Creationists + Special Effects = Stupid Argument

That's right. Over at Creation Minute with Eric Hovind, son of conman, swindler, and tax evader Ken Hovind, you can watch some lame digital effects prop up some seriously weak arguments against evolution in just under a minute.

Watch!


And you can register to win an iPod full of creationist videos! Everyone register as fast as you can!

A president with some scientific literacy?

NO!

As a fan of science and a skeptic of some aspects of R&D, I am in awe of this speech. There is a particular appreciation for science that I haven't seen in a presidential speech since I read JFK's talk about the launch to the moon (a ruse for nuclear weapons deployment mind you) or, for a brief moment, Clinton's wonder about Mars in the late 90s. Nonetheless, I am so glad to have a competent and articulate president who can work with specialists as a generalist.

My favorite parts:

The fact is an investigation into a particular physical, chemical, or biological process might not pay off for a year, or a decade, or at all. And when it does, the rewards are often broadly shared, enjoyed by those who bore its costs but also by those who did not.

...and...

Our future on this planet depends on our willingness to address the challenge posed by carbon pollution. And our future as a nation depends upon our willingness to embrace this challenge as an opportunity to lead the world in pursuit of new discovery.

...(I have some beefs with that but given the audience I pass them by) and...

Now, the nation that leads the world in 21st century clean energy will be the nation that leads in the 21st century global economy. I believe America can and must be that nation. But in order to lead in the global economy and to ensure that our businesses can grow and innovate, and our families can thrive, we’re also going to have to address the shortcomings of our health care system.

That is a highly dubious claim to say the least. "[L]eads the world..." I think not. We are followers here. It's fine to follow. But we have some major catching up to do.

But I have to say that I now find the following a bit odious:

Fifth, since we know that the progress and prosperity of future generations will depend on what we do now to educate the next generation, today I’m announcing a renewed commitment to education in mathematics and science. (Applause.) This is something I care deeply about. Through this commitment, American students will move from the middle of the top — from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade — for we know that the nation that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow. And I don’t intend to have us out-educated.

The notion of competition in the United States is rather toxic. So much so that I think that our obeisance to science as a tool for competition is radically destructive. For all of Obama's talk on how much we need to improve in this or that, it might well fail without a good ethical realignment away from competitive market strategies and toward more cooperative and convivial arrangements.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why we spend so much money on super-colliders and do little in the way to increase genuine human efficiency in the procurement of our food in a sustainable fashion?

Anyway, this is someone who knows about the piecemeal work of science or, at the worst, has worked with people who know the piecemeal work. Unlike the last group of anti-intelligence nimrods that occupied the White House it seems like we are getting somewhere. How refreshing. Let's just hope that he extends the sustainable White House garden a bit more.

So, I end with Obama's closing, because it has some hope in it beyond the mechanical science and technology and math schooling he and others are hell-bent on gaining:

Yes, scientific innovation offers us a chance to achieve prosperity. It has offered us benefits that have improved our health and our lives — improvements we take too easily for granted. But it gives us something more. At root, science forces us to reckon with the truth as best as we can ascertain it.

And some truths fill us with awe. Others force us to question long-held views. Science can’t answer every question, and indeed, it seems at times the more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world, the more humble we must be. Science cannot supplant our ethics or our values, our principles or our faith. But science can inform those things and help put those values — these moral sentiments, that faith — can put those things to work — to feed a child, or to heal the sick, to be good stewards of this Earth.

We are reminded that with each new discovery and the new power it brings comes new responsibility; that the fragility, the sheer specialness of life requires us to move past our differences and to address our common problems, to endure and continue humanity’s strivings for a better world.

As President Kennedy said when he addressed the National Academy of Sciences more than 45 years ago: “The challenge, in short, may be our salvation.”

Shout it brothers and sisters

The New York Times reported yesterday that atheists, skeptics, non-believers, humanists...ya' know...have been shouting it from the rooftops.

The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.

Now that's what we like to hear. I just checked our own campus email listserve and we have over 200 people on it. That's pretty cool. And they are seeing the value of organization and working with community as a group.

They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.

So much for the "herding cats" hypothesis. We at Penn State have done two Bible-a-thons - we read from any sacred of your choice - to raise money for Doctors Without Borders. So much for the argument that we have no morality. We are social primates just like the rest of you.

The 800th post has to be about Sarah Palin

Let's hope she actually runs for the Republican ticket in 2012 as the gift that keeps on giving.

Besides that, watch this series of videos on creationist laughability.

Texas Higher Education Coordination Board will be taken to court by the Institute for Creation Research

The biggest dust-up in creationist activity lately has been about the Texas Board of Education and its new standards for K-12. Critics rightly allege that the Board has opened a back door to getting intelligent design/creationism into biology classrooms and water down teachings in biology and astronomy.

But what might be even stranger is that in that very same state, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) has been denied certification for its Masters in Science Education Degree by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) last April. So what do you do when your program is rejected? Apparently you ask people to pray for you and you sue.

The ICR has just released a press release and a subscriber's email. All of the details aren't essential. Both documents allege that the THECB has violated the ICR's unconstitutionally discriminated against the ICR's "academic and religious viewpoint." But what's really interesting is how different the two communiques are. The press release is your typical formal press announcement. But the subscriber's email is full of references that have nothing to do with the practices of biology, astro-geophysics, geology, or science education that the ICR deals with in its graduate program. Instead, it's about the evilness of contemporary America because of science and the "new atheists."

After a call to pray for the ICR, they write the following:

Much of the focus of our world today is on “science”—and its endorsement of godless activities like abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, sanctioned promiscuity, legal pornography, no-fault divorce, genetically engineered babies, and same-sex “marriage.” The list seems endless.

Today, science attempts to provide a “rationale” for such wickedness. Tomorrow, science—“back in its rightful place” (as Barack Obama said in his inaugural speech)—will further its attack against “religion,” led by well-placed spokesmen like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and others whose hatred for Christianity is seething out everywhere.

Of course, the real battle is a spiritual one (Ephesians 6:12), with the enemy’s ruthless “roar” (1 Peter 5:8) trying to shout down the absolute truth that the Lord Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

Divorce? I may be ignorant on this particular matter but what does science, especially evolution, have to do with divorce? I know that we can play a game like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and somehow we can go from "divorce" to "science."

1. Divorce.
2. John McCain got divorced.
3. He had to answer a question about evolution in a Republican debate.
4. John McCain said he "believes in evolution."
5. Evolution is a science.
6. Science is connected to divorce.

Try your own. Make it even more batty. Try to get Frank Zappa in there somehow.

The main point though is that this is clearly not a science issue as its framed by the ICR for supporters of ICR. It's part of their zealous Biblically literalist Christian identity and its particular notions about the creation of the universe and human beings.

The ICR has slipped something into the press release which is more complicated than what they present. They write,

In fall 2007, the THECB Site Evaluation Team and Advisory Committee recommended approval of the ICRGS application to grant degrees in the state of Texas. However, both agency recommendations were subsequently rejected by Commissioner Paredes after evolution-only activists pressured the commissioner to deny ICRGS a degree-granting license in the state.

This looks fishy. Upon reading it you might think that the THECB Commissioner is a punk and a bigot who had no reason to do what he did. Something is rotten in Denmark so to speak. Wrong.

Commissioner Paredes's actual recommendation contains events in it that the ICR white-washes by calling activities carried out by "evolution-only activists." Paredes notes that the initial visit that led to the recommended approval was "flawed" because one of the site visitors did not go and the recommendation focused on "process and infrastructure" and not "whether the proposed program met appropriate standards of science education." He reports that nine scientists and science educators went for another visit that precipitated a series of conversations regarding the ICR's program that led to the decision.

Paredes chose to reject ICR's application for two reasons. The first is that the ICR requires that its employees be young earth creationists. The second, and to my mind more devastating is as follows:

[The ICR catalog includes,] “All things in the universe were created and made by God in the six literal days of the Creation Week described in Genesis…and confirmed in Exodus….The creation record is factual, historical and perspicuous; thus all theories of origin and development that involve evolution in any form are false.” ICR’s catalog also states “The phenomenon of biological life did not develop by natural processes from inanimate systems but was specially and supernaturally created by the creator.” This statement runs counter to the conventions of science which hold that claims of supernatural intervention are not testable and, therefore, outside the realm of science.

The remainder of the recommendation notes that the ICR's tenets and educational goals run contrary to good science education because they amount to religious indoctrination and they also run a narrow curriculum that neglects large swaths of known science on the things they allege to grant a degree in.

Paredes concludes,

In recommending against approval of the ICR program, I am not questioning the validity of religious belief as a means of comprehending the world and universe around us. As far as I know, science has no answer to the question of how life on earth began or how the Big Bang was initiated some 14 billion years ago. Believers of many faiths might well attribute both these astonishing events to the intervention of a great Creator. It is entirely possible that science may never answer these fundamental questions and that, in these and other instances, religious belief supersedes science. But religious belief is not science. Science and religious belief are surely reconcilable but they are not the same thing.

Sure sounds like a vicious atheist doesn't he? Please. This is well thought out and reasonable. The ICR has no base for its lawsuit.

The ICR is seeking some legitimacy for its programs and surely one of the best ways to do that is to become an accredited institution by a state agency. Without it, the ICR is a boutique provider whose graduates lack broader educational credibility. But it can't have broader educational credibility because the findings that the ICR purports to teach in its graduate program are not only unscientific but anti-scientific. For a legitimating board like THECB to give the "thumb's up" to ICR is to delegitimate the University of Texas's science education program.

Finally, I don't think that this can be chalked up to religious persecution. There is no way in which the ICR is being proscribed from granting degrees, from educating people in the way it sees fit, nor publishing materials it has been publishing now for 28 years. But it lacks scientific legitimacy. End of story. I hope the court understands this.

What role will indigenous people play in climate change politics? I hope a lot!

This a dual-post for Earth Day here and at 3E-COE.

We take the nation state for granted, barely aware of how large numbers of people work outside of the day-to-day life of national bureaucracies. These people, like the Lapps of Scandanavia, the Inuit of North America, the Aboriginal Australians, and San of the Kalahari, the Yanamamo of South America, or the pymies of West Africa live subsistence lives directly tied to their daily interaction with the Earth. Unsurprisingly, many of these people face incredible challenges to their culture's survival because of anthropogenic climate change.

Many of them are getting together to do something about it reports New Scientist. In a recently posted article, they report:

From Arctic Inuit to Pacific Islanders, indigenous peoples from 80 countries are meeting at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska (pdf), this week to forge a common position on climate change. They want an official voice alongside national governments in upcoming negotiations to agree a successor to the Kyoto protocol.

The meeting is emphasising indigenous peoples' histories of adapting to change. But beneath it is the fear that they will be trampled by rich countries trying to cut greenhouse emissions by managing indigenous lands.

Much of the ethical talk about climate change has focused on how the poorest people (a note on this below) in the world will be affected the most and worst by climate change. People like Dan Brown, James Garvey, and Peter Singer, organizations like the IPCC, the U.N., and too many publications to list here have been saying for years that melting ice will affect Inuits and Lapps and people in Micronesia will have their island homes flooded and they will either drown or be displaced. Many of these people have been experiencing these effects. They know what is happening to them because of modern industry and they are owed a place at the table to determine their own fates and how we invest in a common fate. This might well necessitate recalibrating the international deliberative bodies that work on climate change.

If we believe in democracy then people unaffiliated with national governments should have some voice. People with their own sovereign communities are owed fairness and justice. We owe them their survival at the very least. Currently, they are consigned to doom if we continue the status quo.

Finally, it strikes me that even calling these people poor is a misnomer. How can we call a people who have lived in these habitats - indeed evolved into these habitats as nature has selected them - poor? They are not monetarily wealthy because their purpose has not to become monied people, but people adapted to their climates and bioregions. It seems to me that we do not face an issue here of rich and poor, but an issue of the adapted and the unadapted. We have developed such maladaptive behaviors that the well-adapted are being selected out. How is that selection happening?

There are at least two versions at work. The Inuit and Lapps are facing melting tundra such that muddy and unpassable morasses make it extremely difficult or impossible for disparate groups to visit one another. Those with industrially-desirable resources are being face industrial theft and displacement. As New Scientist reports

Forest dwellers such as the Dayak tribe of Borneo or the pygmies of Cameroon fear they will be dispossessed by forest developers rushing to grab carbon credits by cutting and replanting trees.

Other indigenous peoples are already being displaced as foreign companies grab "unoccupied" indigenous lands to plant biofuels or "carbon offset" trees to compensate for fossil fuel use elsewhere.

"We're having the hardest time we've faced in 500 years," says Dennis Martinez, an ecologist and O'odham (Pima) Indian at the meeting. He says indigenous peoples living off natural resources could be highly resilient to climate change – but not if their cultures are destroyed as the rest of the world tries to respond.

Such is the cost of Western life we are to suppose. This is a call to each of us in my opinion. A call to think about how schools play into this system. I think that we need to reconsider how the schools in which we participate as students and teachers prepare us for a life that takes the natural environment of West Africa and transforms it for its own purposes instead of leaving it for the people, animals, and plants that live in West Africa. I think that if we think long and hard about it we can see that not only are we complicit in ecocide, but in (sometimes) slow culturcide and genocide. Preparing people to become the many things that we become as professionals - farmers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, plant workers, taxi cab drivers - has an ethical dimension that has been hiding and hidden from us for decades.

Now we are coming to face a problem so vast that it sometimes seems insoluble: How does what I do in the classroom continue behavior in other people that leads to unintended destruction? This might be the most awful and most important question that we as a profession face? But it's a question that we have to answer so that we can change what is into what ought to be. It seems that, at the very least, we need to engage in some sort of retracted resource use in our own lives, perhaps in our classrooms themselves, a recalibration of day-to-day activities in which schools now invest such that we are using our bodies more for their own sustenance in gardens or farming, and learning more and more from indigenous peoples who have lived within their own niches for millennia. It is time to center education on our own places.

It is time to adapt. An integrated community school can be that place.

If you want to watch the Indigenous People's Summit on Climate Change click here (artwork at right). It started on Monday, has run through today (HAPPY EARTH DAY!), and concludes tomorrow. Their summit goals are:

1. Consolidate, share and draw lessons from the views and experiences of Indigenous Peoples around the world on the impacts and effects of climate change on their ways of life and their natural environment, including responses;

2. Raise the visibility, participation and role of Indigenous Peoples in local, national, regional and international processes in formulating strategies and partnerships that engage local communities and other stakeholders to respond to the impacts of climate change;

3. Analyze, discuss and promote public awareness of the impacts and consequences of programs and proposals for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and assess proposed solutions to climate change from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples; and

4. Advocate effective strategies and solutions in response to climate change from the perspective of the cultures, world views, and traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, including local, national, regional and international rights-based approaches.

I am eager to see what happens as a result of this.

Thank you Colbert

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The age of everything in Texas is unknowable

The most recent dust-up in Texas has brought out cranks on the age of the universe. When will it end? When did it begin?

Will the Texas legislature correct this mess?

Stephanie Simon at The Wall Street Journal reports that some Texas legislators are considering revamping the Board of Education. Recently, creationists led by chairman Don McElroy, have taken the Board on a wild ride of ham-handed anti-evolutionism, anti-big bang education, and anti-climate change education ride. The anti-evolutionism was the standard Disco 'Tute "strengths and weaknesses" language.

Some legislators are tired of it:

The most far-reaching proposals would strip the Texas board of its authority to set curricula and approve textbooks. Depending on the bill, that power would be transferred to the state education agency, a legislative board or the commissioner of education. Other bills would transform the board to an appointed rather than elected body, require Webcasting of meetings, and take away the board's control of a vast pot of school funding. Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, hasn't taken a position on specific bills, a spokeswoman said.

"At this point, a lot of us are questioning...whether the state Board of Education serves a purpose anymore," said state Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat.

I don't know that the Texas legislature is going to be able to quash this any better than all of the protesters could. There have been 54 science organizations, independent scientists, the Texas Freedom Network, the Texas Science Network, concerned Texans, the National Center for Science Education, and civil liberties groups who all came to the Board's meetings to argue against this anti-reality.

The White House science adviser has deplored this garbage. He told Science Insider:

But when you get into the domain of promoting particular views about the basis for skepticism of evolution, and those views are not really valid, then I think we have a problem. I think we need to be giving our kids a modern education in biology, and the underpinning of modern biology is evolution. And countervailing views that are not really science, if they are taught at all, should be taught in some other part of the curriculum.

What more can we get in a democracy?

I don't know. Hopefully this intractable mess can be rectified.

A creationist "science fair"

UPDATE: I've been told in a comment (see below) that the following is a joke. I think I was pwned. Good satire. Check the store. Pretty goofy.

Really? Check out the 2001 Objective: Ministries science fair. They invited a couple of Muslim kids but found them ineligible because of "a number of Biblical inconsistencies." I wonder what method they used to figure out how that made it unscientific?

But the real winner is this!

1st Place: "Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria"

Eileen Hyde and Lynda Morgan (grades 10 & 11) did a project showing how the power of prayer can unlock the latent genes in bacteria, allowing them to microevolve antibiotic resistance. Escherichia coli bacteria cultured in agar filled petri dishes were subjected to the antibiotics tetracycline and chlorotetracycline. The bacteria cultures were divided into two groups, one group (A) received prayer while the other (B) didn't. The prayer was as follows: "Dear Lord, please allow the bacteria in Group A to unlock the antibiotic-resistant genes that You saw fit to give them at the time of Creation. Amen." The process was repeated for five generations, with the prayer being given at the start of each generation. In the end, Group A was significantly more resistant than Group B to both antibiotics.

Prayer can unlock the latent genes in bacteria. That's brilliant. Can we pray for malaria to microevolve itself into something a little more congenial please? Thanks.

Penn State's homegrown creationists

Penn State now has at least two active creationist mechanical engineering faculty members Jeremy Walter and John Cimbala.

The Daily Item, a Pennsylvania rural paper, reports that Walter who directs part of Penn State's Applied Research Lab is indeed a creationist who is exhorting local men to follow Jesus and presumably "disagree with Stephen Hawking and his big bang theory and how the earth came to exist." In case you wonder, he works for Answers In Genesis and has contributed to In Six Days and On The Seventh Day.

My favorite part is this:

Walter, who was raised with a religious background, started questioning evolution as a graduate student in the late 1970s while reading papers about thermodynamics written by creationist scientists.

Great. A creationist engineer who thinks that we live in a closed system? Really? Has he looked into the sky and seen the sun lately?

One Nation Under God?

Newsweek has posted a story about the shifting role of religion in the United States based on a poll they ran earlier this month. Broadly speaking: people have moved faiths, lots of people pray, fewer people report having "old fashioned values," people think religion is losing influence on American life, and the religious "nones" (atheists, agnostics, and the religious non-affliliated) have grown 3% since the last poll.

The comments page is alive with some pretty hefty vitriol. Christian revisionists are all over it lambasting non-believers for not accepting the "truth" of the Word and yammering on about the Constitution as a Christian document. It's pretty nuts.

But if you want to see Christopher Hitchens rip into the notion that the United States is a Christian nation, go to richarddawkins.net and watch an excerpt from Hardball.

Protect Alaska's wilderness and wild

There are two things happening in Alaska now that we should act on. First, let's make the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge out of bounds for oil companies. Keep the "wild" in wilderness.

Second, everyone's favorites fundamentalist wacko creationist governor, Sarah Palin, wants to legalize "poison gas and deadly snares to kill defenseless wolf pups and their families in and around their dens." Fight it by signing a petition and sending Palin a message that this is unacceptable.

Want to hear a killer primer on why evolution is true? Then listen to Jerry Coyne discuss his new book, Why Evolution is True, on Point of Inquiry with D.J. Grothe. He discusses biogeography, genetics, the fossil record, embryology, sex, and natural selection. He trains his sites on intelligent design noting their scientific irrelevance. He also discusses belief and disbelief in God and how Darwin might have acted in today's milieu. He concludes why scientists need to publicly defend and promote evolution.

Climate change deniers on Capitol Hill

During Bush's and the Republican's reign of error for the last several years, climate change denial was to be expected. We knew that Sen. Inhofe (Republican - Oklahoma) thinks climate change is a bunch of quackery and that Exxon/Mobil and big coal are just being oppressed by those pesky environazis. His level of denialism was upheld by a constituency of big energy companies aligned with radicalized Christian denialists across evangelical and fundamentalist sects and denominations.

These people denied, revised, rewrote, or invented scientific findings to support their pocketbooks, cherished beliefs, or both. Inhofe invited that climatology and ecology wiz Michael Crichton to speak against the necessity to reverse climate change. It was twilight zone stuff. I love Jurassic Park. But it would not have made Crichton panel-worthy for some proceeding on what to do about dinosaur digs. He was a fiction author. Come on now.

I hoped that these people would really be cast into the proverbial wilderness with the new Congress and Obama administration. As Solve Climate notes, they haven't. Watch.



Plant food. Plant food. In the interest of "fairness" to climate change deniers the congress hears about CO2 as "plant food." Possible quibbles about CO2 concentrations aside, let's just ignore the fact that we are not living in the Cambrian Era or the Triassic period of the Mezazoic Era. The issue here is that we are transforming the state of our atmosphere so rapidly that organisms may not be able to adapt to it. The issue of the Cambrian and Mezazoic are irrelevant.

Ignore the findings of every national academy of sciences in the world today including the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. who write, "Climate change is one of the most important global environmental problems facing the world today." Ignore the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed literature on this topic. Ignore James Garvey, Peter Singer, Vandana Shiva, Richard Kahn, and Wolfgang Sachs. Ignore the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ignore the U.N. Human Development Report 2007/2008.

Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. Failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem. Looking to the future, no country—however wealthy or powerful—will be immune to the impact of global warming.

All of these people are nuts? Inhofe and his buddies are in such a state of denial or stupidity that it is frankly catastrophic.

For a bigger take down, read Solve Climate or Treehugger. Their take on the Fairness Doctrine is excellent.

Texas, Hitchens, Evolution, and the Public

In Newsweek, Christopher Hitchens has a characteristically wry piece, "The Texas -Size Debate Over Teaching Evolution," on the most recent Texas anti-evolution dust-up.

The Texas anti-Darwin stalwarts also might want to beware of what they wish for. The last times that evangelical Protestantism won cultural/ political victories—by banning the sale of alcohol, prohibiting the teaching of evolution and restricting immigration from Catholic countries—the triumphs all turned out to be Pyrrhic. There are some successes that are simply not survivable. If by any combination of luck and coincidence any religious coalition ever did succeed in criminalizing abortion, say, or mandating school prayer, it would swiftly become the victim of a backlash that would make it rue the day. This will apply with redoubled force to any initiative that asks the United States to trade its hard-won scientific preeminence against its private and unofficial pieties. This country is so constituted that no one group, and certainly no one confessional group, is able to dictate its own standards to the others. There are days when I almost wish the fundamentalists could get their own way, just so that they would find out what would happen to them.

This got me thinking about consequences, unintended consequences that public officials create when they act on private notions on behalf of the public.

The anti-evolution Christians on the board have to understand something: the more they tie their religious convictions directly to public policies, the more they run the risk of jeopardizing their constituent faiths. Religion, though held by people who constitute the public and act in public, is an essentially private matter shared by many people in self-selected communities (see John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems and Robert Pennock's Tower of Babel for more on this). The public is born from and within geographic boundaries are not so voluntary but dictated by previous political and economic decisions. In the U.S., these decisions have come about through a formal secular government that more often than not uses public knowledge; that is, public policy is based on information available to any citizen and subject to any citizen's inquiry and scrutiny because of agreed-upon constitutional liberties and rights. Public policy is frequently based on science.

Science is public knowledge by its very nature. It is open to anyone whether they understand it or not. Peer-review journal processes, though blind for the submitter, acts on behalf of the public in public. Reviewers attempt to assure scientifically rigorous standards, to discover errors, to check methods, and to ascertain the scope of conclusions. Journals, societies, and other media then disseminate this information to the public after it has been checked. The public or members of the public, then, can perform their own review if they would like to by replicating a study, determining consequences, and evaluating them. Religion and religious propositions do not do the same thing. Creationists have no such possible process except in appearance.

Creationism is essentially a private belief. It is beyond empirical scrutiny because it is taken to be true because of faith. That faith emerges from tradition, religion, and/or authority and taken to be sacrosanct and, at some level, unfalsifiable. As such, it is a poor basis for public policy in a state that uses science as the general method on which its policies are based.

So, when a religious group like Texas board chairman McElroy and his anti-evolution associates slip their religious notions into public policy they invite public inquiry and public scrutiny. This makes his private notions public. To become public invites public failure of their religious wishes. I submit that this failure has already started.

In this case, the anti-evolutionists have already received a hefty rebuke from 54 science organizations who found the "strengths and weaknesses" language to be an attack on evolution - the fundamental concept underlying all of biology. Additionally, Raymond Eve found that there is virtually no support for anti-evolutionism with working scientists in Texas universities. From within and without scientists have pressed for McElroy and company to stop this. Scientists almost won.

But as the NCSE notes, the board played some verbal shell games to modify "strengths and weaknesses." They changed it into

"sufficiency or insufficiency" and "supportive and not supportive" — and eventually prevailed with a requirement that students examine "all sides of scientific evidence." Additionally, the board voted to add or amend various standards in a way that encourages the presentation of creationist claims about the complexity of the cell, the completeness of the fossil record, and the age of the universe.

These are all creationist kvetches tied right to so-called "irreducible complexity," old Duane Gish arguments from Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!, and literal readings of Genesis. They've removed the age of the universe (roughly 14 billion years old) from their standards. We have yet to see what will happen to science classrooms in Texas and the states that follow suit because of Texas's overwhelming influence on textbooks. [California, New York, North Carolina, and Texas shape textbook use because they have uniform textbook use across the state.] But we can be sure that textbooks will be even further watered down regarding these touchy issues and students' knowledge will suffer for it. Scientists working in these fields will not like this and they can react in different ways that are not going to be to the liking of McElroy and the citizens of Texas.

Scientists might retaliate. Take for example what the University of California system has done fairly recently. Students who were taught from Bob Jones University Press's biology textbook were not admitted to the UC system because ideas on evolution in those books were presented in a way that is "inconsistent with the viewpoints and knowledge generally accepted in the scientific community." This policy was held up in federal court last year in Association of Christian Schools International et al. v. Roman Stearns et al. The issue cannot be seen as analogous here because the Texas textbooks will not be overtly creationist unless they want to land themselves in court.

However, individual university science deparments who pay attention to state or school curricula might punish Texas by not accepting Texas students to biology, astronomy, or geology programs because of the shoddy evolution understanding. Such threats were made about Kansas students during that state's evolution and intelligent design wars. I doubt that this is something that McElroy really wants. Moreover, I doubt that the Texas public really wants to be classed out of university participation in the sciences. Obviously, Texas scientists at Texas universities do not want this and neither does the public group the Texas Freedom Network.

In short, McElroy and his band of malcontents have done an educational disservice to the Texas public regarding science. Moreover, they discount all of the other possible criticisms of evolution that might be born from the plethora of other religions Texans hold. We'll let Hitchens close this out because he is more eloquent than I am:

Let time also be set aside, in our increasingly multiethnic and multicultural school system, for children to be taught the huge variety of creation stories, from the Hindu to the Muslim to the Australian Aboriginal. This is always interesting (and it can't be, can it, that the Texas board holdouts think that only Genesis ought to be so honored?). Second, we can surely demand that the principle of "strengths and weaknesses" will be applied evenly. If any church in Texas receives a tax exemption, or if any religious institution is the beneficiary of any subvention from the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, we must be assured that it will devote a portion of its time to laying bare the "strengths and weaknesses" of the religious world view, and also to teaching the works of Voltaire, David Hume, Benedict de Spinoza, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. This is America. Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend. We may one day have cause to be grateful to the Texas Board of Education for lighting a candle that cannot be put out.

FDA Approved Depressant

How soon?



FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful