Can I be the space for this?

Last Friday I saw Cynic play with The Faceless and Meshuggah at the Recher in Towson, Md. It was the last show of the tour and it was fantastic. My friend Gary introduced me to Cynic in the winter of 1994-95 and I have loved them ever since. Though my musical training through 7 years of music school too often tok me away from much of the music that I really loved, almost as soon as I left school in 2003, I reconnected with Cynic. They haven't left the listening rotation for more than a few days at a time. To see them live was something of a dream for me. All of my expectations were exceeded. It also made the new album, Traced In Air, really make sense to me. I felt the connections.

The set opened with the opening three tracks from Traced In Air played in rapid succession. It really brought the songs into focus because they elide into one another so nicely. What followed was a mix of stuff from their first album Focus including "Veil of Maya," "Celestial Voyage," and "I'm But A Wave To..." and new songs including "Integral Birth" and "Adam's Murmur" with "King of Those Who Know" closing it out. Songs moved more or less seamlessly from one to the next and each song handled with incredible deftness and the precision and calm passion for which Cynic has always been recognized. Seeing video of them has always stunned me - "Veil of Maya" and "I'm But A Wave To..." are incredibly difficult - but live the power is simply mind-blowing.

What got me most, though, were a pair spoken-word pieces that acted as bridges between songs. Both were sort of Buddhist ruminations. From the first I remember a statement about how one's insistence on being right is a form of violence. The second posited that the mind is not the self. Surely, the full statements could flesh out the ideas. Nonetheless, I find the first statement quite compelling because too often we (me too!) insist on being right that we alienate those we love or could love because we believe in our own rectitude and arrogant senses of justice or what have you.

I hope that one day I get to see Cynic again.

Here. Have a few videos. The first is the promo for Traced In Air.


The second is an interview with Paul and Sean.


"How Could I" (2007)

Missouri again.

I will break this down later. Suffice it to say that Missouri is now considering HB 576 which follows on the heels of last year's HB 2554. HB 576 seeks to promote so-called "academic freedom" such that "one new section relating to teacher academic freedom to teach scientific evidence regarding evolution" will be added. It's another stealth creationism bill akin to Louisiana's bill last year. The NCSE already has a post up about it.

Just one thing. The bill says this:

170.335. 1. The state board of education, public elementary and secondary school governing authorities, superintendents of schools, school system administrators, and public elementary and secondary school principals and administrators shall endeavor to create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues, including biological and chemical evolution.

This is not a matter of taste or opinion insofar as science is concerned. It's a question of data. You can have the most beautiful and illustrative portrait of life's existence and it can be plain wrong. As awe-inspiring as the Garden of Earthly Delights might be, there is no evidence that it is the actual structure of humanity's fate. Evolution is true in the same sense that relativity is true or the germ theory of disease is true. People's opinions checked against data are irrelevant when they are wrong.

I really found this kind of lovely

Belated but fun!

Interviewing Cynic

This Friday I am going to Towson, Maryland to see my favorite band, Cynic play with Meshuggah and The Faceless (read my paean to them here). It is going to be a progressive metal extravaganza.

I am practically beside myself though because...gulp...after the show, I am getting the distinct privilege to interview Paul Masvidal. All or part of that interview will be posted here as part of a review of their newest album Traced In Air (pictured at right). I plan on asking him questions about Cynic's evolution from their early roots in the Florida death metal scene, their transformation into the extraordinary metal fusion band, and the influence of Buddhist practice and philosophy on their music.

Evolution:Education and Outreach

Evolution: Education and Outreach is in its second year. Its purpose, according to NCSE, is to "promote accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience." I strongly encourage any reader to pass it on down the line. I have found numerous helpful articles regarding the state of teaching biological evolution, curricular matters, and work on the state of research.

While its contents can be for "experts" it is not a black box of jargon by any stretch of the imagination. Its tone and style are clear and accessible. If you know any biology teachers, point them to it. Similarly, if you want some help dealing with stealth or open creationist school board members, teachers, politicians, or administrators, I would strongly recommend using this journal as a resource.

I just can't laugh at this

The Muslim creationist lunatic Harun Yahya has been interviewed in "Darwinism is the root of terrorism, Islam is the antidote" in the Tehran Times. It is one of the most amazing pieces of lying I have ever read. It is about as well-supported as Expelled or the blatherings of many of the Christian Right's polemics against evolution.

Q: The Western media often try to distort the image of Islam by depicting extremists, fanatics, and suicide bombers as Muslims. How can we respond to this and show the true face of Islam?

A: Darwinists attempt to equate the violence and terror they themselves nurture and grow with Muslims. But this is inconsistent, because I have exposed it as a ruse. Darwinism is the root of terrorism, whereas Islam is the antidote to it. Islam is a religion of peace and love. Allah says in the Quran that “it is better for you if you forgive,” even those who commit murder.

There is obviously no room for the violence of terror in such a faith. The fact is that some people who have received a Darwinist and materialist education have subsequently said they are Muslims, but they have never abandoned the mindset stemming from that education. As you know, Palestine was a training camp for Marxists and communists in the 1980s. In the same way, the socialist Baathist mindset dominated Syria and Iraq for years. Afghanistan was subjected to communist occupation. Some of these people received a Darwinist education in the West and then returned to settle in their Muslim countries. It is always Darwinists today that espouse the killing of the innocent, terror, and anarchy in the supposed name of Islam.

But it is impossible to provide any proof for what they do from the Quran, the Sunnah of our Prophet, or statements by great Islamic scholars.

Where exactly is the call for killing in any of this so-called Darwinism, whatever Darwinism might even be? This is exactly the kind of religious lunacy that I wrote about in my last piece. If Darwinism is here meant as some sort of capitalist exploitative Social Darwinism that no practicing evolutionary scientist I have ever met or probably ever will, then maybe we can have something to agree about. But that is not Darwinism insofar as Darwinism is the modern synthesis of evolution.

Also, saying that the Soviet Union was Darwinist is absurd. Darwinian thinking insofar as the biological theory of evolution was concerned was a crime. Yes. A crime. The various secular creeds, doctrines, policies, and practices that existed under Socialist Realism (yes, that's an Orwellian term) found evolution by natural selection unacceptable because they didn't hold up Marx's, Lenin's, Stalin's, or Brezhnev's belief in teleological socialism - that socialist states were the culminating goal of history. There was too much chance in evolution. So they adopted the total backward error known as Lysenkoism that could be used to prop up the Soviet state. People were sent to the Gulag for scientifically disputing Lysenko with so-called Darwinian logic. Yahya is off here.

I guess that what irks me about this most is that I am tired of being told that I am some kind of slime lacking love or moral character because I accept a description of life's emergence and change that doesn't need God to explain anything. Then, I am somehow because I don't believe in God (Allah or Jesus, it doesn't seem to matter) that I must be evil.

I'd like to invite Yahya and James Dobson over for dinner sometime to see me take care of my ailing father, to have dinner with my wife and me who work to support our local food market and who are conscientious about our footprints on the world (we can do less to do more for sure), to see that we give money to OxFam, Doctors Without Borders, the World Wildlife Fund, and NPR, that I have volunteered for non-profit media, and that we make our own dinners and love our friends and family. Yayha is my neighbor and I'd like to have the chance for him to see me for who I am and not some caricature he's created.

What do you say Harun? Want to come over for some dinner? Email me. I look forward to it.

Is Darwin dead? Wrong? False? No. Darwin was right.

Happy Darwin Day! As many of you know, today is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. Later this year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species! As we consider his legacy, we should consider how people have reacted to evolution and how people treat it today on the internet. As we know well, there are hundreds of blogs about evolution out there (click here for Pharyngula's blogroll...one is even named EvolutionBlog and the Carnival of Evolution), a plethora of internet resources describing and explaining evolution like Berkeley's Understanding Evolution and the Tree of Life project, lots of state citizen science networks, and of course the National Center for Science Education which works to see evolution taught effectively in U.S. school. There is a lot to use and a lot to learn.

But of course, there is a horde of detractors out there. And Google can you show you that very easily. If you Google "Darwin is" you will get the results on the right. [Hat tip to Blair.] You know that there is something in the world at work that is not good.

Some will wonder what is wrong with our science education that this result has come up. It is rather sad that "darwin is wrong" gets 5,810,000 results. How woeful that our state of understanding in English-speaking and English-reading world yields that result. But I don't think this is a science-education problem in total that can be laid at the feet of science teachers.

According to Michael Berkman, Julianna Sandel Pacheco, and Eric Plutzer, the average biology teacher spends 13.7 hours in a year teaching evolution with 59% of them spending between 3 and 15 hours on evolution. Only 2% of them do not teach evolution at all though 17% omit any mention of human evolution. 25% of these teachers reported that they spent 1 or 2 hours teaching or teaching about creationism though some may have used creationism as a foil or a way to show bad reasoning. That, we still don't know. Why do so many of them spend so little time on it when the National Science Teacher's Association states, "Science curricula, state science standards, and teachers should emphasize evolution in a manner commensurate with its importance as a unifying concept in science and its overall explanatory power." If Berkman et al are correct, "Community pressures place significant stress on teachers as they try to teach evolution, stresses that can lead them to de-emphasize, downplay, or ignore the topic."

In a way, it's Darwin's fault because he correctly and exhaustively formulated the most powerful part of the theory of evolution - natural selection - better than anybody else had and explained its "one long argument" in elegant Victorian prose. So some fixate on Darwin, revering him or reviling him as the father of evolution and the patriarch of Darwinism (a term I'd love to get rid of, as would Carl Safina at the New York Times). It is the revilers on whom I want to focus because it has little to do with our effectiveness as science teachers or researchers that creates this problem. Rather, it is the pervasive institution of fundamentalist Christianity (in the United States) and its educational, doctrinal, and practical efforts. Science teachers work hard. But they cannot easily push back against school boards driven by fundamentalists.

The only way this happens is through the concerted work of a lot of people disseminating and enforcing bad ideas and practices. The religious right's orthodoxy (right belief) demands obedience and an orthopraxy (right practice) that reinforces those beliefs at every turn. Consider fundamentalists' and creationists' particular belief is in the inerrant literal word of the Bible story - from beginning to end it is, in some way, literally true. That belief is espoused by leaders in the church. Those leaders are reinforced by the people of the church who celebrate along with (usually) him in prayer, song, and dance. They share this message within the structure of the church in a socially meaningful and reinforcing ceremony that brings common power and purpose through the practice of these beliefs. Such is the power of this binding ceremony and its ability to bring people together for generating meaning and purpose that it necessarily spills out of the church with really motivated people.

This meaning is something like: "The God of the Bible literally spoke to me and my church. It imbued me with purpose today. I am loved. We are loved. We must share this love." Not only do they share this love but they must share this love for it contains within it all purpose. They share it within and between their families and friends outside of the church, with strangers on first meeting in our common areas, in their shared radio, television, print, and internet media, and on secular media as well. Their personal practices must be shaped so that they recite these same messages to themselves in their own totally private time, making sure that they are paying their dues to God in his tower over the panopticon. It is indeed an all-consuming all-surrounding presence because at any time an adherent can share in the basking of God's glory and love.

With the certainty of this love (whatever that might really mean) comes the certainty of all of the things attached to it - inerrancy and inerrancy that must, in many cases, deny material reality understood through some other "arcane" practice like science - specifically biology, anthropology, and geology uniting in the theory of evolution, or like climate change via climatology and ecology, or the standard model or big bang via astronomy - that competes to explain the same things. Not only must they deny these things despite the evidence, they must attack them as competitors and use whatever means necessary to dismantle the competitor. The creationist necessarily links these things to those ideas they cherish which are moral and spiritual. They then use allegedly scientific arguments conveniently to hold up their beliefs and rebut the enemy.

Their most meaningful arguments are about the beliefs and practices that they believe must come from accepting evolution, climate change (though that is shifting), and the standard model. Creationists link immorality or amorality to these things and (even worse!) atheism (see my last post). A person without a relationship such as that propagated within the church, at home, on the airwaves, and so on must be empty because no one can be complete unless they have the experience that the believer has had. It is all about experience.

These experiences are so powerful that they must be true and real. As Emile Durkheim wrote, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, "I accept that religious belief rests on a definite experience whose demonstrative value is, in a sense, not inferior to that of scientific experiments, though it is different." I don't think that any person can deny the reality of the shared social power of a revival or even the common evangelical church service, nor the way in which the modern evangelical church takes care of its members, or the communities that surround them. They are a community integrated in both belief and practice that uses its institutional organization to create what they believe is a healthy body. In some sense, the beliefs do not matter other than that they bind the group and provide it with identity and purpose. The ontological reality of those beliefs is not important to them until they are questioned by some other cultural or institutional power.

Was the Earth actually created in six days? Was there a flood that covered the whole Earth? Was there really a tower at which all of the languages of the world were born? These things didn't have to really matter as real things until there was a method that came along that could systematically question their reality and could cause membership to falter or fail. Science has provided that challenge.

There is now the world of creationist apologetics that adds another means of group reinforcement for the group. Not only can one believe in a literal six day creation, but one can also fight for that cause fiercely because there is a something that threatens group integrity, identity, meaning, and purpose. The previous binding force of the belief which was true simply because it was shared now becomes a mobilizer because it is threatened. The apologists rise as a caste of ants in the ant farm. The believers are easily turned into soldiers in just a generation and then the hive calls for and gets more soldiers. Sensing the new threat to the integrity of themselves and the group (for it is both individual and group identification, self and institution) they grew larger mandibles and a specific poison to attack their new enemies: evolution, climate change, and the standard model. If you think that I am making this up, watch Jesus Camp. How to do that?

Propagate a pervasive method that your opponent is "wrong," "dead," or "false." Say, as the itinerant preacher does in the link above, that it will make you act like an animal (as if that is ever clearly defined either).

This is a poison to your opponent and an opiate kiss to your leader and follower, brother and sister, mother and father, son and daughter, wife and husband believers. They write, day in and day out, about "Darwin's Dangerous Doctrine." Ahistorical revisionists like Ben Stein and D. James Kennedy hawk garbage that argues that Darwin caused the holocaust. I've heard a creationist, Arlo Moehlenpah, say that evolution leads to suicide. It's led to abortion. Surely there are religious, cultural, personal, and economic reasons for these things.

This is in contrast to Dan Dennet's idea and book called Darwin's Dangerou Idea which brought us the term, "universal acid," an idea so corrosive that it eats through traditional ideas with ease if allowed the chance to touch them. For creationists, the universal acid must be contained. For some its corrosive power clears garbage from the scence, eliminating non-answers about the emergence of possibly everything.

So we come to the Google search again and must ask ourselves some questions.

"Is Darwin dead?" Not to be pendantic, but humans are organisms. Organisms die. Most humans throughout history die in less than forty years. Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago. I think it's pretty safe to say that Charles Darwin is dead.

But figuratively, he lives on through the most powerful scientific meme in history - the theory of evolution. Descent with modification is a truism upheld by virtually every piece of available evidence in the sciences from which it is derived. To deny it is to ritually deny material processes and/or live in ignorance. For people who cannot know evolution, there is no great loss. But for those of us in the potentially scientifically literate United States, we should be ashamed.

"Is Darwin wrong?" Mostly not. He didn't know a lick about the means of inheritance. That had to wait until the 20th century and it really got its big boost with the discovery of DNA in 1953 by Watson and Crick. But atural selection elegantly explains how life descends with modification. Any population of organisms has a variety of traits. Some individuals in that population reproduce better or worse than others depending on their ability to acquire resources and mate. These successful reproducers pass on their heredity to their offspring. This successful heredity, if it continues to be successful in succeeding generations goes on. Rinse and repeat. We can observe this as Darwin did by looking at artificial selection or by looking at the radiation of species like the Galapagos finches. Through deep time from our ancestor, we get the generation of new genera and the proliferation of life on Earth.

"Is Darwin false?" This is the hard question for religious believers. If you have true belief and faith, then you have to reconcile the profligate suffering and death that is part and parcel of evolution. .000000000000000001% (or something like that) of all organisms that have ever lived are alive now. All of those who existed before now...now...now...have died. Many of them have lived wretched lives, died without reproducing, or suffered awful deaths. If one holds that God is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient, then you might have some thinking to do. Some believers say, "I don't know why God has does this. Evolution is real and true. There must be some middle ground." Fair enough.

But the creationist says, "God doesn't do this. He is all of those great things. Man is fallen and deserves God's judgment (apparently so do all of those other organisms). The Bible is literally true. Evolution is a lie." So, they conclude, "Darwin is false." I think that's crazy.

At the end of the day, when we examine the wonder of living breathing nature. When we examine the interconnectedness of the bee to the appple blossom and the apple blossom to the soil and the sun, we see evolution. We see a brilliant creation that took billions of years to emerge through patient descent with modification shaped by the forces of replicating organisms being selected by their natural environments. Eventually, this most beautiful courtship emerged, such that two organisms shared in one another's growth and propagation - the bee helping the apple tree mate and the apple tree sustaing the bee and her hive. They are just two of the "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful that have been and are being evolved."

"Darwin is right." Happy birthday Darwin.

The danger of indoctrination

Charles Darwin's 200th birthday is bringing out all kinds of fervor all over the world. People are celebrating Darwin Day by hosting talks, publicly reading from his books, lectures and discussion on evolution and religion, having Victorian Tea Parties and barbecues, and showings of movies about (or rather against) evolution like Expelled. While this is all fun and good, it has looks to some as it has developed some zealous festiveness. And with all of that fervor, we must expect lots of pushing back. Look no further than the Institute for Creation Research for an initial preview.

This month's Acts & Facts is full of the danger of Darwin. They have some real standard faire that predicts the end of evolution and how accepting Darwin leads to evil. As someone who studies evolution education I was disheartened and pleased to find Patti Nason's article, "The Iron Grip of Darwinism in Evolution." She laments Darwin Day as a kind of indoctrination into a humanist worldview that opposes the Christian worldview. She declares that neither evolution nor creation are scientific but are religious propositions and/or philosophical assumptions that shape humanist and Christian worldviews. She is at least one part right and two parts wrong. She is right that humanists use evolution to support their philosophical positions and that creationism supports certain Christian philosophical positions. But she is wrong to call evolution a religion or that education about evolution necessarily constitutes indoctrination into atheist humanism. Let's take these one at a time.

If we peruse humanist and atheist literature it is pretty clear that humanists accept evolution. Samples from the show Point of Inquiry that a large number of the guests discuss evolution as either a philosophical concept that informs our ethical positions, our sense of meaning, or how we think we know what we know (Dan Dennett, Paul Kurtz, John Shook, Peter Singer, Colin McGinn, Philip Kitcher) or as the practical discipline of science (Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, Stephen Pinker, Marc Hauser, Massimo Pigliucci, Eugenie Scott). Nason recognizes that the Humanist Manifestos include evolution. Even the simple little booklet, What is Secular Humanism? by Paul Kurtz recognizes that since Darwin our understandings of life have centered around evolution and that human behavior, as a part of life, is an evolved part of life. "Any 'theories of reality' are thus derived from theories rooted in scientific inquiry , rather than from poetic, literary, or theological narrations, interesting as those might be." Hernberger and Altmeyer's Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers, the authors find that atheists overwhelmingly accept evolution as the explanation for the emergence of life on Earth and that creationism is an interference. Evolution is central to much of modern humanism because it is uses reason, logic, and evidence to show that how and why we have become reasoning, social, and moral animals.

But evolution is surely not a religion. Religions make sacred and profane claims and mark some things out of bounds. Evolutionary theory doesn't make anything profane nor sacred. Evolution makes claims about the transformation of organisms over time. That it is a material natural explanation derived from material nature does make it unable to accept immaterial or non-material supernatural or non-natural explanations or evidence. That doesn't make material nature sacred nor does it make immaterial or non-material supernatural or non-natural evidence profane so much as unable to be accounted as part of the evidence. Whether any practitioner of the natural method of hypothesis testing takes naturalism as a philosophical groundwork from which to proceed (as yours truly does) then that is an individual choice made in conjunction with her/his community or communities. In short, people who accept evolution do not say that evolution is sacred - it is simply the best explanation available. Non-evolutionary answers aren't profane - they just need to explain the facts of the matter better than evolution does. Nothing has done so yet.

Nor is education about evolution necessarily indoctrination into atheist humanism. There are at least two things to consider here. The first is that while evolution may be important to atheists and/or humanists, evolution does not necessarily cause atheism or humanism. While most atheists may cite evolution as part of their philosophical groundwork, most people who understand evolution do not seem to be atheists or humanists. This leads to the second point: many Christians accept evolution. In this Acts and Facts article, they even lament this fact by citing the The Clergy Letter Project which is "designed to demonstrate that religion and science can be compatible and to elevate the quality of the debate of this issue." Over 12,000 clergy have signed it. Surely, these people aren't all atheists masquerading as believers.

Lots of scientists are in this group too. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke show in Acts of Faith that scientists in America are still religious. They report from a Carnegie Commission Survey of 60,028 academics in 1969, that scientists ranged between 55% of physical scientists and 29% of anthropologists self-describing themselves as religious. However, the professional scientists' level of disbelief shows that their level of disbelief is quite high, ranging from 27% in the physical sciences to 57% among anthropologists. Non-belief has increased among scientists in the forty years since that survey was taken.

However, as of 2007 two sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle reported in their article, "Religion among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics," that it hasn't escalated so much that we can conclude that scientists totally eschew religious faith. 52% of scientists at elite universities report that they have no religious affiliation: nearly four times as high as the general population (see here and here subscription required). The highest rate of disbelief in this survey was 41% among biologists and 40.8% among physicists (see chart below). Combined, we do find that the majority of the scientists in this survey are either atheists or agnostics. However, the authors found that "religiosity in the home as a child is the most important predictor of present religiosity among this group of scientists." This is not the total materialist banishing of all faith from scientists.

As much as I think that Ken Miller and Francis Collins make leaps of logic to rationalize the conflict in themselves between evolution and their Christian faiths, they seem content enough to do so. For some people, faith and science are mutually exclusive spheres. On this the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and one sociology's founders, Max Weber, agree, calling religion and science "non-overlapping magesteria" and separate "spheres" respectively. Apparently, lots of scientists in every field agree.

Let's be clear. Humanists and atheists celebrate evolution as the best available explanation for the proliferation of life on Earth. When a better one comes along, we'll move over. If that happens, it will be an interesting time. But the idea is not sacred. It seems that evolution is like Newtonian physics, at best it will be improved upon and added to and not discounted. It is simply too good a description, explanation, and prediction of what life actually has done, does now, and will keep doing in the future. It is a humbling idea for sure.

Look at how small it makes any of us seem. The long perspective offers us both the sense of how tiny we are in the scheme of things and how late we are. We are also offered the sense of connectedness to every other living thing on the planet. That, my friends, is very special. And on top of that, we are the most sentient and sapient animals we know of, gifted by evolution with the awareness of ourselves and others and the ramification of our actions. Surely that is a beautiful thing. Yes, we want to share this best explanation with others through education. But this is not for the purposes of indoctrinating people. Atheists and agnostics comprise about 8% of the overall population. We are too few to hijack the curriculum and make it our own.

And science is not about indoctrination into a worldview that says that there is only one way to understand everything, that only matter and energy exist, or that there is no such thing as transcendance. Strictly speaking, it is about observing nature to understand nature.

Evolution works. Let's teach it.

Darwin Day in Penn State's Earth and Mineral Sciences

There are a lot of things going on, but I just got this one in from my friend Tim in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Come one and all!

BIRTHDAY PARTY

Come help us celebrate

The 200^th Birthdays

Of

Charles Darwin

&

Abraham Lincoln

February 12

4:00 pm

EMS Museum & Art Gallery

Deike Building

Kids Welcome

Special Darwin Exhibit & Fossil Carts

SWEET!

Science and religion converse

After a few hiccups, here is my piece on the discussion (pdf) between science and religion in Voices of Central Pennsylvania. I think that we need to find a common ground where there might seem to be little. Why? Because we are related and we are our brothers' keepers.

Rhytidoponera metallica

Yes. This is the coolest ant name ever. Rhytidoponera metallica.

Now we just have to get Solenopsis pantera or Formica sepultura.

Ben Stein gets dissed

The University of Vermont was going to have Ben Stein speak at its graduation commencement. Upon the announcement a lot of people slammed the choice. According the Burlington Free Pres, "That announcement was greeted with derision in Vermont’s blogosphere — in part because Stein has defended the notion of intelligent design and other views deemed by some as “anti-science.” " Yep. He promotes garbage a la Expelled.

Some Vermont bloggers really railed it and were grateful to save their fellow green mountain dwellers' brains from at least one more stupidity assault.

"...an incremental step away from dogma-driven curriculum decision-making"

The NCSE reports that the enemies of evolution have lost for now in Texas. In a 7-7 vote, the Texas Board of Education rejected "strengths and weaknesses" language that many (like yours turuly) saw as stealth creationism. Check it out! You can read the Dallas News's report here and the San Antonio News's report here. From Dallas:

In a major defeat for social conservatives, a sharply divided State Board of Education voted Thursday to abandon a longtime state requirement that high school science teachers cover what some critics consider to be "weaknesses" in the theory of evolution.

Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the "strengths and weaknesses" of Charles Darwin's theory that man evolved from lower forms of life.

Darwin's theory has long been widely accepted in the scientific community, although proponents for a biblical explanation of the origin of humans continue pointing to what they say are flaws in evolution theory.

John West and the Disco 'Tute are in a tizzy. "In reality, there is nothing in the amendments adopted that promote creationism, yet (sic) alone young earth creationism." They push for "strengths and weaknesses" (click here for Texas read on this) standards through an Orwellian "expert" panel that was driven by fundamentalists on the board and in the public. It's hard to understand how West can try to decouple himself from creationism when he and his fellow Disco 'Tuters are noted creationists who align themselves with creationist sympathizer groups in other states like the Louisiana Family Forum. Note: this is not guilt by association but rather shared actions toward promoting anti-evolutionism that cannot decouple itself from creationism.

The members of the Texas Board who voted for the "strengths and weaknesses" language are all notably Christian cultural conservatives. For example, the San Antonio News reports that Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, voted to keep “strengths and weaknesses." He said, “This is a battle of academic freedom. This is a battle over freedom of speech. It's an issue of freedom of religion.”

This is an old canard that fundamentalists try to pull. They cry out that they are being repressed by the secular system and being prevented from practicing their faiths. This is in now way true. Students may pray in school. They may read Bibles in schools. They can even pray in groups. They can, themselves, have a creationist club if they want to. But no faculty member can lead them in prayer because the establishment clause of the First Amendment forbids it. The establishment and exercise clauses come into tension in cases like this, but because schools are not places of religious indoctrination, we simply cannot allow any faith to officially be at work in schools and, as I have shown elsewhere (here and here) Mercer's and his band of malcontents have no scientific leg to stand on. They continually repeat fraudulent arguments related to Piltdown man and transitional fossils.

They do, however, refuse to allow their own arguments to be subjected to the same kind of rigorous "strength and weaknesses" probing that they wish to subject evolution to. You have to wonder what would happen in schools if we started probing the creation myth with the kind of "rigorous" skepticism creationists pretend to turn on evolution. My bet is it would be a religious nightmare. Let's have our own Thirty Years War in classrooms. That's hyperbole, but you get the point I hope. We sanitize the public school system of religious indoctrination or apologetics so that we can maintain civil society.

The good news is that students will be encouraged to "apply critical thinking, scientific reasoning and problem solving 'to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence, logical reasoning and experimental and observational testing.'" That's the ticket. Instead of focusing on some alleged strength or weakness in any given theory, invite students to work through the logic of hypothesis testing, learn how to make predictions, observe and record observational evidence, make inferences, make tentative conclusions that can be compared with other data and hypothesis testing, and see how they align with current theoretical explanations. That's a good place to work from because it centralizes the methods of science and not some person's or group's particular gripes with scientific findings. Should a student rigorously work through "empirical evidence, logical reasoning and experimental and observational testing" and find some gaping weakness in evolution, that could lead to great teachable moments whether they discovered something new or not. While this language change is certainly positive, it was not the end of McElroy's and his fundamentalist colleagues shenanigans.

The NCSE reports:

The victory was not complete, however. A flurry of amendments introduced by creationist members of the board sought to compromise the treatment of evolution in the biology standards. Terri Leo successfully proposed a revision to the standards to replace verbs such as "identify," "recognize," and "describe" in section 7 of the high school biology standards with "analyze and evaluate" — no other section of the standards was treated similarly. Worse, Don McLeroy successfully proposed a revision to section 7 to require that students "analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record." It is significant that "sudden appearance" is a creationist catchphrase, associated in particular with young-earth creationist Wendell Bird. During oral arguments in Edwards v. Aguillard, for example, Jay Topkis observed, "those buzzwords come right out of Mr. Bird's lexicon. ... They're his."

Just as worrying were the amendments introduced by creationist members of the board that sought to compromise the treatment of evolution and related concepts in the earth and space science standards. Barbara Cargill successfully proposed revisions (PDF) to the standards to add, in her words, "humility and tentativeness”; in the view of Steven Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science, however, "All five of the changes ... are not needed and were proposed to weaken and damage the ESS TEKS." The worst change was to a requirement that students "evaluate a variety of fossil types, transitional fossils, fossil lineages, and significant fossil deposits with regard to their appearance, completeness, and rate and diversity of evolution," which now reads, "evaluate a variety of fossil types, proposed transitional fossils, fossil lineages, and significant fossil deposits and assess the arguments for and against universal common descent in light of this fossil evidence." (emphasis mine)

The Austin Statesman rightly calls this whole thing "an incremental step away from dogma-driven curriculum decision-making." Well, one step in the right direction is better than a stalemate or back peddling. The fight will continue in March when more standards are considered. We'll stay tuned.