Creeping creationism in Chicagoland

March 3, 2011 • 8:01 am

I wouldn’t have thought it possible. In the South, maybe, but not in supposedly enlightened Chicagoland.  But creationism is extending its tentacles into our area, trying, like Putin, to rear its ugly head in the public schools:

First, as the Daily Herald reports, two candidates for the Fremont School board (about an hour north of here) are in favor of teaching creationism in public school science classes. One is the current board president:

“I think from a scientific standpoint it can be given as a viewpoint,” board President Sandra Bickley said in the interview. “(It’s) another theory to consider.”

Fellow candidate Kim Hansen had a similar take on the controversial topic.

“It should be presented in a very broad type of curriculum or structure,” said Hansen, a first-time candidate.

And get this:

Bickley and Hansen were asked about creationism’s potential role in the school district’s curriculum toward the end of Monday’s candidate interviews.

Bickley called creationism “one set of theory” and thought it should be taught in science classes as part of a unit, although not necessarily promoted.

“It’s something out there,” she said. “I don’t think it’s something that should be ignored.”

Hansen also thought creationism belonged on public-school curriculums.

“There is no right or wrong” when it comes to people’s beliefs, she said.

Note the common trope that creationism is, like evolution, just a competing “theory.”  And note as well the view that evolution is a “belief” and that such beliefs are neither “right nor wrong.” It’s this kind of populist postmodernism that throws me into despair.   I don’t think it can be fixed with any amount of education in evolution: those views come straight from religion.

And if that’s not depressing enough, all four candidates for school board in nearby Lake Zurich favor instruction in creationism in public school science classes. That, too, is reported in The Daily Herald, and there’s so much fail here:

[Incumbent member Tony] Pietro believes creationism should be taught in science class to give students “as much information as possible” about the origins of life.

“I think we can say this is a theory,” he said Thursday. “None of us were here when man was created.”

When man was created?  Sorry, there was no creation: we have the fossils showing our gradual evolution from apelike ancestors. The fail:  misunderstanding of theory and acceptance of the common notion that evidence is only meaningful if we can see things happening before our eyes. (Does Pietro accept the existence of Napoleon?)

When the court rulings on the issue were mentioned, Pietro didn’t waver.

“When we teach (it), we need to say this is a theory,” he said.

Wallace took an even stronger stance on the issue.

“Creationism to me is factual,” he said. “Darwinism is a theory.”

As for court rulings against teaching creationism in science classes, Wallace said people must work within the law or change it.

The fail:  misunderstanding of the word “theory” as it’s used scientifically, complete ignorance of the massive evidence for evolution, and the belief that the Bible is factual.  Religion again, of course.

[Doug] Goldberg also emphatically supported adding creationism to the science curriculum.

“I’m a good, God-fearing American and the answer is ‘Yes,’” he said. “Clearly, religion in general is a big part of our daily lives as Americans. I believe that allowing a student to be exposed to the theory of creationism is a relevant and reasonable thing to do.”

Goldberg said he “hadn’t studied the legal ramifications” of the issue.

The fail:  ignorance of the First Amendment and of the many court cases that explicit prohibit what Goldberg wants.  Note, too, the adjective “God-fearing”.  It’s never “God-loving,” is it? Teach creationism or you’ll boil for eternity in molten sulfur.

But the worst is the intellectual cowardice of another incumbent, who accepts evolution but wants creationism taught to the kids—even though it’s wrong:

[Jim] Burke also said “yes,” but not as enthusiastically as the other candidates. He acknowledged scientific evidence supports evolution.

“It’s not a belief, it’s proven fact,” Burke said. “I would hate to see the line between those two things blurred.”

If teaching creationism in science classes is unconstitutional, officials shouldn’t try to get around the law, he added.

So far I can’t find who won the elections, but since all four candidates in Lake Zurich are pro-creationism, we can safely assume that some of them won.
What’s to be done about this?  I don’t think that my going up north and giving a bunch of lectures on the evidence for evolution will work.  Nor will telling these people that evolution and faith are compatible. (Burke, at least, already knows that.) And will that make them change their minds on teaching creationism alongside evolution?

The only thing that stands between the school children and their inculcation with the ideas of Gish, Comfort, and Dumbski is the courts.  And the issue will never go away in America until religion does.

Living without religion: a CFI campaign

March 3, 2011 • 7:11 am

The Center for Inquiry has launched a new campaign, “Living without Religion,” that will place ads in Washington, D.C., Houston, and Indianapolis (press release here).

“With this campaign, we are aiming to dispel some myths about the nonreligious,” said Ronald A. Lindsay , CFI president & CEO. “One common myth is that the nonreligious lead empty, meaningless, selfish, self-centered lives. This is not only false, it’s ridiculous. Unfortunately, all too many people accept this myth because that’s what they hear about nonbelievers.”

The campaign was created with the goal to reach different areas of the United States, with a city in the heartland (Indianapolis) and the largest city in the Bible Belt (Houston) supplementing the nation’s capital. Other cities may be added as the campaign progresses.

The campaign website features this video: it’s quite nice, and packs a lot of punch into a minute:

Ooo, that’s so strident!  You might recognize some of the faces in the video; if so, identify them in a comment.

And here’s another ad: I hope they turn it into a bumper sticker:

My only beef: they could have added “to be moral” to that last ad.  My experience has been that the issue of morality is the true sticking point for those considering atheism. Here’s a common view:

We have to hit the morality issue hard; I am in fact writing a piece on it now.  That issue is, however, nicely dealt with on the CFI’s campaign site:

There are some common myths about the nonreligious—atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists. One popular myth is that the nonreligious are immoral, or at least that they can’t be relied upon to be as good as those with religious beliefs. If you know any nonreligious people (and almost everyone does—see below), you already know this is not true. Human decency does not depend on religious belief. There are good believers and good nonbelievers; there are wicked believers and wicked nonbelievers. You can’t predict a person’s moral character just from knowing his or her metaphysical beliefs.

Another prevalent myth is that the lives of the nonreligious are empty, meaningless, and dominated by despair. This, too, is false. The nonreligious experience the same range of emotions, sentiments, and sensations as the religious. They are joyful and sad; they feel sympathy and disgust; they experience pain and pleasure. They have aspirations; they are concerned about others. They love and are loved.

These are simple facts, not subject to dispute.  Sadly, some of our fellow atheists, who rebuke us for pervasive scientism, implicitly disagree.  Or they claim that while we, the big-brained atheists, can find solace in a life without faith, the bulk of humanity can’t. You know the condescending mantra: “religion will always be with us.”  Tell that to the Danes and Swedes!

Dust to dust

March 2, 2011 • 12:06 pm

New Scientist presented this striking time-lapse video of a dead African elephant (Loxodonta africana) being dismantled in Kenya.  It took just a week for scavengers to reduce the corpse to a pile of bleaching bones.  This was part of a Channel 4 program, “The Elephant: Life After Death,” that aired in the UK on February 16.

New Scientist also notes that “There are an estimated 6 million calories in an elephant—enough energy to keep a human sated for over eight years.”  (I calculate 6.6 years at 2500 calories per day.)

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.989181&w=425&h=350&fv=videoId%3D790411969001%26playerID%3D659647535001%26playerKey%3DAQ%7E%7E%2CAAAAADqBmN8%7E%2CYo4S_rZKGX3S7qzA9QxPBGY4CrdM-P1a%26domain%3Dembed%26dynamicStreaming%3Dtrue]

Of course, this is going to happen to all of us who aren’t cremated, but it’ll take place decently out of sight, and will involve insect larvae and bacteria rather than jackals, hyenas, and leopards.

h/t:  Chris Noto

Kitteh contest: Clyde Stubbletail

March 2, 2011 • 8:51 am

Reader Chris submitted his cat Clyde Stubbletail, a double mutant with no tail but extra toes.  I think you’ll agree, though, that he’s a handsome lad:

This is Clyde. Clyde Stubbletail – named after a former drummer for James Brown, Clyde Stubblefield. He is a completely tailless (a “rumpy”), polydactyl, Maine Coon Manx. He’s sweet and handsome and when he does something clever, he lets you know by cocking his head and strutting with what I swear looks like a smile. His genetic condition makes him sensitive to too much handling, but at night he snuggles up to us, sucks his thumb, and purrs. That’s when he loves to be petted. We adopted him from an extension of the Humane Society, where, we suspect, he was on his final days. When my wife and I first met him, he was stressed, sick, and biting whoever handled him. So we decided to come back later in the week. Within a few days though, we received a phone call telling us that if we came right away and took him, the Society would wave the adoption fees. We didn’t want to ask too many questions so we went down and picked him up. He has a few problems because of his genetics, but he is so quirky that everyone, including the vet, thinks he’s amazing.

Amazing mimics: the mussel Lampsilis

March 2, 2011 • 6:42 am

This week I lectured on mimicry to my evolution class, a course required for all biology majors.  The lecture is a Powerpoint presentation full of amazing mimics, and is designed to show how some evolutionary principles (directional selection, frequency-dependent selection, mutualism, kin selection, and so on) play out in the making of remarkable adaptations.

Mimicry, a phenomenon discovered in the late 19th century, was also important in buttressing Darwin’s theory of natural selection, for some cases admitted of no other explanation.  Too, many ideas about how mimicry evolved are testable ones: for example, does conspicuous warning coloration in bad-tasting butterflies—coloration that is learned and avoided by bird predators—also protect the similarly colored but perfectly edible species of mimic butterflies?  This shows that evolutionary biology is not just a concatenation of plausible-sounding stories, but yields hypothesis that can be tested in the field or lab.

One of the most remarkable examples of mimicry occurs in some North American freshwater mussels in the genus Lampsilis.  Their young go through a parasitic stage, in which they must attach to the gills of fish and suck their blood before later dropping off and resuming a normal mussel-ish life on the stream bottom.  But how can a sessile adult mussel get its young into the gills of a fish?  The answer involves evolutionary modification of the mussel’s brood pouch—which contains its young—so that it attracts predatory fish.  (The brood pouch is simply an outgrowth of the mussel’s mantle.)

But I’ll let the video tell you the story:

Note that, as the video states, the mussel can’t see the fish it’s parasitizing.  In this case natural selection is literally blind.  Those mutations in the mussel that make its brood pouch look more fishlike will give it a reproductive advantage over its confrères, even if it can’t see the fish it’s deceiving.  Note as well that selection has “acted” (I’m anthropomorphizing here: selection doesn’t really “act”, for it’s not an external force but a process of gene sorting) not just on the appearance of the mussel, but on its behavior.  It has genes that make it wiggle its brood pouch in a fishlike manner.

See how precise the mimicry is: the brood pouch has fake eyespots, fake fins, and even, in some mussels, a fake mouth that opens and closes.  Mimicry is one case in which we know what the evolutionary target, or “optimum,” is, and we can see how close selection can take a species to that target. As in many other cases of mimicry, selection gets it pretty spot on.

I’ll have another example tomorrow.

Religion = frog worship

March 2, 2011 • 6:26 am

A few days ago an English couple, Eunice and Owen Johns, were denied the right to be foster parents because of their vehemently homophobic attitudes derived from their faith.  As The Telegraph reports:

The judges underlined that, in the case of fostering arrangements at least, the right of homosexuals to equality “should take precedence” over the right of Christians to manifest their beliefs and moral values.

In a ruling with potentially wide-ranging implications, the judges said Britain was a “largely secular”, multi-cultural country in which the laws of the realm “do not include Christianity”.

Can you imagine an American judge making that last statement?

The judges added:

“Although historically this country is part of the Christian West, and although it has an established church which is Christian, there have been enormous changes in the social and religious life of our country over the last century,” they said.

It was a “paradox” that society has become simultaneously both increasingly secular and increasingly diverse in religious affiliation, they said.

“We sit as secular judges serving a multicultural community of many faiths. We are sworn (we quote the judicial oath) to ‘do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affection or ill will’.”

Such is the slow erosion of faith in enlightened countries.  But here’s the funniest part.  The faithful, of course, are up in arms, defending the rights of parents to warp their children’s minds however they wish.  And one of them said this:

Speaking personally, Canon Dr Chris Sugden, the executive secretary of Anglican Mainstream, said the judges were wrong to say religion was a matter of private individuals’ beliefs.

“They are treating religion like Richard Dawkins does, as if Christian faith was on a parallel with Melanesian frog worship,” he said.

If the shoe fits . . . .

Treefrog from New Guinea

The Civility Institute

March 1, 2011 • 10:47 am

Richard Doolins has penned a LOLzy op-ed in today’s New York Times, mocking Arizona’s new National Institute for Civil Discourse that will be headed by former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush:

By mid-morning Thursday, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush were conducting anger-management classes, working with Fred Phelps and his civility-impaired congregation from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. Mr. Phelps and his strident adherents filed into the institute waving their famously uncivil signs: “God Hates Fags,” “Priests Rape Boys” and “You Are Going to Hell.” After two hours of tea and therapy with the two former presidents, Mr. Phelps and his followers emerged bearing signs that said: “We Believe That the Non-Sectarian Divinity May Not Approve of Certain Sexual Orientations. You May Have A Different Opinion. Let’s Compromise!” and “Some but Not All Priests Have Struggled With Pedophilia. If You Disagree, We Are Willing to Listen!” and “Have A Great Day! Before You Go to Hell!” All of their signs featured cheerful emoticons and happy faces.

. . . The centerpiece of the tour was a look at how even a topic like abortion, predictably rancorous and caustic, may be elevated in tone to an acceptable level of civility. Observers were allowed to watch through one-way mirrors as pro-lifers and pro-choicers struggled to converse civilly and accommodate each other’s polarized views under the watchful eyes of institute mediators.

By noon, progress was undeniable, as pro-choicers were overheard politely saying, “If you will respect my right to choose, I may respect your right to harbor demented religious delusions.” To which the pro-lifers decorously responded, “If you will respect the word of God and the sanctity of all human life, I may respect your right to murder unwanted babies.” Still not quite there, but the day was barely half over! . . .

. . . Still, the civility institute hopes that these time-honored free-speech fundamentals can be modified. Just a bit. If we promote civility, might we not achieve a political nirvana where it is possible to be robust, vehement and caustic while at the same time remaining punctiliously civil and decorous?

Sure, but that would bring to mind another Ambrose Bierce quotation: “Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.”

I think we should all attend the Institute.  After all, certain philosophers maintain that New Atheists are deeply morally repugnant, and need schooling in civility.  So I can’t wait to start saying things like, “Yes, Mr. Mooney, I think you have shown a certain reticence in engaging the substantive arguments of your critics, but I do adore your coiffure.”  Or “Yes, Dr. Stangroom, I have indeed looked at that woman, and while I can’t say that I find her attractive, I wouldn’t for a moment deny your right to lust after the demimonde.”

Atheist website wins religion Bloggie

March 1, 2011 • 8:49 am

I hate to use the ugly word “blog,” but since it’s in the name of the award, let me congratulate Hemant Mehta and his crew over at The Friendly Atheist for nabbing the 2011 Bloggie Award for Religion (or, in this case, the lack thereof).  The site hasn’t been on my radar, but I’ll be paying more attention from now on.