In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons criticizing the virulent version of Islam, some of them depicting Muhamed.  Four years later, more than a dozen Danish newspapers, in a joint response to Muslim violence and threats to free speech, republished the cartoons.   Now, under threat of a lawsuit from Mohamed’s “descendants,” the Danish newspaper Politiken has apologized for offending Islamic sentiments.

The cowardice of Politiken is shameful, and a danger to free speech everywhere.  Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens, in excellent form, decries the attitude that religions should be uniquely immune to public criticism (note the wonderful title of his piece):

The thing would be ridiculous if it were not so hateful and had it not already managed to break the nerve of one Danish newspaper. In Ireland a short while ago, a law against blasphemy was passed, making it a crime to outrage the feelings not just of the country’s disgraced and incriminated Roman Catholic Church but of all believers. The same pseudo-ecumenical tendency can be found in the annual attempt by Muslim states to get the United Nations to pass a resolution outlawing all attacks on religion. It’s not enough that faith claims to be the solution to all problems. It is now demanded that such a preposterous claim be made immune from any inquiry, any critique, and any ridicule.

Three quick items:

1. Templeton and credential inflation:  The Templeton Foundation website has sort of fixed Rod Dreher’s credentials.  Until yesterday Templeton had advertised him as a “seven-time Pulitzer Prize nominee,” and, as I pointed out, that characterization violated the Pulitzer organization’s own guidelines.  Dreher’s status has now been changed to this:

Nominated by his editors seven times for the Pulitzer Prize, Rod has spent most of the past two decades as an opinion journalist . . .

Well, this stays within the letter of the law, but since any journalist can be nominated if someone fills out a form and pays fifty bucks, it’s hardly a gold star.  Really, Dreher’s rabid ignorance is an embarrassment to the Templeton Foundation.  They have very deep pockets—can’t they hire someone better?

2.  Homeschooling and evolution. The thread has gotten long and predictable. Religious opponents of evolution came to our website en masse, and, while there was some acrimony, many of you patiently and gallantly tried to instruct the benighted about why scientists accept evolution as not just a theory, but as scientific fact.  This exercise, I think, was futile.  Going back over the threads, I can’t think of a single person who initially expressed doubt about evolution and then changed his/her mind when confronted with the evidence. Indeed, one person even refused to look up the evidence, insisting that we provide not just references, but arguments on the site.

There are several lessons from this.  First—and this is disheartening—these people are simply immune to evidence.  Those whose opposition to evolution is based on faith are almost never “converted” when given the facts.

Second, many of them don’t want to get the facts.  These folks have no interest in examining the evidence for evolution.  Their minds are closed.  And it’s exactly that kind of attitude that I’m worried about with homeschooling: the fear that parents will instill in their children a rigid set of beliefs about faith, morality, and biology, along with the attitude that those beliefs are not to be examined.  That’s why many (yes, I know, not all!) parents keep their kids away from the public schools: to prevent their children from exposure to views that challenge their own.

Ignorance about evolution is not a crime.  Willful ignorance is.

Third, the arrogance of some of these evolution-deniers is amazing.  Without much training in biology, they come to an evolutionist’s website and proceed to tell all of us why we’re wrong.  They offer ancient creationist canards like “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”  Or, “science can’t tell us which came first—the chicken or the egg.”  These misconceptions could be remedied by the briefest of scientific educations. But they don’t want that. We scientists are often accused of being arrogant, but that is nothing compared to the arrogance of these creationists.

Finally, the idea that our being nice will bring evolution-deniers into our camp is ridiculous.  Yes, the homeschooling thread provides some anecdotes, not systematic data, but they show that being “nice” to creationists has no effect on changing their minds.  It only enables their ignorance.

The homeschooling kerfuffle demonstrates, I think, that we won’t rid this country of creationism simply by teaching people the facts of evolution.  We have to loosen the grip of religious faith on the minds of our children.

3.  Accommodationism. There’s another kerfuffle going on at several websites about the compatibility of science and faith.  You can find the relevant links at Larry Moran’s website, Sandwalk.  Yes, I do have a dog in this hunt, and yes, people are criticizing my view that science and faith are philosophically incompatible, but my dog is tired.  For now, I’ve said pretty much everything I have to say on this issue.

Finally, here’s a list of the ten best donut shops in the US.  They made a mistake with Chicago, though: Dat Donuts (near me) is good, but doesn’t hold a candle to Chicago’s Old Fashioned Donuts, home of the world’s absolute best apple fritter:

Fig. 1.  To die for. Old Fashioned’s ineffably good apple fritters.

In the latest Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Ruse describes the excitement of modern evolutionary biology and then takes out after those academics who, lately, have their knickers in a twist about evolution. These include the philosopher/theologian Alvin Plantinga and the philosophers Jerry Fodor (co-author of What Darwin Got Wrong) and Thomas Nagel (endorser of Stephen Meyer’s intelligent-design book, Signature in the Cell). Ruse faults them all, correctly, for their ignorance of the field they’re criticizing.

But rather than work over the details, I want to draw attention to the way this crop of critics ignores evolutionary biology—aside from the kind of cherry-picking in which Fodor engages. Nagel may sneer about the failure to find “accessible literature” that answers his worries. In what part of the library was he doing his literature search? Where, for example, is any discussion of the Grants’ work on the Galápagos finches? What about a detailed look at the new scholarship that is challenging earlier thinking about the evolution of bipedalism? What about the discoveries of molecular biology and of the similarities (homologies) between humans and fruit flies? And why no mention of Marc Hauser and his work uncovering the secrets of moral thinking? There is a deafening silence on those and other issues. Fodor, Nagel, and Plantinga don’t need to turn themselves into biochemists, but some awareness of the issues and advances would not be entirely misplaced.

Good for Ruse. It’s especially helpful when a philosopher goes after fellow Darwin-bashing philosophers; otherwise they can claim, as Fodor has, that we simply don’t understand what they’re saying.

When I claimed that the John Templeton Foundation was engaged in bribing journalists, I didn’t mean that they directly paid off those journalists for writing articles that blurred the lines between science and faith.  It’s nothing so crass as that. What I meant was that Templeton creates a climate in which journalists who take a certain line in their writings can expect sizable monetary and career rewards:

As I said, The Templeton Foundation is smart—or rather wily.  They realize that few people, especially underpaid journalists and overworked academics, are immune to the temptation of dosh, and once those people get hooked on the promise of money and prestige, they forever have a stall in the Templeton stable. And, in the hopes of future Templeton funding,  perhaps they’ll continue to write pieces congenial to the Foundation’s mission.

It’s a subtle way of using writers to promulgate your own views, though of course none of those writers would ever admit that they had been bought off.

Rod Dreher is an example of how the Templeton system works.  Dreher was a columnist at the Dallas Morning News, and author of Crunchy Cons (2006), a book about those conservatives who think as righties and live as lefties.  Last year, Dreher won a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship, one of Templeton’s most important vehicles for conflating science and faith. Since he got his fellowship, Dreher has written not only for the Dallas paper, but also on beliefnet, a religion/sprirituality website. His columns have pretty much been aligned with the Templeton Foundation’s own views.

Last August, for example, either at or near the end of his Fellowship, Dreher wrote a piece for the Dallas Morning News describing his wonderful experience at Cambridge, decrying “atheist fundamentalism,” and asserting that the horrors of Nazi Germany were part of “atheism’s savage legacy.”  He then touted a NOMA-like solution:

We ought to reject the shibboleth, advocated by both religious and secular fundamentalists, that religion and science are doomed to be antagonists. They are both legitimate ways of knowing within their limited spheres and should both complement and temper each other. The trouble comes when one tries to assert universal hegemony over the other. . .

Contrary to the biases of our time, the importance of science does not exceed that of art and religion. As the poet Wendell Berry writes, the sacredness of life “cannot be proved. It can only be told or shown.” Fortunate are those whose minds are free enough to recognize it.

This kind of stuff is like cream to the cats at Templeton.  How they must have licked their whiskers when they read it!

In a beliefnet column posted last week, Dreher decried the coming “Age of Wonder” touted by physicist Freeman Dyson,” in which science may play an increasingly important role in our life:

This, in the end, is why science and religion have to engage each other seriously. Without each other, both live in darkness, and the destruction each is capable of is terrifying to contemplate — although I daresay you will not find a monk or a rabbi prescribing altering the genetic code of living organisms for the sake of mankind’s artistic amusement. What troubles me, and troubles me greatly, about the techno-utopians who hail a New Age of Wonder is their optimism uncut by any sense of reality, which is to say, of human history. In the end, what you think of the idea of a New Age of Wonder depends on what you think of human nature. I give better than even odds that this era of biology and computers identified by [Freeman] Dyson and celebrated by the Edge folks will in the end turn out to have been at least as much a Dark Age as an era of Enlightenment. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I will be wrong.

Over at Pharyngula, P. Z. Myers took apart Dreher’s arguments against biotechnology, giving a dozen examples of Dreher’s ignorance and misstatement.  And although Dreher wrote

The truth of the matter is that I turned up in Cambridge knowing a lot about religion, but not much about science. What I saw and heard during those two-week seminars, and what I learned from my Templeton-subsidized research that summer (I designed my own reading program, which compared Taoist and Eastern Christian views of the body and healing) opened my mind to science. It turned out that I didn’t know what I didn’t know until I went on the fellowship.

it appears that he still doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

On Sept. 26 of last year, five days before Templeton started accepting applications for their journalism fellowships, Dreher promoted the Templeton Journalism Fellowships on belief.net, encouraging people to apply.

On November 30 of last year, Dreher announced that he was leaving the Dallas Morning News to become director of publications at the John Templeton Foundation. That’s where he is now. He’s still publishing on beliefnet, though, where, a week ago, he wrote a heated column attacking my contention that Templeton bribes journalists.  It’s the usual stuff—outraged assertions that journalists could be bought, attacks on “atheist fundamentalists,” and what Dreher calls a “brave, contrarian position” that we should all be “nice” to each other.   You can read it for yourself, and I urge you to do so.

The curious thing, though, is that while decrying the idea that Templeton “buys off” journalists, Dreher is himself a beneficiary of Templeton’s practice of rewarding those who, after entering the system, perform well.  Dreher was a journalism fellow just last year. Other journalism fellows have been promoted to the advisory committee for the fellowships.  And several members of the Templeton Foundation’s Board of Advisors have, after their service, gone on to win the million-pound Templeton Prize itself.  The lesson, which seems transparently obvious, is that if you clamber aboard the Templeton gravy train and keep repeating that science and faith are complementary “ways of knowing,” good things will happen to you.

Oh, one last point.  The Templeton website says this about Dreher’s credentials:

A seven-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, Rod has spent most of the past two decades as an opinion journalist, having worked as a film and television critic and news columnist at the New York Post and other newspapers. He has appeared on National Public Radio, ABC News, Fox News Channel, CNN, and MSNBC.

That seemed odd to me.  Seven-time Pulitzer nominee?  That’s big stuff!  But a bit of sleuthing showed that it’s not what it seems.  Nearly any journalist can be a Pulitzer “nominee” for journalism.  All somebody has to do is fill out a form, submit a few of the “nominee’s” articles, and write a $50 check to Columbia University/Pulitzer Prizes. As the Pulitzer website says:

By February 1, the Administrator’s office in the Columbia School of Journalism has received more than 1,300 journalism entries. Those entries may be submitted by any individual based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news site that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles.

Editors do this all the time for their writers, but you don’t have to be an editor to nominate someone: anybody can do it.

And the thing is, the Pulitzer organization does not recognize the category of “nominee” for those who get nominated this way—it recognizes the category of “nominated finalist,” those three individuals whose submissions make the cut and get considered for the Pulitzer Prize itself. The Pulitzer organization, in fact, discourages the use of the term “nominee,” presumably because any newspaper or news site journalist who has a friend with fifty bucks can be a nominee.  From their website:

22. What does it mean to be a Pulitzer Prize Winner or a Pulitzer Prize Nominated Finalist?

• A Pulitzer Prize Winner may be an individual, a group of individuals, or a newspaper’s staff.
• Nominated Finalists are selected by the Nominating Juries for each category as finalists in the competition. The Pulitzer Prize Board generally selects the Pulitzer Prize Winners from the three nominated finalists in each category. The names of nominated finalists have been announced only since 1980. Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. No information on entrants is provided.

Since 1980, when we began to announce nominated finalists, we have used the term “nominee” for entrants who became finalists. We discourage someone saying he or she was “nominated” for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us.

Pulitzer also says this:

The three finalists in each category are the only entries in the competition that are recognized by the Pulitzer office as nominees.

I checked the Pulitzer list of nominated finalists, and I didn’t find Dreher’s name on it.  I guess Templeton is calling Dreher a “nominee” against the recommendations of the Pulitzer organization.  If I’m right here, Dreher and Templeton may want to correct his credentials.

MSNBC has an online poll: Is it okay for home-school textbooks to dismiss the theory of evolution?

When I was in Amsterdam last November I visited the van Gogh Museum and posted some of my impressions.  Almost as impressive as van Gogh’s paintings were his letters on display, most of them written to his brother Theo.  They show a deeply learned man, versed not only in the history of his craft but in literature as well.

In this week’s New York Review of Books, Richard Dorment, art critic of The Daily Telegraph, has a terrific review (free online) of two books about those letters.  If you’re interested in the man and his art, have a look at this piece, which dispels several myths about van Gogh.

Here’s one of Vincent’s letters to Theo, showing how he used them to work out the ideas for many of his paintings:

The home-schoolers have responded, leading to the longest thread in the brief history of this website.

I realize, of course, that not all parents who home-school their kids are doing so for religious reasons.  I have had some contact, for instance, with Susan Mule, who, as Dylan Lovan noted in his piece, is simply trying to teach her precocious daughter the best science on offer.  And I’ve dealt with other parents who are looking for good material on evolution to give to their children. Sadly, there’s not much that is useful if you don’t want to force creationism down your kid’s throat.

But, as Lovan noted in his piece, “83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children ‘religious or moral instruction.'”

I weep for those children.  For many of them are simply being brainwashed by their parents.  Yes, that’s what it is—brainwashing.  For a parent to ignore 150 years of solid science, feeding their children lies based on theology, is to deprive those children of the wonder of the universe—a wonder based on truth rather than medieval superstition.  It kills off the part of a child that most needs nurturing: her sense of wonder, and all the possibilities of life that are opened up by that wonder.  How many budding biologists have been stifled by their parents’ willful ignorance of science, and on their insistence that the Bible is the real source of biological information?  Generation after generation of ignorance and religious dogmatism, all perpetuated by religously based home-schooling.

Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, reportedly said, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” That’s brainwashing.

On another note, I’ve been bombarded with private emails suggesting—and not in delicate words—that I am deeply ignorant of evolution, will go to Hell, and that I’m ugly, too.   One or two of them are amusing:

Then again, by your photo your arms are so hairy perhaps you’re the missing link, and then I will have been wrong.  Perhaps indeed your hairology recapitulates simianology.

But several of them (and some of the comments I have not allowed to go through the website) use the most vicious invective.  Here’s one truncated specimen (warning: NSFW):

Hey Jerry Coyne fuck you. You evolution faggot. Darwinism and evolution are the biggest pile of shit lies ever made on the face of GODS green earth. People in the 1800’s thought Darwin was a dumb ass fucking lunatic. Home school books are lying to children? On no you son of a bitch you and all these liberal piece of shit scum bag evolutionists are lying to children and every public school in the world. . . So go fuck your self or an ape and evolve some grotesque ape kids you loser fuck. I beat the shit out of people like you, you cock smoking douche nozzle.

Ah, there’s nothing so vile as a Christian insulted!  To those who are constantly whining about the “incivility” of atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I suggest that you might first have a look at the behavior of some Christians.

For no particular reason I could fathom, I began receiving all kinds of religous loon-mail today, including denunciations of evolution, pictures of fireworks explosions resembling Jesus on the cross, and sundry laments for the fate of my soul, all by people who have somehow failed to apprehend the sophisticated theologies of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton:

Dear Sir,

I am very upset with what you said within a recent article on yahoo. Sir, I’m going to tell you something that you need to hear. Sir, You are going to HELL. Because when GOD CREATED the Earth HE made everything perfect and in GOD’s perfect plan humans didn’t need to be evolved from monkeys. So there evolution is wrong. GO Read the bible it tells you the truth, see what GOD said about creation, not what some Man thought were we came from. Because I believe that WORD OF GOD is the truth and nothing else is.

Yours truly,

a GOD fearing Man

The textbook publishers defend their books as well-rounded lessons on evolution and its shortcomings. One of the books doesn’t attempt to mask disdain for Darwin and evolutionary science.

“Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to “Biology: Third Edition” from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.”

The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.”

When the AP asked about that passage, university spokesman Brian Scoles said the sentence made it into the book because of an editing error and will be removed from future editions.

Editing error?  More like their real motivations.