Paul Gross shreds Berlinski's "The Devil's Delusion"

Paul Gross, co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse, has just reviewed David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion. The review is up now at TalkReason and will be published in the next issue of Free Inquiry (get a subscription!).

But let us look for substance. The book's dedication is mysterious and strangely moving. It is to the memory of the author's grandfather, and it consists of waypoints -- all in German -- on that man's path through the Nazi death camps toward his end in Auschwitz. One has to reach chapter 2 to recognize of what the dedication is in aid. It is the now-standard calumny favored by religious reactionaries: that the moral horrors of the twentieth century were caused by atheism. The ID movement and its political sympathizers have even produced, just recently, a very bad commercial film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which happens to include Berlinski and which suggests that those horrors, including the Holocaust, were due mainly to Darwinism (which causes atheism). Note: Berlinski insists he is not an advocate of ID. He just rejects anything evolutionary biologists deduce from their work about religion. The Discovery Institute, ID epicenter, supports Berlinski, as he acknowledges. It must be because they, too, have no evidence for ID, but they value any argument against science.

So the "science" whose "pretensions" are being exposed in this chapter is the identification by atheists of brutality, oppression, and mass murder throughout human history carried out under the aegis of religion. Berlinski's response is not to dispute those facts: they are indisputable. It is instead an audacious tu quoque, "you are no better." Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot . . . the lot were, by this argument, atheists. The rest of their dreadfulness is supposed to follow as night follows day. You may recount or even tabulate, as does Berlinski (on three pages, in small type), the long, awful roll call of deaths due to wars and mass murder in the twentieth century. That is the point of Berlinski's dedication: the suggestion that atheism caused those deaths. Ergo, atheism is even worse than religion. Without religion, human brutality is unconstrained. With religion, there is hope for constraint. Eat your hearts out, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Weinberg!

This is . . . well, baloney. To begin with the Holocaust, Hitler considered himself a Christian. "How terrific was His fight against the Jewish poison . . ." he crooned. The "His" refers to Jesus Christ, to "My Lord and Savior," and the quoted words are Hitler's.** But even if he had been an atheist, Hitler's Germany was not populated by atheists. On the contrary, it was populated largely by good Christians, a great many of whom were the executors of the unspeakable Nazi program. Moreover, such crimes, including genocide, were nothing new to Christianity. They were just a new wrinkle on one of religion's oldest tricks: pogroms for entertaining the masses and for the seizure of power.

If any of you saw Expelled, you had David Berlinski bloviate on evolution's alleged problems. In it he alleges that the concept of species is so incoherent that this must surely call evolutionary biology into question. Of course he wanted to warn us that Darwin was at the root of Nazism too. At that moment (and many many others) I wanted to spew my drink all over the screen and scream. Gross seems to think that this book might just induce more of the same.

The paradox of education

Think about who the greatest polluters on the planet are, who the most destructive people on the planet are, and who exploits the most people in the most efficient manner. It is, in the aggregate, the most educated people on the planet. In all of our talk of personal health, efficiency creation, speed, human rights, and democracy, the most educated people in the world sit atop the most exploitative organizations the world has ever seen. One need only look at the number of advanced degrees that work for corporations like Dole or Cargill, who work for international trade organizations like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, or who head and formulate policies for the governments of the U.S. or China.

With our incredible powers of discernment (science) and manipulation (technology) we are not necessarily more moral than allegedly ignorant indigenous people. Though the modern corporate nation state might seemingly kill fewer people through direct conflict than say the Yanomamo or than tribes in highland New Guinea did before modern governments intervened, we have poisoned more people, plants, animals, and ecological niches in the last 150 years than humans had in all of their previous history.

Why could we do this? Because we can learn. This upright ape capable of communicating complex formulations and predictions has used those abilities to store information so effectively that we have created a great set of apparatuses that churn out more and more "educated" people who are wholly ignorant of their effects on the planet. Our evolved capacities for conjoint behavior, for tool manipulation, and for improving on those tools, has created a modern "educated" human who kills more organisms than s/he can ever hope to replace. Any single American individual might be "healthier" than any Aboriginal Australian and can expect to live longer, s/he can also expect to be forced into any number of cybernetic treatments necessitated by the poisons s/he eats on the food that s/he has not grown or that have been pumped into the cow's milk s/he has no control over at all. These chemicals - rBST for example - can modify her/his biochemistry beginning very young. The accumulated effects of all of these poisons, though, are believed to be an acceptable form of collateral damage incurred in the industrial production of food that must happen in order to maintain economic growth and generate agridollars from agriculture. Pay no mind that overly nitrated soil spills down the Mississippi River creates a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

All of this has been created by the most educated people on the planet. Is more education the answer to this problem? I am not begging this question. I do not say yes or no. I think that our ideas about education need to be rethought.

In short: If the most educated people on the planet have collectively brought about the sixth great extinction event on planet Earth, is more education the answer?

Texas board discusses science standards [audio]

Take a listen to the Committee of the Full Board C (11/19) to the Texas Board discussion on the science standards. Start it up at about ten minutes in. There's a great wrap up over at the Austringer with a little highlight reel of some pretty serious nonsense.

p.s. I love the woman who advocates for environmental education.

We don't need God to be good.

Paul Kurtz, the president of the Center for Inquiry wrote a great article in the recent "On Faith" column, called "Belief in God Essential for Moral Virtue?" at Newsweek and The Washington Post. To their credit, Newsweek has been hosting some surprisingly intelligent thinkers on practical ethics, practical religion, and their role in politics and public life.

Secularists recognize the centrality of self-interest. Every individual needs to be concerned with his or her own health, well-being, and career. But self-interest can be enlightened. This involves recognition that we have responsibilities to others. There are principles of right and wrong that we should live by. No doubt there are differences about many moral issues. Often there may be difficulties in achieving a consensus. Negotiation and compromise are essential in a pluralistic society.

However, there is now substantial evidence drawn from evolutionary biology that humans possess a moral sense (see Marc Hauser, Steven Pinker, and David Sloan Wilson). Morality has its roots in group survival; the moral practices that evolved enabled tribes or clans to survive and function. This means that human beings are potentially moral. Whether or not this moral sense develops depends on social and environmental conditions. Some individuals may never fully develop morally--they may be morally handicapped, even sociopaths. That is one reason why society needs to enact laws to protect itself.

Keep reading.

Texans stand for science

Members of CFI Austin and other science advocates went to the Texas State Board of Education meeting this week and showed them what was up. The new language in the science standards calls for students to learn about the "strengths and limitations" of evolution with the possibility to discuss alternatives to evolution." What alternatives? The utter drivel in Disco 'Tute books like Icons of Evolution or Explore Evolution? See my posts on Louisiana (here and here) for some thoughts on those. In brief, they are intellectually dishonest, anti-scientific, and constitute awful educational methods. This is a backdoor attempt to get creationism into classes.

In short, a huge clod of intellectually toxic s*** has been excreted onto the Texas' educational system by the Disco 'Tute and its carrion birds fattened up on the carcasses of 19th century dead science. And like vulture crap, this stuff is caustic; it eats good thinking right up and invites lazy thinking supplemented with religious bromide. Thankfully, the CFI folks and dozens of others are there to clean it up.

Check the FOX News story online. One woman notes rightly that this was a debate in the 1860s. It is irrelevant to the 21st century. Another man came in a Barney the dinosaur suit adorned with a sign that reads, "Don McElroy. Am I 4,000 or 64,000,000 years old?" Sweet.

Wooly mammoth DNA mapping

My hometown paper reports today that scientists, including PSU biochemist Stephan Schuster, have sequenced 80% of an extinct Siberian mammoth. Even more incredibly, we might be on the verge of an Ice Age version of Jurassic Park.

Three years ago, Japanese scientists said they planned to find frozen mammoth sperm and impregnate an elephant and raise the offspring in a safari park in Siberia. But using genetics to engineer a mammoth makes more sense, Schuster said.

Anthropology professor Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said he no longer considers such ideas impossible. Poinar, who wasn't part of Schuster's study but consulted on the movie Jurassic Park, said director Steven Spielberg may have had it right when he told skeptical scientists: "This is the science of eventuality."

For those of us who unabashedly love Jurassic Park, this sounds so cool I want to jump out of my seat with joy. But let us not forget Ian Malcom's chidings. To paraphrase, just because you think you can engineer extinct animals doesn't mean you should stop yourself from considering whether you should engineer extinct animals.

But Jurassic Park dreams aside, the coolest thing in this is that we are learning about evolutionary rates.

Elephants and mammoths - comparable in size at about 8 to 14 feet tall - diverged along evolutionary paths about 6 million years ago, about the same time humans and chimps did, Schuster said. But there are twice as many differences between the genetic makeup of chimps and humans as those between elephants and mammoths.

"Primates evolved twice as fast as elephants," Schuster said. But some animals such as rodents have had even more evolutionary changes, indicating that it might have to do with size or metabolism, said study co-author Webb Miller.

Another interesting finding is that in the 50 or so species with mostly mapped genomes, there are certain areas where the genetic code is exactly the same in all the animals - except the mammoth.

Pretty cool stuff. With each new finding we see more and more of the tree of life through deep time up to the present.

What's ailing the Republican Party? G-O-D!

Kathleen Parker at The Washington Post has a great piece, "Giving up on God," on what needs to go in the Republican Party - "the gorilla in the pulpit."

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth -- as long as we're setting ourselves free -- is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

The choir has become absurdly off-key, and many Republicans know it.

Right-o folks. The Republican brand is now soaked in toxic religion that the non-religious or moderately religious can smell miles away. And it's killing the party. I can deal with a fiscal conservative like the deceased Milton Friedman. They use reason and evidence to show me why their ideas are good. They aren't bathed in the blood of their savior and spewing idiotic bromides like Sarah Palin's recent silliness (cited by Parker):

"I'm like, okay, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is.... And if there is an open door in (20)12 or four years later, and if it's something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

She doesn't have a prayer. The moronathon that Bush set up and scores of evangelicals catered and attended has so hamstrung the country that she is totally unelectable. Somewhere between her prayers and her reading the news, she might get that and decide not to go through that door.

"...actually an illusion..." [Updated]

Celebrate good times!

Raymond Eve and Chawki Belhadi have just released "Evolution, Creationism, and Public Schools: Surveying What Texas Scientists Think about Educating Our Kids in the 21st Century." The survey finds, unequivocally, that Texas scientists are not bickering over the truth of evolution and that to "teach the controversy" is to manufacture nonsense for the purposes of a religious agenda. The research was funded by the Texas Freedom Network, a group that has been fighting evolution education's erosion and manipulation by conservative Christian apparatchiks like Don McElroy and his cronies in the Texas Education Agency. In fact, McElroy and co. just appointed three creationists (Stephen Meyer, Charles Garner, and Ralph W. Seelke) to the new board reviewing Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for science. They have sought to include language that requires students to examine the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories in order to strengthen students’ critical thinking skills. That's code for attacking evolution with pseudo-scientific claims (read the Disco Tute's spin here). Eve's and Belhadi's study could not come at a better time.

The survey measured what 464 Texas biologists and biological anthropologists actually believe about evolution, creationism, intelligent design, and education. In short, the have found that "that the much ballyhooed lack of consensus and uncertainty about evolution held to exist among scientists is actually an illusion on the part of those making such a claim." No one who follows this can really be surprised.

Let's start with their first finding which is the most supportive of our cause and devestating to the Disco 'Tute's Wedge tactic.

• 89.7% responded that, “Modern evolutionary biology is largely correct in its essentials, but still has open questions for active scientific research.”
• 8% responded that “Modern evolutionary biology is correct in some respects. While further scientific research will require some major alterations to current theory, these advances will not invoke intervention by any supernatural agent.”
• 1.4% responded that “Modern evolutionary biology is right about the common ancestry of all extant organisms, but it is necessary to supplement it by invoking periodic interventionby an intelligent designer.”
• Only .9% responded that “Modern evolutionary biology is mostly wrong. Life arose through multiple creation events by an intelligent designer, although evolution by natural selection played a limited role."
  
• 0% responded that “Modern evolutionary biology is completely wrong. Life was created essentially as we see it today.”

See that? 2.3% of respondents find it at all acceptable to invoke a supernatural creative force at all who intervenes in the physical universe through "creation events" or who created life "essentially as we see it today." The authors find that of the ten creationist sympathizers in the survey, seven of them have not taught a course that "included a substantial block of material on human evolution." Zero of those respondents had taught graduate students about human evolution in the last five years. As the authors say, "there was no person out of the total sample of 464 respondents who said they both supported intelligent design and had taught graduate students within the past five years." We can safely infer that intelligent design has no support within Texas graduate studies in biology and biological anthropology.

The authors also found that Texas scientists believe that Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, and Intelligent Design have almost no place in edcuation. 98% totally reject YEC, 94% totally reject OEC, and 92% reject ID. They also found that 95% of respondents would prefer to teach just evolution while 5% said both evolution and creationism. 0% said that they think that just creationism (ID or otherwise) should be taught. That last finding deserves a little bit of attention.

Creationists and ID folks are keen to harp on ID's scientific merits. If it has so much explanatory power, why not teach it as a sole and satisfactory descriptive, explanatory, predictive, and modifiable scientific theory? What does it describe and what is the evidence on which it its descriptive power rests? How does it explain the breadth and depth of variation in the biosphere? What predictions does it make and how have they stood up to the scientific method? How has ID changed over time as new evidence has come in?

Any theory worth anything deserves at least one graduate course in major research universities that shows its power in these regards. The paucity of these courses (outside of places like Biola - the Bible Institute of Los Angeles) and the level of research they need shows that ID is an empty lot. It it were a tenable scientific theory, it would stand on its own. We all know that ID is scientifically vacant. The Disco 'Tute has known this for a long time. Paul Nelson wrote that there is no "full-fledge[d] theory of biological design...and no general theory of biological design." Enter "teach the controversy."

What do Texas biologists and biological anthropologists think of teaching the controversy or the alleged weaknesses in evolution? They think it's a canard and a sham. 94% of respondents of them think that the weaknesses that creationists allege do not constitute valid scientific objections to evolution. 67% think that this "weakness" language should not appear in science standards at all while 28% think that discussion of alleged weaknesses should be included. However, some of the scientists who responded this way do so because they wish to "discredit such claims." One respondent wrote, "Perhaps dissecting a proposed 'weakness' could be a good tool to demonstrate a flaw in the logic of the 'weakness.'" I know university professors who do that.

But we should remember that these are experts more informed on evolution that any other group of people and for them, using ID as a foil to be ripped apart might be easy. I, for one, doubt that most biology teachers who spend less than 13 hours a year on evolution in any given class do not usually have the time or resources to do this. Additionally, we might end up in First Amendment infractions. No matter whether they would like to rebut and dismantle ID's claims, 79.6% of respondents think that teaching evolution's alleged weaknesses actually "impairs college readiness." This reminds me of Kevin Padian's statement at the Dover trial that these efforts are garbage:

I think it makes people stupid. I think essentially it makes them ignorant. It confuses them unnecessarily about things that are well understood in science, about which there is no controversy, about ideas that have existed since the 1700's, about a broad body of scientific knowledge that's been developed over centuries by people with religious backgrounds and all walks of life, from all countries and faiths, on which everyone can understand.

We should not be teaching people that there is confusion where there is clarity and that we fail to explain where we actually explain. That would be a lie. This leads to the survey's last finding.

Eve and Belhadi found that most scientists believe that it is possible to "accept evolutionary biology and to have religious faith." 91% agree strongly or agree somewhat. Only 6.3% disagreed strongly or disagreed somewhat. They cite a Texas A&M respondent:

It needs to be pointed out that scientists operate by testing hypotheses. Any statement that explains everything, such as "God made it that way," is not a legitimate hypothesis. I don't have a problem with people believing that God created everything, but their religious beliefs should not be taught in schools as valid science.

I'm down with most of that. "God made it that way" explains absolutely nothing. I do have a problem with people believing things that probably aren't true and using those thoughts and their connected emotional and social baggage to push the rest of us around. Too many people who believe that "God made it that way" devote themselves so powerfully to that beliefs web of beliefs that they try to hijack public policy.

There are a lot of scientists out there who try to smooth a lot of this over. They are well-meaning moderates who wish to get along with their neighbors on issues of faith, family, and the meaning of everything. I agree whole-heartedly with the sentiment that we must do our utmost to get along. We need to be charitable to and with one another to maintain social cohesion. But we can't keep pretending that supernaturally-grounded mission-driving worldviews are something we shouldn't have a problem with. When we play that game - a game way too many of us play in an effort to play nice - is to believe in something that is "actually an illusion." Don McElroy's opposition to science is caused by belief in God. They are inextricable and telling him that they needn't be is pointless. Science corrodes his kind of belief and it has to.

Dan Dennett is right: the evolutionary concept is a "universal acid" that eats away at our cherished beliefs. In this case, it is Biblical literalism. It destroys that kind of faith. It should. We need it to.

To close out, I am so glad that the Texas Freedom Network sponsored this study. It's a rich look at this topic in a place that needs it more than anywhere else. It shows the apparatchiks working for the armies of the night that they are flying in the face of the reality-based community. They are, quite obviously trying to falsely vault their religion into the world of science.

On a final note, I think that this study should be replicated in other states. Should I try to get it done in Pennsylvania?

--

I should have posted this earlier. The Texas State Board of Education convenes today through Friday (Nov. 19-21) to discuss the new state standards. As the NCSE reports, the evolution fight will be serious. Let's hope that for all of Stephen Meyer's hair-splitting anti-scientific silliness, the board seriously weighs the well-informed opinions of the 464 scientists who responded to Eve's survey.

We don't talk to only ourselves

Check out this article. It has some interesting, if limited, findings on our atheist movement. Atheists are an increasingly vocal, organized, and frankly well-reasoned group of people. The government must face us. The Christian Right faced by its own sputtering silliness and anti-pragmatism in the face of AIDS, poverty at home and abroad, and the utter lack of understanding they show the people they pretend to help in the name of Jesus now stands before the precipice of being inconsequential. That is no prognostication: it is a statement about the scampering political weakness of the revealed Christian position whose opposition to reason has shown itself to be utterly stupid. Do they agree?

Of course not. Check the following:

Atheists "are talking to a very small slice of the population," said Mathew Staver, a leading Christian conservative and law-school dean. "In some ways, they're really just talking to themselves."

I beg to differ. The volume of people buying these books speaks volumes (no pun intended) about the state of the political-religious discourse in this country. I think it is telling that Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, and Sarah Palin all ran for executive positions in the U.S. and lost quite seriously. My hunch is to say that they lost because they were not pragmatic. Atheists do not address the afterlife prospects of you or me or the divine natures of you or me. We are focused on the here and now. We raise money for charity and give to the needy as we can. Like many, we hope to do what we can to alleviate suffering in the here and now and forward the happiness of those we know and love in the hopes that the circle can expand to those we can't know. In the long version, we speak to the many by promoting the greatest welfare we can find.

We are here to stay now. Dawkins was right to say that Bush galvanized us. I am so sick and tired of people fighting the "reality-based community" that I have no choice but to articulate myself in politics. With me?

Fight the results of Prop 8

I hate Prop 8. A constitutional amendment against rights? What is that? I am with the scores of thousands from around the country who marched and protested this utter absurdity, this deprivation, this disgusting hatred. Yes. I do believe that it is hatred.

People who believe that they hear messages from God + Domestic family policy = Senseless pain.

What does my sister's love for another woman do to your family in the privacy of your own home? Nothing.

Are you so insecure in your own belief that you need to legislate against it? Yes.

Are you so entrenched in your ideology that your mental and moral flexibility left you long ago? Yes.

You are fearful people. Sad and fearful people whose good sense needs to be revitalized. Your addiction to shepherds' myths and the power that it has inherited deserves contempt. And I have it here. Utter contempt for your small-mindedness, your provincialism, your cruelty, your ignorance, your lack of understanding, and your willful hatred that wraps itself in the cloth of the sacred and bathes itself in the blood of its misunderstood scapegoat savior. Was it not he who commanded us with the Golden Rule? Do unto others as we would them do unto us? Alas, human happiness falls all too easily to the ignorant and those addicted to stupidity.

But we are here. Some of us are queer. And we will fight tooth and nail to bring about greater equality. You watch.

Your world will change for the better. My sister and her wife will be recognized for the loving people that they are as members of their family and not yours. And their love and commitment will shine for all to see as it has for the last five years while many who voted for Prop 8 will be divorced all the while holding "sacred" the sanctity of marriage between men and women.

I press forward to that day.

Guardian has a great post on evolution and ID

I am really impressed by this piece, "The creationism controversy in classroom" at the Guardian. It contains a wonderful walk through on how evolution explains biodiversity via a zoo visit and a cladogram, the new creationist movement in Britain (both Christian and Muslim), and a healthy respect for evidence and the scientific method. The conclusion is a great way to invite the common debate into classes by looking at the pentadactyl hand (five-fingered hands and feet).

It's a wonderful example of good teaching and one that we can't do in the United State because of the First Amendment. Don't get me wrong. I don't want most of the religious whackos in the U.S. to inculcate my kid or yours into some sort of whacko nonsense, but I think that a really great teacher can use ID as a foil to show the crane of evolution.

Richard Dawkins profile

T5M has put up a nicely put together profile of Richard Dawkins here. I've included the first portion below:

I agree that we need our consciousnesses raised to afford the greatest human happiness that is also in line with reality...as free as it can be from the delusions that we drug ourselves with. The scientific method is our best tool to discerning what is false in order to approximate what is real and true. Religion does not. It alternates between being a beautiful story we tell ourselves, a poor approximation of the truth, a tool to cheat, deceive, and oppress others, and a way to assure ourselves that we ultimately mean something to a universe that seems to not care about us at all. While it may fill in our little hope vessel with just-so stories, it fails as a system to understand reality. Dawkins is one of our most eloquent proponents.
Here's his digest of The God Delusion:

Student activism at Penn State: We're not dead yet.

On Wednesday, about 50 people gathered outside of Penn State's Old Main to tell PSU President Graham Spanier that there are well-informed student activists who are alive and well at Penn State (pic at right with yours truly in the stripes on the right). See, Spanier wrote off student activists in his recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription needed) in a piece titled "Is Campus Activism Dead - Or Just Misguided?"

Spanier's piece contains some grains of truth. Student activism, at least at Penn State, doesn't burst out as we might wish it would. Where has the outrage been over the invasion of Iraq for example? But Spanier tries to convince his readers that current student activists are ill-informed about the issues that we embrace. In particular, he takes to task Students Against Sweatshops (SAS).

Students have occupied administration buildings at Penn State and elsewhere, willing to be arrested if their presidents didn't adopt the Designated Suppliers Program, an evolving concept developed by the Worker Rights Consortium. The students insist that the program is up and running, but in reality it does not yet exist. Didn't they check? Most students look at me blankly when I try to engage them in a discussion about antitrust concerns or other topics relevant to the compelling but complex juncture of manufacturing, international trade, unionization, and exploitation. (emphasis mine)

Now I'd like to see Spanier say that to Ben Brewer, former president of SAS, and Brewer's sister who is now involved with the Progressive Student Alliance and SAS. They are tireless workers and very well-informed on the issues of "manufacturing, international trade, unionization, and exploitation." In fact, Ben is now a labor organizer near Pittsburgh and was the editor of Voices, a progressive Pennsylvania paper. My bet is that Ben knows at least a comparable amount about these issues and I'd love to see the lie put to Spanier regarding the Designated Suppliers Program which is "a system for protecting the rights of the workers who sew university logo apparel" so that people who make apparel for universities are paid a living wage for their work.

No sweatshops. No more .3% earnings for women in Guatemala who are forced into bondage as Charlie Kerneghan shows us in "The Human Face of the Global Economy." Spanier has corporate ties that bind him. Of course, this former anti-war and anit-apartheid activist can't question his corporate masters and enter into an agreement that the U. of California system, Brandeis, Brown, U. of Wisconsin, and dozens of other colleges and universities have agreed to. Instead, he makes up excuses about a so-called "evolving concept" and then tries to say that the students who talk to him are ignorant of the concepts for which they advocate. This is pure mudslinging and wide-scale character assassination.

But this is not new. Spanier and the Penn State administration have fought labor before. In the last ten years they shut down an attempt by graduate and fixed-term faculty to unionize (see GFTEO here). A university as massively wealthy as Penn State won't pay a solid living wage with benefits to all of its lecturers. Nope. It aligned its massive legal, press, and economic apparatus to fight human dignity.

So the other day, I was pleased to see gay students out saying "Who is better informed than I am about inequality Mr. Spanier?" Some of the atheists were out saying, "Do you speak for me about religious discrimination Mr. Spanier?" SAS was there asking why he kept making things about the DSP? Student for Justice in Palestine were there to ask why Penn State and the U.S. unequivocally support Israel and support the apartheid state that demeans Palestinian people. I spoke up for my group 3E-COE (Environment, Ecology, and Education in the College of Education) that hopes to do quiet and substantial activism by putting a garden in every school that can have one and show children the value of raising our own food and the ecosystems that we interact with.

I'm sorry Mr. Spanier, but it is you who seem to be ignorant. We don't need to shout in your face for us to be knowledgeable and active. Your ignorance does not mean we are ignorant. Maybe he knows a little better now.

Teaching and learning and helping and caring

I've been teaching since 2003. It is one of my favorite things to do. I get to interact with curious people (usually) about subjects that I love. Teaching is sharing. Because it combines the public and the intimate, it affords me the possibility of engaging many people in a way that feels genuinely meaningful.

Right now, as a teaching assistant in Introduction to American Education, I teach aspiring teachers. I share with them as much as is feasible from the innumerable weekly updates from EdWeek, Teacher Magazine, Teacher's College Record, and the New York Times education section. This week in Teacher Magazine, Jenn Bonn a veteran French and Spanish teacher, wrote a great "Letter to an aspiring teacher." I'll share just a snip here too.

One of the things that teachers face is, of course, student inattention. Most of the time it isn't stupidity, though that happens occasionally. But it adds up and teaching and its associated traffic cop and disciplinarian duties can be a huge drag. They can drive you to this:

By the end of the day you won’t want to hear your name for a very long time. (I have had days when I lingered in the staff bathroom just because the peace and quiet was so exquisite.) You will have students give you more information about their personal life than you are prepared for.

My good fortune has led me to teaching college students. They may not cause many discipline problems, but the hullaballoo of cell phone chatter, text-messaging, and nattering about how so and so "got so wasted," or how class x "is such a waste of my time," or how "stupid friend x is" wears me down sometimes. And yeah, the only thing to do is just retreat from it all. And sometimes students tell you more than you had thought you had bargained for.

Those can be the best and most meaningful times. As Bonn writes:

On the other hand, you can be the one stabilizing force in the life of a child with a chaotic home. You can be the one to make a child feel special. You can convince a child that she can do or be anything. You can watch countless student faces light up when they realize that they really do understand. You can connect with a child and make a difference. All of this outweighs the stress and strain of teaching.

On a good day teaching is stressful, tiring, demanding, and amazingly rewarding. Although there are days when you feel like tearing out your hair, there is one major reason to teach: The children need you. It makes a huge difference if you can see the humor when you are struggling. Laughter is strong medicine for just about anything. Keep a sense of humor about all the other stuff, and realize that you can make a difference.

Exactly. I have students who still email me to tell me about they're doing, that they encountered something or other and it reminded them of my class, or that they are in town and wonder if I will be around. Why? Because I have shown them that I care about their personhood, that they are more than just receptacles for my specialized knowledge in any of the three disciplines that I have taught. Students have asked me for help with mental illness (referrals to professionals), a father who had disappeared and now wants to reinitiate contact with his son who is in my class, figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives, or who, after the semester is over, just want to go and have some beers and sing at a karaoke bar with me.

They can see me struggle and I can see them struggle. We are in this living world together as people craving to learn about all of it - our art, our literature, our science, and our condition as people experiencing it all. If I can give my students one thing, it is my compassion and my curiosity.

Sometimes it is exhausting to work through the mountains of papers and write "Thank you" on all of them. But I do thank them. All of them. Because their thoughts are worth something and they have shared something with me. Yeah, sometimes their thinking is pretty poor, and sometimes it's mediocre, and sometimes it's bloody fantastic. But much of it needs to be openly celebrated because it all teaches me something. If I teach them nothing else, I want them to learn that they have taught me something by sharing their thoughts with me.

My kid learns about flowers (Warning! Cute picture!)

Sometimes you just have to revel in how cute little kids are when they get into something. These flowers are right next to our compost and Sacha loves to play there. It's so cool to watch them learn.

Metal Post! Obituary

I haven't done a metal post in a while. So why not go with a death metal classic like Obituary? Only great reasons exist for listening to music so brilliantly mindless and bone-crushingly violent. If there is a band that sounds like a backhoe digging up your great grandmother's grave so that the kids at the youth center can play catch with her bones, it's Obituary.

Obituary is one of the original Florida death metal bands with the likes of Death, Cynic, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse (who totally suck!). The band's signature style comes from a combination of tuned down ultra-distorted guitars that sound like a Tiger tank outside of Stalingrad in 1942, a tendency towards very slow tempos, simple driving repetition, descending chord progressions, wailing whammy bar dives and strangely chromatic solos, and John Tardy's growl. I'd venture to say that Tardy (pictured at right) has perhaps the most distinctive growl in all of death metal. He has this fantastic ability (no doubt aided with some production) to fade in or out from a growl with fantastic control. A T-Rex would be envious.

The lyrics are generally unabashedly awful. Song titles paint the picture for the most part: "Insane," "Chopped in half," "Slowly We Rot," "Cause of Death," "Like the Dead," "The End Complete." They tend toward the horror genre of returning from the dead, dying, destruction, unleashed minions of evil, and the like. This is bad horror movies come to music in the great tradition of Black Sabbath, the Misfits, Venom, and Slayer but at slow tempos. From time to time though we get a sneak of sentimentality as on "Final Thoughts," a song that bemoans the death of a friend, presumably by suicide.

What I like about bands like Obituary, is that they give free reign to that part of me that is quite simply morbidly fascinated. What social commentary there might be embedded in a band fixated on teenage interpretations of H.P. Lovecraft and our reptilian fears. There really is just something primally appealing in it. Its seeming stupidity - its baseness, callousness, obsessive grotesquery - make it genius somehow.


Videos!!!

"The End Complete" - Watch for the kid wearing a shirt that says, "Evil Seizure." I thought it was so awesome when I was 17 that I made my own with a black t-shirt and a white paint pen.



"Insane" - Tardy rolls it in with one of his signature growls!



"Turned Inside Out" - The sound on this is really awful. But you can hear Tardy's live vocal ability.



"On the Floor" - This song gives the hint of some of their thrash tendencies.

I stay away from Bill O'Reilly

But sometimes this kind of madness is nutty. I can't believe that O'Reilly is going to say that Palin could be coached into learning basic civics (watch it here). I'm sorry. Or really...I'm not sorry at all. Someone who doesn't know that Africa is a continent and not a country or that the Pledge of Allegiance had "under God" added to it in the 1950s or can't name a Supreme Court case sans Roe v. Wade that she didn't agree with...that person should never be vice-president much less VP.

Come on now. Africa has dozens of countries. The little token anti-commie sillines "under God" was added to show that the U.S. wasn't a nation of godless communists so that the Knights of Columbus could feel good about themselves in the 50s. And all she had to do was say, "Plessy v. Ferguson" to get out of the Supreme Court bind. Come now! Just a shred!

But we were supposed to settle for mediocrity that Bill O'Reilly wants us to at least be sympathetic toward. May she have a happy and healthy life far away from the capital of my country.

The Freshwater saga goes on and on

The Panda's Thumb has a ton up on Ohio science teacher John Holywater's...err Freshwater's hearings. If you remember, he's the man accused of using a Tesla coil to burn crosses into his students' arms, of proselytizing to students, and teaching creationism in various forms to students.

I've posted on earlier days before. I encourage you to read a mother's reaction to this nonsense (here). Day 4 of the hearing is here where you can read that one of Freshwater's students states that "Science can’t be trusted. Science can’t teach us anything." Why is this guy a science teacher then? What a weird world to live in. The next entry informs us on some of the procedures the school took regarding complaints, the presence of religious materials, and a medical expert's take on a Tesla coil being applied to human beings. Let's just say it's really bad. The most recent entry gets us more overt creationist literature from All About God Ministries and another student testifying the same.

Who does this guy think he is? Really!

Brunswick, North Carolina's evolving education board

Recently, the Brunswick, NC school board's 3 open seats were taken by Republicans. Their resident creationist, Southern Baptist chemical engineer named Joel Fanti, said that he still wants evolution and creationism taught side by side. But he recognizes that it isn't likely to happen. So what does he want now? "Teach the controversy" of course!

StarNewsOnline reports:

He proposed, instead, that the board adopt a curriculum that would make evolution “defend itself” in science class.

“It needs to be thoroughly examined, it needs to be broken apart,” Fanti said.

The board is currently unaware of any curriculum that can aid them in this tactic. I welcome them to look at my recent blog posts on Louisiana's SB 733 or give a visit to NCSE to see how this make evolution "defend itself" curriculum is just repackaged creationism. There is no evidence to support the "teach the controversy" tactic. None.

But I'm sensing a new dust-up here. I suspect that Disco 'Tute might well be in contact with these people shortly, advising them on the tactics to take.

Obama: "Whose Christianity would we teach in schools? James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?"

In case you missed this a few months ago:



"Democracy demands that the religiously-motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. What do I mean by this? It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."

How about it? Vive common law!

Now if we could just convince him that faith-based initiatives are a bad idea.

Unforeseen consequences in Florida

The National Center for Science Education (whose new website is very snazzy if you haven't seen it yet) is reporting that the Florida science standards might be put up again for vote. This past year, evolution was finally and correctly represented as a "fundamental concept underlying all of biology." But there might be a glitch as language arts, social studies, math, and science might need to be revised so that they are sufficiently under the umbrella of the "Next Generation."

Florida Statute 1003.41 seeks to create the "Next Generation Sunshine State Standards that establish the core content of the curricula to be taught in this state and that specify the core content knowledge and skills that K-12 public school students are expected to acquire." Here we have the law of unintended consequences at work. As in all of policies, the words "Next Generation" are fuzzy enough to allow legislators, advocates, and lobbyists to define whatever their particular agenda item as part of the "Next Generation" and that their opponents' ideas are antiquated. How could this affect evolution education in Florida?

All of these new standards need to be adopted by December 31, 2011. These could include the evolution standards that some legislators, school board members, parents, or lobbyists like Disco 'Tute attorney Casey Luskin and his fellow creationists could lobby the state government to change. We know that this is already a possibility. Florida Citizens for Science report that Brian Moore, member of the Joint Administrative Procedures Committee (JAPC which works with Florida Department of Education to work out the Deparment's rules), "opined that the standards that were revised and approved prior to the passage of SB 1908 are not “Next Generation” as required by the new law."

Over at EdWeek, they report that Moore:

wasn't making any judgment about the scientific merits of the new standards. His only interest is what the law requires, and in this case, it appears that the new science standards are out of compliance, given the requirement that such documents be approved as "Next Generation" standards. So they'd have to be approved with this designation by 2011.

It's unclear what happens next. It's possible, Moore explained, that Florida's commissioner of education could seek to have various experts certify that the recently approved science standards comply with the Next Generation law. But it appears likely that new standards would have to be re-approved in some form by the state board of education.

It seems that procedural rules within the Florida 1003.41 might simply require that all standards passed before it came into effect on July 1, 2008 will need to be passed again to reach consensus on whether standard X (evolution for example) is sufficiently part of Florida's "Next Generation."

This is, I think, quite unfortunate and perhaps also necessary. The science standards that passed in the last year took an enormous effort and overcame a lot of resistance from creationists supported by the Disco 'Tute and others. Following their adoption, Rep. Rhonda Storms tried to get one of the oh-so lovely "academic freedom" bills (SB 2692) through the legislature. Thankfully, it died. I'm afraid that the fight will renew if the science standards come up for review under the new definition. It may not happen if the JAPC committee member's judgement is not held widely. But this is politics and it's worth being cautious and skeptical, especially when the Disco 'Tute and other creationist opportunists are on the march.

When ignorance is repackaged

Let's just say something obvious. Answers in Genesis is a bastion of ignorance, mental filth, and moral mishaps. Their newest "Post-Election Prescription pack" nearly says it all. It's a nifty and thrifty combo of how to misdirect your ideas about global warming, stand up for the rights of the doubly unborn stem cells that God really wanted to to be born but didn't have the guts to come down and fight for himself, and to deny evolution for Jesus.

Basically, it's a prescription for the continued neglect of reason and the embrace of bronze age dogma. It's one of the purest embraces of idiotic dogmatism in one place that you could "hope" for.

Happy. Eager. Skeptical. Hopeful.

Of course, I am elated that Obama won. I volunteered a bit and canvassed on election day. I watched the returns come in, cheered when the west coast polls closed and all of the networks declared him Obama the president elect. Finally, a remarkable person to be our president.

I am eager to see what he will do as president. He celebrates what makes us different from one another while he knows that we can still bring ourselves together to work toward something bigger than ourselves - our progeny seven generations away. The real future. Of course, I expect that we will pull out of Iraq, that we will have a figurehead who can represent us to the world and bring a real message of peace, justice, and mercy, that we can work together to bring ourselves and the rest of the world out of a financial morass brought about by greed and waste, that we will combat climate change and establish more sustainable energy, that we will work toward health care for all, and yes...redistribute the wealth. It's about time that the robber barons in this country face the music.

How odd is it that the groups that says it opposes Darwinism more than any other - the fundies - have politically aligned themselves with the economic elites of this country. It is them who have established a de facto and de jure economic system of social Darwinism. The modern robber baron gets to hold pay people shit, get their employees' health care subsidized through emergency care on the public's dime, and the church gets to nourish and support the ignorant proletariate. In effect, big industry needs the church and the church needs big industry. They legitimate one another. One is dad. One is mom. And the government is the nurse always needed but never thanked.

Can Obama change this? Maybe some. The amount of incompetence the Bush administration seeded into every corner of our government will sprout for years to come. Bush's absurd notions of "spreading democracy" amounted to an newspeak slogan that really meant "exploiting people, institutionalizing neglect, and mocking liberty." Obama cannot change this.

We have to change this. Our voices have to matter. We must be the change we want to see in the world as Ghandi said.

Obama cannot make us achieve sustainable practices. Put in a garden. Compost. Drive less. Ride a bike. Eat less meat or none. Turn off your lights. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Obama cannot achieve energy independence. We have to call for it. We have to support energy initiatives that cost more now so that we can use them later.

Obama cannot give to Africa and prevent disease on his own. We must open our wallets and our time to help those who need the most.

Obama cannot defeat ignorance. He is not a wizard. He is a an educated and informed man, assured of his own abilities of perception, his sense of good, and his powers of persuasion. But he is one man. We have to want to learn and know.

We must demand that enlightened and compassionate thinking guide us along the dark and twisted paths that lie ahead. Paths where the specters of bigotry, selfishness, religious zealotry, pride, greed, and wrathful self-righteousness lurk. The path that castigates alleged gays as perverts, blacks as inferior, women as subordinate, atheists as evil, and those who live in the "reality-based community" as elitists who are out of touch with reality. The path on which the belief that because we are powerful that we are also right. The path that leads to a library full of books that teach us that love is hate and hate is love and that we some animals are more equal than others.

We must overcome our own shortcomings so that Obama can help us. And about that, I am honestly very skeptical. The entrenched bigotry and selfishness in this country staggers the imagination sometimes. But it is also a great country. We are, on the one hand, the country where people snigger and protest at gays' funerals because "God hates fags" and Matthew Shephard got what he deserved and blacks should know their roles. We are the nation that has subjugated people with arms and trade - whether in Iraq or in Guatemala - all for our "interests." Sometimes we do it in plain sight. Sometimes we use "plausible deniability."

But we are also the country whose fertile soil created Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, whose capacity for compassion opened to Margaret Sanger and Martin Luther King, Jr., landed a man on the moon and decoded the human genome, and has now elected Barack Obama president. We became the home to some of the greatest minds in the 20th century who escaped the Third Reich and the Gulag - Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Einstein, von Braun, and way too many more. We can only be the city on the hill if we work to be the city on the hill, whose light shines into the night and guides people to the future that they want and that can be possible.

So I sit and wonder if it is possible. Can we do it? You and me and him and her?

I think the answer is, "Yes we can." And I mean it.

Campuses seek to curb greenhouse gases

The future is now. Universities and colleges around the country reach for the future. How? By reducing greenhouse gases of course. The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) writes:

Over 200 signatory campuses of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) have submitted public greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories through the ACUPCC's online reporting system. The GHG inventory is the first major reporting requirement of the Commitment, and is due within a year of signing. Signatories reported on emissions from on-site combustion, mobile combustion (fleet), purchased electricity, student, faculty and staff commuting, and institution-funded air travel, among other things. Over the next year, these signatories will work to create a plan for reducing their emissions.

At Penn State we have some quite proactive people in our Office of Physical Plant (OPP) and in Organic Material Processing and Education Center (OMPEC) which work in combination to work through something on the order of ~200 tons of compostable materials a year. However, we at Penn State are not signatories on the agreement. This is a shame. Methinks that something ought to be done about that.

To read more about the ACUPCC agreement, check out the Inside Higher Ed Article. It gives a detailed account of how to move forward and the challenges that institutes of higher education face. As the leader (at least for now) of a student group that wants to extend sustainability into every part of education, I hope that PSU will work towards this goal in an intelligent and responsible way. We are a huge institution whose interests compete with one another; mining or petroleum engineering and ecology or sustainable ag are at odds. But we are servants to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as well interested in the promotion of the common good, health, and well-being of 0ur citizens.

Jerry Coyne rips Palin a new one too

Jerry Coyne is one of my favorite politically-active scientists. He's defended evolution numerous times over the years in The New Republic. In this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, he shreds Palin for her contempt of science. Let's join him and keep adding to the heap of scorn that she deserves. Anyone who so openly revels in her own ignorance must, unfortunately, be met with derision.

Coyne writes:

Why are the Republican candidates so contemptuous of science? I suppose it's part of their general attack on "elitism," which has been surprisingly effective. We white-coated nerds in our labs, fooling around with flies at taxpayer expense, are easy targets.

But America can't afford cheap shots at science, because a lot of basic research has immense implications for human welfare - even if ignorant politicians can make it sound silly. Work on fruit flies is just one example.

This year's Republican campaign has consistently attacked the values of reason and logic that undergird our democracy. If anything has led to America's high standard of living and world preeminence, it's the idea that we can advance only with the best science possible.

When Palin declares that we don't have to know what causes global warming in order to fix it, she's not only exposing herself as a scientific illiterate; she's going against two centuries of American progress in technology, medicine and science. Trying to bond with the American people by taking pride in your ignorance and making science the common enemy - now that's a bridge to nowhere.

Creationists march on everywhere

There is a really fine article up on The Guardian about how and why creationists are continuing to mutate the world over. England has had to deal with a resurgence of ID silliness and the press there have been attending to American wackaloonery (thanks PZ) and its Turkish fundamenalist parallels.

Check it out.

76 Nobel Laureates endorse Obama

The Bush administration has a well-documented science abuse history. NASA. NOAA. They've thumbed their noses at sex education and might have even tampered with federal grants for evolution grants. Read Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science to get a little taste.

Scientists have responded to the Republican machine by endorsing Obama. 76 Nobel laureates, three of them winners this year, say that we need someone who can lead our politics toward solutions that tackle the mammoth problems of "energy, disease, climate change, security, and economic competitiveness." The likes of Sarah Palin would have us deny climate change or pretend that we don't have a good idea of why it's happening and we should just go about our merry ways and trust God to take care of it. I think not.

Science - basic research and its method of inquiry - constitutes our best tool to understanding the world and (for better or worse sometimes) the way by which we manipulate our environment. If we want to live through the emerging food shortages, energy crisis, and global climate change that is precipitating as we speak, we need leadership that recognizes and acts upon reality.

Tomorrow, get up really early, and VOTE!

This election and the courts

Ito some Hillary Clinton supporters who are waffling over voting for Obama or abstaining (I haven't met any who will vote for McCain) by discussing the Supreme Court. The gulf between McCain and Obama on this issue could not be that much wider unless McCain was a fascist. He likes the originalists - Thomas, Scalia, Alito. Ugh.

This article at Politico makes this all very clear.

Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, was a lecturer at the University of Chicago for 12 years, from 1992 to 2004, when he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Biden, who earned his law degree at Syracuse, chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1987 through 1995, presiding over the stormy confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork, and opposing both nominations.

“The first thing to know about Obama, which hasn’t gotten sufficient attention, is that he is himself appointable to the Supreme Court,” said Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein, an Obama friend, advisor and former faculty colleague at the University of Chicago Law School.

“He is a constitutional specialist who has taught for many years, said Sunstein. “There’s a guarantee that we’d get someone of the first intellectual rank. No Harriet Miers.”

Carnival of Evolution #5

I've joined in on the Carnival of Evolution, a blog whose home rotates every other week. This week it's hosted over at my friend Kevin Zelnio's blog on invertebrates, The Other 95%. Go and check it out and read the other blog entries.