And Louisiana goes down and down and down...

I hope to do a more extended post on this later.

Louisiana Coalition for Science has a new post up that is simply appalling in how far creationists have gotten in their push to undermine good science education there. The creationists of the Louisiana Family Forum seem to have gotten rules rewritten so that good teachers complaining to good people in the state apparatus will be thwarted so that "the prerogative of [Department of Education] professionals to handle the review process and make a recommendation to [Board of Elementary and Secondary Education] has been seriously undermined."

I'll say. There seems to be nothing to prevent total charlatans from the review panels. Total yahoos free of scientific evidence and the weight of reality can attack biology curriculum with impunity.

What I find interesting in this post, though, is that the climate change part of SB 733 hasn't been latched onto by the Luzianna Fam Forum. Wonder why.

R. Crumb's take on the Genesis

My wife is going to go bananas for this. She loves R. Crumb (image at right courtesy of dgtweb's site on R. Crumb). I think there's a festivus present in this.

PARIS — Subversive US cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose take on the Bible is about to be released worldwide, says people are "totally nuts" for taking the book so seriously for so long.

"I grew to hate the Bible," he told a press conference for the international launch of "Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis", which he called a "gruelling" four year project. The book hits bookshelves in late October in Europe, Brazil and the United States.

"The idea of millions of people taking this so seriously is totally nuts," he added. "The Bible doesn't need to be satirised. It's already so crazy."

Crumb's 220-page epic take on the Book of Genesis painstakingly mirrors every twist and turn, from God's Creation of the world through the meanderings of Noah's Ark and the adventures of Jacob of the "coat of many colours".

Worst politician in America.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). Just watch the video at this link and marvel at his pernicious lunacy. It is a spectacular level of willful ignorance to say, "The science really isn’t there" about climate change. Sorry bud. You need to go the way of the dinosaur. Like 20 years ago.

Teabaggers to attack "Darwin-lovers?"

Is there going to be a "tea party" at Southern Methodist University over the Darwin celebrations this year? The Texas Freedom Network reports that Bill Dembski, "cdesign proponentsist" extraordinaire, wants his students to stick it to the "Darwin-lovers."

(1) For extra credit I'd like you to go to SMU on September 24th. On that day there are two back-to-back events at SMU celebrating Darwin -- go to smu.edu/smunews/darwin/events.asp and scroll down to September 24th. I don't want you going there merely as spectators but will indicate in class how you might actively participate and engage the Darwin-lovers you'll find there.

Tea party or bust?

Better yet, maybe he should get his teaching assistant to help him with all of that grading he'll need help with.

(2) I keep trying to reach our grader, but so far with no success. I'm not hearing back from him by email or by phone, and his voicemail indicates he's going to be incommunicado till September 21st. I don't know why this should be. In any case, please keep working on the precis statements. They need to be turned in and you need to try your best, but I will cut you all some slack on the grading until we get into a regular routine.

Hey Dembski. I have been a college lecturer for 5 of the last 6 years and an active teaching and research assistant too for 4 of the last 10 years. Want some help? I'm sure I can grade those papers and you won't have any of that silly theological hocus-pocus to worry about either. What do you say? I know it can be hard to get in the swing of things but isn't it about time now? It's almost October. But let me know.

Maybe I can fly down for some observations on how well your students teabag those silly Darwin-lovers too. Those sillies.

Oh Kirk. Give it up.

It's hard to wrap my head around such totally infantile thinking as Kirk Cameron's. See, he and his numbskull buddy Ray Comfort are releasing a "special edition" of Darwin's Origin of Species 3 days before its 150 anniversary release date. And Ray has written a very "special" introduction for this edition. Short bus anyone?

But inquiring minds want to know...or something. You can read some real zingers in a new article on Cameron's crusade in People magazine (thanks Pam).

"You can see where [Hitler] clearly takes Darwin's ideas to some of their logical conclusions and compares certain races of people to lower evolutionary life forms," Cameron says. "If you take Darwin's theory and extend it to its logical end, it can be used to justify all number of very horrendous things."

Whose logic is this? And what are the values behind the so-called logic of these actions?

You mean like all those pogroms that Christians across Europe and Russia had organized for all those centuries because of their reading of the Gospel of John justified further by Jesus saying that he comes with a sword? Oh yeah. Those Jews were really sad about the Darwinian blood libel.

And all of that Darwinian thinking that has created racism since the kings of Europe sent out all of those explorers in the Age of Discovery to forcefully convert the indigenous people of South America. Definitely from The Origin of Species.

Or how about when the first tribes fought?

Oh wait! People are violent tribal animals who use mental tools available to them to justify their actions.

How does he breathe with that brain?

But I like Christine's takedown. Plus! Her accent is sexy.

Creation gets a distributor

NCSE reports today that Creation, the new movie about Darwin, has found a U.S. distributor. Hoorah.

Amazing handmade aeroplanes

My acquaintance Ondrej Mitas makes airplanes from balsa wood, paper, acrylic enamel, steel, and aluminum. The shapes are amazing! Watch them fly!



You can see them at Webster's Bookstore & Cafe in downtown State College, Pa.

THE END IS NIGH!!!

Apparently we atheists and god-haters think the end of the world is coming because of the Mayan calendar. Or says World Nut Daily.

How can a world filled with secular humanists, atheists, and just plain God-haters be pondering the end of the world? They are embracing what is found in the mystical Mayan calendar that has the world ending on December 21, 2012. And has the media taken notice! The History Channel, Fox News, U.S. News & World Report, ABC News, USA Today, and more are talking or writing about it. Books on the topic are flying off the shelves.

Repent! The end is nigh!

Will the 'nones' have it?

We've been saying that there are fewer religious people in the U.S. than the holy rollers would lead you to believe. But it's true. Recent social surveys have been showing that 15%-16% of the U.S. do not affiliate with religious groups, though about half of them identify themselves as believing in a "higher power." Now we have some more mainstream media coming on board.

USA Today reports "Nones are not a fringe group anymore and are now part of Middle America. They're present in every socio-demographic group."

Wait. I'm not a freak waiting to eat his own kid?

Metal Post! Black metal + bikes = Antitron

This is just too awesome. Antitron, black metal lord of urban bike assaults!



I hope that Abbath (at right) from Immortal gets to see this. Abbath usually looked like some stupid pro wrestling goon. This kid...it doesn't matter what he looks like because he kicks so much ass on his bike. Move over Ryan Leach (okay...maybe not) because darkness has a new look and it's stalking on a bike.

Maybe Antitron will do some bangin' bunny hops over Abbath's flames at next year's Waacken Open Air Festival. That would be from beyond.

It's the plebes too

Rep. Shimkus' climate change denial is bad. But how does someone on the ground who hates "big government" say they don't believe in climate change? Like this.

Hmmm. So God is engineering climate change? So he gets the blame for all of the species that go extinct then and the displacement and deaths of poor and indigenous people the world over? What a strange thing to lay at your master's feet in thanks and praise.

Thanks to Keith for the photo.

Titanic stupidity

I had almost forgotten about this piece of horrific lunacy when I decided it was a good time to go look up some fundamentalists denying climate change. Who comes to my rescue but Rep. John Shimkus (R-Illinois). Watch as he reads from the Books Genesis and Matthew and uses them to deny climate change, the sixth extinction (my words not his), and ecocide. You know why? Because the Bible is the infallible word of God. This is lunacy.

Not an ounce of ignorace here.

Do these people huff glue before they talk? Or do anything at all?



Don't forget that Jesus is our king in this country.

On Darwin's loss of faith

A commenter (Steve of the SENTinel) on my last post about the new movie on Darwin, noted the following: "Darwin's loss of faith was driven more by his daughter's death than by his science. Maybe the science gave him an intellectual footing, but his daughter was the emotional & volitional impetus." I don't think that this is the case given what I have read of his autobiography.

For a man as minded to the cultivation of evidence as he was, the feeling of anger or repudiation of a God that he had grown up with and minded as a voyager on the Beagle would not be enough. His daughter's death may have provided him late in life with some conviction or, as Steve calls it, "emotional & volitional impulse," about his agnosticism; perhaps it would be something to the effect that he would believe that a God such as the one who created and ruled over a universe such as ours is a monster (and I don't say that he said or believed this). But evidence would inevitably be the thing that persuaded him, and much of that would have to deal with the absence of any independent evidence for any particular religion, that the argument from design was flawed and that natural selection accounted for the variation of life, and much evidence that there was nothing like justice to be found in nature outside of human culture. In what follows, I will paraphrase some of Darwin's points from some of his Life and Letters.

While he was aboard the Beagle for two years, he thought much on religion. He started as a scripture-quoting youth (was even mocked for it some) who ended up doubting. Why should we believe in Christianity when we don't believe in the visions or revelations of "Hindoos?" Like David Hume, Darwin wondered why we should accept at all that miracles which are the basis of the Christian faith. As total violations of "the fixed laws of nature" there remains no good reason to believe. He wrote, "But I found more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress."

But it was not just this lack of evidence for the texts themselves. Darwin well-knew William Paley's argument from/to design whose antecedents go back to at least the Greeks. In short order, Darwin relegated them to the dustbin of history. He wrote, "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, that in the course which the wind blows." Though design may be lacking, and with it we might think purpose, that did not relegate happiness to the abyss. He believed that it followed from sentient beings' existences and survivability "that all sentient beings have been formed [by natural selection] so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness." In short it seems that survival of sentient species correlates with pleasure and happiness such that the subjective experiences of pleasure and happiness accompany survival. But what of suffering?

Darwin was well-acquainted with suffering. His own daughter died very young. However, he saw suffering that extended well beyond his own life. Every day humans experience anguish. This, he argued, has been seen as means for the moral improvement of us and our fellow people. In the day-to-day observation of our world, though, we seem to be the only ones who might be improving, so to speak, from what we learn from the experience of suffering. In the long scheme of history and pre-history, no species seems to have been sapient (knowing) of their own senescence. Their suffering has served no moral purpose nor some sort of meaning. In a way, all of prehistory has been in vain to the human observer. If we are made in God's image, then God seems to have spent an awful lot of time building a quite tortuous planet (not to mention practically a whole universe inhospitable to humans).

He also dispelled the notion that one's subjective feelings about God are no indication of God's actual existence. They are, quite simply, subjective feelings and "inner convictions." The power of one's passion for something is no piece of evidence for whether it is real or not. I was the line party organizer in my area for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy releases. Yes. I am that big of a dork. :-) But I can assure you that my love for Middle Earth does not have anything to do with its existence as a thing outside of my imagination, the shared imagination of other fans, or of Tolkien's writings.

Quite naturally, this subjective feeling of God's existence is concomitant with their belief in immortality of the soul. Darwin found this equally unlikely as God's existence.

Finally, he seemed to find some possibility that there was a God of the "First Cause." He neither embraced nor totally rejected this possibility, writing,

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

So it would seem that the volitional impulse was not merely Emma's death but the long acquaintance with the myriad complications of life. Clearly he wondered about suffering and happiness and how that might relate man to God, man to nature, and nature to God. He also, though, very clearly looked at the ethical aspects of nature noting that it lacked the subjective/intersubjective qualities that human beings so desire. Certainly the long sweep of the Earth's existence held no evidence of a God because it was full of a) meaningless suffering and b) was accomplished by the course of natural selection. Individual human experiences remained unable to show that God existed because they were either prone to error (miracles), personal delusion (inner convictions), or a lack of evidence (belief in immortality or of any god vs. another or others).

To close, I would say that given his arguments as I know them, it doesn't really matter what the volitional impulse was because it doesn't make his argument. Darwin was a master of integration who refused simple explanations. Having rejected others' personal "inner convictions" regarding faith I suspect that he wouldn't allow his own to color things too much either. His case for agnosticism is strong and built on reason, evidence, and the believer's lack of both.

Darwin is to American psychotic evangelicals what depictions of the Prophet Mo' are to psycho Muslims...or something

Creation, a new movie about Darwin, has no American distributor. Yep. Apparently distributors in America are such pansies when it comes to anything not in line with absolutely insane lunatic religious zealotry that no one will pick it up. People here have made fun of the "Muslim world's" reaction to the Danish cartoon controversy. Now we have a case of self-censorship in our own media outlets because of the lunatic fringe.

Really?

Is it really so ridiculous as that?

Is it because of assault-weapon-wielding whack-a-moles who might show up at a screening toting signs that say, "Who was the monkey? Yer momma or yer poppa?" or (ironically enough) "Darwin = Hitler." Who knows?

I have some skepticism that it really is as bad as this. But the longer it takes for an American outlet to pick this up, the more sissified I think our big gun, big oil, big car, big war, big religion, big bag of wind Christo-nationalists have cowed us into becoming.

The land of free and the home of the brave sure isn't looking so brave when it's a fear-mongering quivering pile of simpering jerks who bend over for the Sarah Palins, James Dobsons, and Ken Hams of the world, people so out of touch with anything resembling reality that they actually praise the Lord by building Creation "museums" where truthiness reigns.

Well, I'm not alone in thinking that this is a big quack-a-doodle-dumbster. Even Kent Jones on Rachel Maddow's show at MSNBC has gotten in on it. Maddow ends it right when she ask Jones whether we should be worried about a country that stops believing in/denying things that have long been proven.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

PZ has a post that's a little less screeching than mine (how'd that happen?). He suspects it might just be a little too controversial and not big enough to really be worth it in the world of Michael Bay films.

But, we might have a lot to worry about here when the power of feeble-minded blinder religion controls what I'm allowed to watch because of a perceived threat. That's sad.

Creation: A new movie on Darwin

Now we have a movie about Darwin called, The Creation. Over at The Panda's Thumb (a blog named loosely after an essay, "The Panda's Peculiar Thumb," by Stephen Jay Gould) they've posted a review (click HERE) by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie which is being shown at the Toronto Film Festival.

Scott writes:

I and NCSE staff were invited to view the new Jon Amiel movie, Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly. I believe it to be a thoughtful, well-made film that will change many views of Darwin held by the public—for the good. The acting is strong, the visuals are wonderful, and it treats with loving care the Victorian details of the furnishings at Down house and other sites (such as Malvern), and the local church.

The movie takes place after Darwin has returned from the Beagle voyage, and has settled down with his wife, Emma. It concentrates on their relationship, on the growth of their family, and of course, on the production of his most famous scientific work, On the Origin of Species. It looks hard at Darwin’s growing disenchantment with Christianity, especially the concept of Providence, and how poorly it fits Darwin the naturalist’s knowledge of a very unpeaceable kingdom. Darwin’s frequent illness is portrayed with brutal honesty. Sometimes pale, nauseated, unable even to eat dinner with his family, much less work on his science, Darwin is shown suffering from vague symptoms which he attempts to cure with what we would recognize as quack treatments.

A centerpiece of the movie is the death of Annie, the Darwins’ beloved 10 year old daughter, and how it affected the relationship of Charles and Emma. Much of the movie takes place as flashbacks to when Annie was alive; much takes place after her death, when her father imagines conversations with her. In some reviews the later Annie is described as a ghost. Not really. Creation is not a ghost story. Rather, the filmmakers are taking dramatic license to make Darwin’s thoughts about her visible to us. Also given much attention is Darwin’s reluctance to set down his scientific ideas on evolution and natural selection for fear of upsetting the devout Emma, and society in general. Huxley and Hooker encourage him to publish, but Darwin procrastinates.

This is the 200th b-day year for Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, or, as my father-in-law calls it "the good book." So the flood of Darwiniana has been incredible. Festivals and happiness. Hell, I got an email today that asked e to help book a hip-hop artist who does stuff on evolution. I'm game.

I think that we should note that Darwin wrote a lot of other books. The second most famous is The Voyage of the Beagle wherein his travels and collections take life and we can see his genius as a naturalist integrating his ideas. He wrote The Descent of Man wherein he agreed with Smith and Hume that our sympathies as social beings lead us to do good. In part, our evolution as social beings has created our concept of good. This has of course affronted many a religous person because it suggests that impersonal natural sources have "given" us our morality/ies and that God has not. There is no one law but a window that indicates what is good for survival.

Morality is an indicator of survival. In today's day and age, that's hard to swallow for the totalitarian.

But there has been the backlash. While it is most heartening to see is that there is a concerted effort in the broader scientific, artistic, philosophical, and humanities fields to really work toward effective understanding of what evolution actually is and why Darwin was instrumental though far from the end of the story, the religious right is out there in force to quash it.

There have been those forces in the "armies of the night" who have fought to caricature our respect for Darwin as a cult of personality but I think that it is largely a failure. Unlike the cult of Stalin or Mao or the religion of Christianity, the movement that surrounds evolution comes from the power of the idea to describe, explain, and predict the real material universe and not to deify the man who did it. Unlike Stalin who believed that the spirit of history would move us to a socialist state, Darwin was under no such compulsion. Evolution is as yet to be disproved while Stalinism is an abject human failure that has created tremendous suffering. In fact, evolution is practically mathematically proven while the systems that have followed Stalin, who rejected the Darwinian account for Lysenkoism, failed. Awfully. But our reverence for a powerful theory is, I think, easily misconstrued by creationists and those who don't take the time to learn about evolution as a theory and a fact. Experiencing awe because an idea hitches integrates other ideas and facts is part of being a human. It just so happens that evolution is perhaps the greatest idea human have ever created. It integrates more than anything else in descriptive, explanatory, predictive, and meaningful ways. Sorry creationists. You lose.

Darwin did not come up with evolution willy-nilly. The materialist philosophers of Rome had some inklings about the recombination of matter and energy. If one reads Lucretius's De Rarum Natura (On the Nature of Things) you will have a sense of what I mean. Much much later, David Hume had very similar conclusions to what Darwin would actually explain and describe. Erasmus Darwin had similar though incomplete ideas. Then came Charles whose life we can read as being about evolution. And for those of us who revere and use evolution for what it is, we thank him and might think of him narrowly. But that is not the whole story.

He was a human with the quibbles we have. He lost his daughter Annie. He loved. He wondered how his work affected his family. His health was quite awful. People around him who loved his idea pressured him to do more. There were those who villified him. I think, he was like most of us but vaulted onto a huge stage because his genius was nearly incomparable because of his ability to integrate information.

What I hope can happen in the wake of this film is a humanization of the man who galvanized evolutionary theory and our understanding of biology. I'll follow Scott on this one and try to do the following:

By telling an interesting story, and making Darwin human, Creation will I think encourage some viewers to find out more about the historical Darwin and his ideas. From my standpoint as director of NCSE, that’s useful, indeed. The more people know about evolution and its most famous proponent, the less they will fear it. I’d like to see this movie get distributed in the US. Unfortunately, although Canadians and British will see it, there is not yet a US distributor. We can only speculate why, but the well-known American nervousness about evolution is probably and unfortunately part of the mix.

This movie deserves to be seen in movies, not relegated merely to Netflix on DVD. I hope the reviews following the North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10 are good, and also the reviews following the British premiere October 25. If a bomb like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed can get a distributor, a well-made movie with an excellent script, actors, direction, and cinematography like Creation surely should.

Maybe people who care about science should do what the promoters of Expelled did: get lots of people to show up on opening weekend to give the movie a big ratings boost.

Of course, it has to get a distributor first, and there isn’t a lot we can do about that. If anyone has contacts with someone associated with movie distribution, send them to Creation!

I am about to call my local indie theater.

Roger Ebert's ode to his post on Expelled

You guys remember Expelled, that steaming pile of film excrement that attacked evolution as a conspiracy by some scientific cabal? Oh yeah. Don't forget that it tried to link all of us evolutionists to Hitler. Pay no attention to the fact that most of the Germans were Lutherans entrenched in a history of Christian anti-semitism. It was a wicked movie.

Last year Roger Ebert flushed it down the toilet in grand style. The discussion on that thread went to incredible length and the Sun Times finally had to clip it. Now Ebert's revisited it in an ode to that thread's evolution? Or has it been...ahem...intelligently designed?

Pain free animals?

This article about genetically engineering "pain-free animals" has really got my goat (download the whole Neuroethics article here). As one commentor has put it, "But wait... why don't we genetically modify humans so we don't feel empathy? Sounds reasonable enough. This way we can continue to abuse any and all who are weaker than us without a single bit of remorse." Exactly.

Let's turn this over a little bit and think about what doing this does to humans and our senses of duty. To take an extreme example, people who are prone to being cruel to animals are also prone to being cruel to humans. This exists in extreme cases in people like Jeffrey Dahmer but also in domestic spouse abusers. Can't hit the dog? Hit the wife. I think that we can propose that the person or people who are increasingly able to be cruel to animals with impunity can also be cruel to people more easily. And that brings me to another point.

Why, if we feel we ought to elimate to sentience of some animals - like pigs for example - shouldn't we do it to humans who are also sentient? As scholar John Alessio writes at Green Theory and Praxis, "in-group and out-group behaviors are projected onto an artificially created hierarchy of life – a hierarchy based on how similar or dissimilar non-human beings are to humans." (full-text available here.) So how does this relate to the article in hand?

I think that what this article at New Scientist (a journal I often like) is one that saves industrialism and the machinery of industrial agriculture and not the dignity of a) the animals or b) the people who work there. By genetically modifying them (a deeply dubious idea for these animal's survival anyway) we enable the further "out-group[ing]" of whatever species we choose. That only leads to the further mechanization of animals and the people who work with them. As if people working at Tyson or Smithfield weren't potentially dehumanizing enough to all parties on the floor of the slaughterhouse, this makes this pain-free killing. So why shouldn't we do this to people?

I don't want to beg that question. I think I've just answered it. Removing people's pain receptors removes their humanity. Removing their empathy removes their humanity. Doing this to animals takes an already depersonalizing system and amplifies it.

What a terrible idea.

Pennsylvania Judicial candidate understands church-state separation

This is a nice piece of news from a fellow atheist blogger and social activist. Austin Cline write to Judge Anne E. Lazarus regarding religion, atheism, and the role of the state and got a pretty satisfying answer. Here is the excerpt I find most important.

With regard to my courtroom, all who are before me are entitled to equal access and justice in the law -- regardless of race, sexual orientation, religious or non-religious belief or gender. I can assure you without condition that any litigant in my courtroom would be treated equally.

Read the whole post here.