Women in Saudi Arabia protest driving ban by driving

October 27, 2013 • 7:55 am

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that forbids women to drive. Even foreign women can’t drive.  This is part of the religiously-based conservatism that pervades that Islamic nation. You might have heard about the biological consequences of driving: about a month ago a prominent Saudi cleric declared that driving while female damages the ovaries.

Well, Saudi women have had enough, and yesterday mounted a protest of the driving ban.  As CNN reports:

Several Saudi supporters of the campaign told CNN that at least 25 women had driven Saturday, and that more planned to do so.

Five women who were spotted driving in the Saudi capital were stopped by authorities and “each case was dealt with accordingly,” Col. Fawaz Al-Meeman of Riyadh police told CNN.

Al-Meeman, an assistant spokesman for that city’s police department, explained that the women weren’t taken to police stations. Instead, they were kept in their vehicles until their male guardians arrived, at which point the women were released after signing pledges not to drive again.

Their “male guardians”? What a great way to infantilize one gender.

Driving campaign supporter Mai Al-Swayan, an economic researcher, told CNN she is one of the women who drove Saturday — and posted a video of her action to YouTube.

She said she drove from home to a grocery store in Riyadh, and then back with her groceries. “I drove on the highway and was noticed by a couple of cars but they were fine with it,” she said. 

“I’m very proud. I feel like we accomplished the purpose of our campaign.”

Al-Swayan, who has taken the wheel before in defiance of the ban, said she was worried about what might happen before she drove Saturday, but now plans to keep driving.

Here’s a BBC video from yesterday showing Al-Swayan during the protest. In 2011, she spent nine days in jail after posting a YouTube video showing herself behind the wheel:

As Time magazine notes, this gender bias rests, of course, on religion:

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ban on women driving is based on a very conservative interpretation of Islam that prohibits granting driver’s licenses to women and requires women to get permission from men in order to travel, open bank accounts, attend school, and get married, among other things.

Humor is a great weapon against this type of insanity. Here’s a Saudi dude using a Bob Marley song to parody the driving ban:

The video has gone viral, and you can read more reaction to it at Twitchy.

Public “charter schools” in Texas lie about evolution and push creationism

October 27, 2013 • 5:04 am

In a new article at Salon, former fundamentalist Jonny Scaramanga examines some shenanigans around the teaching of evolution in Texas’s charter schools. I wasn’t sure what “charter schools” really were in Texas, but they turn out to to be a form of public school that is more loosely regulated than “regular” public schools (the latter are government schools for you Brits), but which are funded by the state. The Texas Educational Agency explains:

To further promote local initiative, the 1995 revision of the Texas Education Code established a new type of public school, known as a charter school. Charter schools are subject to fewer state laws than other public schools with the idea of ensuring fiscal and academic accountability without undue regulation of instructional methods or pedagogical innovation. Like school districts, charter schools are monitored and accredited by the state.

At any rate, Scaramanga’s piece reports that at iSchool High, a charter school in Houston, students in science classes are reading textbooks containing stuff like this:

[Hitler] has written that the Aryan (German) race would be the leader in all human progress. To accomplish that goal, all “lower races” should either be enslaved or eliminated. Apparently the theory of evolution and its “survival of the fittest” philosophy had taken root in Hitler’s warped mind.

Now we’ll learn in a few hours, when I post about a new book on the history of science, that this is a patent lie: Darwin had virtually no influence on either Hitler, his minions, his racial policy, or his acts of genocide.  Chalk up one more lie told to the kids.

Further investigation by an outraged parent showed that the curriculum used in this school, “Responsive Educational Solutions,” (“ResponsiveEd”) was basically a disguised program of Christianity:

It emerged that ResponsiveEd was founded by Donald R. Howard, former owner of ACE (Accelerated Christian Education). ACE is a fundamentalist curriculum that teaches young-Earth creationism as fact. Last year it hit headlines because one of its high school science books taught that the Loch Ness Monster was real, and that this was evidence against evolution.

More on the Loch Ness monster in a second.

After Howard left ACE in the 1990s, he founded Eagle Project charter schools, which became Responsive Education Solutions, or ResponsiveEd, in 2007. ACE’s selling point was that it integrated Bible lessons into every academic subject. ResponsiveEd planned to do the same, but without the explicitly religious basis. Howard told the Wall Street Journal in 1998: “Take the Ten Commandments ­– you can rework those as a success principle by rewording them. We will call it truth, we will call it principles, we will call it values. We will not call it religion.” But in Joshua Bass’ mind, at iSchool High, his son was taught religion in class.

. . . ResponsiveEd says it has 60 schools in Texas, with an extended charter to open 20 more by 2014. It also has facilities in Arkansas, and plans to open in Indiana. Amazingly, it isn’t the only charter school curriculum based on Accelerated Christian Education’s format.

This sounds like “scientific creationism” and its descendant “intelligent design”, both of which try to hide the religious motivation and content of their so-called biology so they won’t be challenged in court.  In other words, these organizations are lying for Jesus.

What about the Loch Ness monster? The Raw Story gives an excerpt from another ResponsiveEd textbook:

“Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all.”

This piles idiocy upon stupidity.  Not only do we have some transitional forms between fish and amphibians (Tiktaalik for one) and between amphibians and reptiles (Proterogyrinus for one; go here to read about more transitional forms in vertebrates), but there’s no evidence for Nessie at all. In fact, there’s precisely as much evidence for Nessie as there is the for the Master Craftsman. If they want to use such an example, why not use a real one: of amphibians like frogs living in areas that harbor alligators and fish?

But wait! There’s more:

ResponsiveEd’s teaching on evolution promises that students will, among other things:

  • Explain the difference between microevolution and macroevolution.

  • Describe the theories concerning the origins of life.

  • Discuss theories of human development.

  • Express opinions regarding evolutionary theory in general and human evolution in particular.

  • Describe controversies regarding evolution.

If you know anything about how creationism is pushed in the U.S., you’ll see that this is all normal anti-evolution fodder, including the bogus distinction between the processes involved in microevolution and macroevolution, a distinction completely erased by looking at the fossil record, while “the origins of life” is a standard way to dismiss all of evolution because scientists don’t yet understand how the first replicator evolved.  And I doubt that the “controversies regarding evolution” are about the role of genetic drift or sexual selection!

Another widespread curriculum in Texas’s charter schools is “Public Accelerated Curriculum, or PAC. It’s even worse (textbook quotes in italics):

Like ResponsiveEd, PAC teaches that the theory of evolution influenced Hitler to create the Third Reich. It also relies on the traditional creationist argument of “gaps” in the fossil record:

Darwinism claims that humans gradually and mysteriously evolved from non-living materials. Some critics humorously claim that evolution proposes a philosophy of “from goo to you by way of the zoo.” […]

Evolutionists insist that their theory must be right and that missing fossil evidence is merely the result of a flawed fossil record; the catastrophists insist that evolutionists have not exercised the scientific method of discovery and therefore have little real scientific evidence to prove their theory.

In another chapter, the PAC science materials use examples in history where science has been wrong – geocentrism, phlogiston, an obsolete theory that attempted to explain burning processes, and ancient Egyptian superstitions (such as using fly excreta to treat tumors)  – to undermine the authority of science in general:

Many other historical blunders of science could be mentioned. What we need to keep in mind is that scientists are human beings. The assumption that they are completely objective, error-free, impartial, “cold machines” dressed in white coats is, of course, absurd. Like everyone else, scientists are influenced by prejudice and preconceived ideas. You should also remember that just because most people believe a particular thing does not necessarily make it true.

This “science-can-be wrong” trope, one I’ve encountered frequently even in books on sophisticated theology, is just a way to drag science down to religion’s level.  And yes, of course science can be wrong, but it also contains ways of checking and righting itself.  That’s why some scientific truths, like the formula for water, the age of the cosmos, and the existence of evolution, are very unlikely to be changed.  In contrast, while science gets some things wrong, religion, which has no way to check its truth claims, gets nothing right.  I wonder if they tell the kids that, too.

The sickest part of all this is that even Bob Jones University, an infamous fundamentalist school in South Carolina that teaches young-earth creationism, finds the ACE curriculum is so deficient that it can’t even prepare students for that mockery of a University.

Educators at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University also criticized ACE’s academics, says historian Adam Laats, “According to BJU writers, the ACE and A Beka curricula failed to adequately educate their students academically or spiritually by neglecting … higher-order thinking skills.”

Adults have the right to be as stupid as they want, but I don’t think they have the right to tell lies to children. Those lies include not only religious dogma, but the antiscience attitudes that come with it. How sad that a group of bright and curious children can become ignorant, superstitious ideologues simply because they were born into the wrong families.

And have I mentioned that teaching creationism in a public school—even a charter school—seems blatantly illegal? Why hasn’t this been challenged in Texas? After all, Texas’s taxpayers are funding a form of “science” that’s really disguised religion.

h/t: Barry

A reader asks a question about free will

October 26, 2013 • 10:17 am

Well, perhaps Ben Goren, who asked this question, is better described as a “fixture” than a reader. But in the latest free will post, he made a comment that deserves some discussion:

I, too, would very much appreciate an answer to this question.

It would seem obvious that there is no fundamental difference between what goes on in human brains from what goes on in any other computational device. That’s the essence of the Church-Turing Thesis, and that one’s on superbly solid ground.

So, if humans have free will, the only possible conclusions are that all other computational devices, whether biological or mechanical, also have free will — a proposition which the overwhelming majority of proponents of “free will” will outright reject. The other logically possible path to take is to reject Church-Turing and embrace supernaturalism, to go with a ghost in the machine; this is precisely what that same overwhelming majority of proponents of free will in fact do do.

If we can get a clear answer on this one from the proponents of compatabilist free will, I think it would go a long way to clarifying whether this is an argument over substance or semantics. And if it’s an argument over semantics, I think it should also make clear the perils of embracing the loaded and oxymoronic term for something that it is typically the diametric opposite of its common meaning.

Clearly, if you’re a compatibilist, then you might admit that a computer programmed to respond (deterministically) to many complicated contingencies has free will.  So do robots.  And perhaps a thermostat has free will. If it doesn’t, then there’s somewhere on the continuum of “response devices” where one must say, “I’ll arbitrarily decide that free will begins at this point.”  And, of course, compatibilists must agree that some (but perhaps not all) animals have free will, and even some plants (after all, plants can respond to diverse environmental challenges in complicated ways).

But you needn’t do any of this if, as Ben implies, you just deep-six the whole idea of free will and use other language to express what you mean.

Now I’ll sit back . . .

fat-cat-with-popcorn

 

BioLogos eliminates reader comments

October 26, 2013 • 7:14 am

The end is nigh, and by that I don’t mean the Second Coming but the First Going.  What is going—and has been going for some time—is the credibility and efficacy of BioLogos, the Templeton-funded organization founded by Francis Collins to help evangelical Christians embrace evolution.

It’s been apparent for a while that the matchmaking between Jesus and Darwin has not been a rousing success.  Several of the BioLogos’s bigwigs, including Karl Giberson and Pete Enns, the vice-president and head Biblical scholar respectively, have jumped ship, I suspect because of disagreements about the organization’s increasing fear of offending evangelicals.  BioLogos, for instance, takes no stand on the historicity of Adam and Eve, despite the manifest genetic evidence that the population size of human ancestors could not have been smaller than several thousand individuals in the last million years. They don’t want to offend evangelicals by speaking the truth: that Adam and Eve are complete fictions.

It is in fact BioLogos’s failure to take the hard line when it comes to science that has led to its failure. Rather than insist that the science is right, and then cajole Christians into accepting it, BioLogos has been moving itself toward the Christians, waffling on crucial scientific (and theological) issues rather than offend its audience.

I suppose this was predictable. In fact, I suspect the BioLogos mission was doomed from the outset.  Evangelicals are simply not going to cede crucial issues affecting their faith to science.  If Adam and Eve were metaphorical (one interpretation offered by BioLogos in the ludicrous “federal headship” model), then Jesus died for a metaphor. That simply won’t do. Well-intended as they were, Giberson and Collins didn’t know what they were up against.  Karl, I think, has finally seen the light, but BioLogos continues to move more and more towards apologetics and farther and farther from science. So much for the accommodationist strategy of “If we don’t insult the dogma of Christianity, creationists will come around to evolution.”

BioLogos’s latest desperation move is to turn off all reader comments, allowing instead a small selection of comments to be vetted, published, and answered by the editors.  According to a description rationalization of their new comments policy, outlined by content manager Jim Stump:

We’ve been talking about how well our current open comments policy on the blog serves the purpose of facilitating discussion within the BioLogos community. So we did our own study, and it turns out that our comments section does very well at facilitating conversation among very few people. We have multiple tens of thousands of unique visitors to our site per month. During the month of September, 93.7% of the comments made on the blog came from .026% of our visitors. That leaves a lot of voices “cowering in the back of the classroom” (in a virtual sense, of course). So we’d like to try something different.

Beginning next week, comments on the blog will typically be closed (there may be some exceptions to that policy for certain posts). Instead, we’ll invite readers to submit their comments and questions to an email address (comments@biologos.org). Then, every so often we’ll ask the author of the blog post to respond to some of the best of these, and we’ll feature them in a “Letters to the Editor” format on the blog. We want to see if this encourages more people to join in the dialogue about origins. Perhaps we’ll revert to the open policy at some future time, but we thought we’d give this a try. For now our Facebook page will remain open for comments. And comments to this post are open for one last time.

I’m not sure how to take this, but one thing it means is that there won’t be free discussion, but rather discussion slanted toward what the editor wants.  And I’m not sure, either, whether this policy will encourage more people to comment—or at least to take issue with either BioLogos’s views or views of other readers.  Why would someone be more likely to comment under this new policy, particularly if the comments aren’t anonymous (BioLogos says nothing about that)?

I can’t imagine turning off comments on this site for two reasons. First, I learn a ton from those comments. I think people see that there’s a huge range of expertise on my site—expertise that often either takes issue with what I say or finds errors in my reasoning or statements.  Although I do ban people for rudeness or micturation on the carpet, I try not to stifle free discussion—so long as it’s civil. I’ve learned a lot from those discussions, and a lot of thinking inspired by my readers will be on tap in my next book. (Thanks, folks!)

Second, what good is it to put something out there and not allow people to have their say? My guess is that readers come here at least as much to speak their piece as to listen to mine. And if people disagree with me or others, they want to voice their dissent. I hope that in the end there’s been more light than heat.

The reaction of BioLogos readers to the new policy is mixed, but mostly negative. Here are two comments:

Picture 2Picture 5What I found most interesting, though, was a comment by the post’s author, James Stump:

Picture 6

This, it seems, is the real explanation: people were arguing back and forth about how God interacts with the world, and those comments apparently turned people off.  Atheists showed up, and so did young-earth creationists: precisely the people BioLogos doesn’t want. And “sophisticated” Christians, like those who run BioLogos, don’t want that kind of discussion for two reasons. First, it emphasizes how little (i.e, nothing) any of them know about God, and may shake their faith. Second, if the nonbelievers and yahoos get their say, it will show clearly why BioLogos will never sway most evangelicals.

And of course neither BioLogos nor the new comments policy are ever going to settle the issue of “how God interacts with the natural world.”  But in the end, that’s exactly what BioLogos has to do if it is going to draw Christians toward evolution.  It is going to have to admit the science: straight evolution, no evidence for theistic guidance, no guided mutations, no Adam and Eve. It is going to have to say that there is no evidence that God does interact with the world, and then proceed on that basis.

I’m amused at Stump’s statement, “Not everyone within BioLogos agrees on how God does this.” Doesn’t that show the ultimate futility of their mission? Scientists can agree on stuff like evolution, but Christians won’t agree on whether it really happened and, if so, how God did it. Some of Biologos’s commenters don’t believe in God, or at least in the Christian God (the readers include Jews).

Commenter “Eddie” cuts through all the crap (I’ve left off the last two bits of his comment):

Picture 2

All that Templeton money, all those electrons expended in the service of accommodation, and what does BioLogos have to show for it? Have they offered a consensus view on how God works through evolution? (For example, does God make mutatons? And why all those extinct species?) Have they brought even one evangelical and creationist Christian around to evolution? In terms of converts per dollar, I suspect that Richard Dawkins is infinitely more efficient than BioLogos.

The reason BioLogos won’t succeed is because they have no consensus view to offer evangelicals: just an array of speculative and untestable options which are in various degrees unpalatable to everyone. Templeton should stop throwing money down this empty well.

Caturday felid trifecta: WEIT book club recommendation, a new “Simon’s Cat”, and Kick the cat gets a scary ride on the M1

October 26, 2013 • 4:11 am

No, I haven’t read it yet, but it certainly is intriguing.  Thanks to reader Merilee for calling it to my attention.

It’s on Amazon in paperback, audiobook and Kindle:

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that he had been changed into an adorable kitten.”

Thus begins The Meowmorphosis—a bold, startling, and fuzzy-wuzzy new edition of Franz Kafka’s classic nightmare tale, from the publishers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Meet Gregor Samsa, a humble young man who works as a fabric salesman to support his parents and sister. His life goes strangely awry when he wakes up late for work and finds that, inexplicably, he is now a man-sized baby kitten. His family freaks out: Yes, their son is OMG so cute, but what good is cute when there are bills piling up? And how can he expect them to serve him meals every day? If Gregor is to survive this bizarre, bewhiskered ordeal, he’ll have to achieve what he never could before—escape from his parents’ house. Complete with haunting illustrations and a provocative biographical exposé of Kafka’s own secret feline life, The Meowmorphosis will take you on a journey deep into the tortured soul of the domestic tabby.

Picture 2

You can have a look inside on the Amazon site (it’s also at Amazon.ca). Two editorial reviews follow, and there’s an introductory video:

“Highly recommended for connoisseurs of the bizarre.”—Publishers Weekly
“Takes meta-fiction to dizzying new heights.”—The Huffington Post

And an approving review by a reader:

Picture 5******

Arachnophobes may bridle at the latest Simon’s Cat video, called “Scary Legs.”  To me, only the ending is disturbing.

Be sure to subscribe to Simon Tofield’s wonderful animations (he makes all the cat sounds with his own voice), and head over to his shop for some Simon’s-cat-merchandise, just the ticket for your ailurophilic friends at Christmas. (Note: merchandise priced in pounds and must be shipped from the UK.)

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Reader Steve sent a link from the Torygraph’s “This week in pictures” about Kick the cat, who hitched a ride on a car on the M1 in England. The caption to this photo reads:

A daredevil cat, Kick Buttowski, clung to a ladder on the roof of an electrician’s van during his unexpected high-speed journey down the M1. Kick has been reunited with his owners after amazingly surviving his adventurous motorway ride. The van driver, Helen Stevens, pulled over to check what was wrong after another motorist flashed her a warning, and was amazed when she saw the 18-month-old cat clinging to her roof. Picture: CATERS

POTD_Cat-70mph-Roo_2709349k

I love Kick’s last name.

Steve added his own note: “The M1 is a UK motorway (freeway), where the speed limit of 70mph is regularly exceeded, so Kick will have had quite a ride!