I’ve received a copy of the police report on the incident described in Dumpster diving for docs. It is a “found property” report, not a criminal complaint. The report contains a 3 page typed account of the incident by Don Matolyak, Freshwater’s pastor.

The main message of the circulating story I described in my earlier post–the mysterious appearance of new evidence from the district via a cloak and dagger route–is confirmed by Matolyak’s statement, but a number of details differ. I’ll list them below the fold, based on Matolyak’s statement in the police report.

A strange story is circulating in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. According to the story, John Freshwater, currently the subject of an administrative hearing on his termination as a middle school science teacher, received a call from an unnamed person on Thursday, Feb 4. The caller purportedly told Freshwater that the school had discarded some documents in a dumpster at the high school and that the documents contained information that would exonerate him. Sometime during the night of the 4^th or morning of the 5^th, Freshwater, his lawyer R. Kelly Hamilton, and his pastor Don Matolyak are said to have gone through one or more school dumpsters, removing some documents and taking them to Matolyak’s church, Trinity Assembly of God, to go through them.

The story goes on to say that the three then called the Mt. Vernon Police Department which responded to the church and took custody of the documents. Two sources I am not permitted to name have told a trusted friend (and one source told me) that a police report on the incident has been written but is not yet publicly available because it has not been approved by a supervisor. When asked directly about it, the police department would not comment.

This strikes me as unbelievable in at least one important respect. My wife has taught in the Mt. Vernon City School District for more than 30 years and I am fairly familiar with their records disposal policies. With new privacy regulations covering a wide range of personnel matters from evaluations to medical history to student records, sensitive documents are not casually discarded in dumpsters, they’re shredded. The schools are equipped with shredders and they’re used. I simply cannot believe that an administrator would be stupid enough to casually toss unshredded documents relevant to Freshwater’s case into a dumpster. If in fact Freshwater, Hamilton, and Matolyak had possession of documents from the school that bear on Freshwater’s case, I strongly doubt that they came from a dumpster. I hope the cops are investigating other potential sources.

A couple of speculative implications of the story are also circulating. One is that Freshwater and his attorney are pushing for a criminal investigation of the school district for withholding or destroying evidence important to the administrative hearing and/or the two federal suits. Another speculation is that this is yet another delaying tactic by Freshwater and his advisers that is designed to increase pressure on the Board of Education to settle with Freshwater on his terms. A third, held mainly by local conspiracy theorists, is that the story is true and the district was in fact concealing evidence. Of course, those are not mutually exclusive. I’ve so far found no evidence indicating whether those or any other hypothesis has any support.

If true, this story pushes the Freshwater saga past merely strange into bizarre territory. I say again that there is no official confirmation of the story, but even the fact that it is circulating and is being taken seriously speaks to the mood of this badly divided community. That’s the true tragedy of this whole affair.

That is the title of an article to be published in The International Journal of Cardiology, a presumably reputable journal published by Elsevier. Avijit Roy, the editor of the pro-science website Mukto-Mona, published in both Bengali and English, takes Elsevier to task on Talk Reason here.

Science Daily reports today that

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a ‘primordial soup’ of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the ‘soup’ theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth’s chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. “We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent – one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores.”

The soup theory was proposed in 1929 when J.B.S Haldane published his influential essay on the origin of life in which he argued that UV radiation provided the energy to convert methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth. However critics of the soup theory point out that there is no sustained driving force to make anything react; and without an energy source, life as we know it can’t exist. …

Discuss.

Photograph by Dave Rintoul.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.

Late March sunset reflected in a channel of the Platte River near Gibbon, Nebraska.

Meandering channels with sandbars such as this one are critical habitat for sandhill cranes and whooping cranes migrating north; the birds roost in the river overnight, which protects them from predators such as coyotes.

Tai “Butterstick” Shan, the panda born at the National Zoo in Washington DC and displayed up above, is going back to China. CNN has a report on his farewell party.

This months PLoS Biology contains a review article by Floreano and Keller on studies that explore evolution using robots. It is an interesting read.

Evolution of Adaptive Behaviour in Robots by Means of Darwinian Selection

Darwin suggested that adaptation and complexity could evolve by natural selection acting successively on numerous small, heritable modifications. But is this enough? Here, we describe selected studies of experimental evolution with robots to illustrate how the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of complex traits such as adaptive behaviours. Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

The glory – seen from an airplane.

Enough of biology! Another optical phenomenon. The dark line to the right is the contrail. Contrast has been enhanced.

Okay, this is classic Casey Luskin. He recently published a law review article of minimal interest in the Hamline University Law Review, about “teaching biological origins,” which as we know means, “finding some clever way to pretend that creationism is science so that we can teach it in biology classes in violation of the law.” He’s posted a couple paragraphs of the article over at DI’s blog. Here he mentions a case called Segraves, in which a California court rejected a Free Exercise Clause challenge against a school district for teaching evolution–that is to say, the court correctly held that teaching evolutionary science in a government school does not violate a person’s right to freely exercise his religious beliefs. But here’s Luskin’s interpretation: “This opinion is of minimal value as precedent, as it comes from a lower state court and was never officially published as a legal opinion. Nonetheless, it implies that evolution education policies may avoid establishing religion when they are based upon the legitimate secular purpose of avoiding dogmatism in the classroom.”

So, in other words, an unpublished, and therefore unciteable, decision by a trial court, which is therefore not precedent for anything, really, but which upheld the teaching of evolutionary science, is somehow precedent for the DI’s mission of teaching religion masquerading as science on the taxpayer’s dime. I have nothing against the trial court’s decision in Segraves, obviously, but it’s not exactly the strongest court opinion to cite for anything, least of all in the service of Luskin’s badly disguised defense of creationism.

You can read the Segraves decision here.

“Explore Evolution” is the latest shot in the ‘get ID creationism into the public schools’ strategy of the Discovery Institute. It’s a book aimed at home schoolers and public schools that purports to use an “inquiry-based” approach to teaching evolution. In fact what it does is use an “error-based” approach, one laden with strawman arguments and the usual creationist distortions and misrepresentations of the science. The National Center for Science Education has a detailed analysis of the trash that the book conveys to students.

Now the British Centre for Science Education has prepared a shorter pamphlet (pdf), based on the NCSE material, which is aimed mainly at British schools. An outfit named “Truth in Science” (what else?) sent the book to many schools in the UK, and BCSE is responding to that wallpapering of their schools with ID creationism.

Leaving aside the UK-specific material relevant to their national curriculum, pages 7-15 of the pamphlet (pdf) are a succinct and readable rebuttal of the glop in the book, and would be useful for anyone involved in this effort in the UK or elsewhere. It’s designed as a teacher resource and does a good job. Highly recommended.

Hat tip to NCSE on Facebook.

You humans have finally finished sequencing my genome—okay, not exactly mine but a cousin’s. Some of you might be thinking about using this to clone me. But I own the copyright to myself so you can’t do anything!

I’m busy clubbin’ with some seal friends of mine right now and haven’t had the time my species needs to digest such monumental work. I recommend Matthew Cobb’s take on the giant panda genome.

Last summer, I began working as a postdoc at the University of Houston. I was initially unsure about the move, but I am pleasantly surprised with the city and the university. There is a strong, core group in ecology and evolutionary biology here. Thus I pass on this student recruitment letter, with the mention that if you attend school here, you will get to hang out with Prof. Steve Steve.

The Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston (UH) welcomes applications for its graduate program in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology for Fall 2010. The following faculty in the area of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology are seeking graduate students for their labs:

Blaine Cole ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Evolution and social behavior
Dan Graur ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Theoretical molecular evolution
Diane Wiernasz ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Ecological genetics
George Fox ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Experimental evolution and origin of life
Gregg Roman ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Evolution of behavior
Rebecca Zufall ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Genome and molecular evolution
Ricardo Azevedo ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Evolution
Steve Pennings ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Community ecology
Tim Cooper ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Experimental evolution
Tony Frankino ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Evolution of complex traits
Yuriy Fofanov ([Enable javascript to see this email address.]) — Evolutionary bioinformatics

For more information regarding the Evolutionary Biology and Ecology graduate program at UH see:

http://www.uh.edu/admissions/graduate/
http://www.bchs.uh.edu/graduate/
http://www.bchs.uh.edu/about/resear[…]d-evolution/

The deadline for application of prospective students is April 1^st, 2010, but students are encouraged to apply as soon as possible.

Creation, the true story of Charles Darwin, based on the book by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-great-grandson, opens in theaters this Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and D.C.

“His love for his wife, his observations of his children, his friendships with gardeners, schoolteachers and pigeon fanciers, his fears about death, revolution, bankruptcy, inbreeding … all these things found their way into his theory. He was the most inclusive of thinkers.” Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box

Support the film! The distributors will gladly link back to your organization from their Facebook and Twitter pages if you link to them. Help us spread the word.

Become a fan of Creation on Facebook.

Follow Creation on Twitter.

For theater information, check http://creationthemovie.com/.

This post was modified from a press release we received today.

In my recent post on testimony on December 30 I noted that Freshwater’s attorney, R. Kelly Hamilton, engaged in some theatrics about an exhibit introduced by the Board’s attorney, characterizing it as a forgery. I also described some of the similarities in the writing on two documents. One is a copy of an article on building tall structures decorated with handwritten comments about the Tower of Babel, found in Freshwater’s classroom. The other is a lesson plan written by Freshwater in 2006 and introduced by his attorney as an exhibit. Freshwater testified that the handwriting on the lesson plan was his.

I’ve put scans of the relevant portions of both documents on the web, and I invite readers to make their own comparisons. Note that when one clicks on one or the other document there is a button towards the top right of the screen to magnify the displayed document.

For reference the similarities I noted earlier are below the fold.

The 31^st day of the administrative hearing on whether John Freshwater should be terminated as a Mt. Vernon Middle School science teacher was supposed to be today, but after 2 hours and 15 minutes of private conferences among the attorneys and referee the hearing was abruptly adjourned until January 22, 2010.

In addition, I have learned that a new member of the Board of Education, Steve Thompson, has started engaging in private efforts to produce a settlement without authorization or discussion by the Board of Education, thereby exposing the Board to significant legal jeopardy. Both are described below the fold.

Yesterday, I showed how the treatment of information in Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, contains many misunderstandings and unjustified claims.

Today, I want to focus on what I call the “dishonesty factor” of the book: claims that are misleading or just plain false. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has stated that “Meyer’s book seems to me to be written in good faith.” Perhaps, after reading these examples, he might reconsider his assessment.

While the administrative hearing on the termination of John Freshwater as a Mt. Vernon, Ohio, middle school science teacher is slowly approaching a conclusion, the preliminaries to the two federal suits are in progress. Recall that the Dennis family’s suit against the school district was partly settled, with the district agreeing to pay attorney’s costs plus a small amount to the family. However, Freshwater remains a defendant in that suit. And Freshwater has sued a range of entities and people in federal court.

I recently obtained the transcript of a deposition made a year ago by another student in Freshwater’s class that academic year, 2007-2008, and that deposition corroborates two major allegations about Freshwater’s classroom behavior, the use of the Tesla coil to mark students’ arms with crosses and the showing of a creationist video, The Watchmaker in science class.

The deposition of the student, referred to in the deposition as “Student No. 5”, was taken on February 16, 2009 for the Dennis family’s federal suit. In it there are two passages of immediate interest. They’re below the fold.

A couple of months ago, I finished a first reading of Stephen Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell. It was very slow going because there is so much wrong with it, and I tried to take notes on everything that struck me.

Two things struck me as I read it: first, its essential dishonesty, and second, Meyer’s significant misunderstandings of information theory. I’ll devote a post to the book’s many mispresentations another day, and concentrate on information theory today. I’m not a biologist, so I’ll leave a detailed discussion of what’s wrong with his biology to others.

In Signature in the Cell, Meyer talks about three different kinds of information: Shannon information, Kolmogorov information, and a third kind that has been invented by ID creationists and has no coherent definition. I’ll call the third kind “creationist information”.