the largest single customer, and thus,…
gregladen | February 29, 2008According to a poll this week, approximately 31 percent of surveyed Americans believe Roger Clemens is telling the truth about never taking performance-enhancing drugs.
This is about the same percentage of Americans who believe in creationism, and still insist George Bush is doing a good job. And here's my theory: These are all the same people, the true believers. If you cross-indexed these polls, you would likely find that Gallup and Quinnipiac just keep tapping into the same wacky group. ...
The Daily Blahg
gregladen | February 29, 2008That is the title of the First Place science fair project from a baptist science fair.
The description of the project:
Cassidy Turnbull (grade five) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.
Very cute. Too bad little Cassidy's brain is now hobbled forever. (Well, maybe not. She's only in fifth grade. She could get over it....)
This is from here.. You will find…
gregladen | February 27, 2008Bennett Gordon has a post on the Har Mar Science Fair:
...Every diorama in the Home School Science Fair, which took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, had a biblical quote attached to it. A young woman whose project involved teaching her dog how to run circles between her legs decorated the words: "If you love me, you will obey what I command." (John 14:15) in pink lace fabric. This quote got to the crux of the science fair, in my opinion: parental commandment. These parents pulled their children out of school, away from their peers, and said, "Now prove that Darwin was…
gregladen | February 24, 2008We are busy watching Florida, and the ICR's new "degree" in "life science education" in Texas, and whatever crap is happening in our own back yards, and we may be missing a dramatic development at the K-12 level in Texas: Social conservatives are poised to take over the Texas State Board of Education.
There is a primary in on March 4th, in which Barney Maddox, a conservative creationist, may take over the run against incumbent Pat Hardy for the District 11 (Fort-Worth) seat on the school board. This would shift the balance of power in the Lone Star (read Libertarian Fundamentalist Yahoo)…
gregladen | February 23, 2008PZ Myers notes that Ken Miller is making a case for the term design in evolutionary biology. Miller simply claims that "design" comes from the usual, expected evolutionary processes (Natural Selection, etc.). PZ is not buying this bill of goods, and neither am I. One way to address this question might be to ask: "What would Darwin do?"
Darwin uses the word quite often in The Voyage (a text I'm closely examining these days) but with only one exception that I found (my search was not perfect) this is typically in connection with cultural things .... the design of a road, for instance. One…
gregladen | February 21, 2008Plan B is, of course, inserting Christian Creationism into the Social Studies curriculum. This is disconcerting. Many otherwise perfectly rational and intelligent people think this is a good idea. It is not.
This sort of proposal is becoming more common now (this week) in editorials and other opinion outlets, with the defeat of the Wedge Strategy to water down the science standards in Florida. (This rebound effect occurs every time creationists are defeated.)
So, why is this not a good idea?
Social studies is a broad field of investigation that has many important goals. Like modern…
gregladen | February 21, 2008"The Wedge Strategy" refers to a document (the Wedge Document) developed by the Discovery Institute in 1998 and leaked by Tim Rhodes in 1999. It outlines a strategy to insinuate a specific subset of Christian Fundamentalism into the public education system. Although Wedge Proponents have denied this, the Wedge Strategy is still very much in use (more or less), so it is important for people interested in protecting our system of education from religious freaks to know about it. You can download a copy of it here (large PDF, 0.5 megabytes).
gregladen | February 20, 2008A good trick in child psychology is to come to a "compromise" in which the child, not knowing any better, gets what they think they wanted but it really turns out to be cod liver oil after all. Florida creationists got their cod liver oil when the Florida School Board voted, with a worrisome 4-3 count, to accept the proposed science standards that actually use the word "evolution."
The word "evolution," however, is qualified as a "scientific theory." That's the compromise part. Creationists, like young children, can get certain concepts very wrong, and this is one of them. We often hear…