Fact: You cannot teach biology without evolution.
Several years ago, my 10th grade son was taking AP Bio. My Bio major (and quite successful immunologist today) brother asked to see his textbook. When I (art major sister) asked why, my brother said, “Just wanted to make sure the textbook started off with evolution. It does, so all is fine.”
Which brings us to this nonsense:
Kentucky Republican Senators were all on board for educational standards until they discovered that those standards included *gasp!* evolution.
In an exchange with officials from ACT, the company that prepares Kentucky’s new state testing program, those lawmakers discussed whether evolution was a fact and whether the biblical account of creationism also should be taught in Kentucky classrooms.
“I would hope that creationism is presented as a theory in the classroom, in a science classroom, alongside evolution,” Sen. David Givens, R-Greensburg, said Tuesday in an interview.
Think that’s bad? It gets worse. Take a look at this:
Another committee member, Rep. Ben Waide, R-Madisonville, said he had a problem with evolution being an important part of biology standards.“The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up,” Waide said. “My objection is they should ensure whatever scientific material is being put forth as a standard should at least stand up to scientific method. Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny.”
Zander (Balloon Juice) speaks the truth:
You sir are the dumbest mofo on Earth, and I am offended that you are an elected lawmaker in the Commonwealth. Your ignorance is so astounding that I have to believe you actually don’t exist, because nobody can be this stupid and survive without collapsing under the density of their own idiocy.
Seriously, evolution has “never stood up to scientific scrutiny”?
Exactly. It’s hard to believe that people can be this stupid.
According to the artist — this may be the first peer reviewed rap album ever.
I heard an interview (and some snippets of his work) with this artist — Baba Brinkmann — on this morning’s Living On Earth program. Mr. Brinkmann is a Canadian Geek rapper, whose previous claim to fame was a rap version of The Canterbury Tales. You can hear the interview (or just read the transcript) here. On further investigation, this work has been in progress for a couple of years and has been an Off-Broadway show for at least a year, with glowing reviews all over the place. This was developed with a scientist looking over his shoulder and keeping the science lyrics on track, hence the “peer reviewed” claim. Anyway, it is interesting and sorta fun (in a geeky way) and wonder it this might to for evolutionary biology what Schoolhouse Rock did for civics?
Performance, Feedback, Revision 2.0:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROgR3nK6ayk[/youtube]
He even articulates an evolutionary purpose for bling:
GELLERMAN: In evolutionary terms, is there a role for “bling” in the rap world?
BRINKMAN: Absolutely. Yeah, bling features quite broadly in the off-Broadway show. The peacock’s tail is the classic example because if you have some kind of a flaw in your genes, or you’re, you know, not strong – then it’s impossible to grow that large of a tail and carry it around and not get killed by a predator.
So the tail is a handicap that’s an advertisement of its own cost and I think that’s what bling is as well. If you can afford to carry bling around, then it means you’re winning the game. You know, I’ll just say, anybody who looks down on bling needs to look at themselves in the mirror and figure out what their bling is – because everybody’s got bling.
Whether it’s your fashion sense, or your Harvard degree that you’re showing off that hangs on the wall or the fact that you raised a couple of kids that are whip-smart or winning at something. You know, there are a lot of things that we display to each other to try to advertise something about ourselves. And bling just happens to be the sort of symbolism that hip-hop has settled on but anything could suffice as long as it’s difficult to fake and costly and represents your resources.GELLERMAN: You know, I don’t think I’ll ever listen to rap or look at a peacock again the same way.
Cool!
The 2011 Miss USA “scholarship” pageant was held last night in Las Vegas. Out of the 51 contestants, only two of them said that they believed in evolution.
Out of all the contestants in last night’s Miss USA pageant, only two affirmed they thought evolution should be taught in schools.
The winner, 21-year-old Alyssa Campanella was one of the two. The rest either confused the question with evolution of species (versus the intelligent design debate), or stated that they thought both should be taught in school, according to Scientific American.
Campanella and Alida D’Angona from Massachusetts were the only two contestants to state that they fully believed in evolution, according to Think Progress.
Can you guess which states the ones who don’t believe in evolution hail from? Here’s a hint:
Perhaps most prominently was Miss Alabama, Madeline Mitchell’s opinion that evolution should flot-out not be taught in schools.
An anti-evolution group built a creationist museum in Kentucky a few years ago. There are some amusing accounts from various scientists that have visited the museum, but PZ Myers passes along some observations from a museum curator who visited the museum and wrote about it in a Curator’s journal.
Asma highlights a couple of things that leapt out to me, as well. It’s not really a museum — there’s no opportunity to explore or think, you’re given a script to follow and you may not deviate.
When I visited, I discovered no way to break off the tour at any point prior to Consummation. About two hours in, I started to get claustrophobic; the spaces seemed to get tighter and darker as I walked the eschatological narrative. I decided to step away–just as racism and crime were being blamed on Eve’s taste for forbidden fruit. I tried to find an exit to the cafeteria (“Noah’s Cafe”) so I might nourish my weakening spirit. To my horror, I discovered that one cannot actually exit anywhere along the pathway. The herding is so absolute that when you attempt to backtrack, you find that the doors you’ve been entering have no handles on the opposite side. Like someone in a haunted house, you must complete the entire circuit.
The other striking thing about it is that it is an empty shell, a hollow façade. Go to any other respectable museum in the country, such as the Science Museum of Minnesota (which does have a bit of a pop-science, entertainment quality to it), and you can find extensive collections and research facilities behind it. The part that most people visit is the public relations side, with nicely laid out exhibits and explanatory material and hands-on elements. Behind the scenes, you’ll find large rooms with shelves everywhere and buckets and barrels and crates full of specimens, the smell of formaldehyde and alcohol, and spaces full of beetle larvae gnawing away at carcasses. Not at the Creation “Museum”, though!
It’s not quite accurate to call this evangelical center a “museum.” It contains almost no “information,” unless you count as information speculations on how Noah kept dinosaurs on the ark. It offers no new observations about nature, unless you think that inferring a Designer can be called observational. Unlike most other nature museums, it has no “research” component whatsoever. When I asked Mark Looy, vice president for AiG ministry relations, where the research labs and archive collections were located, he confessed that he didn’t understand the question. “This is a museum,” he finally said, chuckling.
That’s revealing. These people don’t even know what a real museum is.
When you finally spill out of this ball of confusion into the gigantic gift shop, you become keenly aware of the unholy mixing of piety and profit. Someone is making a fortune on this stuff. The museum speaks directly to the anxieties of a fearful subculture that sees its family values under attack by a rising secular tide. The visitors at the Creation Museum feel like David, facing the secular giant Goliath. They see themselves as underdogs of righteousness who’ve chosen an origin story that’s different from the science story. Like bad reality television that drives up ratings with violent and abusive scenarios, the museum drives up profits by demonizing science. The search for meaningful origin stories is understandable, of course, but the museum’s suggestion that science causes nihilism and racism is inexcusable.
I’m so glad the state of Kentucky gave tax money to this same group to build a Noah’s Ark Museum, too. (It’s about jobs!) I don’t think we should be surprised that there’s no room for thinking or contemplation at the Creation Museum. I am surprised that the Creation Museum proprietors know nothing about real museums. Have they never visited one? If I think about it more it makes sense, since the creationists avoid anything that challenges their views and think that people need to be protected from opposing viewpoints.
Read this statement:
The measure from Republican state Rep. Bill Zedler would block higher education institutions from discriminating against or penalizing teachers or students based on their research into intelligent design or other theories that disagree with evolution.
Zedler said he filed the bill because of cases in which colleges had been hostile to those who believe that certain features of life-forms are so complex that they must have originated from a higher power. [emphasis mine]
Let’s start with the first phrase I emphasized. What research?
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.
“They never came in,” said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.
“From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review,” he said.
Of course, the research never appeared. Intelligent Design is about faith, not fact. It is about, as Zedler claims, “those who believe.” For anyone with a basic understanding of science it is a given that disproving something is as important as proving something. Advocates for Intelligent Design have no interest in disproving their beliefs, and given their laziness when it comes to research it seems they have no interest in proving them either.
Here’s another scientific rule: You have to be willing to accept research results that differ from your original hypothesis. Are Intelligent Designers willing to consider the possibility that their “theory” is wrong? Of course not. They’re not even willing to do research.
Cross posted at Punchline.
At two recent debates, Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell balked at answering a simple question, “Do you think evolution is a myth?”
O’Donnell maintains that her beliefs are unimportant, and her job is to follow the Constitution. I mean, when’s the last time someone had to vote on evolution?
It’s a sad de-evolution of modern political candidates that someone who is this close-minded, unqualified and unprepared to hold national office is supported by over 30% of Delawareans.
I don’t know the last time someone had to vote on 2+2, but I’d still like my elected representative to know that the answer was four.
Meet John Freshwater, an eighth-grade school science teacher from Ohio who likes to play loose with the facts, use the Bible as a scientific resource, and, yes, torture children with electricity.
The New York Times reports that the school district started the procedure to fire Freshwater back on June 2008 because he burned crosses into the skin of two students with a Tesla coil and taught creationism in class. Freshwater says that the creationism accusation is “fabricated” because he failed to remove a Bible from his desk. He said the Bible in question was his “workplace bible, not his devotional bible”. Freshwater’s pastor said, “If he had ‘Origin of Species’ on his desk, they would celebrate that.” If by they, he means East Coast liberals like me, then he’d be correct.
Regarding the charge of teaching creationism (aka Intelligent Design), Freshwater used Legos to illustrate how difficult it would be to randomly put them together to build a Lego car or a Lego house . . . you know, “proving” that there was a hand behind evolution guiding it through its intricacies. When cross-examined the other day, Freshwater said that he did recall the exercise and that maybe his students initiated it reported The Columbus Dispatch. The school district lawyer also played a tape recording of Freshwater appearing on a radio show back in April discussing the Lego exercise:
If you mixed up the blocks for years, the likelihood that they would become something tangible is improbable, Freshwater told the show’s host, Dr. Patrick Johnson of Rightremedy.org. He compared the blocks to human cells and said that the chances that a random combination of cells could become an eyeball are “slim to none.”
But, even after hearing his own radio interview, Freshwater could not recall the exercise.
Freshwater also passed out handouts that said that the giraffe and the woodpecker could not have possible evolved reported The Columbus Dispatch. The students were not allowed to take the handouts out of class, because Freshwater said he was conserving paper.
In another round of questioning regarding a survey in which Freshwater allegedly asked incoming students about the importance of religion in their life, Freshwater said that he had never surveyed his students reported The Columbus Dispatch. The school district lawyer then presented Freshwater with two completed student surveys.
. . . he [Freshwater] studied them closely and, after a long pause, replied, “It appears like you have gone through my room and taken some stuff out.”
Apparently so, Mr. Freshwater, apparently so.
After Freshwater is finally fired, I hope that he enjoys teaching pseudo-science at some Christian private school at half the salary.
One hundred fifty years ago today Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species was published. It is arguably the most important scientific work ever published. It was the product of painstaking scientific observation. Darwin was not only a scientist’s scientist, he was a great writer and populizer of science. It’s amazing to consider that Origin was written before much was known about genetics – yet Darwin’s conclusions still stand up to scrutiny. Darwin revolutionized biology – all modern biology is based on the principles of evolution.
